Personal

The Story Behind MattWolfe.com

Matt Wolfe

13 Aug 2020 • 20 min read

Transcript:

Hey, what's up. Matt Wolfe here, and welcome to this podcast thing that I'm doing. This is going to be the first episode of a yet to be named "kind of" podcast. The reason I say "kind of" podcast is, this isn't going to be super consistent, like the Hustle and Flowchart podcast, where we release episodes every Tuesday and Thursday. It is going to be more of a random podcast. It's going to be when I have something to say, or if there's something I want to rant about or something I'm interested in, or maybe a behind the scenes story from our business or something like that, that I want to talk about, I'm going to record episodes.

As of right now, I don't have any intention of releasing these on any sort of consistent schedule. If you're expecting me to release a new one every Wednesday or something, I will probably eventually get to that sort of flow, but as of right now, it's just going to be when I have something that I want to say, I can put it out there in audio form or written form.

The Long Wait For My Domain Name

Let me go back a little bit and explain what's going on here and why I'm even doing this thing in the first place. I've been trying to get the domain name, mattwolfe.com, for roughly 13 years now. I think I tried to get the domain, mattwolfe.com, back in 2007. In 2007, it was owned by somebody else named Matt Wolfe, who is a real estate person. He's a realtor. It was taken so I couldn't use it. I reached out to Matt Wolfe because if you went to mattwolfe.com, it would redirect to his Remax website, his real estate website. There wasn't even anything that lived on mattwolfe.com. mattwolfe.com was just a redirect to this real estate.

So, long shot, I shot the guy an email. It was a shot in the dark. I was like, "Hey, I'm going to email the guy. See if he would be willing to give up the domain name for a good price, and I can use it. He's just redirecting anyway, so maybe he won't care." Well, long story short, he never responded; never, ever heard from the guy. I looked at when the domain name expired, and I don't remember exactly what month it expired. Let's just say it expired on January 15th. I literally set a calendar notification inside of my Google Calendar back in 2007 on the expiration date of mattwolfe.com.

So every year, when it came time to renew that domain name, I double-checked to see if the Matt Wolfe who owned the domain maybe forgot to renew it, or decided not to renew it anymore or something. Every single year, on, let's just call it January 15th, I would log into GoDaddy and Namecheap and all the various domain providers, I would search mattwolfe.com, and I would see if there's been any change to the domain status. For 13 years, nothing happened with it. It kept on getting renewed.

Then just this year, actually, it might have been at the end of 2019, my timeline might be a little off, but either at the end of 2019, beginning of 2020, I randomly logged in and noticed that the domain name had expired. I was like, "Oh, I'm going to jump on this domain name. I'm going to get this mattwolfe.com domain name once and for all." I tried to buy it on GoDaddy, was who it was registered through, and for whatever reason, it didn't go through it. It went into some holding thing.

When somebody's domain name expires, it doesn't just become publicly available overnight. There's a grace period where the old domain name owner has the opportunity to re snag it before it opens up to other people. Domain names that these domain name providers see as higher value domain names, they send to auction. The domain names that they don't see as a very high-value domain name, they just put it back into the registry, and people can register it for $10 a year.

Well, mattwolfe.com went into its grace period, the grace period expired, and instead of just going back into the registry where I could buy it for $10, it went to auction. I went to the website that was auctioning it off, and I got into a bidding war that drove it up, and it just kept on going up. I got it to the point where I think I was bidding about $2,000 for the mattwolfe.com domain name. The other person outbid me again, and I just went, "Well, forget it. I've gone 13 years without having the mattwolfe.com domain name. You know what, whatever." I've got matthewwolfe.com. I've got mattwolfe.net. I've got all these other variations of my name. Do I really need mattwolfe.com?

I didn't bid again. I think about $2,000 was my max, and I just went, screw it, whatever. I'll have to live without ever owning mattwolfe.com. I gave up on it. Then, about a month after this auction happened, now we're definitely into 2020, I randomly went to mattwolfe.com, out of curiosity. I was like, who's this new Matt Wolfe that bought this domain name? What are they putting on the thing? Who bought this? Who wanted it so bad that they were willing to bid me above $2,000 for this thing?

I went to mattwolfe.com, and when let in on this site, it was one of those pages that says, "This domain name is for sale." So whoever was bidding me up in this auction was just bidding me up so they could buy it, and then frigging resell it again? Anyway, they obviously thought they'd get more than $2,000 for it.

When I went to this mattwolfe.com site, it had a big banner saying, "This domain is for sale. Click here to inquire." I clicked, sent them an email saying, "Hey, how much are you asking for the domain name?" I think they came back and said, "We need $2,800 for the domain name." I replied and said, "I'll give you $2,200 for it." They accepted it, sent me an invoice, and a couple of days later, I had mattwolfe.com. It only cost me about $2,200 to get my own damn name.

