What is Pat Walls working on now?

What happened to Pat Walls after HubSpot bought Starter Story?

Pat Walls sold Starter Story to HubSpot and stayed with the business; today he is still one of the people visibly building it.

HubSpot acquired Starter Story in full in February 2026. Pat, his sister and COO Samantha Walls, and producer Gustavo Tiffer joined HubSpot Media with the company. The price was never disclosed.

This was a substantial business by the time Pat sold it. In his acquisition announcement, Pat said Starter Story had published more than 4,000 founder stories, reached 1.6 million followers across platforms, passed 250,000 newsletter subscribers and 10,000 paid members, and generated multi-million-dollar revenue while remaining bootstrapped and profitable. ADWEEK separately described it as a profitable seven-figure-revenue company with more than 800,000 YouTube subscribers.

The biggest change, then, is ownership rather than Pat disappearing. He spent eight years building an independent company and now works on that same brand inside a much larger media organization.

Before the sale	Today
Pat owned Starter Story	HubSpot owns Starter Story
Independent bootstrapped company	Part of HubSpot Media
Pat carried the financial risk	Pat joined HubSpot with the team
Small independent media operation	Access to HubSpot's media resources and distribution
Exit was hypothetical	Acquisition completed; price undisclosed

Does Pat Walls still run Starter Story today?

Yes. Pat Walls is currently still hosting Starter Story videos, interviewing founders, traveling for shoots and appearing in the editorial parts of new episodes.

The most recent material makes this especially clear. One of the newest episodes follows a founder running three simple websites at roughly $32,000 in monthly revenue and ends with Pat and Gus discussing what they learned from the business. Another new format follows a builder who created almost 100 apps without making money and challenges him to generate revenue. Pat also recently spent a day in New York with the founders who sold Cal AI.

This looks like active operating work rather than a founder occasionally appearing after an acquisition. Pat remains part host, part interviewer and part editor. His name is also still listed as the creator of the current Starter Story podcast.

Although Pat no longer owns Starter Story, calling him a former Starter Story operator would be misleading. He is still deeply involved in what the audience sees.

What does Pat Walls actually spend his time doing now?

Pat Walls currently looks much more like a creator, interviewer and product builder around Starter Story than someone running a conventional software startup.

A large part of the work is obvious from the output. Pat finds interesting founders, interviews them, travels to film some of them, tests their products and then turns their stories into tightly produced videos. The format has moved well beyond the old written Starter Story interviews.

There is also more interpretation now. Many episodes end with Pat and Gus talking through why the business worked, what the founder did differently and what another builder could copy. Pat's role increasingly involves spotting patterns across thousands of businesses rather than simply documenting one founder at a time.

The second part of his work sits behind the content. Starter Story now has databases, bootcamps, idea libraries, courses and builder programs designed to turn the audience from people watching entrepreneurs into people launching businesses themselves.

Has Starter Story become mostly an app-building channel?

Pretty close. Starter Story's recent output is heavily concentrated on apps, solopreneurs and very small software businesses.

We checked the eight newest episodes currently visible in the Starter Story podcast feed. Seven of the eight revolve directly around app builders or solopreneurs whose work is heavily app-based. The exception is still very close to that world: a founder running three small database websites at roughly $32,000 per month.

That concentration is striking because Starter Story historically covered almost every kind of small business: ecommerce brands, agencies, newsletters, physical products, marketplaces and local businesses. These days, the editorial center of gravity has moved much closer to the indie software world.

The revenue numbers follow a recognizable pattern too. Recent stories include an $18,000-a-month app, an $80,000-a-month localized copy of an existing app, a $100,000-a-month app, a $22,000-a-month solopreneur, a $40,000-a-month solopreneur and the founders of Cal AI after their exit. Pat keeps looking for businesses that feel surprisingly small relative to the money they make.

Recent Starter Story episode	Main idea
Three simple websites making about $32K/month	Small database businesses
Nearly 100 apps but initially $0 revenue	Shipping versus distribution
$22K/month solopreneur	One-person software business
Cal AI founders	Mobile apps and exits
Localized app making $80K/month	Copying proven concepts into new markets
$40K/month solopreneur	Small-team internet business
$18K/month first app	AI-assisted app building
$100K/month simple app	Finding unusual consumer app ideas

Did HubSpot push Pat Walls into apps?

There is little evidence that HubSpot created Pat Walls' app obsession; Starter Story was already moving heavily in that direction before the acquisition.

Pat had been interviewing mobile-app founders, AI builders and portfolio entrepreneurs well before the deal. Starter Story was already teaching people to build software with AI, and Pat had increasingly framed the falling cost of software creation as one of the biggest opportunities for aspiring entrepreneurs.

HubSpot has good reasons to accelerate that direction, though. People trying to start internet businesses are unusually valuable to HubSpot because they are choosing CRMs, email tools, marketing systems and other software for the first time. HubSpot itself said that Starter Story reaches founders while they are still deciding which products will become part of their stack.

The acquisition looks more like fuel added to an existing editorial direction. Pat found a subject that performs well with his audience, while HubSpot acquired an audience that overlaps neatly with its future customers.

