00:00 Hey, we got some really cool research here from Starter Story. It's a premium solopreneur report where Pat Walls of Starter Story put together this really cool curated data on solopreneurs, people who are working alone.
00:16 And in this video I wanted to point out some really cool things that he did. If you want a copy of this yourself go to StartaStory.com slash solopreneur.
00:24 For BetterSheets members, this is one of the few spreadsheets I'm not putting available in the BetterSheets members section of the video.
00:32 If you're watching this on YouTube as well, just go to StartaStory.com slash solopreneur to get yourself a copy. I'm not giving it away.
00:40 You can get it through starter story. It's completely free here for your email address. So what is inside it? It is listed Let's talk about what it is then I'm going to talk about what it does well I'm also at the end of this video gonna have some really Some finer points just to make it a little bit
00:57 better because we can always make our spreadsheets a little bit better But I really love this First off, what it does, it has literally names on the left side, individuals, the business that they run, the business description, and I love that it's a short description here, very short.
01:14 It's not like a overly wordy description. Categorized by their industry, Categorized by their industry, by the product or service, SaaS, product, niche, blog, online courses.
01:26 And then you have also product pricing, sort of how do they, what business plan or business, this probably might be better, it's like a business model, how do they make money?
01:38 Then, how much money do they make? And it keeps going. This, she just, Just keep going. Dedication, are they full-time or part-time or is it a side hustle?
01:46 We have just a few side hustles on here. All the way at the bottom we have some side hustles. I think going full-time is really an indicator correlated with revenue.
01:56 And then you have initial investment. This is unique because at the start of the story it's all, about getting started, how do people start their business, and then you see here's individuals who are successful, here's how they started.
02:08 This is exactly how much money they started with sometimes in A, not applicable, but here you have someone who started with $20,000 and is making $96,000 a year, but people also up here less than 500 bucks and making over 200 thousand dollars a year.
02:23 But it keeps going. We have how they came up with the idea. So instead of just a list of people and sending you over to start a story right away, in this report it has how did people come up with the idea.
02:36 Then the main customer acquisition channel again. If you are looking for you know how to start a business. With less than $500 that can make over a million, you can do a few filters here and come up with here's the main acquisition channels for each of those.
02:50 How many employees do they have? The location? Year started? So you can sort of correlate. You can see. Is there anything that's going really fast that started in 2020?
03:01 Here you go. Dan Nees started this in 2020. What was it? Let's see. It's a niche blog. It's a newsletter TLDR, newsletter making $5 million a year now.
03:12 And it only started in 2020. There's a couple more, but some have been 20, 2003. Oh, here's a 2021 made chocolate.
03:22 This now goes into Instagram and Twitter territory. So if you're looking to connect with them on Instagram or Twitter, there's a username, there's a link directly to that thing that they have, how many followers they have.
03:41 So if you're looking to connect with them on Instagram or Twitter, there's a link directly You have some people who are not even on Twitter up here at the top and you have some people with 0 to 5,000 followers here 100k yeah a lot of people with some followers, but not everybody has a follower and then
03:55 what tools do they use? Here's three one to three examples of the tools they use well Eric Brown has zero here, but You see all of these cool Photoshop landing pages, Twilio, Kajabi, Ruby on Rails, and then finally after all of that information, we have an actual link to a full case study over, they're
04:16 not even all on Starter Story. That's the crazy thing about this. Wait, this is okay to work. This is, growth and reverse, we have life hackers.
04:24 So these aren't even on starter story themselves. This is great. So this report is for people who are starting who are like, what do you need to do to get successful?
04:33 What are some easy case studies that I can come see? All in this sheet are here. Which you can filter by industry, you can filter by product.
04:42 Filter by revenue, dedication, you can see how do they come up with the idea, the main acquisition, all this cool cool stuff in the spreadsheet already because you know we're just gonna put this stuff in a spreadsheet and then analyze it.
04:55 We got Ms. Excel here, Microsoft Excels online content courses and content. So also I want to point out But there is more information over here, starter story, solar print or report.
05:06 So there's two tabs, there is the data tab, which is gorgeous. And then you have the info tab, which might be better of like start, maybe start here.
05:17 And it's a really simple report, just goes through a few. You. Pieces of information, data doesn't lie, over 90% of case studies in Star Destroyer are solopreneurs, it started with less than $500, that's crazy, right?
05:31 More than half of the 6,000 startups with a successful exit were run by solo founders. Yeah, you have really cool stuff, you can, go to file, make a copy yourself, just get it at startofstory.com slash solar printer.
