Starter Story - Starter Story’s Sunday Breakfast #29

1. The orange juice 🍊

How one guy created a $1.6M/year conference 

This is the type of story that gets me excited. 

Blogger realizes there isn’t any good event for his niche. Asks for some feedback and people agree.  

Without anything planned yet, sends out a teaser email and people start giving him money. 

Did I mention the same happened to me last week? 

Back to the story: The level of detail about how the whole process was (even shares the type of insurance he had to get and how much it cost) it’s ridiculous.

2. The coffee  ☕️

This guy left Wall Street to start a $30K blog 

The grueling hours and non-stop stress weren’t what he wanted in his life. So he went on to start something on his own.

Two key learnings from this story:

(1) There’s something better out there for you. Don’t stick somewhere that makes you miserable.

(2) When you start something on your own, it’s grind time. He had to master cold emailing to get guest posts at other publications (sent 30 messages to land a single spot).

 3. The eggs 🍳

This couple started a $15K/month business with $100 

The best part? They’re only working 20h per week. 

All they needed was a laptop, a printer, and a license that costs $100. 

As a local business, they thrive thanks to these 2 strategies: 

(1) A tip-top Google my business profile

(2) Free marketing opportunities that competitors feel they’re too good for; such as Chamber of commerce networking and events, and Craiglist leads.

4. The toast 🥪

This super niche e-commerce yields $36M/year 

And generates 7% in net profit. 

So many things done right by these brothers: 

(1) Did some research to find a profitable niche where manufacturers were nice to resellers 

(2) Put together an extremely basic website to validate as quickly as possible 

(3) Found a way to eliminate MOQ (minimum order quantity) from most brands 

(4) Great email marketing hack to spot potential super buyers

Killer case study.

5. The pancakes 🥞

These guys quit a $100K/year job to start a Canva competitor 

They’re the type of people that always are working on something.

Most projects won’t retire you, but you can learn a ton, find a great business idea or build an asset that you can leverage in future projects. 

And this is exactly what happened to them.

A blog post ranked #1 on Google led to building a stock images website and that led to an online image editor. 

Plus, they share the exact pop-up that doubled their sign-ups. Pure gold!