Pat Walls: Using SEO to Build Start Story into a Worldwide Brand

Key Takeaways

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starter story starter story has had huge success over the last few years and pat credits most of that success to good seo that leverages user generated content pat's brand and his method in creating his business is one of a kind one of the things i love about pat is that he is a scrappy entrepreneur in this episode we talk a lot about the mistakes he's made along the way the experiments he's done and the lessons he's learned we also talk about how we built a team of employees and also contractors that fulfill the roles he needs at the time and finally we finished the conversation talking about pat's revenue models it was really cool to listen to the evolution of the business and to learn about the trial and error process that pat leaned into that ultimately generates the most money and delivers the most value for his users pat was a great guest and i'm so happy we got to talk please help me welcome pat walls hi brother well pat thank you so much for joining me on my show i've been reading your blog i've been following your story you and i actually met on twitter uh a while ago because i asked you how you were creating those automated social media featured images and you shared with me it was called placid i think i don't know if you remember that but that's how i started following you oh wow that's so funny yeah my friend started that uh that company plastic it's really cool we use it for a ton of stuff to create basically automation with images so like to put dynamic text on images it's cool software yeah it is cool um so point is i've been following your story for a while i think this is a little bit different of a show because we really don't know each other at all uh usually i have like some kind of relationship like we'll be sort of getting to know each other through this podcast so let's just dive right into it i want to hear about starter story man um you've you've hit something with uh this idea of like mass volume of content and with personalized stories and like individualized experiences and it's really working i'm an seo man so i i check out your site from time to time and man the traffic that you're getting is absolutely crushing it so let's just jump right into it man tell me about how starter story came into play and just give me a little bit of insight about the journey yeah well i looked at uh recently uh the date and it's been almost four years wow that's kind of a trip i you know sometimes you feel like you're going not fast enough or or too fast so that's crazy but it started in 2017 and i started uh you know i just come off with failed startups tried to build a sas with some friends first you know journey into entrepreneurship and after that i i wanted to start something on my own because you know my co-founders from before didn't work out and i kind of caught the startup bug i guess and i didn't really know what to do so i just started with this idea of interviewing entrepreneurs about how they built their business and i figured maybe you know this could be a blog and then i could meet people or find a new idea through that so back in 2017 i would um you know interview people and they would share how much money they're making with their business that was kind of the theme of the blog is you tell me transparently how you started your business and how you grew it how much money you make and we'll publish the interviews and then you know it just kind of took off from there we just you know back in the early days it was just purely interviews with entrepreneurs because we were sharing those revenue numbers and there's this other website called indie hackers which also did the same thing but they were more focused on software developers we were in the early days like um talking to e-commerce startups so people who were you know selling physical goods so we went with that angle and then we just kind of you know took off from there and now it's a lot different uh we we do a lot more content i would consider as more of like a media company i say that with quotes but um a blog versus the media company so we're doing like lots of different stuff we have employees now and all that but it did start as just a simple interview blog yeah isn't that funny how anything that i've ever started well even the things that have failed what it turns into is hardly ever the thing that like you planned for it to be i've almost accepted that part of the journey now where you can't get too attached to your idea because like i don't know what the expression is not trying to sound too like meta here right but like just that energy of life or whatever will take it to where like it's supposed to be it sounds like that was your experience i don't want to put words in your mouth so where where was it in the timeline where you were able to take a step back and say like hey i think there's something more going on here than just simple interviews with upstarts and revenue numbers like when did this transition from an interview blog into a media company coming to fruition yeah that's that's interesting you say that because it is important to follow the energy and the reality is i didn't really take it fully seriously full time thinking that this was it until last year because i'd actually after starting you know my goal was to you know just do these interviews and then find something new and i had started another business about two years ago i think that was a sass and this is after starting starter story and i thought that was gonna be it like that starter story was just kind of a way to pay the bills and and that sort of thing i was gonna start this new business and that long story behind that but i ended up finally sometime last year it took us to actually did um what's called a think week and where i just like i was working