This blog post is an archive of this series of tweets that I wrote, so I apologize for spelling errors and strange formatting :)

May 2018 Income Report for @starter_story

💵 $421.75 Revenue (May)

Stats:

👨‍💻 59 Interviews (+13 in May)

✉️ 1,838 Email Subscribers (+138 in May)

💻 202,703 Pageviews (+22,965 in May)

Revenue first:

This is the biggest month so far, and I doubled last month's ~$200.

This is thanks to locking down a front page sponsor (@MastermindJam) and a newsletter sponsor.

The @Shopify affiliate program is also proving to be a nice source of income.

We published 13 new stories this month, a monthly record. 📈

Earlier in the month, I committed to publishing 3 stories a week (Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday)

Turns out spreading them out was a good idea, in terms of exposure and it felt like "less work"

Email subscriber growth is still slow. My subscribe rate is about 1.8% on average. Any ideas on how to make that better?

I also got help this month.

Shoutout to @alex_grossmann, who reached out on Twitter. He's helped me:

- Get more leads

- Implemented CRM inside Gmail (@streak)

- Editing and posting interviews

- Helping me work on more automation.

It's also nice to bounce ideas off each other.

Lately, I've been super motivated about the project:

I'm starting to work on some cool projects, such as:

- Moving to 'real' database and to Rails.

- Automate social media.

- Automate reddit, HN, Facebook group posts.

- Community

- Verification (preventing false revenue claims)

It's pretty exciting to think about the potential of @starter_story when a lot of the manual stuff is taken out of the way.

I think it can become a well-oiled machine! The tough part, though... revenue. That continues to be a very manual process.