Matt Warren

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Author: Matt

  • Why Doing It Yourself Is the Ultimate Competitive Advantage

    Why Doing It Yourself Is the Ultimate Competitive Advantage

    In a world where AI is accelerating everything—and the barriers to learning are lower than ever—being a DIY generalist isn’t just a personality quirk. It’s a superpower.

    Here’s why mastering many skills and doing things yourself can set you apart.

    1. You Learn Faster Than You Delegate

    Hiring someone to do something sounds efficient—until you realize you don’t understand what you’re asking for. Learning a skill yourself first gives you context, vocabulary, and a feel for what’s hard vs. easy, expensive vs. cheap.

    When you know how something works, you communicate better, negotiate smarter, and make better decisions.

    2. You Don’t Have to Wait on Anyone

    Speed matters. Especially in the early stages of a project or business. When you can jump in and do it yourself, you avoid delays, blockers, and the endless back-and-forth of delegation.

    DIY lets you ship faster. Period.

    3. You Attract More Opportunities

    People notice when you can actually do stuff. The more skills you develop, the more likely someone is to say, “Hey, can you help with this?” That’s how doors open.

    Being seen as “useful” makes you opportunity-rich.

    4. You Go From Idea to Execution Without Friction

    Most projects die between inspiration and execution. Why? Because there are a hundred tiny skills required to get to the finish line. Writing, editing, designing, coding, publishing…

    The fewer skills you lack, the fewer excuses you have.

    5. You Avoid the Paralysis of Complexity

    When you need others to execute every step, you introduce friction: sourcing talent, communicating needs, aligning timelines, budgeting. That can kill momentum.

    The more you can do yourself, the simpler the project becomes.

    6. You Future-Proof Yourself Against Disruption

    Specialists are increasingly vulnerable to automation. When one tool can replace a tightly defined role, that role disappears. Generalists thrive by adapting, connecting ideas, and solving a wider range of problems.

    In an AI world, adaptability beats specialization.

    7. You Build Confidence and Clarity

    There’s nothing more empowering than getting something across the finish line yourself. That confidence compounds. You don’t wonder if you can do something—you know you can.

    DIY doesn’t just get things done. It makes you unstoppable.

    Final Thought: The DIY Ethos Isn’t About Doing Everything—Forever

    It’s about learning enough to start, to understand, and to execute when you need to. Later, you can delegate—but from a position of strength, not ignorance.

  • Merchant Cash Advance to Annual Interest Calculator

    Merchant Cash Advance to Annual Interest Calculator

    in eCommerce, Merchant Cash Advances are common financial offereings. Both Shopify and Amazon have integrated financial offerings based on your sales data. These offers are often quite appealing: borrow $10,000 and payback $11,000 in 6 months.

    At face value these offers seem like a fair market rate like 10% in that case. However, it’s a bit deceiving.

    If you had instead borrowed with a term loan, then as you pay down the principal of the debt the interest payments come down as well.

    So, borrowing $10,000 at 10% APY, with monthly payments you’d pay back about $10,530. Not $11,000. That’s a big difference!

    Here’s the calculator to find the equivalent APY rate for a merchant cash advance. Use this to more fairly compare the cost of credit and wether or not you’d be better off with credit cards

    MCA to Annual Interest Calculator (Monthly Payments)

    Enter your merchant cash advance details below:







  • Goals and Goal Setting

    Goals and Goal Setting

    I’m one of those people who have stubbornly made new years resolutions for many years. Sometimes they stick and sometimes they don’t.

    What I’ve learned about what works and what doesn’t comes down to these core lessons:

    1. focus on action rather than results
    2. Write it somewhere you will look at regularly – and rewrite the goals often as you break them into monthly, weekly and daily actions
    3. measurable is best

    Lets dig in.

    Action over Results

    I might have in my mind that I want to lose 10lbs this year, but the effective resolution that will help me get there has been to record my weight every day. When recording my weight it keeps things in mind often enough that progress happens by default – because I can take action everytime that my weight unexpectedly goes up.

    Here’s a couple more examples:

    Instead of 500 Youtube followers – goal is to publish at least 1 video a week

    Instead of the goal to build some AI software – it’s to commit code to git everyday.

    The lower the level of action that can be measured the more likely it has been for me to make progress on it.

    Write it Somewhere Obvious

    Goals that disappear behind and app, on a sticky note burried in a pile of paper, or in the middle of a journal will tend to be forgotten within days. You cannot hit a goal that you’ve forgotten about.

    Sometimes even if it’s just on a big billboard right in front of your face all day you can still be blinded by it.

    That’s why I like to re-write the goals often, revisit your goal list at the beginning of every month. Pick the goals that can be broken down into something that can be accomplished for the month and rewrite into a monthly goal, then every day of the month rewrite the goal into the day’s action to take.

    Write it by hand – makes it more real and the tediousness of re-writing adds motivation to get it done.

    Measurable Output

    Something like the goal of 500 YouTube subs isn’t entirely in your control. There’s algorithms, and luck involved in catching the right moment in time with the right video.