so hard and i had i was experiencing burnout and i just took a week off and i just drove around the united states i just thought about everything and that was the moment that i realized that okay starter story is is the business that i should be working on not this new sas or this you know like you said like you have this your idea what will work is probably not what will what will work um you know it's usually something small like interviewing entrepreneurs that becomes the main business so yeah okay hold on a second did you just get like get in your car on a whim and just start driving around like i'm feeling [ __ ] up i'm feeling burned out i'm gonna go drive around for a week or did you at least i don't know pack some food yeah i mean pretty much i have this like uh marriott deal uh because my my dad works for marriott so i could stay in hotels for like 30 bucks a night and it was this was like two months after covet happened or it was maybe three months after cove it's always like super pent up and they just said you know screw it i'm just gonna drive to the new city every day and then just you know find a marriott hotel and stay there and then just drive again so i drove like three thousand miles it didn't end up costing all that much money i went all around the west coast i went through utah and nevada california oregon washington so cool montana wyoming yeah what was your favorite place you know it's funny i just i spent all the days driving and i'm just staying at a hotel uh i did like oregon that was the first time i went to oregon went to eugene and eugene was really cool like that a lot and i i've been in california for like years with college and after college i've seen all that so i'd say oregon was my favorite yeah i know i'm drifting off a little bit but my wife and i in october or something she was pregnant and we wanted to like travel a little bit more before we had this you know little dude in our lives and so we did the same thing we spent a week in oregon which i had never been there before any experience on the west coast has been either snowboarding in utah or just chilling in los angeles because i got some business partners in la and oregon was really really beautiful and we got to see the um the redwoods as well and you know you see the pictures of it but i'm telling you i even made a video of it like i've never felt so stupidly insignificant before that when the trees are four times the size of anything that you've seen before so um i i could relate we did something similar took two weeks off it was like i am sick of work and i am working way too hard i've been doing this for way too long and it was like yeah i don't want to be too dramatic like a life-changing experience right but it was exactly what i needed at the time so i'm happy that you got to get that yeah i mean i think taking time off is and i should i should do it again this year it was the best decision i could have made and i didn't i kind of did it and who knows if i didn't do that what would be you know because that's when we saw the six months after that you can look at it on a graph is where the business really started taking off wow okay uh i'm going to get back to starter story but i want to touch on on this a little bit because you've written about it in your personal blog a few times on on patwalls.com and i can tell through your writing that you're still sort of figuring it out a little bit but i can also tell that you're having these these ideas these thoughts um maybe questioning you know the internet entrepreneur status quo about like oh this is who i am and everything is about creating content and like tweets and likes and share when then at least my feeling and correct me if i'm wrong is that uh you and i are going through a little bit of the of the same experience we're like you know what maybe it's better not to do so much take some time stepping away from the work and just making sure that the work that you actually put out there is of maximum value and i know i'm paraphrasing you a little bit but i i can just tell through your writing that you're you're sort of questioning some of these ideas i'd love to hear about them yeah um yeah i mean there's this theme online that you you know got to be on twitter and instagram and do everything at once i think yeah over time i've learned that it's important to just focus on one thing if you can i mean today i i played tennis for two hours and i'm gonna go play tennis again for another two hours focus on things that you like to do um and you're gonna get the same amount of work done even if you work four hours instead of 12 hours as long as you uh you know really focus and work hard in that time and there's so many distractions you know there's twitter especially in social media is just a huge distraction and really the only way that i've learned to you know those how to handle that is just over time and building a business and seeing what has worked and what hasn't so i think it's just that you know there's so much pressure out there to you know be all these things at once i don't know no i think it's important to talk about that man because with copyvlogger we have um we offer a few products and services but there's a community called copyblogger pro and it when i'm in there and people are asking questions you can feel that tension right you can feel that um that well you said pressure i think it's even more than that it's it's this idea that if we're not if we're not putting something out there 24 7 then like we're never going to make it you know because you go on social media for one second and you see the people with like a couple million followers and then over time i've learned that the people that i really look up to um especially the the men and women that have built really really significant businesses that like mean something to them they're not doing that they're spending all of