Dumb iPhone Apps Are Making People Rich Again (Here’s how)

**Pat Walls** (0:00)
When I talk to 12 founders a week, I'm seeing six of them are crushing it with iOS apps. There's a guy that we interviewed on the channel that have an app that forces you to do pushups. They're doing 30K a month.

**Sam Parr** (0:21)
Pat is here from Starter Story. Pat, HubSpot just bought Starter Story. That's amazing.
Congratulations.

**Pat Walls** (0:27)
Thank you.

**Shaan Puri** (0:28)
Is the news out?

**Pat Walls** (0:28)
It is technically not closed yet. I'm going through a whirlwind. I'm going to try to put on a good face for you guys.

**Shaan Puri** (0:37)
You're seven days out right now from selling, and when this goes live, it is presumably closed, and yet you are nervous. What's that about?

**Pat Walls** (0:46)
Well, the deal is supposed to close tomorrow. But it's the psychology of it needs to be signed, closed, wired. Otherwise, I cannot take myself to that place yet. That place to celebrate or tell people or anything like that. And it's kind of weird doing the production process because content needs to be recorded early to go out. So it's super weird to do an interview before it's done.

**Sam Parr** (1:10)
How did you do with the negotiation? Do you feel like, walk us through how you approached that and how you think you did? Give yourself a score there.

**Pat Walls** (1:17)
I had a number in my head before any of this conversation happened when it just came to my head. I started talking to ChatGBT about it, having a little conversation of like, what is, before even the sale or anything, conversations happened, said like, what would be my walk away number? And I just remember thinking back what that number is. And when I went back to the negotiation and then it sort of was that number, I was like, okay, well, I made up that, that would have been my number before any sale influenced me or anything like that. I negotiated to that number because I wanted to be like, authentic in my negotiation of like, that was like truly my number, not to make up something for whatever, that was actually the number.

**Shaan Puri** (1:58)
Do you feel any bit of regret? Because you're like, oh, I got my number. I should have asked for more.

**Pat Walls** (2:03)
Yeah, 100%.

**Sam Parr** (2:05)
You haven't made it yet. If that doesn't happen, that's the final stage for maximum regret. And then it turns to maximum relief when it's done.

**Pat Walls** (2:12)
Yeah.

**Sam Parr** (2:14)
All right, so let's explain. What is Starter Story? People don't even know.

**Pat Walls** (2:17)
Starter Story is a lot of things, but it started out as a side project while I was working in nine to five, because I couldn't start any successful business. So I said, why not just start interviewing founders and sharing their stories online? And maybe I will find a co-founder through that or I'll find a good idea through that. Long story short, it took off. We found other mediums. We had the blog with the case studies. We had products, we had community, we had a YouTube channel. It is all built around interviewing founders doing anywhere from 10K to 100K per month.

**Sam Parr** (2:49)
Let me ask you, what'd you get right? Because this idea of, hey, I'm going to interview founders about how they did it. That's not like a new idea. You did this only a couple of years ago. How many years has it been? Three, four years? How long has it been?

**Pat Walls** (3:02)
No, I've been in the game longer than you might think. Eight years is when I officially started the business.

**Sam Parr** (3:08)
Even eight years ago, that wasn't a completely novel idea, but you did well with it. You separated yourself from the pack. You made it a success. What do you think you got right that others didn't? And I really hope it's not just like, I worked hard, you know.

**Pat Walls** (3:23)
Yeah, I think one thing that now I'm looking back, what did we get right is that we were, you had to share your revenue to get on the website. So a lot of founders at the time, they didn't want to share those things because they had investors, it was private or whatever. We made it a requirement to share your revenue on the site. This is something that we got from Indie Hackers at the time, which was big on that too. Shout out Cortland who built that. But once you could see, like you don't want to read a story about a business and you don't know how much revenue they're making. You want to know how is this business doing? Okay, now I want to learn from this business. So having that revenue number at the top, that was really, really big.