$960K coffee bean business, 15-year-old builds $360k/year website, Zoomwear is trending?

Hey starters - happy August!

This week, we're featuring 4 inspiring stories + a business idea that's taking off:

#1: Cassy's making $480K/year selling "fat"-focused skin products:

Cassy Burnvoth started FATCO - a paleo-certified skincare brand. 

• Started the business with just $10K
• $480K/year revenue
• Just two employees. 

Her secret? One viral giveaway - she ran into a paleo-influencer at the grocery store and asked her to collab. 10,000 people registered for the giveaway and her Instagram blew up from there.

Read the full story here.

EDITORS NOTE: Interested in learning more about giveaways? We put together a guide on organic social media here.

#2: Two friends built a $960K/year coffee bean business:

Raimonds and Gatis run Kalve Coffee Roasters - a sustainable coffee roasting company based in Riga, Latvia. 

After realizing a demand in the specialty coffee market, Raimonds quit his studies and started working for a leading coffee company to learn everything he could.

They're now doing $960K/year and distribute their product all over Europe. 

Check out Rainmonds and Gatis story here.

EDITORS NOTE: Want to read more coffee success stories? Check out this $26k/month coffee subscription box and this $1.2M/year matcha business.

#3: Michael launched a $360K/year photo filter marketplace at 15 years old. 

Last week, we caught up with Michael from FilterGrade - a marketplace for photo filters.

He completely bootstrapped his business and validated the idea with a simple landing page.

He's now doing $360K/year with 450,000 monthly users to the site. 

His secret? Educational content and tutorials - this content has attracted 10 million unique visitors and over 25 million page views in the last six years:

FilterGrade traffic overview

Read Michaels full interview here 

EDITORS NOTE: Want to learn 8 ways you can validate your idea? We wrote up a guide here.

#4: 64 Best Small Business Ideas For 2020

Because of the pandemic, nearly all businesses have gone digital. 

However, it's still a great time to start a business.

We went through our database of case studies and found the best businesses to start in 2020. 

Check out the full post here.

#5: What's trending? Zoomwear.

Let's face it - most people who work from home aren't accustomed to wearing pants (or at the very least, only wear the stretchy kind).

Studies show that only 10% of people that WFH gets dressed at the start of the day and change into "comfortable clothes later."

The pandemic is changing fashion - and companies doing particularly well are those capitilizing on "zoom-approved activewear."

#6: Are you ready to boost your revenue?

I want to give a shoutout to our long-time sponsor Klaviyo.

Using Klaviyo will open up a massive, untapped sales channel and bring you closer to your customers!

I'm a huge fan of the product (I use it for Starter Story and love the segmentation/drip features). I've also been able to collect so many emails using their website form integration - my list growing over 3k/month now 😲

Here are just some of the impressive businesses we've interviewed that use Klaviyo for email marketing and are raving about the product - all great interviews you should check out as well!

• Brumate ($1.1M/mo at 23 years old)
• Sheets & Giggles ($76k/mo in just 6 months)
• Beardbrand ($100k+/mo - 1.5M YouTube subscribers)
• Abs Protein Pancakes ($25k/mo passive income business)
• Xero Shoes ($460k/mo - featured on Shark Tank)
• The Longhairs ($30k/mo)
• Framed Tweets ($25k/mo)

Level up your email marketing with 👉 Klaviyo!

(And thank you for your support 🙏)

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Thanks for reading! See you next week.

- Pat Walls, Founder @ Starter Story

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