Matt Warren

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Category: Entrepreneurship

Founder journey, startup lessons, and business strategy

  • 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.

  • My Early AI Business Failure

    My Early AI Business Failure

    The year was 2011, I was deep into affiliate marketing and AdSense with content websites. On the side I had created and launched a dozen different WordPress blogs.

    Things were getting unwieldy. The backups, updates, monitoring, designing, and writing content for all these websites was a lot of work, and it easy to miss things that broke.

    I knew that keeping the content fresh and updated was key to ranking on Google. Even back in 2011 I been already been blogging for over a decade.

    I wanted to scratch my own itch and build some tools that could automate the management of these WordPress installations. As with all things that get automated I wondered about how big of a scale this could get. Would it be possible to manage 100 blogs? 1000?

    At a certain scale, writing blog posts for these websites becomes an impossibility, so I started looking into an approach called content spinning. This used an earlier approach of AI techniques called Natural Language Processing to re-word and re-arrange other written content so that it appeared unique in the eyes of Google.

    I built it and it worked!

    This platform could crawl the internet and compile the latest news, and interesting data into dozens of fresh blog posts every day.

    This was the first SaaS business that I built and launched with paying customers. I was pumped.

    A customer could simply load in a domain name, a list of keywords to target for the blog content and select one of several available themes. The system would then install WordPress, configure it with users, themes and plugins and it would start the processes to crawl the internet for related content that could be re-purposed.

    It was almost entirely hands off.

    I used it to launch and run over 60 websites.

    The launch went well, and I had a perfect number of users to build off of.

    And then it happened.

    The same month that I launched Automatic Blog Machine, Google rolled out a major overhaul of it’s search engine and it was insanely good at finding websites with content like what was possible to generate with the NLP approaches I was using. It was immediately able to flag and de-rank all these websites.

    With no other better approaches for automated content generation, and better AI still a decade away the users slowly churned. The defeat was de-moralizing, and instead of pivoting this into what could have become a decent WordPress management and hosting service I lost the motivation to keep it going.

    At the time I learned the wrong lessons from this experience:

    Google can stomp you out of business in an instance

    Timing is just part of the random chance involved – I lost.

    However, with more experience under my belt I can say that it should have taught me some different lessons:

    Persevere in the face of challenges – there are always challenges.

    Pivot if necessary.

    Success is a mental game as much as it is about execution.

    What seems like bad timing might just be the natural course of competition and innovation required to stay ahead.

    Hopefully you found this story entertaining. If so, let me know. Thanks for reading.

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  • Launch with AI: The Agile Path to Success

    Launch with AI: The Agile Path to Success

    Maybe the algorithm is trying to tell me something, but I’ve heard a concept from multiple different people, in different ways over the last few weeks:

    “Now Not How” – Noah Kagan

    “Press Publish” – Colin and Samir

    “Do It Now” – Brian Tracy

    “Done is better than Perfect” – Sheryl Sandberg

    “Start Before You’re Ready” – Marie Forleo

    “Ready, Fire, Aim” – Michael Masterson

    “Be Demand First, Not Supply First” – Jason Cohen

    “Sharpen our ideas in the market; not in our minds” – Daniel Priestley

    Just Do it. But starting something new is daunting. There’s a million things that need to be done and limited time to do it in. So where do you start? You start with selling.

    Sell before the brand exists, before the domain is purchased, before the first line of code is written.

    Sales is the process of asking questions and finding out what people want. You get a commitment from them (often money, but could just be an email address) and then you figure out how to deliver.

    But this is a newsletter about AI. So I asked myself: Could AI take this advice and apply it in new and innovative ways to test demand even earlier, and reduce risk of failure even further?

    Yes, of course! What kind of AI Newsletter would this be if the answer was no?

    Some of best ways that AI can help de-risk a business or product as early as possible are:

    Critique and Refine Ideas

    AI is another voice to critique and refine ideas before presenting them to people. Ask what are the hard parts, what are the possible issues what are the steps to do it. Start your research with a chat. ChatGPT is often annoyingly positive, but the back and forth conversation can be a great way to help flesh out an idea, and discover things you hadn’t considered.

    Data Mining

    Some of the best business ideas are just improvements on existing products or services. Use AI to help comb through the competitors and find their pain points. What are the most important improvements that could give you an edge? AI can be great at helping with data analysis.

