Pat Walls is the founder of Starter Story and Pigeon for Gmail. He also launched The 24 Hour Startup Challenge.
He has been incredibly open about the difficulties of starting a business.
Learn more about how he works on a daily basis.
Current Projects
He compares the different journeys of building Starter Story and Pigeon at SaaS vs. Info Products.
Starter Story
Starter Story features interviews with successful entrepreneurs that share the stories behind their business. In each interview, they ask how they got started, how they grew, and how they run their business today.
Pat has been incredibly open about how he has built and grown Starter Story. The page How I Built Starter Story curates most of the journey. It has links to monthly updates and guides. He also shared a more personal perspective at The Best Year Of My Life: In 35 Tweets.
He reached 100k visitors/month for Starter Story in August 2019. In August, 2020, 250k people visited the site with the majority coming from Google Search.
Features
- AMA at Indie Hackers
- Founder Interviews: Pat Walls of Starter Story at Hacker Noon
- Quick Chat with Pat Walls of Starter Story at Indie Hackers
- Turning a Side Hustle into a $9k/mo Business, with Pat Walls from Starter Story
Guides
- How I Hustled My Way From 0 to 1,000 Email Subscribers
- How I Find And Hire Freelancers (On An Extreme Budget)
- Guide: How To Grow Your Audience With Interviews
Pigeon
Pigeon is a powerful CRM and automation suite for Gmail.
Check out Pigeon for Gmail.
He has been regularly documenting the business journey at his personal blog.
- He shared a Monthly Report in November, 2019.
- In December, 2019, he shared 2020 Pigeon Marketing Plan
- He wrote about how he hit the first 40 customers at $1,000 MRR: Harder Than I Anticipated.
- In April 2020, he wrote about moving to a freemium model.
Starter Story Academy
Lean SEO
During November, Pat sent out a tweet asking if people would be interested in learning more about his SEO strategy. He got 100+ messages across email and twitter in response.
At the end of November, Pat announced that he was going to create and launch a course that week. He documented the entire process on Twitter. He had $2,054 in presales when he made the announcement. The preorders came from those who had contacted him previously about the course. When he woke up the next day, presales had reached $6,124.
He started sending hype emails to the list a week before launch. He sent an email blast the day before it launched, which generated over $3500 in presales. Total presales were over $20k.
You can read the entire Twitter thread here.
Side Projects
How To Say No
How To Say No is a “mini-site” of all the different situations where you might want to say “no”, as well as some pretty neat templates from Naval, Tim Ferriss, Paul Graham, Casey Neistat, etc.
The project took about 36 hours from idea to launch. The end result was about 35k visitors to the project in 24 hours, about 200 signups to Pigeon, and 3 paying customers. He shared more about the experience at Side Project Marketing in 36 Hours (35K Visitors)
The 24 Hour Startup Challenge
In 2018, he created the 24 Hour Startup Challenge. 104 startups were launched on November 17, 2018.
You Don’t Need WordPress
Pat set a goal to build and launch this product in 24 hours. He streamed the process on Twitch and had over 5000 viewers. He shared the process at How I Built A Startup on Twitch in 24 Hours.
Check it out at You Don’t Need WordPress.
Personal Posts
2019: Going Full Time As A Founder
In 2019, Pat struggled with having so many projects while exploring being a digital nomad. This post focuses on the successes of Starter Story and struggles growing Pigeon.