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

My @starter_story #openstartup and life update...

November 2018:

• 💵 Revenue: $2,736
• 📈 Uniques: 19,470
• ✉️ Mailing List: 3,287

So much awesome stuff happened in the last two months 😁👇

First of all, this update is for the last two months.

Because of the craziness of #24hrstartup (which I'll talk about later) - I missed posting my October 2018.

So this may be a bit longer than my usual threads 😅

October 2018:

• 💵 Revenue: $1,723
• 📈 Uniques: 33,508

October 2018 was actually my first "down month" in terms of revenue.

It's funny, it's the same month I quit my job... 😜

October was a massive month in terms of traffic, but I also started to get nervous about my business model. Finding new sponsors every month SUCKS!

In early October I quit my job and moved home!

Working 100% on my projects is AMAZING. If I can make it work, I will never have a job again.

It's hard to imagine ever working like that again. But also, I see some great benefits of having a full time job + side project.

When I was full time I was much more determined because of my time constraints.

I would wake up at 6AM and knock out a few hours before starting work. Now, it's much harder to do that.

So mentally, it feels great to be without a job, but I feel less productive overall.

I am now officially nomad!

I'm writing this tweetstorm from @hubbathailand - just got in here yesterday after 30+ hours of flying.

This month I'm going to be touristing Thailand and making my way to Chiang Mai where I will be living there for a few months.

Last update I noted that I wanted to find more long-term sponsors for StarterStory - so I can spend more time on growth and less time on... finding sponsors.

Spent much of October 2018 trying to figure that out... cold emails, meetings with people, etc

And I found the ultimate sponsor...

@klaviyo is now sponsoring the ENTIRE StarterStory website 😁😁

This is everything I wanted.

Klaviyo is such an amazing tool that everyone that uses it LOVES and it actually drives serious revenue for stores.

So I'm super grateful for @abialecki and the whole Klaviyo team for that.

This saves 5+ hours per week dealing with sponsors and worrying about if I can pay the rent. Now I can focus 100% on growing content and adding features.

10/ Added "starters" pages.

Now, we have individual pages for each entrepreneur. Soon, I will add business pages as well.

I want StarterStory to be more than content - a database of businesses, entrepreneurs, and content.

This adds ~200 new pages to our Google Index.

On that note, Google search continues to grow...

Impressions are getting close to 40K per day.

My #1 focus is content.

• Oct: 30 pieces of content
• Nov: 23 pieces of content

That's almost one post per day.

My goal next year is to be doing 2-3 posts per day.

Pumping out content as a one-man show is challenging... I'm continuing to build software and automation to help.

I did another (personal) 24hrstartup.

 https://clout.report

- #2 product of the day

- 270 upvotes on @producthunt

- inspired @levelsio to build  http://makerrank.co

14/ Personally, I LOVE this project.

I'm a massive fan of hip hop and I think something like this has potential. Record labels are desperate to find talent early, and to be able to provide them insights into that I think it's something they would pay for.

I made a ton of updates to https://youdontneedwp.com

embed:tweet

On the topic of content automation, I also added a new "story" dashboard for @starter_story.

• Enter all meta information (revenue, name, etc)
• Write into the Google doc right there
• “Submit" functionality.

This saves me lots of time and allows me to be more hands off.

 

And now for the elephant in the room...

The 24 Hour Startup...

This was the biggest thing I've ever done in my life and I'm so happy about its success.

I talk more about the numbers here 👇

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But want to talk more about how this came about and my thoughts behind it.

I had the idea for a "24 hour startup hackathon" right after I did my first 24 hour startup. But I was sitting on the idea for a while.

I had many doubts about the idea...

Boy I was wrong.

I reached out to @arminulrich since he built @shipstreams and we decided to work together + @_feloidea joined.

We realized the only time we could do it was Nov 17 (bcuz of holidays) so we put our heads down and launched a website in 1 day.

Then the hype train BLEW UP.

We had 100 signups in like 24 hours. At that point we realized we "had something" so we then did everything we could to make the event as big as possible.

21/ It felt amazing to have that traction, but it also destroyed me.

I didn't do ANYTHING but #24hrstartup for about 3 weeks...

There was so much to do, dealing with sponsors, managing the event, setting rules, building the app, managing the community, running the stream...

22/ But, I don't care - it was so much fun.

That was our moment, and we had to capitalize.

I LOVED working with @arminulrich and @_feloidea. Normally I'm cautious of working with other people - can get complicated - but these guys JUST GET SHIT DONE.

We are the perfect team 😁

I believe that streaming + making is the next big thing.

So what's next?

@arminulrich and @_feloidea and I are heads down, working on Shipstreams 2.0 🚢 - this will be a new platform to enable makers to ship AND build their audience.

I'm so excited.

And that's pretty much it...

Sorry for the long thread, live updating, and if it was a bit scatterbrained - I write these "off the cuff" so any questions let me know!

Thanks for reading!!!