    Do More Yourself

    AI enables you to get more done yourself before needing to pay others. Get some initial copy written, gather some pain points and counter points for them, get brand ideas, color schemes, or suggestions about how to find and contact the target audience for your new idea.

    Faster to MVP

    When it is time to build, Auto-code, no-code solutions and AI tools make it easier to build a Minimum Viable Product. Use AI to think of brand names, domain names, or generate logos to bring your idea to life.

    Craft your best message

    Write better cold openers, more convincing emails, stronger arguments – not sure how to ask people to buy? Get some AI advice. You can get help building landing pages or writing video scripts. Because, how you present an idea can be more important than the idea itself.

    Do you have an idea? It’s never been easier to develop an idea and make it real. With social media it’s never been easier to connect with people and build an audience.

    With AI by your side, there are fewer excuses.

    “Act Now, Build as You Go.” – Matt Warren

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  • Factorio

    Factorio

    I don’t often get to play video games, but I have put in 242 hours on Factorio. These are my favorite kind of games – resource management. And this one in particular focuses on one of my favorite things to think about – factories.

    The game features a complex tech tree of products that need to be built, and you design the full vertically integrated factory that extracts basic resources, refines them, and builds increasingly complicated parts. You get to layout all the complicated conveyor belts and machines to move things from one place to another.

    The most interesting things that end up complicating what you build tend to be around matching the production and consumption rates of various parts of the system – how many things fit on the conveyor belt, how fast can it deliver items, how reliable is the source material – does it need a buffer, what’s the ratio of particular production of sub-components required so you don’t have 1000’s of one thing, but none of another part.

    The game also has an element of battle with the aliens who occassionally attack and destroy everything (this is probably the least fun part of the game)

    There’s enough depth to the gameplay that I could definitely put 1000+ hours into it and still not be an expert in all the more advanced things like train management and control signals. And once you have explored the stock game, there’s a massive librarly of mods that can completely tweak everything.

    This is a game that teaches some valuable thinking skills. Managing complex systems and how best to abstract and organize things. I definitely got my money out of this game. Lots of fun. Highly recommend.

  • The Thesis Behind Psychedelic Water

    The Thesis Behind Psychedelic Water

    I posted this on Twitter a while ago, but this site is a good place to document these thoughts as well:

    1. Alternatives to alcohol is a growing market. There is a tailwind here as more people opt-out of consuming alcohol. I believe this is driven from disruption of the bar scene, zoom and video games replacing evenings out and health trackers clearly showing the negatives of drinking

    2. Psychedelic Water developed a proprietary mix of herbal supplement ingredients that is a compelling replacement for alcohol. It provides the relaxed happy and social benefits without the drunkenness, and hangover negatives

    3. Alcohol is bad stuff for us. it’s a habit forming drug associated with car crashes, domestic disturbances, poor sleep quality, hangovers, beer belly, loss of coordination, blackouts, hangovers, heart disease, high blood pressure, and worse. The world needs something better.

    4. The bold brand gets attention. It’s a double edged sword, but people hear about it and get excited. Our customers love what we’re doing & there are raving fans. It’s a product that people buy on-the-spot after hearing the 30 second elevator pitch.

    5. Psychedelics are becoming more acceptable and mainstream, as legality opens up we’re positioned to add new products. The brand also plays a role in normalizing and reducing stigma which hopefully accelerates legalization.

    6. Solving the problems with alcohol with something compelling will literally save lives, it’ll mend families and make people happier. There is a moral imperative to the mission of Psychedelic Water. That’s important

    So yeah, Psychedelic Water is an important company that needs to exist. The mission matters. The impact can be huge. That’s why I left a good job to work on Psychedelic Water.

  • Write down what you do

    Doing a little Journaling to document all the things you do in a single day can have an eye opening feeling.

    Yesterday, at around 5pm I started to write. At first, it felt like I hadn’t done much that day, but as I started to write out all the things that happened the list got longer and longer. Some of the items were decent wins – progress on the home renovation, grocery shopping, writing an investor email, baked cookies, caught a mouse and the list goes on.

    I looked at my partner and said “we got a lot done today”

    She replied “No we didn’t”.

    Writing it out gave me the hindsight to see just how many little things were accomplished that day. Before starting to write it out the day emotionally felt wasted, afterwards I had that emotional high from a sense of accomplishment.

