Smash Notes
17 Years of Online Ventures, with Matt Giovanisci of Swim University
Matt Giovanisci (@MattGiovanisci) is the founder of Swim University, the biggest niche site around swimming pool and hot tub care. Matt got into the internet world after learning how to build a website for his indie rock band. Since then, he has spent the last 17 years getting fired and re-hired, building new ventures, launching lots of podcast episodes…
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Notes
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Matt shares his background and what he is currently working on.
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Mat shares his motivation behind building SwimUniversity, a niche site around swim pool and hot tube care, which was making $400k/y, pre-Amazon's cut on affiliate commissions.
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Matt Giovanisci, founder of Swim University, says he always wanted to be his own boss and has never done well with authority. Around age 20 he nearly bought a pool store. A backer was ready, and the first pool store he had worked at, starting at 13, was for sale. He and the owner talked it through and then did not do the deal. Small money-making projects had been a hobby since childhood, and he always assumed he would run something, maybe a web-design shop, without knowing what. Swim University was what he finally chose. Learning HTML and CSS, he says, later made independence practical, because he could build Swim University himself.
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Spruce was Matt Giovanisci's attempt to turn the monthly spreadsheet behind Swim University into software. He logged traffic, new email subscribers, and revenue, then calculated churn, traffic-to-email conversion, and the split between digital goods and affiliate income. He shared the sheet through Money Lab. His partner said they should connect Google Analytics, email, and the money tools, then return a health score, a Baremetrics-style view built for publishers rather than subscription software. Giovanisci still likes the idea. They tried to ship in 60 days. He designed Spruce, then learned Ruby on Rails, Git, PostgreSQL, and Heroku instead of the PHP and MySQL he already knew from WordPress. He calls the new stack the mistake.
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After sharing the whole Spruce's fail story, Matt shares what were his real motivations behind building the product.
Was it because you wanted to use it yourself or because you knew other founders would use it?
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Brandon asks Matt if he thinks there are any other products solving what they aimed to solve with Spruce and if there's any space for a product like it to re-flourish and belong in the market.
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Matt has a personal website (called MoneyLab) where he runs experiments on his different online ventures. He shares everything (mistakes, numbers, wins, etc) super transparently on long-form article (even a 12k-word article on why did Spruce fail). What does motivate Matt to do this?
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Matt shares what is Swim University about as if he was explaining it to a 10-year old child.
"We teach Mommy and Daddy keep your pool clear".
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Matt shares how he grew his swim pool care site to millions of visits and 6 figures per year. He has been working on the site for +10 years...
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Brandon asks Matt is he applied any of the lessons learned from Spruce's failure into SwimUniversity or other businesses. Matt shares he did on one Wordpress plugin he has built.
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Matt Giovanisci says inspirational posts do nothing for him. He runs on negative motivation: tell him he cannot do something and he will. Swim University started when he talked about it so long that a friend called him all talk. What gets him up is refusing to have a boss again. He says he would rather live in a cardboard box than work for someone else. He also treats pool writing as a hobby that now pays. He wakes up to do what he wants, and the day he loses control is the day he has to stop. He describes income around $350,000 a year, just him, and he is proud of it.
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Matt Giovanisci, publisher of Swim University and Money Lab, says marketers obsess over volume. They think publishing must be constant, bigger, and longer, including the claim that a blog post should average 2,000 words. A short explanation, such as what a guitar pick is made of, does not need 2,000 words. The other mistake is calling every post a story when it is only a diary of someone's day. He wants writing that is crafted and interesting to a reader who is not the author. Even Money Lab entries about Spruce get edited: he asks whether the piece is interesting, whether the order is right, and why he picked one tool, then rewrites lines.
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Matt shares what he would tell Matt from many years ago after Spruce Metrics was shut down. He's critics his intentions on getting into a business he didn't really enjoy or care about.
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