The Russell Brunson Show
Scaling with Sanity: The Anti-Burnout Blueprint from Matt Gray | #Success - Ep. 35
Wed, 14 May 2025
What if you could build a thriving business, grow a massive audience, and still have the freedom to live life on your terms? In this episode of The Russell Brunson Show, I sit down with Matt Gray, an incredible entrepreneur and founder who’s done just that. After exiting his first company, building HERB into a 14-million-person media brand, and now leading Founder OS, Matt has figured out how to scale without stress, attract high-level talent, and turn content into consistent growth. If you’re an entrepreneur or creator trying to build a business and a life you love, this conversation is packed with frameworks and mindset shifts that can help you get there. Key Highlights: How Matt turns one long-form video into 30+ pieces of content across platforms The structure behind his organic content engine that brings in 12,000+ leads per month Why he avoids selling directly on social and what he does instead to convert cold traffic The systems and team setup that keep his business running while he travels the world How he overcame burnout, quit smoking and drinking, and rebuilt his health and energy What a founder-led brand really is and why it’s the key to long-term growth We also go deep into personal branding, content strategy, hiring, time freedom, and the hidden cost of sedating stress instead of solving it. Matt even shares his book-writing process, his thoughts on founder identity, and what it really takes to build something that lasts. This one’s not just about marketing and business. It’s about building a company that actually fits your life. Let’s dive in! https://sellingonline.com/podcast https://clickfunnels.com/podcast Special thanks to our sponsors: NordVPN: EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal https://nordvpn.com/secrets Try it risk-free now with a 30-day money-back guarantee! Northwest Registered Agent: Go to northwestregisteredagent.com/russell to start your business with Northwest Registered Agent. LinkedIn Marketing Solutions: Get a $100 credit on your next campaign at LinkedIn.com/CLICKS Rocket Money: Cancel unwanted subscriptions and reach your financial goals faster at RocketMoney.com/RUSSELL Indeed: Get a $75 sponsored job credit to boost your job's visibility at Indeed.com/clicks Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: Who is Matt Gray and what is his entrepreneurial journey?
And he's here in Boise in office, and we're going to be talking about some really cool things in his business. His name is Matt Gray, and thanks for coming to Boise, man. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. Great to be here. So you're living in Bali, but you've been traveling...
in your world travelers we'll talk about more but um yeah just curious the trip you're on right now why you're swinging by boise yeah so uh was yeah on a bit of a journey twice a year we run different events and experiences for founder os and we just ran one in austin and i figured well i'm in the country might as well make an epic trip out of it so took my parents to wyoming to yellowstone and uh grand teton for some hikes and then yeah we were talking and it was like why not make the trip out to boise you
Yeah, no one comes to Boise.
A couple of connections later, you're in Boise even though it's next door and you make it happen.
Wyoming to Boise would be simple, yeah.
Yeah, exactly. So yeah, no, it's great to be here.
That's awesome to have you here. So for those people that don't know you, like how did you get your start in this whole world?
How long ago? So yeah, a little background. When I was 20, I started a technology bootcamp in Canada, the first of its kind where we trained full stack.
software engineers and then got them jobs at tech companies like shopify facebook uh google and over the course of a few years we trained 2 000 software engineers um one month after graduation they'd go through these like three months of intensive training and we'd train them up get them jobs 90 of them were getting jobs one month after graduating and uh did really well we ended up exiting the business to general assembly uh they bought us uh you know when they were coming north to canada
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Chapter 2: How did Matt Gray overcome burnout and addiction?
This idea that, you know, people follow people, then they follow brands. And, you know, I think that when you have a personal brand, what I call a founder led brand, you know, you're able to go and make sure that you have. People like really understanding the story behind what you're building and they can really follow you, follow your journey.
And that makes the brand that much more impactful and it allows you to grow it a lot faster. And so this importance as a founder to really be thinking about building your audience day one. You know, there's that whole saying like first time founders focus on tech, second time founders focus on distribution.