their time on like important meaningful work where you don't necessarily have the dopamine hits that come with it but you have like the real meaningful success um i've noticed that is there anybody that like you've seen that is is setting that tone for you that's the change in your mind about it yeah the thing is like you just you don't really see them and that's kind of the point exactly yeah a lot of these people that you look at who are doing you know a lot of twitter all that stuff is like that is their business so they're building a person they're building a brand around you know their name or their business or you know they're in news or i don't know whatever they are so a lot of the people that are just behind the scenes you don't hear about them and um i think that's kind of hard especially because now everything is is virtual so you only see the the people that are loud and proud so i think it was it's gotten a lot harder and um i guess yeah your community that you mentioned is that's one of the best ways to to meet people or to to get inspired by people is to be a part of like some sort of online virtual community in the beginning when i first started my business i was a part of a couple online communities that really really helped me yeah grow and you know it's just like you know there's just like a chat there's like a telegram chat or that sort of thing and that was like um i just feel like it's so distracting to do that on twitter and to follow a giant feed of people that are screaming that's that's tough just yelling everybody listen to me it's just yeah it's just it it gives the wrong message it's just like there's just a big difference between building a business and building you know like a personal brand or uh if you're doing anything other than that then um we need to think of better ways to [Music] have communities of entrepreneurs or just like how how to you know better books to read or better ways to get inspired than just to go on twitter i think there's a distinction to be made what you said there's the lines are so blurred right now but there's actually a difference between building a business and building a following and like it could be so difficult to see the difference between between the two because you automatically assume uh this person has 40 000 followers like they're successful where it's all in many cases unless you have something really valuable to offer it can totally be an illusion where the only thing that you know the the person with 40 000 followers is selling is some kind of info product on how to get 40 000 followers where and it's like a weird thing you know what i mean it's this weird cyclical um concept whereas writers like myself and writers like you with starter story where that's why i always try to advocate um the value of having long-form content that the people who actually have interest in reading it are gonna be there to sit and like take time to absorb the information and consume it as opposed to you know just the scroll the next dope and mean hey you know and i think that's coming back a little bit i think people are starting to see the value of like storing all of your content write meaningful content for the people that actually want to read it and then um and then i build not just your audience but like your tribe of people through that mechanism and you've been having a ton of success with it yeah i think there's something to that to building slowly and building maybe not through just channels of twitter and getting followers like i think this guy his name is matthew paulson he started marketbeat.com really really big successful finance and stock media company but he doesn't really have any following at all [Music] and he actually wrote like a couple books and he like you know you never really heard of anything like that but those books have been like one of the most uh helpful things for my business because he runs a similar business as me and um those books were like you know amazing but you know it's not like the typical really successful book from you know successful author that you'll that you'll see or hear of you know that are more mainstream or household names yeah but that guy's probably killing it yeah i mean he's awesome man he's got like he i think he's out of south dakota or something like that and he's like really focused on the startup community of south of south dakota can't remember what city sioux falls um and he's he's like investing in south dakota businesses he's building small communities he's like doing a bunch of stuff for his community and you know he's not really focused on like the the twitter world he's more focused on like this like smaller community so that's inspiring to me i think and he's more in it for the long haul you know it's like i think he's been working on his business for maybe almost 20 years now so i think a lot of people think that you know with this kind of hard and fast entrepreneur lifestyle where you grow to a million followers and in one year or two years but i think kind of slow more you know human to human building of community is a more powerful long-lasting way to build a business totally agree i think that's something you learn when you get older i shouldn't say you it's something i've learned as i've done this a while and the difficult thing there is learning how to be comfortable without instant gratification because kind of what happens is you're five years down the line and i never had that moment where it's like oh man i made it right like i never ever had that moment however when i look back in it it's like every year was a little bit more positive than the last year and so you're almost sacrificing that that movie scene right where you get to stand with your trophy and be like ah i did it but what you're gaining in return is like that actual peace of mind of success that you actually that i actually wanted so it's it's