Great month for revenue, traffic, and email subscribers (all-time record on all accounts). 

236K uniques to the site, a 51% increase in traffic over last month! Revenue also at an all-time high at $17.1K.

Our growth is mainly from all of the SEO work we’ve been doing over the last 3-4 months. You can go back to our last few updates and learn more about that.

In October, we spent a lot of time working on Ideas 2.0, which shows off thousands of business ideas and lots of metadata around them. We are rolling this out today. Here’s what it looks like:

We also put a ton of work into our new tagging system on the backend. 

This will allow us to tag business ideas with different characteristics, like funding, business model, skills, growth methods, and more metadata that we want to add.

As we keep enriching this structured database, we can do really cool stuff. For example, a how-to guide can be generated through our tagging system. The possibilities are quite endless. If we do this at scale, we’ll have millions more in traffic.

In a way, our goal is to be the “Crunchbase of small business ideas” and this gets us closer to that.

We ran some AB tests and found that people are willing to pay $179 for a lifetime membership at about the same ROI that people would pay $99. We’ll raise our prices to that. I’ve been thinking about raising our prices, in general. Starter Story is probably too cheap.

Here’s some of the new content we’re trying last month:

- Best Books For X (leans on UGC)

- Best Tools For X (leans on UGC)

- Email Subject Lines

- Slogans

- Quotes

- Hashtags

- Monthly revenue (accrual): $17.1K (+11%)

- Traffic: 236K unique users (+51%)

- Content published: +240 (+38%)

- New email subscribers (net): +4.4K (+47%)

- Email collection rate: 2.1% (-12%)

This month, we’ll keep pushing on new content ideas. We’re still gunning towards our goal of 500k monthly uniques by the end of the year. I think we have a good chance.

We have a good playbook for growing through SEO now, so now we’re trying to think about how we can build more tools, and more process around this. Our focus has and will always lean on code, automation, and outsourcing to keep scaling that.

We’ve spent so much time on growing traffic over the last few months, but eventually, we’ll want to think a bit more about different growth channels and more monetization.

What’s on my mind are two things (1) YouTube and (2) courses.

I chatted with my buddy who has 100K+ subscribers on YouTube and he sees an opportunity to turn our case studies into YouTube videos. 

If we do this right, we could have hundreds of YouTube videos and a massive new acquisition channel. This would be a super long term play, but I think it can be huge.

Eventually, we will want to sell some courses. This is a huge revenue opportunity because our traffic is so high and people are willing to pay a lot for courses. 

I’m not sure exactly how we’ll do it, but we’ll probably start with super-niche courses, like “how to get started on TikTok for your business”. I can imagine that one day, we have dozens of smaller courses that all drive revenue.

(previous monthly updates)