From #1 on Product Hunt to $15K/mo + $50K/mo helping people get married

Dear starters,

Pat Walls here, creator of Starter Story. 

As you know, every Thursday I send you an email highlighting the best stories that we've published on the website. A bite-sized summary of the most interesting experiences that starters have shared with us.

I hope you enjoy it!

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From #1 on Product Hunt to $15K/mo

Kingsong is the founder of Techintern.io, a platform that connects startups and tech companies with the best software developer students at colleges across North America.

After some tech consulting work, they noticed that a lot of startups were growing, raising money, and needed to hire tech talent quickly. Due to the pandemic, many large tech companies had paused their internship programs, so a lot of very strong developers lost their internships. So they started to connect these companies with students individually. And as they got more demand, they decided to scale the process and start building a web application.

Many people aspire to nail their PH launch, that’s why he wrote a guide to share their experience. These are the top 3 tips:

• Set up groups of friends where you can drop links to your and other social media posts for them to promote throughout the day.
• Check for followers of Product Hunt on different social networks to see who likely already has an account, as their upvotes will carry more weight. Ask your friends to do the same and keep a list of people to reach out to during the day of.
• Write different copy texts and create images for your own social media posts and examples for friends to post to help promote.

If you want to have a successful Product Hunt launch, we have many interviews with founders that have shared their secrets:

• Ramy has gotten thousands of subscribers thanks to launching the different versions of Page Flows, a library of inspiration videos for digital product designers.
• Nishant and Arnob also reached the #1 spot with their notes tool.
• Danielle made over $1K on the first day of Leave Me Alone - a service to easily unsubscribe from unwanted emails.​
• This $31K/mo screensharing app also launched there.

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$50K/mo helping people get married in Denmark

Arezoo Mana & Rasmus Clarck Sørensen; are the husband and wife super team that co-own and run Denmark’s No. 1 wedding consultancy agency ‘Getting Married in Denmark.

Denmark is the easiest country to get married in for foreigners, this has helped grow the business from doing 5 to 10 weddings a month to 80 to 100 weddings a month in 4 years.

The wedding industry generates, just in the United States, over 60 billion dollars a year in wedding and ceremony-related expenses. Definitely, an industry to keep in mind if you want to start a business or branch out.

An industry as big as this one always has many opportunities for those willing to start a successful wedding business. I’ve put together to you some of my favorites:

• At Gulf Beach Weddings they make $165K/mo with their pre-designed destination beach wedding packages. 
• Many people don’t like to buy expensive things that are probably (hopefully) just going to use once, that’s why Brittany started a $5K/mo bridal accessories rental business.
• No Cold Feet is an $18K/mo fun and colorful groomsmen socks company.
• Ruth makes $13K/mo with her bespoke wedding invitations.

About to propose but not sure what ring to buy? Rowena runs a $2K/mo advice service to help people save time, money and hassle when trying to buy or make an engagement ring.

“If you focus on trying to convince people that they need something when they really don’t want it - or don’t see the need - that’s a recipe for failure.”

Andrew Detweiler, Founder
The Rockville Real Estate Exchange

Follow up stories

As you know, I like to catch up with fellow starters after some time to see how they’re doing. And this week we’ve had some very successful updates!

$250K/mo cold email and sales automation platform

Guillaume is the Co-Founder & CEO at lemlist and since 2018, they’ve grown to $8MM ARR. How? Building the biggest community around sales automation that today has 15K+ members, cold emails, being consistent with value-oriented content, persistent distribution, and leveraging LinkedIn where they get over 1,000,000 views monthly with all their profiles.

 

Growing 118% and reaching $5.2MM/mo

MonetizeMore provides ad technology to large Google AdSense websites. Publishers can either outsource their ad operations and ad optimization teams will handle all their ad optimization tactics, execution, and strategy. Or they can keep their ad operations in-house and use PubGuru (the Hootsuite of the ad technology industry).

Part of their success is due to successfully entering new markets such as LATAM and South Asia. To do that, they have hired dedicated teams for some of these markets that understand the cultural intricacies of these countries. And that’s made a huge difference.

 

From $275k/mo to $700k/mo in 2 years

Chris is an SEO nerd and also CEO, and founder of Rankings.io, where he helps elite personal injury attorneys dominate first-page rankings.

Something super cool that he shared with us is their Mini SEO acquisitions strategy AKA Playing the game of Monopoly with Google.

When you think of business acquisitions, your mind probably goes immediately to buying the entire company. However, one of the most beneficial light bulb moments for them has been acquiring landing pages and blogs within their industry. The goal here is essentially buying existing geographic real estate vs. generating properties from the ground up.

The results? As of this writing, their properties rank #1, #5, #7, and #9 for one of their most essential and high-intent phrases. Not bad!

Job opportunities

MonetizeMore ($5.2M/mo) is hiring a Product Manager. 

Lemlist ($250K/mo) is hiring Designer and Customer Support Experts.

Rankings.io ($700K/mo) is looking for Account Managers and SEO Specialists.

Savvy & Suite Ltd. is hiring experienced Bookkeepers to work on corporate returns.

Mirai Clinical ($100K/mo) is hiring new members for Marketing, Operations, and Administration.

Hallow, a Catholic meditation app, is hiring a Head of Growth.

You Call We Haul Junk Removal ($25K/mo) needs an Accountant.
 

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