    And all it took was a few minutes to reflect on the day and write it down.

  • Playing a Part in Re-Shoring

    One thing that has become abundantly clear over the last year is just how fragile our global supply chain is.

    • Covid lockdowns froze up the train yards and docks creating a shipping backlog, spiking costs and adding delays on all imports
    • hoarding of toilet paper made it a scarse resource
    • Snow in Texas disrupted all vehicle traffic for weeks
    • National first interests restricted availability of PPE and vaccines
    • ransomware on gas pipeline triggered a run on gas stations and fuel outages
    • Suez blockage prevented $9.6B worth of trade
    • Chip shortages are causing car factories to furlough workers waiting for parts
    • Lumber prices spiked 4x

    We discovered that our globalized marketplace based on finding the best prices for things wherever in the world they can be done is more fragile than it should be. Instead of being globally distributed and efficient it is focused centralization and adds dependence on a lot of risk factors. Clearly we should be finding solutions to add resiliancy to global supply chains.

    Resiliancy comes from having multiple options available and the flexibility to quickly change suppliers that are located in different countries. The closer businesses can be to their suppliers the lower the logistical risk. For many decades the focus on local commerce has been on food (at least here where I live). “Buy local” often refers the farmers markets for fresh locally grown produce and for artisan produced wares.

    Much more needs to be done and it is something I’d like to find a way to play a part in.

    There is a real need to fill in the gaps on the production of products where we rely heavily on imports. But that’s such a wide open problem that it’s hard to know what actionable things any of us could do to help. Some areas I’m trying to brainstorm on:

    • Is there something that could be done to make adding robots to factories, quick, easy and less daunting?
    • Could something be built to help find suppliers and lower the barrier to getting deals done?
    • Are there any industrial machines I could buy to scale up my own manufacturing business?

    Over the next few years I think and hope that investment money will allocate to solidifying local supply chains for the critical goods that have been off-shored. Bring that critical stuff back while remaining competitive through the use of more automation. It’s a wave I’m looking for a way to participate in.

  • Finding Winners

    There are lots of stats out there about how many businesses fail. It is astounding that something close to 9 out of every 10 businesses fold in just a few years. With each of those businesses there are smart ambitious people with the best of intentions, plans, and money to get things off the ground.

    With odds like that it’s amazing anyone every tries to start their own business right?

    But from a different perspective, with those odds and the potential rewards of a success why doesn’t everyone keep trying to start businesses?

    Every time you tackle a challenge like starting a new venture there is a tremendous learning curve.. how to hire/fire, how to raise financing, how to balance sales and marketing, what are your strengths and weaknesses, what should be delegated or contracted out. Nobody has all these skills in grade 5. There are no naturals. Everyone needs to learn.

    With that context it’s easy to understand why early attempts to start something have a high likelyhood of failure. Most people need to learn by doing and it’s easy to make lots of mistakes before you’ve mastered the skills.

    If one out of every ten lottery tickets was a winner would you keep buying tickets?

    matt warren

    I think I’ve scratched off more than my share of losing tickets. But with each loser my confidence has improved in specific areas.

    I think I’ve got a winner on my hands now.

  • Canadian Manufacturing

    Over the last couple of months I’ve been giving some thought to how the manufacturing business works, specifically in Canada. It’s been driven partly from things that I’ve been trying to buy, partly from wanting to try my hand at small scale production of something in the garage and also because it’s such an important sector of the economy that’s been struggling.

    There’s an unintuitive mismatch of economic incentives for supply chains. Retailers often treat their suppliers as trade secrets, sharing information about where they buy products from can have several negative impacts. For one, if someone buys the same products they could become a direct competitor and start pushing down prices. Secondly, the supplier may have less product available for them if others start placing orders.

    Up the supply chain the same things continue to happen. Suppliers are tightly held secrets. If you want something you should buy it through the downstream company.

    In comparison, the chinese manufacturing industry has found a way to unlock these barriers to efficient commerce. It has become so much easier to find chinese suppliers that even for simple components like standard metric bolts I will order them all the way from Guangzhou instead of HomeDepot.

    Canadian manufacturing seems to need incentives that align better with the whole sector, and the national economy at large. It’s a bigger challenge than seems feasible for me to have any impact on, but nevertheless the mental wheels are turning to see if there is something that could make Canada make again.