AI Summary
5 min readIn 2017, Colin McIntosh was a 27-year-old who had been fired twice and laid off once. He was done working for other people. So he wrote a business model before he even knew what product he would sell, eventually landing on bed sheets. Twenty-five months after shipping his first box, Sheets & Giggles hit $1.2 million in a single month. He now runs the company largely from bed—or from a river in Denver, where he sets his laptop on a rock and works with his Jack Russell terrier.
Business model first, product second
McIntosh argues that the conventional startup advice—"find a problem and solve it"—is incomplete. The real question is whether people are willing to pay for a solution. He recommends building a business model first, then tweaking the product to fit it. He calls this "founder-market fit": matching the business to your existing skills and passions rather than chasing a novel idea. "People think they have to have some blisteringly intelligent, never-before-seen idea to start a business," he says. "That's just not true."
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:00) **Episode Introduction & Guest Overview** - Host Pat Walls introduces Colin, founder of Sheets & Giggles, who built a $1M/month bedding brand.
- 2 (01:29) **Colin's Backstory: Getting Fired and Finding a Mentor** - Colin describes being fired twice and laid off once before a friend's Kickstarter changed his trajectory.
- 3 (04:41) **The Mentorship Tactic That Changed Everything** - Colin reveals his specific approach to finding mentors: asking for one hour per week in exchange for buying them lunch.
- 4 (05:05) **Business Model First, Product Second** - Colin explains his counterintuitive approach to finding a business idea: build the business model before choosing the product.
- 5 (06:32) **Validating the Idea: Brand Identity Map & Pre-Selling** - Colin details his three-part validation process: brand identity map, financial model, and business model, then selling before building.
- 6 (09:42) **The $284K Launch: Crowdfunding Math & Email Conversion** - Colin breaks down the exact math behind his first 30-day campaign, including day-one targets and email list conversion rates.
- 7 (10:41) **The Power of Personal Engagement at Scale** - Colin emphasizes that he answered every social media comment, customer care email, and wrote every word of copy for years.
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Guests on this episode
Show Notes
I Make $1M/Month From Bed
This is the breakdown of how Colin McIntosh made $1M a month selling bedsheets online... From his bed.
📚 Save your seat to the FREE workshop on How I Built A $1M Business On Two Hours Per Day → https://www.starterstory.com/class?utm_campaign=colinmcintosh&utm_source=youtube
Follow Colin 🐦 Twitter - https://twitter.com/ColinDMcIntosh ✍️ Threads - https://www.threads.net/@ColinDMcIntosh
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Sharing ideas that make money!
Disclaimer: This podcast is published by a viewer using content from Starter Story's YouTube channel with the goal of making his valuable insights more accessible to those who prefer audio formats, helping more people discover and learn from the insights shared in his videos. It is not an official production of Starter Story. For any requests from Starter Story, please don't hesitate to get in touch.
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------------ Keywords: app development, startup advice, app marketing, revenue stories, software business, business podcast
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