How Starter Story ditched recurring payments and built a $1.5 million information product

The Business of Content

Patrick Walls is the founder of Starter Story, an outlet that’s published thousands of case studies on how entrepreneurs built successful businesses. At one point, he was selling upward of $50k a month in sponsorships.

But earlier this year, he not only stopped selling advertising, he also switched from recurring subscriptions to a one-time payment that gave customers permanent access to his content archives. The move helped him grow to $1.5 million in annual revenue.

In a recent interview, he talked about why he got tired of chasing sponsors and his motivations for switching from subscriptions to one-time payments.

I also spoke to Bradley Hope, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and co-author of the New York Times bestselling book Billion Dollar Whale. In 2021, he co-founded Project Brazen, a production studio that creates narrative nonfiction across podcasts, books, newsletters, TV, and film.

He answered questions about how he chooses narrative projects to fund and the process for adapting a single piece of IP into multiple formats.