Matt, the founder of WeRateDogs, isn’t just making a decent living rating dogs—he’s thriving, earning six figures. What’s more, he’s using his influence to help dogs in need by promoting fundraising campaigns. It’s less of a ‘dog eat dog’ world and more of a ‘dog pet dog’ one with Matt around.
Matt launched the WeRateDogs account on Twitter in November 2015 and soon dropped out of Campbell University as he became more and more involved in the project. Those dastardly doggos were cutting into his studying time and he decided to focus on being an entrepreneur.
Once he set up a website with an online store where he could sell merch, Matt began solidifying his status as the head of one of the biggest dog-lover communities online (and IRL). It took around two years for him to turn his start-up idea into an empire of canine goodness.
Matt made the account at an Applebee’s. A day later, he had over 3k followers and people were lining up in his inbox, asking him to rate their dogs. That’s the kind of response you get when you’ve got a great idea that’s relatable to people and you add in a dash of great timing and luck.
However, juggling dog ratings and his studies proved to be a real challenge. Soon, Matt was burned out, low on sleep, and posting 18 times a day, as he told ‘Money.’ What’s more, even though he had loads of influence on social media, he was pretty much broke in real-life. And his friends had to take away his phone when they went to parties because he’d keep checking his Twitter feed. Something had to change.
“I was spending full-time work hours or more monitoring everything about the account. Monetizing it became a necessity if I was going to continue doing it at that level,” he told ‘Money.’ That’s when Matt partnered up with social media marketer John Ricci who convinced the founder of WeRateDogs to delegate some of the work to him.
“That told me that I need to be a good delegator if I’m not going to go crazy,” Matt explained how he learned the lesson that he can’t do everything alone. He also dropped out of college so he could fully focus on WeRateDogs instead of splitting his attention two ways.
Most of what Matt does, he can run on his phone (imagine the number of GB he uses up!). And despite practically swimming in money by providing wholesome and funny content about dogs to the internet, the so-called ‘Dogfather’ is still very humble.