And I think more and more people are waking up to like the quicker you can build that distribution, build that personal brand and an audience around yourself. It sets you up.
for, you know, having this amazing kind of media moat around your business for the next decade to come, whether you're still building that business or maybe it's sold and you're onto the next one and you still have that brand and audience around yourself. A hundred percent.
It's interesting because like 10 years ago, I was our first talking about nobody. It was just funny. Cause people were like, no, I'm like, they didn't want to be the ones like the, the joke was always like, I don't want to dance on Tik TOK or I don't want to show my face. Like I'm a, I'm a, you know, I'm starting a company. This is like dumb stuff. And, um,
Whereas, you know, it's like, it's free media, it's free leverage, it's free. Like you build the brand and the personality and it ties together and just makes everything else easier on top of it.
I learned, you know, the benefits of that, but also the struggle of, you know, you maybe have an idea that comes into your head of something you want to create. And then you have to kind of brief it and delegate it and follow up on it and quality control it. Whereas for me, like building a personal brand or building a founder led brand around yourself.
The speed at which you can go from just idea to creation is oftentimes just instantaneous. You don't need to answer to anyone. You don't even necessarily need to manage anyone. You can just come up with that idea, sit down, film it, push it. And having that control over your media, I think, is nice. You can kind of control your destiny more and you're not reliant on so many people. Yeah.
I also realized when we launched ClickFunnels, we had some competitors, and I had a voice, I had a brand, and our competitors didn't. They had a lot of VC money, but they had no voice, no brand.
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Chapter 3: What is Founder OS and how does it help entrepreneurs?
And, you know, we work so hard as founders, like bashing through walls all the time, oftentimes fighting different fires and building things that I was like, I felt it kind of hit me that I was kind of working backwards. You know, I was working so hard in so many ways, but then on a health side, working backwards in terms of like, yeah, even chemically screwing up my body a little bit.
So I decided to, I said I didn't need to make a change. Because it wasn't sustainable the way I was going. And that journey led me to, you know, finding a sobriety coach, finding an executive coach, and really going deep on the health side, I started replacing smoking and drinking with journaling daily. I had read the book The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron.
Didn't really know the change it was going to make in my life and just started waking up every day to write my morning pages. Three pages just kind of poured out of me daily. Did that for about 90 days. And I started bringing some of these concepts online, sharing them on Twitter at the time and in a newsletter.
really no agenda in mind other than just hey let's just put some stuff out there and see the kind of people that are interested in this or maybe not and one thing led to another and yeah I started attracting a lot of founders that really resonated with this they had similar experiences in their lives.
Um, they thought, I think these were some topics that they were hoping someone would open up more about. And, uh, that kind of compounded to building more of a audience online that, uh, people that kind of are attracted to, you know, not just building amazing systems around your business, but amazing systems for your own, your life, your health. Um, so that, yeah, at the build strong businesses.
And so you need to make sure you're taking care of yourself. So yeah, that's kind of a bit of that. It's really cool.
I think it's interesting in, in at least the community I watch every single day, like people start making more money, they get more stressed, they get more, all that kind of stuff. And they're always looking for ways to sedate the pain, the pressure, the, whatever those things are, you know? And it's interesting. Cause I always, I see people who, you know, I'm a big, I'm,
I think one of my superpowers, I see someone, I see their divine potential, like what they could do or they could become. And there's like the pressure and the stress. And instead of like allowing that to be the thing that helps them get to the next level, they sedate through other things and take the pressure off. And it's almost weird to not do that. You know what I mean?
Like people are like – anyway. And so – And it's been hard for me to be able to be in that conversation because I'd never done it. So I can't be like, oh, we shouldn't do it because of this or this. And I thought it was really fascinating, especially since you have a company around that kind of thing. But then for you to be on one side and then go to the other is really fascinating. Yeah.
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Chapter 4: How does Matt Gray create content and scale his audience?
It's done in like a few days. I can delegate it to my team from there and then just get back to living my life, traveling, enjoying things. And so trying to make sure that at the end of the day, when you are both a founder and a creator, it kind of doubles your chances of burnout. And we were just talking about some of the things I used to cope with for that burnout or those feelings of overwhelm.