What is Starter Story Build becoming?

Starter Story Build is currently the clearest product Pat Walls is pushing beyond the videos themselves.

The current Starter Story Build checkout offers lifetime access for $3,995. It includes more than 4,700 case studies, courses and recordings, a private community, research, a deals database and upcoming growth and distribution bootcamps.

Starter Story also runs more tactical programs around shipping apps with AI. One current bootcamp page says 29,589 builders have joined its AI app-building ecosystem. The main Build product promises to take someone from a vague idea to an app with users and payments through validation, shipping, authentication, data and early distribution.

Starter Story used to mainly show people how other founders built businesses. Pat is now building products that try to move the reader one step further and get them to launch something themselves.

Starter Story product	What it does
Founder videos	Shows how real businesses were built
Idea database	Searches roughly 3,000 revenue-generating projects
Starter Story Build	Turns research into a structured building process
AI and app bootcamps	Helps beginners ship products quickly
Paid community	Connects people actively building
Growth programs	Teaches validation, distribution and customer acquisition

Is Starter Story now just a HubSpot lead-generation machine?

Starter Story is now clearly part of HubSpot's customer-acquisition system, while still operating as its own founder brand with paid products and an independent audience.

The HubSpot integration has become easy to spot. Starter Story's legal terms are shifting to HubSpot's terms, and the current paid checkout links directly to HubSpot's privacy policy. Recent videos also repeatedly send viewers to free resources through HubSpot-controlled or Starter Story lead-generation links.

We found the same pattern across the eight newest episodes in the current podcast feed: every one includes a call to action for a builder resource, app guide, business-idea package, bootcamp or similar product. The content attracts the founder; the resource captures the founder.

Starter Story still sells its own expensive Build membership, operates its own databases and keeps its own voice. Commercially, though, the HubSpot connection is already much deeper than putting a small corporate logo on the website.

Why did HubSpot buy Starter Story?

HubSpot bought Starter Story because Pat Walls had built direct access to exactly the kind of founder HubSpot wants before that founder chooses a software stack.

HubSpot was unusually explicit about this. In its acquisition announcement, the company described Starter Story's audience as early-stage founders who are still choosing the tools they will use to build their companies. That is an unusually attractive audience for a company selling CRM, marketing, sales and customer-service software.

The scale was already meaningful. HubSpot said Starter Story was reaching more than 100 million content views a year, with more than 800,000 combined YouTube subscribers, hundreds of thousands of newsletter readers and thousands of founder case studies. ADWEEK put the total cross-platform audience at roughly 1.6 million.

As seen above, HubSpot is also using media much more deliberately as a distribution channel. At the time of the acquisition, HubSpot said its media network generated more than 50 million engagements each month and that its YouTube channels collectively produced more than 20 million monthly views.

Pat had effectively built a media asset sitting several steps upstream from a HubSpot purchase. Someone watches a video about quitting a job, downloads a startup guide, starts a business and eventually needs software. HubSpot now owns that journey much earlier.

Is Pat Walls building another startup outside Starter Story?

We still cannot identify a named new Pat Walls startup that has become more important than Starter Story.

That is worth saying clearly because Pat has started talking like a builder again. In June 2026, he compared himself with Pieter Levels and said he had roughly a 10% project success rate. Two days later, he wrote that there would be "100 more startups" on his project list by the end of the year and said he was cooking.

That sounds much more aggressive than someone planning to spend the next few years only producing YouTube interviews. Yet the public evidence currently stops there. We have not found a new Pat Walls company with a product, customer base, revenue number or public presence large enough to call it his next main business.

His newest visible work still revolves around Starter Story, its founder content and its builder products. For now, the new-startup story is about experimentation rather than a clear successor to Starter Story.

Is Pat Walls really going to launch 100 startups?

Pat Walls looks serious about shipping lots of projects again, but we still have not seen anything close to 100 public launches.

His comment was unusually specific. Pat said he had roughly a 10% success rate and then wrote that 100 more startups would appear on his project list before the end of the year. That fits his older way of operating unusually well.

Pat has previously published his own project history and estimated that only a small minority of what he launched became meaningful successes. He built many side projects before Starter Story became large enough to demand nearly all of his attention.

The 100-project target looks like a real intention. Treating it as 100 businesses already underway would be a stretch. Right now we have the ambition, his history of rapid experimentation and his renewed interest in builders who ship constantly. We do not yet have the portfolio.

Is Pat Walls back to coding himself?

Probably to some extent, but Pat Walls' public work today still shows far more media production and builder education than personal software launches.

Pat has the technical background for it. He was a software engineer before Starter Story, coded much of the original product himself and has continued building digital products over the years. Starter Story's current AI Bootcamp describes him as having built more than 25 apps and digital products.

The environment around him is also pushing strongly toward coding again. Starter Story now spends a lot of time on Claude, Lovable, Replit, Cursor, mobile development and founders who can ship software without traditional engineering teams.

What we are missing is the output from Pat himself. There is currently no public stream of newly launched Pat Walls apps comparable with the constant stream of products being launched by some of the builders he interviews.

Pat can clearly build software. Most of what we can actually see him producing these days is still Starter Story.