such a juxtaposition there but it's one worth noting it's so hard to zoom out like that like i was just looking at you know i was just mad about that our traffic didn't grow um month over month like it was the same as it was last month and then i was just like you know like you know you you're like oh why didn't we grow 20 like we usually do and then i went and looked i was looking at the spreadsheet of traffic and then like oh we've 10x traffic in one year if you look at the traffic from last year from that month it's it's 10x smaller so like it's it's really hard especially as a business owner to really be able to zoom out because you know you get used to um what seemed impossible a year ago you're that's now feels normal so it's this constant you know desire for more that can be especially because we're just so stuck in the details you know you're so you're so focused on today and right now that you forget the big picture there's this really analogy that steph smith uh she wrote about and she told me about it um her and i are our friends kinda we're internet friends right and so she gave this really great analogy where every time you take another step up all you see is the one more step in front of you and the one more step behind you and so you you take these incremental growth steps but your perspective is still just where you are in the present moment it's like oh i didn't get to that one next step where like you just said i'm basically reiterating your point but to to be able to have a self-awareness to really zoom out and be like oh [ __ ] look at like the 100 steps i just climbed over the last three years and and the thing that's brutal about it is uh you know we can talk about it's like oh like wow such high class problems but i think a lot of people quit because of that um mental game you know like the two years down the line whereas i've been working out this for two years and like when's this really really really going to take off whereas the five years of continuing to build the steps day upon day is is really where it happens and so i i get not worried but i get uh just concerned i suppose about all the the the people out there with great ideas and great things to say that quit too early just because they they couldn't recognize the incremental progress that they had yeah i think you know my mindset kind of changed on it over the past couple years it's like i know that i want to do this just you know business and entrepreneurship and starting businesses i'm hopefully going to be able to do it for the next 40 50 or 60 years i'm not really someone who wants to like retire early or something like that so if you know that you're going to be at it the next 40 years a couple years doesn't sound so bad you know so i think it's just yeah learning how to yeah not to be so focused on instant gratification and to enjoy the process enjoy the daily kind of grind daily work and uh you know just know that you know if as long as you enjoy what you're doing then eventually you'll you'll get where you want to go even if it takes you until you're you know 60 or 70. yeah hey let me know when you figure that out all right i could all use that advice so so that's really cool man thank you so much for uh for being vulnerable in that way with me um it's something that i think a lot of us feel and and very few of us are willing to actually acknowledge let me pivot back to our original point a little bit um i i always want to make sure i provide like some technicalities with with the the people that listen to this podcast uh starter story seemed like it went through and have an evolution of what it was as a business uh you seem to kind of be hitting a stride right now and so what are the ways that you're actually creating revenue from this a lot of times what happens is you get a lot of traffic and it's like oh [ __ ] what do i do here like how do i monetize on this traffic and uh i've i've been through those struggles and that that journey of like stumbling over all the the rocks in front of you right um so how where did you land with that like how are you making money from this and how's it going yeah i think it's really interesting topic especially for for your audience um we started by native advertisements so we found a company who wants to get in front of our audience and um they are an email marketing tool called clavio amazing company like kind of like a mailchimp uh competitor more more advanced version of militant they've sponsored our our newsletter for the last almost three years now and hopefully they'll continue to sponsor it um and that was really effective in the especially in the early days we didn't have a lot of traffic we didn't have a lot of brand recognition they were able to sponsor us for you know a fixed amount per month so that we could so that basically i could go full time i mean living cheaply it was enough to just kind of keep keep the thing going and focus on growth which i liked it was like more of a sturdy strong sponsor rather than like a one-off sponsor um so that was huge and then we right now our revenue is very diversified so i do have a lot of opinions on this topic um but after that we decided to try out a premium membership so um we have like a new york times style model we have an article limit and you can pay to unlock that limit and then we also have certain gated features on the website so a lot of times we take and this is this might be an interesting thing to talk about later but we'll take our content and we will kind of build databases around it or our databases will become our content and vice versa so if you want to you know find a business idea we have 5 000 in our database and you can pay for the membership to get that and we also run programmatic ads on the website and then we also have a bit of affiliate marketing so just like your normal affiliate uh links so we're like very diversified in our