Perfectionism Is Killing Your Brand w/ Matt Gray | Ep 446

**Matt Gray** (0:00)
We're actually living in a day and age right now, where the more actually imperfect it is, where you can just feel the humanity and the authenticity behind it, is like where humanity is at right now. They want to know it's you.

**Chris Do** (0:12)
I believe your perfectionism is an avoidance strategy.

**Matt Gray** (0:17)
I'm Matt Gray, and you're listening to The Futur.

**Chris Do** (0:22)
Matt Gray is my guest today, and we're going to talk about how to build a profitable personal brand. We're going to get into the story, and we want to start to unpack the things he's been able to do to help a lot of other people. Then normally, he speaks to, I think you have a program called Founder OS. Is that your main thing? Yeah. That the average person there does what? Two to three million dollars a year, and then you help build their personal brand. Yes. You have a lot of frameworks and strategies, and even AI tools to help them do that. We'll get into that in case you want to find out about that, but make sure you stick around. Let's get to know the man first.
Matt, you look like a super chill guy who's got very meditative vibes.
Where are you before you do any of this? Who is Matt?

**Matt Gray** (1:04)
Yeah. I'm currently living in Bali, Indonesia, and then spent my time there and then in Europe, typically in the Dolomites in Italy, mountain biking and doing my thing there in the summer. I've been building businesses for about 18 years now.
Exited a company that I first started when I was 21, exited at 24
Since then, I've built three other profitable companies, audiences of 14 million around those companies, and when I was 30, started building my own personal brand. I've now scaled that to 3 million people and currently focus most on a company called Founder OS, which really helps founders build profitable personal brands to help them feed their businesses with organic content. What I've noticed over the years is that founders are looking to do this stuff, but they're kind of on the fence and not sure how to really get into it.
I think the key thing behind it is you need to have the right systems at the end of the day because without those, you end up on a bit of a content treadmill. And before you know it, it's all coming down to you, and obviously, you got to run a business. And so I think there's a lot of talk about building personal brands online, but I think sometimes it ignores the fact that it's not just about building followers online, right? We're trying to actually drive real business results. And so there's a bit of an infrastructure layer there that I think most people miss that we'll probably get into here.

**Chris Do** (2:16)
All right, let's get into this. I've seen you grow really, really fast.
In terms of millions of followers in a matter of like a year and a half, two years. That is not something that we see every single day. And oftentimes people will send me your content like, what's Matt doing? I'm like, he's doing something good. I could tell he's doing it. What have you learned in the process of taking your account from nothing to like where you're at now? You have millions of followers. What did you figure out in this process?

**Matt Gray** (2:43)
Yeah, so I mean, I started my personal brand around five years ago.
The process to getting to that point was kind of actually quite messy. But eight years ago, I was using substances, drinking too much. I had become kind of a little bit lost. And I had gotten out of a relationship and had this opportunity to kind of like look myself in the mirror and go like, okay, something's got to change. I had tried to kind of quit 40 plus times and knew I needed to get some help. And so I started looking at my phone, started to think about who do I know, who can I reach out to? And probably listening to any podcast at this point in time, I was like, okay, Huberman could help me. And so I picked up Instagram, sent a voice note to Huberman, two minutes long, and sure enough, the next morning, randomly, didn't expect this, I had no relationship with him. He got back, sent a voice note and acknowledged the situation I was in, told me some of the health issues that were likely to come up if it continued, and then made a referral to a guy named Dr. Kyle Gillette and was like, hey, you should go get blood work done with him. I think it'll help you understand the impact you're making on your body. And so, sure enough, a few weeks later, had blood work done, realized that the substances I was using caused my testosterone to drop from 800 to 200 as a 30-year-old male, which is super, super low. And so, decided in that moment, and something clicked. I think it was like this idea of almost gamifying sobriety, which for whatever reason worked for me, which was like, okay, it's at this level now.