Welcome To My Personal Blog and Podcast

Now, fast forward several months later, all I've managed to do on mattwolfe.com is put a landing page with my face on it that says, "Let me send you some cool shit," and there's an opt-in form. That's literally as far as I've gotten. I spent 13 years and $2,200 to get mattwolfe.com, and six or so months after finally registering the domain name, I still haven't done a damn thing with the website other than put my image there and put an opt-in form.

Now, if you've opted into that form, I haven't even sent one email yet, not a single email. I haven't even checked to see how many people have opted in, how many people are on the list. I have no freaking clue how many people are on that list right now. If I had to guess, I'd say it's like 20 or something. It's not a very big number, but I've never mailed once to that list. I've never put a piece of content up on the blog. All I've done is that landing page.

That's where I am today. I've got mattwolfe.com, and I want to start putting some content on that website. Now, anybody who's followed along to me, you know what I'm about. I'm about podcasting. I'm about affiliate marketing, and I'm about driving paid traffic and SEO traffic, learning traffic in general. My two main focuses in my business are podcasting and affiliate marketing. The paid traffic and the SEO and stuff are feeders for the main goals; the affiliate marketing and the podcasting. That is the main stuff that I talk about.

However, this podcast is probably not going to be as much about that stuff. I'll probably do some rants from time to time about various marketing strategies. I'll probably talk about affiliate marketing and podcasting and traffic and stuff like that from time to time on episodes here and there. This podcast is really going to be my audio journal, I guess, you could call it.

It's going to be me talking about what I'm up to and what I'm interested in right now, books I'm reading, podcasts I've listened to, things like that. It's not always going to be audio form. Sometimes I'm going to be in the mood to just type some stuff out, and I'm going to put some blog posts up on this site. The point being, I'm going to actually start using mattwolfe.com to put some of my thoughts and ideas out there.

Now, those of you who've followed along with me for a while, I've been doing online marketing stuff since 2005. I started my first blog and content marketing strategy in 2007 with my partner, Joe Fier. 2009, I quit my day job to work on this stuff full time, and here we are fast forward, over tons of business models, tons of different experimentations, tons of partnerships. Here we are in 2020, and this is going to be my new outlet to talk about the things that I don't talk about in those other platforms.

If you're subscribing to this or you're listening along to this, and you're thinking like, "I'm going to get a whole bunch of cool tactical elements out of Matt. He's going to teach me his Facebook ad strategies and affiliate marketing strategies and how to grow a podcast and stuff like that." There may be some of that sprinkled in, but to be honest, that's not really what you're going to get a ton of on this podcast. I don't want to disappoint you. I also do want to remind you that this is going to be a fairly infrequent show. It's going to be when I have something on my mind.

Eventually, once the other side of our business, the Hustle and Flowchart, Evergreen Profits side of the business is so automated, so systematized that I'm not doing as much in there, I'm probably going to get a little more consistent and frequent with this blog.

Get Insightful Books and Podcasts Summaries

Here are some of the things that you can expect from either this audio version of the blog/podcast or written things. I plan on doing books and podcasts summaries. Now, why book and podcast summaries? Well, I am an insane content consumer. I read a shit ton of books. I listen to a ton of podcasts. If I'm in my car, I'm listening to a podcast, and we go on a lot of road trips. I listen to a lot of podcasts. When I'm out walking my dog, which I do pretty much every single day, I'm listening to a podcast. I just recently got back into working out, built a home gym in my garage. When I'm working out in the garage, I'm listening to podcasts. When I'm doing my dishes, I'm listening to podcasts.

In the evenings, a lot of times before going to bed, I'll put on YouTube, and I'll watch podcasts. I'll watch things like The Joe Rogan Experience, or I'm a fan of a podcast, which I'm not sure if they're still releasing new episodes or not, called Harmontown from Dan Harmon, the creator of Community and Rick and Morty. I listen to Mike Dillard’s show when it comes to business stuff; Mike Dillard show, James Altucher show, Ryan Moran show. Occasionally, I tune into Pat Flynn and Tim Ferriss' shows. There's a lot of different podcasts that I jump between; Brad Costanzo's Bacon Wrapped Business, not a super consistent podcast, but he's a great interviewer. I love that the episodes he does when he releases them. I listen to a lot of podcasts, and I read a ton of books.

Now, one thing that's an issue when you're a prolific content consumer is when you're going through this much content, it's hard to lock it all in. It's hard to really internalize a lot of the content that you've just been studying. One of the people that I study is a guy named Tiago Forte. He teaches things like knowledge management, how to use Evernote, progressive summarization, ways to study and take notes and retain all your information. He has a course called Building a Second Brain, and it's all about how to collect a ton of information and have access and retain a lot of this information.