revenue and our revenue is like um 43 000 a month right now so um it probably could be more if you focused on one or but you know and [Music] we like very very i feel confident that you know not if one source of revenue or something happens in the business we'd be able to kind of you know rely on the other ones yeah was that intentional did you intentionally seek out to diversify or was it something that just happened organically yeah i think yeah potentially stick out to diversify especially as we become more of i now think of us more as a media company yeah and as a media company you have so many options for the type of content you can do and also ways that you can reach people like through like you know different channels such as twitter instagram youtube the blog whatever so there's also lots of opportunity to try different business models you know what i really love about and i've embraced not doing a sas but doing a media company is that you can just try lots of things and like you can break a lot of things and one decision probably is going to break your business i really really enjoy that i've embraced that more um i think that's one of the more fun things about starting a business like this and why i would tell a lot of people who might want to start a software business think about a media business because it can be especially for someone like me i like to try a lot of different things and you know i'm a software engineer by by trade so i think starting a media company is like really fun and allows you to have fun and experiment i couldn't agree more with that man i think that well it's probably not so much anymore because it's the verdict is in and the the likelihood of you actually being able to hit peak scalability with the sas product is very very low uh there was all there's this rage 10 years ago about you got to get into sash you gotta get into sas just because they're so scalable right but i i see maybe not quite the same scalability with media companies but it's it's pretty damn close and the thing that i like more about it is you don't need you know two million dollars in upfront capital start a media business like you need that for a software product because somebody's got to build the thing and it's hard like that is very very expensive time and that is very expensive work whereas if you want to start a blog it can be about anything like it really can be about anything the thing that i think is so cool is that if you're interested in something other people are going to be interested in it and it can just be the most random esoteric example i i was talking to ethan uh from the hustle the other day and he was saying something very similar he's obviously more into newsletters but he was going through examples of people that he saw who started successful newsletters and i use the examples like yeah like you can do cutting your grass and start a newsletter and i i put that in the podcast and when i posted the podcast some guy posted a link of his youtube channel and blog that he wrote and the whole entire thing the whole his whole entire media business is just about him mowing his lawn and he's i think he's making like 30 grand a month from like affiliate products and advertisements with with lawn care stuff and and i think from a practical standpoint that is such a it's there's such an easier access to entry to go in the media route as opposed to going you know like the product route yeah i mean yeah we we're fully bootstrapped um you know we're making 200 bucks a month 400 bucks a month 600 bucks a month and we figured it out you know in the early days we were running the site for 30 a month so that's where you can start you can have a profitable business on day one um so i would say that that's an amazing way to get into entrepreneurship and especially if you don't want to make you know like you said the sas model if you want to change your pricing model if you want to go freemium or whatever that could break your business like a simple decision and break your business um it's it's a lot more do or die let's say in a software business um so media business you can kind of screw up and i i'm always screwing up i've screwed up so many times and so like what are some of the painful lessons that you learned well the sas business i started after starting starter story i put almost all my effort into that let's say 90 percent of my time is dedicated to going back and 10 of my time was going to start dedicated to growing star story for about a whole year and that still didn't break star stories business it still lived on and i was able to catch myself and and realize that that that star story was the right business to be spending 90 or 100 of my time on and that one was not worth working on and my business still lives on and and you know maybe we wouldn't be maybe we'd be a little bit further in our journey but you know it's still okay it didn't it doesn't doesn't break the business yeah what other you mentioned just like to experiment and and and try new things give me some examples with that like what are some of the things that you tried and clearly like this isn't going to work and maybe some like surprises that you had where oh wow this is working better than i thought it would yeah i mean there's so many like you know we we tried starting a community one time that didn't work and i think where what i love and the experimentation side is like how we experiment with content so um we just have taken and the reason why we a lot of why we've grown in seo so much is our experimentation with content so we say like okay is this like this kind of content do people want this or not we can experiment with it you know it may take a couple days to come up with this style of content and see if people like it and sometimes i know with seo we can see the results of it so are people searching for this in search engines and can we rank number