The last thing I want to do is set founders up for that same issue. And so as much as you're sort of ramping things up in terms of the content and the audience side, I think you also need to be ramping up the systems to make this whole journey sustainable. So you don't burn out. Yeah.
All right, funnel hackers, let's have some fun for a second. One of the hardest parts about B2B marketing isn't getting attention. It's getting the right attention. I'm sure you know what I mean. Isn't it a pain when you see the weirdest ads showing up in your feed?
Ads for things you know you would never use in a million years, and you start thinking, that person's wasting so much money targeting me for a product or service I will never use. And here's the thing. Those companies probably thought that they were marketing perfectly, but they were wasting money because they didn't get their targeting right. And that's why LinkedIn ads is such a game changer.
LinkedIn isn't your everyday social platform. This is where over 1 billion professionals, people who are already thinking about business are hanging out and their targeting options are unreal. You can target by job title, industry, company size, role, skills, revenue level, seniority, literally laser focus to the decision makers who can actually buy what you're selling.
It's like having a magic filter for your perfect customer. And if you're serious about growing your business and you don't want to keep paying to show people ads who will never buy, then you have to get on LinkedIn. Hey, everyone.
if you're anything like me you've probably spent more time than you want to admit just trying to stay on top of your email am i right i used to wake up fire up the inbox and boom i was hit with the wave of random stuff newsletter noise low priority requests affiliate spam and somewhere in the chaos a few messages that i actually needed to respond to it drove me nuts and i'd end up spending hours every day sorting replying getting distracted and pulling off the work to actually move my business forward but that all changed when i tried notion mail and let me tell you
It's like somebody took my funnel brain and built an email platform out of it. This is the inbox that thinks like you. NotionML uses AI to organize everything based on what's important to you. It learns what matters, automatically labels and sorts messages, drafts, responses, and even schedules meetings. It's personalized, automated, and completely flexible.
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Chapter 5: What is Matt Gray's approach to organic social media growth?
So that number one, yeah, we don't need to make it too complex. We can kind of just keep it simple. And then two, there's someone there that can then, if there's something wrong or whatever, can quickly go and edit the sequences and make sure that there's no chaos there.
So, yeah, I think the lesson for a lot of people is like when you're trying these things, don't try to over-engineer it too fast. You know, like simplicity is genius, right? And...
Yeah, I think the more simple you can keep things like if you're just getting going a couple platforms, getting the CTAs right on there, really monitoring it and putting in the reps before you just over engineer it and then just let it loose. And sure enough, you know, issues come up. Yeah. Yeah.
It's so much – it's funny. I got started in this game before there was any social media at all. Like I remember I was in college and Friendster was the social platform of the day. And we were trying to figure out how to hack Friendster to get leads and all sorts of stuff. And then MySpace came after that. And so it's just fascinating just how much now it's like –
the majority of traffic online is coming from social where when I got started, there was zero social at all. It's just fascinating how much it's evolved and shifted, you know, to that, that direction, then how many multiple platforms. And then, you know, it's all, you know, around five or six platforms now, which is, which is interesting.
Now I've never, um, in fact, I think the, one of the first, the first thing we connected with her, something was you posted something, um, If it was on Twitter, we must not have been on Twitter because I'm not on Twitter, but it was about Twitter, about the algorithm and stuff like that. And I remember seeing that. I was like, oh my gosh, this actually makes sense to me.
I think that's when I first reached out to you. But for your business, how much – I'm curious about the written side. How does that work? Like the Twitter and – what's the one that Instagram has now? Threads? Do you guys do a lot over there? What's that – That's what the internet looks like because I'm not playing in that at all, so I'm curious.
So at a high level, how I look at all content is what we call like a content waterfall. So a content waterfall is essentially like a system that you can use to go and turn like one core piece of content into like 32 or more other pieces of content.