    Publishing a weekly video is in your control, it’s a cadence that you set, and hopfully can meet. The quality of that video can be as good as you can make in the time allocated to it, and hopefully with repetition, the quality improves.

    I prefer to have measurable items that are dependant on me and remove uncertainty about the finished result. Writing code vs features delivered, videos published vs subscribers gained, emails sent vs converted sales.

  • Programmatic SEO

    Programmatic SEO

    A couple weeks ago I was inspired to revisit an idea I had launched a business into a decade ago, but failed and shut down. 10 years ago, I built a service called AutomaticBlogMachine, it would deploy wordpress to a new server, set up the theme, install some plugins, and publish content.

    However, 2 major things caused it to fail.

    1. Shortly after launch, Google rolled out a series of updates – Penguin, Panda etc that was able to identify the content as machine generated and ignore these website from any SEO impact with ease.
    2. The natual language approaches available at the time were crud and resulted in low value spam. Basic word swapping, translations and gramatical rewording of existing content. Visitors didn’t like it.

    Today with LLMs it’s possible to create genuinely value-add content automatically that answers people’s questions, links to the appropriate resources and has unique imagery to accompany it. It can be engaging content.

    Researching, generating and publishing content automatically using these new approaches is now possible, and so I’m starting an experiement to see how it works.

    I’d like to see what happens with a website that has 10,000+pages. How fast should this site grow content? and if there is a growth in traffic, can it be sustainable and monetized?

    The bigger idea is to build a system (again) that can be used as a domain parking service. It grows the domain rank over time passively, and ideally generates revenue along the way.

    Register your interest with the form: https://forms.gle/QsgyGMbHDJ87Zmv39

    Join Interest Group
  • Founder Fuel: How do you Manage your Business Finances and Cash Flow?

    Founder Fuel: How do you Manage your Business Finances and Cash Flow?

    Sometimes a business is in growth mode and it makes sense to spend money to buy revenue, other times cashflow is king and the focus is on accounts receivable and payable. This stuff is hard and involves a bunch of things I rarely hear people talk about.

    If you have your fingers into the accounting system like I do there are some tools to help make the bookkeeping just a little less tedious and give you visibility on where the money is coming and going.

    Here’s the current software in my finance stack:

    1. Dext – for automatically parsing invoices and receipts, it categorizes and sends into Quickbooks
    2. Quickbooks Online – love it or hate it, it’s a defacto standard that’s hard to avoid for profit and loss, and balance sheets. and is the double entry accounting final resting place for all numbers.
    3. A2X – tears open the payouts sent from Amazon and Shopify into the more granular transactions that make it up. These import into QBO where it’s then possible to see revenue and payment processing fees, returns and other transactions split out.
    4. custom software – theres a few things that A2X can’t handle and for that we have some custom tools (nice to have a software dev in-house). It can help get COGS numbers across all sales channels, and display nicer reports.
    5. Google Sheets – the most versatile tool for adhoc models, and tracking things. Flexibility and shareability is hard to beat.
    6. Notion – notion is the home of all documented SOPs. These how to guides are incredibly helpful for making sure that recurring tasks are understood and done consistently each time.
    7. Banks with virtual cards – virtual cards make it easier to give employees a card for paying expenses, and lower risk that if one card is compromised, a bunch of things will need to be updated. I’m using Relay in the US and Vault in Canada.

    Is there anything I wish could be done better? Yes. The custom software is kind of a pain, mostly because so many systems it interacts with don’t have APIs and have to use fragile ways to get data.

    And that’s it for this Daily Founder Fuel Journal entry.

  • Founder Fuel: How do you measure the success of your marketing efforts?

    Founder Fuel: How do you measure the success of your marketing efforts?

    At different times in a business success means different things. Sometimes it’s measured in Likes and views, other times in ROAS or ACOS, other times it’s in brand recall. But as with most things in business, if you don’t measure you aren’t in control of it. So KPIs for your marketing efforts is an important aspect of understanding if things are working as intended.

    I have been drawn to sales and direct marketing approaches in the past because the metrics are easy to collect. I think most small companies should start here. The direct testing enables quicker learning which can then form the backbone of a brand. Where as jumping straight into brand marketing usually requires a lot of assumptions.

    With one-on-one sales you get immediate and clear annecdotal feedback about what customers want. Then expand with direct marketing ads to scale those up to 10,000+ people to further refine the messaging and targeting, and test the market further. Finally layering in the branding in a way that applies everything you’ve learned so far.

    Easier said than done. People feel compelled to start with a logo.

    As you get more sophisticated, something I have not yet explored is Marketing Mix Modeling approaches to measure the effectiveness of marketing. With a complex set of marketing channels in which to budget marketing spend this is probably the best way to assess how it all is affecting sales.

    That’s how I think about measuring the success of marketing. This journaling prompt came from Daily Founder Fuel a very short daily newsletter that contains a journaling prompt for founders, entreprenurs and business owners.

  • Founder Fuel: How do you motivate and inspire your team?

    Founder Fuel: How do you motivate and inspire your team?