one for this if we do then we can not have this course um like last year i we had so much growth in seo and people were interested in it so i said okay maybe would you guys be interested in my my methodology and that's kind of our methodology so i i did a course on it um [Music] it's just trying like tons of different things and not having like a you know too much ego or pride about your ideas you know maybe one out of five or one out of ten actually works but that's that's how we've seen our a lot of growth is just finding what people want through experimentation yeah i love that i can't tell you how much time and stress i've wasted and put on to myself just because i was convinced that like this is going to work where you find out that this other thing that you tried and hardly paid any attention to is just what people are searching for and so you know the faster you get out of your own way the better so um let me stick on this one for just a little longer what what are like some of the you mentioned you had a community that didn't work and you experimented with some different ideas with content and a lot of them were working so i'm looking for for actionable steps that people can take away from this like what were some of those things that ended up sticking um i think what really worked is we just thought about what you know we do content about business and entrepreneurship people that want to start their own business what kind of questions do they have what do they need help with this has kind of been my like general thesis about starting businesses in general is like how can you help people um one thing that works really well for us is like people want business ideas how can they find a business idea so we did a ton of stuff around business ideas like you know business ideas to start for introverts or couples cool and that sort of thing so we did like tons of content around that and we built our business ideas database um because at the end of the day that's helping someone find a business idea or maybe they're trying to find a name for their business or they want to know how much it costs to start a business or what are the right tools to start your business so we think of things in terms of like how can we help people and how can we create content like what are the questions that people have by talking to people or just doing online keyword research how can we create content around that rather than some idea that you have that would work like okay we just thought maybe that people really wanted a startup community but people didn't want to be a part of the community or the community just wasn't solving people's problems it was more just like talking about businesses people wanted business ideas that's that's what we found through that a lot of those experiments is that that was what people wanted brian clark he's the founder of copyblogger if there's one thing that he's constantly taught me and drilled into my head it's like audience first audience first audience first for some reason certain people gravitate towards certain brands and it can be it can be challenging because you think okay if so copy bloggers writers you know and i've had the urge to put in other ideas maybe around video type content you know or maybe around podcasting like we have a podcast but even the data that we said says the podcast let's do the best or people that wrote or that built businesses through writing um and so the more and more we analyze it the more and more we see the copyblogger exists for two reasons long form seo content that like you said basically solves a problem and conversion copy and like that's it man and it's it's such a funny thing where where success will bring the desire to grow right and a lot of times the way to grow is to get smaller as opposed to just bringing all of these other ideas and i was hearing that in your story where for whatever reason the people that gravitated towards starter story the people that were looking for business ideas so you saw it you just doubled down on it and now look look where it's got you you know yeah i think that there's so much opportunity and it doesn't mean that you have to go bigger it really means that you can dig deeper within the existing opportunities you have and the longer you spend time in the details digging deep and understanding what people want like specifically for you for like you know copywriters like all the elements of copywriting is such a vast short topics right you could write about it forever you probably haven't even talked about 10 you know not only you've only talked about 10 of everything and the deeper you get what i've learned and what i try to tell people is like the deeper you get in industry you the the more opportunity there is and the more like you feel like you can't get enough done like for example i've been playing tennis a lot for the last year and you know when i first started tennis i thought it was like pretty simple like you know there's forehand and there's backhand and there's serve and that's it right but as you get deeper antennas you you understand all the nuances there's there's slices there's volleys there's just so many different elements of the game of tennis and i'm only one year and i know that you know after three years or ten years there'll be even more for if you're starting a business about a small topic it may sound like a small topic but it may actually be you know in a massive topic like cryptocurrency is another good example like it's it's at its surface level it's a simple idea that isn't digging to the rabbit roll there's endless topics and and ways to approach it i guess you're so right about that and it's it's like a scarcity complex i think where there's not going to be enough here but even this the quote simple concept of copywriting right it's it's endless you know you can get as detailed as you want with um i mean geez even off the