Thread by @thepatwalls

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)

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2/ 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 👇

3/
- 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

4/
- Created twitter tools posts ➡️ bit.ly/2tTbGJK
- Added social media follower counts & alexa ranking to article pages
- Automated "Published" email
- Google Docs integration ➡️ Auto publish stories from google docs

5/ 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!

6/ 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!

7/ 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

8/ 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.

9/ 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.

10/ 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.

11/ 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.

12/ 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.

13/ 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?

14/ 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.

15/ 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.

16/ 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 :)