Starter Story
Est. 2018Pat Walls hand-wrote Starter Story one founder interview at a time, from a Starbucks after work — most posts got under 100 views.
▶ STARTER STORY · 2018STARTER STORY · now ◀Drag the handle — Starter Story, 2018 → now.
“I had failed with a previous startup, so I just thought, okay, maybe I can just start interviewing founders so I'll find my next idea, or I'll find a co-founder.”— Pat Walls, founder of Starter Story
The ugly part. After his own startup failed to get into Y Combinator, Pat Walls started cold-emailing and calling founders a questionnaire about how their businesses actually worked, then writing each one up by hand into a case study. He published nights and weekends from a Starbucks while holding down a full-time job.
What he did that didn't scale. Two or three interviews a week, one at a time, on a slow bet — that a big enough library of real founder stories would eventually rank on Google. For the first year, most posts got fewer than 100 views.
Now. The library compounded past a million visits a month, and HubSpot acquired Starter Story. The whole thing started as one guy hand-writing interviews after work.