top of my head i if it's almost like the more specific you go the easier it is to come up with new ideas because yeah like like you mentioned there's nuance and you don't have to you don't have to open up like a different compartment in your brain you can just dig deeper into the compartment you have and i think that's a really great piece of advice for for people that maybe you know have written 15 20 articles maybe they got like a thousand people on their new on their email list and and you know i think about self comparison a lot and you see some of these other brands that have a a million email subscribers and it's like well they're reaching this huge broad audience why can't i and i think those are anomalies really i think that i think that what happens is the curse of being big means that you have to be generic because only generic things can reach that many people where the the real real little diamonds are in like the tiniest tiniest niches and industries and once you figure out what to write about you're you're off to the races you're killing it yeah you never really reach that point where there's you've done it all right yeah the more you go into it the more opens up opportunities that's what i've like you said the scarcity versus abundance mindset is you know you think that when you start out you think that there's just these couple things but you keep peeling back the onion and you keep finding more things and it's like there's not enough time in the day to do all the things you wanted that feeling i think that's really exciting feeling every time i i experience that feeling a lot and every time i do it's like it's it's it's it's an exciting feeling it's like uh how can we it's like kind of a scary feeling it's like it's so big and it's so vast but it's also just like exciting to know that there are so many things that haven't been done well like there are so many businesses to be built there are so many media companies to there's so much content that is literally not even talked about like i watched this um movie called my octopus teacher it's all about um this guy who's learning about octopus and he goes under the water every day and he starts learning things about octopus that have never been recorded in science history just because he spent one year learning about octopus probably more than most people will ever spend learning about this small species like there are so many things that are undocumented that he found just after one year and that's the kind of idea like feeling that i experience sometimes is like you think it's all been done and i always tell people like oh like they want to start this business and then they went online and they saw that someone else had started this business and they say i guess i'm not going to start that business but there's just like i just i just like if you just spend a little bit more time learn about that business there's so many other approaches and you know it's endless i think that like all people the scarcity mindset thinks that like everything's been done but yeah all problems are man-made and man is always making new problems meaning there's always going to be new solutions there's always going to be new problems to create companies or solutions for that you can that you can build a business or you know dedicate your life to fixing so that's one of my big learnings or what i've experienced after you know i've been working on business for four years is that there's always going to be new problems and that's like exciting to me that you know there's never going to be a shortage of problems to work on i guess man i couldn't agree with you more and that feeling you said about about just that excitement i'm always living in there and i'm thinking to myself how is everybody else not seeing this you know like one of the examples i see is is local stuff especially in the second tier city you know like i moved to nashville like three years ago and and i always tell people to reach out it's like hey i'm looking for id i'm like just write about the city that you live in and it's so simple and it's so dry but like and then it's like well why am i gonna do that with the newspapers because the newspaper isn't you and they're never gonna be you and like i swear to you if you just learn everything there is to learn about your city and you go around you meet the people you see the restaurants you meet the businesses like you can get instantly so much traffic and build such a a good newsletter list where local businesses will be like begging you to advertise for them and it's and that's just like one one tiny example of all these ideas that go flinging through my head all around yeah all around the notion of like go small you know get specific and just be the best at this one tiny specific thing to me that's just so much more fun even if you can't make a lot of money doing it it's so much more fun than going and you know working at a corporate job or whatever there's so many people out there that are scared to that want to start something that are scared to do it because they don't you know but like if they only knew how much opportunity at least is just right in front of your face you know yeah i totally agree all right um you've been so gracious with your time man we'll start wrapping this thing up i wanna i wanna pick into your brain a little bit about where you see this going you're at a point right now where you can go down so many different paths and i'm putting myself in your shoes a little bit i've i've been there and almost there's like a curse of choice right we're like no i can't go this way i can't go this way and and really deciding on which direction you want to go and doubling down on that i think is important so when when you're playing tennis you know and you got your adrenaline and you're walking home or whatever and your mind is really clear and you like stare off into space