Pat Walls

Pat Walls is the founder of Starter Story, a media brand built around in-depth interviews with founders about how they started and grew their businesses — including, unusually for the time, how much money they actually make. He began it in 2017 as a side project while working a corporate job, writing in two-hour deep-work sessions at a Starbucks before his day job.

Starter Story first found readers through Reddit, then scaled with SEO-driven idea and case-study databases, a premium membership, newsletter sponsorships and later a YouTube channel that grew past 800,000 subscribers. After shutting down his other side projects in 2020 to go all-in, Walls grew the business from under $10K a month to roughly $1M a year by 2023, and in February 2026 HubSpot Media acquired Starter Story, which continues to run under its own brand.

Walls is a long-time builder in public: he wrote monthly progress reports from the days when the site earned nothing, and still shares openly about revenue, burnout, think weeks and the mindset side of entrepreneurship. His newer Starter Story Build program teaches people to ship AI-built apps in days.