Has Pat Walls changed his mind about focusing on one business?

Yes. The Starter Story sale appears to have reopened a style of building Pat Walls deliberately gave up when one company started consuming nearly all his attention.

This is one of the more interesting reversals in his story. Pat previously described a period when he was trying to run Starter Story alongside another company and both suffered. He eventually sold the other business, concentrated on Starter Story and said revenue doubled within a month.

That lesson shaped him for years. Starter Story became the big bet, and Pat increasingly spoke about the benefits of doing fewer things and going much deeper on one company.

As pointed out above, he is now publicly talking about adding 100 projects again. The difference is that Starter Story no longer represents his entire personal financial outcome. HubSpot owns the asset, the team has more resources and Pat has said the acquisition left him financially set.

The old constraint has disappeared. Focusing on one company helped Pat create the asset that gave him the freedom to experiment again.

What kinds of businesses interest Pat Walls now?

Pat Walls is currently obsessed with small products that one or two people can ship fast, market hard and push to real revenue without building a large company.

As we saw above, recent Starter Story episodes keep returning to mobile apps, tiny SaaS products, localized copies of successful products, niche software and solopreneurs. One founder took an existing app concept into a country where it did not exist and reached more than $80,000 a month. Another runs three similar database products for different customers and makes roughly $32,000 a month. Others built extremely narrow consumer apps and reached five or six figures in monthly revenue.

Across those examples, AI is secondary. The recurring pattern is small scope, fast shipping, obvious distribution and measurable revenue.

Pat also seems increasingly interested in distribution as the scarce resource. One of Starter Story's newest challenge formats starts with a builder who shipped almost 100 apps and initially earned nothing. The problem was no longer his ability to make software. He had made too much of it without finding customers.

That is probably the clearest theme in Pat's work these days: software has become dramatically easier to produce, so he is spending more time studying which ideas deserve to be built and how anybody gets attention once the product exists.

Is Pat Walls trying to turn Starter Story into more than a media company?

Yes. Starter Story increasingly looks like a media, data and education business wrapped around the same question: what should an aspiring entrepreneur build?

The database now lets users search roughly 3,000 real revenue-generating projects by business type and revenue. Starter Story Build teaches people to validate and launch. Bootcamps push users toward actual products. The community keeps builders inside the ecosystem after they start.

This makes the old archive much more useful. Thousands of founder interviews can be turned into structured data about business models, revenue, startup costs, tools and growth channels. The same information can then feed videos, searchable databases, idea lists, courses and AI-assisted research products.

Pat spent years collecting founder stories. Increasingly, he is turning that collection into infrastructure for people looking for their next business.

Is Starter Story still Pat Walls' main project?

Yes. As of now, Starter Story is still the center of Pat Walls' professional life.

His current LinkedIn profile lists HubSpot, Starter Story's official pages still identify him as the founder, HubSpot continues using him in its entrepreneurship content, and Pat remains deeply visible across new Starter Story productions.

The absence of a public replacement is equally important. Pat has announced his intention to start experimenting heavily again, but no new venture has emerged with enough activity to rival the time, distribution and product surface he currently has through Starter Story.

The best description of his position is unusual but fairly simple: Pat sold his main company and kept working on his main company.

What is Pat Walls likely to work on next?

Pat Walls is likely to keep expanding Starter Story while using his new freedom to launch many smaller products around the opportunities he discovers through it.

The two activities fit together unusually well. Starter Story gives Pat constant access to founders making real money. Its database shows which business models keep appearing. YouTube tells him which ideas grab attention. The Build community shows what aspiring founders struggle with. His own experiments can then test those lessons directly.

Pat did not have this setup when he originally became an indie hacker. Back then he had coding ability and curiosity but almost no audience. Today he can launch into an ecosystem with millions of followers, thousands of case studies, a builder community and HubSpot behind the distribution.

That does not mean the next experiments will work. Pat's own point about his roughly 10% historical hit rate suggests he expects most of them to fail.

But the starting position has changed enormously.

So what is Pat Walls working on now?

Pat Walls is currently working on Starter Story inside HubSpot, with his attention increasingly split between founder media, products for people who want to build businesses and a return to his own rapid startup experiments.

Starter Story remains the biggest piece. Pat is still interviewing founders, filming episodes and shaping the editorial direction. Recent output has become unusually concentrated on mobile apps, solopreneurs and tiny software companies where a very small team can reach meaningful revenue.

At the same time, Starter Story is becoming a larger product ecosystem. Its database contains roughly 3,000 revenue-generating projects, its Build offering packages thousands of case studies with courses and research, and its bootcamps are designed to move users directly from consuming founder stories to shipping something.

Then there is Pat himself. His promise to add 100 projects suggests that the HubSpot deal has given him something he had largely lost as Starter Story grew: room to mess around again.

Our answer today is fairly clear. Pat Walls has not moved on to one mysterious new startup. He is still building Starter Story, now with HubSpot behind it, while gradually turning the business into a machine for finding, teaching and testing small internet-business ideas. The next genuinely new chapter will begin when one of Pat's own experiments becomes important enough to compete with that machine for his attention.