thinking about like where this is gonna be in another three years what what comes into your head um i mean what i'm thinking about a lot now is like how can we build um like a scalable media company that doesn't rely on me personally to be doing the writing or to be having the direction um or to have you know all the ideas um we're trying to build something that you know has you know right now we probably have like 10 to 15 freelancers working on content and building our databases and that sort of thing i'm trying to think about how can we get to 100 how can we like uh like i said before is like our goal is to help entrepreneurs how can we reach more entrepreneurs and help them with more things so like what kind of content can we do and and how can we add more business ideas or cover more businesses how can we get into potentially news and can we do more newsletters and that sort of thing something about like how do we grow this company and scale it to a point where it's not it's not based off my own personal brand or anything like that how can we build something that's more so much like forbes or business insider uh how can we build it like a media company how do you build a company i'm learning that and how can we do it that's you know profitable and scalable and i mean my focus has always been on user generated content and relying on data um and building databases and building our own tech and building like a skip like a system where all our content writing happens and we have review and that sort of thing so it's kind of going to the nuances of running a media business but i'm i'm trying to figure out how to take that next step and build and have like a you know a team that is all thinking about the same mission and figuring out how we can grow i think you're at the the systems step like you just said because so much of this has been reliant on you and you're at that stage like how do i get out of this thing so i can start to build it right um you're gonna do it man i i've really been following your journey for the last year and just seeing how far you've come um i'm like excited for you you're gonna you're gonna do some cool things so i'm excited to watch you grow all right so we got starterstory.com right um patwalls.com you used to write every day you don't write anymore what's going on with that pat uh we do a lot of writing i think might be an interesting point is a lot of my writing is no longer my blog anymore because we do a lot of writing in our company so we run our company through just basically writing so like all our projects are are planned through these long documents something i learned from amazon from amazon yeah i did that same [ __ ] with my company yeah yeah how's that going it works great man because it makes people force like to think things through you know you can't just start spitting ideas through slack it's like okay you have an idea like tell me exactly what it is that you want to do and if you can't write it out then like you don't actually understand it exactly yeah a lot a lot of my writing is now internal company i think that's cool like it's not you know it used to be a lot more about my own personal brand and like twitter and i know a lot of people would would follow that but i've learned so much about like my goals you know right now around building a company and i've just like by writing about that even though it's probably not interesting to really anyone else or it's too specific or if it's too private um that has been where we've seen some of the you know the most growth is like to really just write about the company what we're trying to do so yeah that's really cool i enjoyed your blog a lot and i hope that you start writing about it even things like you know you went through a fitness journey which i think is really cool and i know you got really into tennis and your move um i i like those things the blogs that i read every day are actually there's a guy named fred wilson who writes a blog called abc he's like a vc you know the seth godin blog um this guy named seth levine he lives in boulder i don't know i've always been into those personal maybe not daily but very frequent kind of like this is what's going on in my life so i'm not telling you what to do i'm just telling you that i noticed that you ain't there anymore and i hope you pick it back up yeah yeah for your listeners i hope we didn't talk too much about you know the personal journey if people are interested in some of my you can go into into my blog and find a lot of stuff about like seo and that sort of thing um maybe yeah in the show notes you can put some stuff around that's your audience you know about content writing yeah and building a blog uh unfortunately i don't know we didn't talk about that uh we should i probably could have mentioned that more but ah man i think it's really important i really really mean this one of the most frequent concerns i get is just that that parallelization i suppose on there's already so much out there what is it that i can do that's going to stand myself out and and the answer is just find something specific and bring your own perspective to it so yeah there's always room to get into like you know some of the technicalities about content marketing quote-unquote but unless you get that initial unless you break through that like initial plane of glass you know i find a lot of people just constantly write something and then they doubt it and they write it they doubt it whereas having a plan and just going with it and like like you said man trust in the process i think it's really important i i appreciate your insight i appreciate your time cool cool man all right so i will link everything up in the show notes um i'll have your twitter on there so that you can build your following like i know it's so important to you and we'll do this again pat i really appreciate that thank you so much yeah man thanks