    Leaders can lead in different ways, but some of the best leaders have been truly inspirational. They may inspire people to invent new things, or produce better work, or just provide enough motivation to put in 5 extra minutes. The Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAGs) can work, but can also backfire if people don’t believe they’re possible.

    It’s been really enlightening to see that clear vision and inspiration can break through walls, but that once those walls are broken others quickly follow behind. This happens in sport – the 4 minute mile – once broken more and more people started to do what was previously thought impossible. It also happens all the time in technology – Landing rockets, now that SpaceX has done it, the Chinese are copying it.

    Inspiration is required to get the first people to unlock these barriers.

    How do I inspire? I hope to inspire by setting a good example. By working hard. By being informed enough to provide good reasons for decisions. But it is hard. Inspiring is not a skill learned in high school, though perhaps inspirational writing should be taught right after persuasive writing.

    I believe that more times than not inspiration comes from good story telling. The story you tell yourself or that you tell others.

    It’s not something that I feel confident I have excelled at in practice. But through writing down these thoughts I have a little bit more clarity on how I might learn and improve.

    For more inspirational journal prompts subscribe to Daily Founder Fuel

  • Founder Fuel: What new markets or customer segments could you explore?

    Founder Fuel: What new markets or customer segments could you explore?

    The best markets and segments to explore are the ones that are adjacent with what you already have. The further you go the more you have to start from the beginning to find the audience and the less overlap you have with your existing marketing assets.

    Much more preferable to push into new markets by expanding at the borders.

    This land and expand type of strategy could be geographic, it could be demographic or it could be interest based.

    Now, the thought of how to be deliberate about this comes to mind. How do you align people and keep the focus on markets and customer segments that can be efficiently won? Tie bonuses to winning certain types of customers over others? Create visualizations of the data?

  • Founder Fuel: What inspired you to start your business?

    Founder Fuel: What inspired you to start your business?

    Inspiration comes from many places. The original inspiration for Psychedelic Water came from a desire to go after what a trend towards the opening up of psychedelics – how can we catch the wave with something in the comercial space. Delving deeper into the research revealed more reasons why there was a need for this product to be on the market.

    Other ideas come from trying to solve problems. How can I solve for cheaper housing? How can I design a more interesting e-bike? How do I apply AI to improve productivity?

    My current insipiration has gotten me to think about a blend of a holding company concept as a way to test out all the backlog of ideas I have. There’s so many things I want to be able to accomplish but not enough time or capital to. So I’m attempting to test the ideas out cheaply and quickly with a build in public approach and should anything prove useful, it can develop further under the umbrella of my company.

    I think at a more fundamental level, I like to start businesses because I’m attracted to uncertainty. Life is more interesting when you are dealing with a level of not knowing everything. There’s always more to learn, always new situations and people to interact with. Ideas are everywhere and it’s just too compelling to not explore them.

  • Starting Daily Founder Fuel

    Starting Daily Founder Fuel

    This past week, I had an idea for an app. This idea came from an impulse to jot down some thoughts about my business challenges and how they needed to be written out, journaled, thought through, and developed further. I wanted to incorporate this into a daily practice, recognizing the value of writing. Everyone knows that through writing, ideas become more concrete, real, and memorable, as well as easier to share. So, writing was on my mind as I considered how to approach this.

    I also wanted to maintain a balanced approach to my thought process. Some days are for strategic thinking, others for sales processes, numbers, finance, long-term growth, or professional development. As a founder or entrepreneur, it’s crucial not to fall into old patterns of focusing only on preferred areas but to address all necessary aspects that might otherwise be neglected. Having a structured approach ensures a balanced distribution of thoughts and developing ideas, preventing a single-minded focus and fostering a holistic view of the business.

    I began searching for journaling apps tailored to entrepreneurs, addressing their specific concerns and questions to improve their business and life. Most journals available are generic, catering to a wide audience with personal goals and life thoughts. I wanted something more specific to business ideas. While I enjoy writing on paper, a physical book can be easily forgotten. To counter this, I decided to create an email newsletter that would appear daily, ensuring it remains visible and part of my routine. This way, it consistently prompts daily reflection without being easily hidden or forgotten.

    After collecting journaling prompt ideas and quotes, I realized many turned into homework-like tasks, which, while interesting and fun, also served as valuable exercises. Questions about handling team conflicts, delegation, sales tactics, personal skill development, team motivation, and defining unique sales propositions kept me engaged. These prompts helped test my clarity of thought and understanding of various business aspects, ensuring I stayed sharp and well-rounded in my approach.

    Seeing a need for such a resource, I launched a website, dailyfounderfuel.com, and created a newsletter signup so everyone could try it. I populated it with prompts scheduled out for the next several months. This experiment required minimal effort and low cost—around $40 initially and $10 monthly for email service, domain, and hosting. This small investment sets up an ongoing experiment to see if there’s interest in such a resource. If successful, I’ll have a valuable list of entrepreneurs and founders. If not, it’s a learning exercise. Either way, it’s a worthwhile endeavor. If this sounds interesting, check out dailyfounderfuel.com and sign up.