05:48 All right, what did he do? So that's what it is. That is what this is. It's a data of solar printers.
05:56 I do wanna point out before I move on that the term unicorn, I'm not sure if you know this, the term unicorn.
06:02 Was created by cowboy ventures. The woman who ran that VC fund put all of the CEOs of the top tech firms at the time into a Google Sheet and tried to figure out what are some common patterns and she put in like their age, she put in where the university was, all types of, of information into a Google
06:24 Sheet. And she found out, after doing this report, kind of thing, for Cowboy Ventures, that there is no single pattern.
06:34 And so that's where she came up with the term unicorn. And that's why now we have the term unicorn for a billion dollar company, is because there is no discernible connection between them.
06:43 Here we can see a very similar thing with solar printers and successful solar printers. There's different industries. There are different prices.
06:51 There are different kinds of revenue. There are different dedications. OK, most of them full time. Different investments. There is another type of information you can get from this, which is you're trying to look at.
07:03 Trying to look for patterns, and sometimes there are none. So you really got to do things your own way. You got to get traffic your own way.
07:09 But there's a lot of options we can choose from. And so now, what did Pat Walls and Spider Story do really well?
07:18 For one thing, they're not using Ariel. They changed the font. It's in the font. Here, that's really cool. Enter all over the place.
07:27 They used Enter. Great. One thing they did highlight are bold. The names are just really sweet and good because the names of the people are very important.
07:41 We might know some. We might, have some familiarity with them, and if they were not bolded, I think this would, yeah, this looks very different.
07:50 But the fact that they're bolded brings them out, highlights them against the sort of data to the right. They use their purple, this is their custom, not their custom, their brand.
08:03 Color of starter story so it fits really well one thing they missed out on here is having starter story up at the top in Row one, it's okay because the whole thing is called starter story, but over here on info They do have their logo.
08:15 They have solid no perner report So yeah, maybe they just decided not to have this logo here as well, but I'm I might have added that as well.
08:25 I really like over branding because you can't really have too much branding. In a Googlesheet that people are getting anyways.
08:31 And it's a gorgeous screenshot, right? And the reason is because you have this data that's cut up. Instead of just black and white text, all the, yeah, black text, white background, all the way to the right.
08:43 We have these industries categorizations. So we have some context over this data that we can categorize. We can see the categories here very clearly.
08:54 One very cute thing that really helps make the sheet really nice is that these are all colored. All of these industries.
09:04 The main product services also color but slightly different shade of the same color. So normally if you're being sort of quote unquote lazy and you want a little bit of color, you'd just sort of splash some color and done.
09:16 And very easily these two columns could have been muck together, mushed together into sort of a color, mushed together into sort of a color, mushed together into sort of a color, Smosh, but they didn't do that.
09:26 They took the extra time to figure out the different shades of a single color here. I might have also come up with some other shade here, but I do like, you know, there's a quite a different color here and then shades here.
09:39 And then as you go over, there's yellow and, Purple and then shades of green. So they did that twice. They have shades of green here for money They have these shades of this pink or red for the main product service And I like that they're product pricing and revenue they put in two columns of text that's
10:02 just bare black text and then more color, more categories. It's very simple and very easy to sort of have a bunch of data, it's all black and white, and then some color.
10:14 That's very easy, but I like that there's a little bit of a heartbeat here. There's a bit of business, a little business description, a little categorization, big categorization, and as we, more and more to the right.
10:26 We do get more personalized, right? We have more product pricing, very specific thing. We have very general things here. What is the literal name of the business?
10:34 A short description, the main categories industry, and as we go to the right, we get more and more detailed. How do they price their product?
10:44 How much money? What money do they make? Are they dedicated or not? Now it's more about the founder, the solopreneur.
10:49 What investments did they put into it originally? How did they come up with it? It's like this big funnel of like, here's this person we may know, the business they run, but as we go to the right, it gets more and more minute, very much more detailed in this report.
11:04 Much more about like the customers are getting then literally about who they are and what they do right Instagram Twitter Who you can find out more you can follow more?
11:14 See how there how many followers there he's even data about their follower account really really cool the tools they use Links to even full and if you want to read more like I of course I always want to read more about Neville.
11:26 Like, I want to know more and more. There's a YouTube video. I'm going to go watch this probably after I make this video.
11:31 Really, really cool. So I really like the sheet. I think Pat Walls and the Star Story team did a wonderful job on this.
