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Back to Turning a Side Hustle into a $9k/mo Business, with Pat Walls from Starter Story.

Why Did Pat Walls and His Roommate Start Delite?

About six months after a coding bootcamp, Pat Walls was a full-time software engineer on a roughly nine-to-four schedule. A roommate who ran a manufacturing business had an idea, and Walls, already building small side projects and looking for something real, joined immediately. They built Delite, software for wholesale orders, at night and on weekends. They never planned the selling. Because the roommate needed Delite, they treated the idea as validated and expected customers at launch. Nobody came. Walls then left the day job for demo calls in a coffee shop, and half the prospects missed the call. Delite already existed, so stopping felt impossible. He says that is where it began to fail.

Transcript

Turning a Side Hustle into a $9k/mo Business, with Pat Walls from Starter Story ·

The Failory Podcast

More from this episode

  1. Who Is Pat Walls, Founder of Starter Story?Pat Walls founded Starter Story, interviews with people who have built businesses, and Pigeon, a Gmail tool he describes as a CRM.
  2. How Did Pat Walls Go From Economics at UCSB to Writing Software?Pat Walls says he never knew what he wanted.
  3. Why Did Pat Walls Leave Salaried Engineering to Start Companies?Pat Walls says leaving a salary was another turn of the same habit: find the next challenge.
  4. What Was Delite (pat's Failed Startup)Brandon does his typical question of asking the founders how would they describe their startups to a 10-years-old person.
  5. Why Did Pat Walls Say Delite Failed?Pat Walls says Delite was a cool idea rather than something buyers had to have. He and his co-founder did ask, and people said they wanted Delite.
  6. Why Did Y Combinator Rejected PatPat has applied to Y Combinator twice and has been rejected in both of them. He shares the story behind applying to YC and his view about funded startups.
  7. Why Does Pat Walls Say Businesses Pay, Consumers Do Not?Comparing Delite's buyers with consumer subscriptions, Pat Walls says a bootstrapped founder will usually collect money from other operators more easily than…
  8. What Personal Mistakes Does Pat Walls Blame for Delite's Shutdown?Besides the market problems, Pat Walls names two mistakes at Delite that he thinks were avoidable.
  9. How Did Pat Walls Go From Delite to Starter Story?Pat Walls ended Delite soon after a Y Combinator rejection. The will was gone, and the idea had belonged to his roommate. He still wanted to start something.
  10. What Delite Lesson Did Pat Walls Use When He Built Starter Story?The Delite fact Pat Walls carried into Starter Story was that nobody used Delite. Starter Story was the opposite.
  11. How Has Pat Grown Starter StoryPat shares the behind scenes of getting the first interviews, going viral on Reddit and Hacker News, building an email list and growing a content site.
  12. Why Did Pat Walls Quit His Job the Day After a 24-hour Product Launch?Pat Walls ran Starter Story for a year before leaving his job.
  13. What's the 24-hour Startup ChallengePat shares the story of his 24-hour startup and how the success of it motivated him to start a challenge for people to do the same, in which +200…
  14. How Has Pat Gone Viral So Many TimesBrandon asks Pat about the science behind going viral in Reddit and Hacker News with what he publishes on his site.
  15. Why Does Pat Walls Make Starter Story Founders Publish Their Revenue?Pat Walls says a revenue figure is the point of Starter Story. A founder who wants the front page has to say what they make.

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