Starter Story - Show me the money

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This is Pat, founder of Starter Story - every week I write this email to share the lessons we learned after talking to successful founders around the world. If you're not interested, you can unsubscribe here.

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Here are this week's stories, enjoy!

Show me the money

Did you hear the news? Major changes are coming to the HR space… 

Microsoft will include pay ranges in all U.S. job postings and the EU is working towards making all salary information transparent.

Until now, a job’s salary was usually only revealed to a few candidates after going through several stages. And once you’re in, the only way to know how much your colleagues are being paid is… by asking them.

I think that Microsoft is embracing this early to be competitive in the job market, as startups have been using their retribution policies to attract talent for years. Some examples:

#1. ConvertKit’s founder has paid $3.9M in profit sharing to his team in the last 5 years, and tweets about it publicly (a great way to attract talent).

#2. This company raised employee salaries across the board by 21%, then used it as a press event to attract more talent. Read how they reached 6 figures in ARR without any investment.

#3. This agency took some creative measures to keep employees happy.

#4. This cybersecurity company spends all their revenue growth on improving salaries and benefits.

Why all this matters to you:

Talent is in high demand. Finding it is hard. And once companies find it, they don’t want to lose it because they can’t offer a raise or a clear career path.

Any solution that helps companies find and retain talent is going to make lots of money. Most small startups don’t have an HR department, so there’s a big opportunity for tools that take that burden off the founders’ shoulders.

Some numbers for you:

• $15.59B -> HR software market size
• $28.68B -> online recruitment market size
• $12M -> yearly revenue of this HR tool
  

Together with Semrush

How this website went from side project to 5M visits and $200K/year

They took these 3 key steps:

#1. Ran a Semrush Backlink Audit and removed links from spammy websites. 

#2. Low-hanging fruit keyword strategy approach. Targeting relevant low-competition keywords at first; to quickly grow traffic and build site authority, which lets you rank for more competitive keywords. 

#3. Content optimization. Achieving an average 2.5X increase in pageviews for articles optimized using Semrush’s SEO Writing Assistant.

>> Try these Semrush tools for FREE during 14 days  and start growing your website.

No experience required

Think you need a lot of experience to build a successful startup? 

Nope.

Some of the most successful founders started out in completely different fields or had little experience running a business. Notorious examples include Steve Jobs -video game designer-, Mark Zuckerberg -college student- or the Airbnd co-founder -bodybuilder-. 

More examples from our case studies database: 

• This founder built a $600K/year biz with absolutely zero previous experience

• This writer created a $450K/year SaaS

• This father and son started a $780K/year business

• These college friends sell $3M/year worth of gummy bears

Experience is good, of course, but when you’re new to something you aren’t biased and face everything with a fresh look. You think outside the box by default, because you don’t know nothing about the box. That can be an advantage.

Quick hitters

(1)  This guy makes $60K/year writing about something that nobody talks about. What started as a side project during college is now a very lucrative business. Takeaway: Niche down to win. 

Another example: this woman blogs about an extremely rare topic and generates $72K/year.

(2) This business makes $1.2M/year by providing a very specific service to trans people. An awesome story at all levels.

To celebrate Pride Month, here are some other successful businesses in the LGBT+ community that we’d like to highlight: This founder makes $120K/year helping startups with their marketing (only 1 employee); this website generates $156K/year by helping people start a family and these friends make $720K/year with their memes.

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One last thing...

Want to see exactly how 3,000+ founders built businesses with thousands of customers? Join Starter Story to access our business knowledge database.

P.S. Again, a huge thank you to Klaviyo - our sponsor at Starter Story. Try Klaviyo!