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

June 2018 Open Report for @starter_story

💵 $553.51 Revenue (June)

Stats:

👨‍💻 71 Interviews (+12 in June)

✉️ 2,210 Email Subscribers (+372 in June)

💻 263,581 Pageviews (+60,878 in June)

👋 30,955 Uniques (June)

Read more 👇

Best month to date in almost all categories! 😁

This month was filled with a lot of shipping and lot of luck.

As far shipping, I've never been more productive in my life 👇

- Automated social media images & posts with @buffer 

- Moved entire website off @Netlify/@reactjs and onto @rails 

- Began strategy of posting in FB groups

- Improved backend tools ➡️ Less manual work

- Moved tools form to rails app and created individual tools pages

- Created twitter tools posts ➡️

- Added social media follower counts & alexa ranking to article pages

- Automated "Published" email

- Google Docs integration ➡️ Auto publish stories from google docs

As far as luck this past month, we hit the front page of Hacker News twice in two weeks:

1. news.ycombinator.com/item?id=173463…

2. news.ycombinator.com/item?id=174245…

We've only done this two other times, but it provides an incredible amount of traffic.

The site also didn't go down!

And hitting the front page of HN has other benefits:

👏 I had 4-5 people reach out to inquire about advertising 👏

Before, I was doing cold outreach for this, and it's so nice to get emails like this.

Advice: Put a call to action on your "About" page, people will email you!

All advertising spots are now booked!

1. Front page

2. Newsletter

3. Article/story page

4. Tools page

I had to open up the article/story page spot just to accomadate all of these sponsors.

Most of the revenue will be deferred to next month, so I hope for an even better July

I significantly increased my ability to ship:

☀️ I now work in the mornings.

I wake up every day around 6AM, go to a coffee shop, and work for about 2-3 hours before my full time job starts.

I've never been a morning person, but this is really working for me.

I used to work at night, after getting off work, but working in the morning:

No excuses, I do it every morning and it becomes routine, whereas before I would skip some nights (like Fridays).

I am so much more focused in the mornings.

And it's so much nicer to get off work and be "done" for the day, instead of racking my brain from the hours of 7 to 10pm.

Now I just go to bed 2-3 hours earlier than before.

But, as far as the last month, my "shipping ability" increased by literally 3x. Not exaggerating.

Since this past month was so successful, I have a new excitement for the future of Starter Story.

I have been thinking a lot about how Starter Story can become a "hub" for entrepreneurs in the e-commerce and consumer product space.

I plan to soon expand the website.

There is a serious lack of quality content in this space. There is a lot written about indie hacker type stuff, but I think there is a massive opportunity in the space of "non-coder" entrepreneurs out there.

Think about how many friends you have that can't code but are passionate about entrepreneurship.

Where do they get great content that's actually written by founders?

This is way more big picture stuff, but it's really been in the back of my mind the past month.

I plan to start publishing "non-interview" content and exposing a "real blog" on the home page.

More on that in the next few months.

This past month I spent a ton of time of automation and backend stuff, which has been really fun (for me), and I also think it's something really lacking in the "blogging" industry. Maybe there is some product opportunities here.

And lastly, I've shipped so much more this month from the help I've gotten from @alex_grossmann.

He's published a ton of interviews and has helped me with a ton of shit behind the scenes.

It's also been nice to have someone to show all of my boring automation stuff :)