11:41 I wish it was even more. Right now, it's $199. People. I wish there was more. I wish there was another 100 here and maybe perhaps putting out something like this, get some attention and then more people add sort of their info and get on to starter story and they put more on here.
11:59 Like I'm a solar printer myself making about 8k a month-ish. Plus or minus. Some months are better than others. Some months are terrible.
12:10 Very spiky revenue, right? And I think there's a few things. So now I'll go into a few things that might make this sheet better.
12:19 One quick thing to do is just few show and unshow the grid lines. I think they cut a. Made their own specific grid lines here.
12:28 Very much like in the starter story realm. I'll do that right now. It's just go select everything but the top one.
12:36 And I'm gonna go to the borders. I'm gonna add just a little bit thicker, not gonna be black, but it's going to be a shade of purple.
12:44 I'm gonna add just a little bit more purple. I'm gonna see how that looks. Yeah, that looks great. Awesome. I would also try to come up with some very minute shade of purple here.
12:57 So I might go over here, take this custom color and go there. Nope, up there. Very very very little tiny thing of purple Great Let's see how that looks when I go here.
13:16 Oh, that looks great Copy that back over Yeah, see now it looks a little bit less than like a So one thing I might consider There is, do I want this to look exactly like a Google sheet?
13:29 And sometimes you want it like that. Screenshot of this with a little bit of color, some black and white, some nice high contrast.
13:38 Great for screenshots, great for featured images on blog posts, eye catching. But when you're looking at this, I might consider some other kind of background.
13:54 Maybe even take this down a notch of this black. Yeah, this is the blackest black. I love in my case, 444.
14:02 And it's just a little bit, A little tiny difference, but I think it makes a huge difference in total. So I think we did that as well here.
14:15 Just double check. And we might even do another shade of purple here, even less purpley more on the white side.
14:28 So I do this but then I would change it and go even lighter but just a hint, just a hint of purple there.
14:39 What I might do, I don't really like these grid so much, I would do a different grid. I might actually.
14:46 Change it to the smallest. Yeah, that looks way better. Yeah, I think that grid was a little bit in the way.
14:53 I would also take all of these rows and just bump them a little bit. I saw that there's some text here that is much better to read.
15:02 Maybe even do a little bit more. To then take these names and center them all the way around vertical and there.
15:12 So that's a little easier to read. Again, having that shot of everything sort of scrunch up and seeing a lot of data great for outside people to come and look at this.
15:23 But now I'm like, I really want to make this more of a joy to read and more. Of a joy to sort of peruse through.
15:29 So I'm gonna increase these rows. The rows might be a little too much, but you can see now you can read a lot more in the product pricing, you can read a lot more on these customer acquisitions.
15:39 I'd even consider doing way more. Or what we could do is just say. Enter everything vertically. I think that's going to look a lot better.
15:50 Sweet. Does. Definitely does. Businesses might be. Oh, there's two. Just saw Amit, Google Sheets, Miss Excel, spreadsheets. My spreadsheet fam is represented fully in here.
16:05 Oh, Peter Levels. It's a quick. I've already started a Nomad List as a Google Sheet. A lot of Google Sheets here.
16:11 A lot of Spreadsheet people here. Neville loves Spreadsheets. Thomas Frank, Notion. Yeah, a lot of Spreadsheet people here. So increasing your Spreadsheet skills is really good.
16:21 If you want to increase your Spreadsheet skills even more, make sure you're a member of bettersheets.co. If you're already watching this on sheets in the member section.
16:29 Thank you for being a member. The last thing I would do, it's just a little pet peeve of mine, having these extra columns just peeps me a little bit.
16:40 So I would just delete those very minute little changes. I would also go to the bottom and delete all of the other Rose, this is just for presentation and reading, right?
16:51 If you're in the middle of working on this and you're like, I need those extra rows because I'm gonna add more stuff, go ahead, keep them, keep them.
16:58 But just like in presentation, I don't want to get lost on the bottom. If I go to the bottom and it just keeps rolling down to row 1000, I'm lost, right?
17:08 This not much better, right? It is not a vast difference because I think the sheet was really good. I think there could be a little bit more design here.
17:18 I saw if you want to watch another video, check out my video on seed table. Their Google sheet was just uber well designed.
17:26 They did a lot of design. Lot of cool things in the report section that I think would be really cool here.
17:31 But go watch that video about seed table in their Google sheet. Thanks for watching. I hope you learned a little bit from Pat Walls and Starter Story.
17:39 And if you do get this go to make sure you go over to Starter Story dot com slash solar printer.