One of the things that he recently suggested is when you read books or listen to podcasts or things like that, summarize them. Go back and write your own notes on them, create analogies from your own understanding of what you just read. Go back and try to summarize and use your own wording to explain what you learned and what you found valuable from the content you just consumed. By turning around and summarizing and explaining that, then it locks it in and helps you better internalize it. Just that act of speaking it out on a podcast like this or that act of typing it out and summarizing it and creating your own analogies around what you just learned, that really helps internalize and lock in the concepts.

I plan on using this blog to do that, to consume a lot of other people's content, the stuff that I find really valuable. I'll turn around and summarize, and I'm doing it for selfish reasons. I'm summarizing and putting my big takeaways for my own reasons of better internalizing and locking in these thoughts, but also, if I'm going to do that, I might as well put it out into the world. I might as well let other people see my summaries, learn from my takeaways, learn from any alternative analogies that I create around the concepts I'm learning. That's what I intend to do.

It's going to be things like podcasts. It's going to be things like books I've read. If I read really long blog posts that I felt were really beneficial, I might shorten and summarize those blog posts, YouTube videos, things like that. I'm going to do my best to compress information that I'm consuming to better internalize it for myself, but also to give others who want to learn from what I'm learning from an opportunity to read compressed versions. They can either use these compressed versions and just learn from what I've compressed for them, or decide if it's something they want to pursue more and go and read the longer form version of what I compressed them.

Get Insights on a Whole Range of Topics

That's one of the main goals of firing up this mattwolfe.com blog again. I'm going to be doing a lot of that stuff on the blog. Another note on that: when it comes to podcasts and when it comes to the books I read, and when it comes to the YouTube videos I watch, when it comes to all this content that I'm consuming, I would say it's mostly not business and marketing content. It's content that I can apply to business and marketing, but 9 out of 10 times, I'm not reading the next greatest business book. I'm reading books about storytelling, books about psychology, books around standup comedy. I love jokes structuring, standup comedy, and that kind of stuff. I can figure out ways to tie it back to the business.

Learning how to structure a good joke is beneficial for my email writing. It is beneficial for the podcast interviews that we do. It is beneficial for writing blog posts. I read non-business books and then do my best to connect the dots back to what I am doing in business. A lot of times, there are no connections. A lot of times, I'm going to read books that are just things that I'm fascinated by. There's a lot of topics around futurism. I love Steven Kotler and Peter Diamandis' work on books like Abundance and Bold, and The Future Is Faster Than You Think. I love reading about that kind of stuff. I love reading about plant medicines.

We recently had Will Kleidon on our Hustle and Flowchart podcast, the founder of Ojai Energetics, and we talked about the cannabis industry. We had Mike Dillard on the podcast, and we talked about how he used MDMA to help with some traumatic brain issues that he had. We had Justin Goff on the podcast, and we talked about how he leveraged Ayahuasca to help him get over some mental roadblocks. We've had multiple people on the show talk about their experiences by hiring therapists and the therapists helping them get over things that then help them in their business. A lot of those topics I'm interested in, too.

You're going to get this wide breadth of topics from me. When I start summarizing books and podcasts and things like that, some of them will be business podcasts or books or things like that, but most of them probably won't be. They'll be me trying to connect the dots between this mindset book and what I'm doing in my business. This plant medicine book and what I'm doing to improve my happiness on a day to day basis. This book on writing the perfect joke and how I'm tying that back to being a better podcast interviewer and things like that.

That's what I love doing. I love connecting the dots where other people in our industry either haven't connected the dots yet or haven't outwardly shown how the dots connect yet. That's what I'm freaking into. That's the type of stuff you're going to get; these little audio rants like what you're getting here. I almost feel like not calling it a podcast. It's an audio rant. There's no intro. I don't know what this podcast is called yet. That's the type of thing you're going to get in these audio rants and my written book and podcast summaries. The summaries will probably mostly be written, to be honest. These will be more of I've got something I want to get on my chest and talk about real quick.

On mattwolfe.com, you're going to see a lot of that stuff; book and podcasts summaries of the things that I'm into, not so much standard business books. There will be some from time to time. We have a lot of guests on our podcasts that send us free copies of their books, and I like to read their books real quick before we interview them. That way, I know the sweet spot of where to take the conversation.

