We’re already more than halfway through August, apologies for my lateness!

July 2021 was a strong, promising month. We did $45.2K in revenue, a 2.74% increase over last month and our 2nd best month ever!

Unfortunately, traffic was down around 10% since last month, but, again, putting things in perspective, traffic is up 570% compared to July 2020!

Our focus on email continues to pay off, and will be an anchor for the business. The newsletter just crossed 120K subscribers, and we’ve generated $9,028 strictly from our newsletter and automated email flows over the last 30 days.

We have 19 people working on Starter Story right now! Most are “part time”, but that is by design. We’re building a distributed media team - people from all around the world, who work on different aspects of the business. Writers, editors, programmers, analysts, and more. We assign them work, and they get it done, on their own time.

And we’re building software that can manage this and scale. As we grow, this will become 30, 40, 50 and then 100 people, all working together to create and improve our content that helps entrepreneurs and founders across the lifecycle of starting and running a business.

For example, the team is in the process of deploying our “best coworking spaces” content across 60+ cities. This content, specifically, is still in the experiment phase - our software enables this - to test out and deploy this content quickly and with low expense. Low risk, high reward!

We’re doing the same thing with our ”best VC firms” content, our instagram bios content, our new start a business checklists, and tons more experiments.

Our goal is to scale this process of creating, deploying, and improving content. How can we do it faster, leaner? How can we enable our team to do it on their own (and without much oversight from us)? 

My background is in software, and I always thought I would build a SaaS business… But over the last year, I’ve slowly come to the realization that I’m building a digital media company. The more I realize this, the more excited I get about the future of Starter Story.

I’ve been reading and listening to a lot more stuff about how others have built media companies. If you know of any good books, podcasts, etc on this, please send them my way!

We are also looking for people to join us in all aspects of the business. I explained above how we work, so if that sounds interesting to you, and you’d like to contribute something to Starter Story, let me know!

Have a great month, and thanks for reading!