This week, The Hustle was acquired by Hubspot for $27M. And a couple of months ago, Morning Brew was acquired by Business Insider for $75M. 

It is exciting to see media companies having big exits. I believe we are just a couple of years behind those guys, maybe even less.

I’m not thinking about an exit, but this news does give us more validation. It also fuels us to work harder and push the limits of what’s possible with our small team.

Last month, we saw 880k visitors to the website (+37.5% over December), and our email list just hit 51k. Our revenues were $24,784 on an accrual basis.

I shut down Pigeon, for good. I tried to sell it, but no dice. All of our focus is now on Starter Story. We are building something BIG and I’ve never had more energy and excitement.

Goals

Last month, I said we’ll do more courses and try new channels like YouTube, but I take that back... We’re going to stay focused on our main goal: website growth.

We will keep pushing on our SEO efforts to grow the reach of the website. It’s what we are best at. I said this a few times before, but I believe we are still scratching the surface here.

My 2021 goals: 5M monthly visitors and $100K monthly revenue by December 2021.

Over the next few months, we’ll focus mainly on website and visitor growth, and depending on how that goes, we may switch to “monetization” mode later in the year. But right now, we have a lot of cash to hold us through so we can focus on GROWTH!

In January, we launched the Business Ideas Profiles, a more data/dashboard approach and I’m confident that this will be a big feature for us as we continue to develop it out.

Internally, we are thinking a lot about how we can scale this to 10,000 business ideas. We plan to have the most comprehensive database of business ideas on the internet. Starter Story is a technology-first media company: Crunchbase meets Forbes, or the Wikipedia for entrepreneurs.

We are also putting more work into the email newsletter. In January I experimented a lot with different “styles” of newsletters.

Overall, I think it’s worth it to spend more time there. Each of our newsletters generated an average of ~$1k in sales of our membership.

Removed Chat From Site

Lastly, we removed the Intercom chat from our site. We added a FAQ and switched to email support for the rest. This was the right move and is allowing us to focus.

I’m excited for February and beyond!

- The Starter Story team.