There will be some business books, but it's mostly going to be the ones that people on our Hustle and Flowchart podcast send me so that I can quickly review them before having them on the podcast. The books that I personally choose out of my collections tend to be less of the business style books. Over time, I'm going to talk more about my knowledge management strategies, how I organize my Evernote, and my big takeaways from guys like Tiago Forte, and the How To Write Smart Notes, Sönke Ahrens. I'm going to talk a lot about knowledge management and how I study, how I take notes and how I consume so much information and manage to have this information accessible to me when I need it.

This almost sounds like an egotistical, arrogant statement, but people who know me really well know that I have this insane memory. I'll read something in a book seven years ago, then I'll be on a podcast, and I'll recall something that I read in a book seven years ago. Or I'll have a conversation with somebody at a networking event ten years ago, and I'll be having a conversation with Joe. I'll be like, "Hey, do you remember that conversation we had with so and so?" Joe will be like, "No." I'll be like, "It was ten years ago, in this restaurant, it was probably nine o'clock at night, and we were talking about this." I have this crazy recall of conversations and things that I learned a long time ago.

I think a lot of that isn't that I've got it really good brain that has a good memory. I think it's a very methodical way of doing things. A lot of the information that I consume, I have various ways of saving it so I can remember it later in things like Evernote, my Kindle highlighting strategies, in Google Docs. I have processes for freaking everything. My own education in memory is one of those. I don't want to lose thoughts. Sometimes I make sure thoughts are written down in the cloud, so I have access to them later.

Those will be some rants for some future episodes or some future blog posts. I've got this crazy recall, and I'd love to talk a lot about that. Knowledge management is a passion project or a passionate topic that I get really excited about. We'll dig into some of that in some future episodes.

Get My Random Thoughts on Emerging Issues

You're also going to get rants like I'm doing right now. This is what I consider a rant. I have some bullets in front of me of things I want to mention, but other than these quick bullets, I do not have anything scripted. I'm just off the cuff; whatever comes out, comes out. You're going to get a lot of that.

I'm probably not going to touch too much on politics. I have very strong opinions in the political field, so much so that I don't want to draw that line in the sand. I don't want to be polarizing with what I put out. If anybody ever wants to talk politics or anything about what's going on in the world, my thoughts on COVID, my thoughts on having to wear masks, all that, I do have pretty strong opinions. I'm very fluid with my opinions. I do have strong opinions that are very changeable, but I only ever talk about that stuff in one-to-one. I will never talk one-to-many about my political beliefs or things like that because I'm not trying to draw that divisive line.

I'm not against being divisive. I'm against being divisive in the realm of things like politics and religion because those are ones that my opinions are likely not going to change other people's opinions off of a podcast. If you want to have one-to-one discussions where we can bounce ideas back and forth, I like talking about those topics; I'm just not going to talk about those topics in a one-to-many platform.

When it comes to divisiveness, I'm very divisive around what works in business and what doesn't, what I think people should focus on, what I think they shouldn't focus on. Things around mindset, philosophy, strategies, things like that, I have no problem drawing a line in the sand and saying things like, "If you're doing it this way, you're doing it the dumb way. If you're doing it this way, then you're being smart about it."

I don't have the problem with the divisiveness. I have the problem with politics and religion and the fact that I might feel like I'm trying to change people's minds on things. In a one-to-many platform where there's not that feedback coming back to me, it's just not going to be productive. You will get rants and me just off the cuff like this from time to time.

Get a Glimpse of My Travel Experiences

I will probably talk about travel. One of the things that my wife and I decided to do, as soon as this COVID thing hit, we started to question, "Well, what are we going to do with our kid's school?" I've got a seven-year-old and a five-year-old. They're both in elementary school. What are we going to do? Well, we made the decision for this upcoming school year, to homeschool our kids. We found some curriculums and purchased the curriculums and signed up through a charter school to do the whole homeschooling process.

Part of that was the COVID and if they were going to go to regular school, they'd be doing distance learning anyway. They would just basically be Zooming into their school. Well, we figured it'd be more productive if we did a homeschool and we got to steer the curriculum a little bit. That was a piece of it, but the other piece of it is we want to do more traveling.

We want our kids to learn through experience and through other cultures and through getting out into the world. That's the second reason we decided to do the homeschool. To be honest, we were already debating, and having that conversation around homeschool before the COVID stuff happened. We wanted to travel more. COVID was just pushing us over the edge and saying, well, let's test it for a year. If we really don't like how homeschool works out. Well, we can put them back in public school next year. Ideally, all the COVID stuff is out of the way after one full school year passes.

The point of that whole thing there was to say that we're probably going to be doing a lot more traveling. We're going to be getting out of San Diego quite a bit more. We're talking about purchasing an RV and being on the road for a couple of weeks out of every month, going to new cities and experiencing new things. From time to time, I might use this blog as a bit of a travel blog. There probably won't be as much audio content on those. It'll probably be more images and pictures.