And so what this may look like in my business is we would have, say, a YouTube video that we've created a concept for and flushed it all out into, say, 3,000 words. That YouTube script can become obviously a YouTube video. That YouTube video can also be posted onto Spotify and to Apple Music and Apple Podcasts.
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Chapter 6: How does Matt Gray's team structure support content creation?
That's helped us scale a newsletter to about 200,000 people in the last couple of years. And yeah, it's a power of... those written platforms. Then in terms of threads, honestly, I don't even understand like, you know, really what's going on with that platform. I don't use it personally, so I don't spend any time on it. Our team posts my stuff that's already on X there.
I think we've gotten some good growth, but I have no idea what's going on there.
That's always the first day I signed up and like it imports all your Instagram followers. I'm like, I'm a genius. And then it was there for like a week and we posted a couple of times and then it all disappeared and stopped working.
Yeah. I still remember those days where people thought it was like taking over the world. And like, it's like two months later. Yeah.
It's like, uh, I remember clubhouse had the same thing when it came out and like, I was actually really excited for that. Cause I was like, it's exciting seeing a new social platform pop out and then blow up. And then it just dried out so fast. It's always interesting. What's going to have longevity in, in people's minds. Um, Yeah. Do you guys have outside social platforms?
Do you pull people to communities? Like do you have a, like a school community or, you know, something like that where you're pulling people separately off platforms besides just newsletter, but it's like an actual community or do you just keep all the communities kind of happening on social?
Yeah. So with founder, I say we have everyone about 800 people in a school community. And yeah, that's where like all the systems that we have are all nicely organized depending on, you know, content, audience growth, all the different platforms and their operating systems. And then, yeah, I think it's,
Similarly, from my experience, founders, I think, overthink the tech side sometimes, especially when you're getting started. It's just like just pick something that feels good that maybe someone you admire is using that platform and it feels right to you.
Or maybe you've enjoyed using it just on the other side of the equation and as a community member and just get up and going, get running with it. So, yeah, most of the tech on what we build is pretty simple. Like, you know, yeah, school is what we use right now for the community. But I think that there's a lot of platforms that are really solid there. Yeah, for sure.
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Chapter 7: What strategies does Matt Gray use for lead generation on social platforms?
you know do it on your own terms and just be okay with being freaking weird you know the amount i travel is like really weird probably to a lot of people and like that's okay like find your weird and double down on it yeah do you take personality profiles i think i have maybe one time okay or something i think and that's wonderful yeah i don't know i love anyway we have a whole side business it's all about personality profiles but it's fast i'd love to learn that stuff from you i feel like that's a key to like hiring and really dialing it up is really knowing that people humans
But what's cool is one of the tests, the DISC profile, there's a secondary test that usually when you take it, it gives you the results. It's called either values or motivators. It lists what your core motivators are, like top to bottom. And I'm assuming, I would bet, your number one motivator is probably freedom. We have a lot of guys in our program who...
I make all of our coaching clients take, so I understand them, but a lot of them like freedoms are number one. That's where they optimize everything in life towards freedom. Uh, my number one value in that is, uh, it's called utility, but, uh, or ROI. It's like return investment. What's return investment of every situation. Um, which is like why I struggled in school. Cause I couldn't see the ROI.
I was like confused. Like, I don't understand this, you know, or things like that. But if I understand ROI, like I'll kill myself. Cause I'm like, I understand this whole thing. And so I'm, I, anyway, just assuming ahead of time that that's probably your number one, uh,
It seems like you build a lot of what you're doing around that motivator, which is always fascinating when you see someone and how they optimize. Funnel hackers, let me tell you a story that still makes me cringe a little. We were gearing up for a huge launch, funnels were done, landing pages were tight, copy was dialed in, everything was ready to rock, except for one thing.
we were looking for more support people to be able to handle the launch. And we figured, no big deal, we're gonna find somebody quickly. But that didn't happen. We spent weeks trying to hire the right person, we put listings on all the typical sites, but they got buried under a flood of random applicants who weren't even remotely qualified.
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