Hi friend!

I'll be at SXSW next week! Let me know if you'll be there. I'd love to see you in-person!

This week's deep dive is a story I've shared a little bit a couple of years ago, but never as a full deep dive. Excited to share this one as I met these founders pretty early on in my creator journey and they've been a huge resource for me.

What's one hurdle you're trying to get over with your business? Happy to try to help if I can!

Now, here's this week's deep dive:

Here's this week's deep dive:

Sometimes the best businesses start with solving your own problem. For Jesse Lakes, that problem was losing affiliate commissions from international traffic to his niche extreme sports soundtrack website.

That single frustration eventually turned into Geniuslink, a company that has survived four "revenue-cut-in-half-overnight" catastrophes and still emerged as the leading smart link platform for creators.

I sat down with Jesse and Shannon, two of Geniuslink's co-founders, to hear the full story of how they bootstrapped this business from the ground up and grew it to over $250k in annual revenue.

Recommended Tool of the Week: This email/section contains affiliate links. I earn a commission if you make a purchase at no extra cost to you :) Since this week's deep dive is about newsletters, here's my favorite newsletter tool: Kit! You're actually receiving this newsletter thought Kit and it's one of my favorite tools in my personal tech stack. It's easy to use, there's a growing community of creators around it, and you get 10,000 subscribers for free?? 🤯 ​Try Kit for free here.

Helpful Content from Others:

​Maybe the best quote of the year​

I love building businesses, but I love building ones that have a great understanding of how they impact people in positive and negative ways. This quote by Mike Evans might be one I use for years to come.

​YouTube can take a minute...​

In some recent deep dives, I've talked a bit about long-form vs. short-form content but not much about platform comparison. This post was interesting because it showed how YouTube video performance can take months to gauge success. I can fully attest to this as someone who has had videos pop years after publishing them.

Another newsletter you should check out:

Automate with Heart by Bev Feldman, Kit Consultant + Email Automation Strategist Actionable strategies delivered to your inbox to align your email automation with your ethics and business - without the overwhelm or one-size-fits-all advice. Subscribe​

Thanks for reading!

Matt

P.S. Looking for recommendations on software or content? Check out my personal recs here. Some links in this email and in recommendations are affiliate links, so I do get some credit if you sign up for things with these links :)