How I Make $25K/Month Creating TikToks For E-Commerce Brands

Matthew Gattozzi

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Published: August 29th, 2022

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Matthew Gattozzi

Founder, Goodo Studios

$25K

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Goodo Studios

goodostudios.com

from Seattle, WA, USA

started October 2019

$25,000

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Discover what tools Matthew recommends to grow your business!

Discover what books Matthew recommends to grow your business!

Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business Gino Wickman

This Is Marketing: You Can't Be Seen Until You Learn to See Seth Godin

Want more updates on Goodo Studios? Check out these stories:

Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?

I’m Matthew Gattozzi, the founder of Goodo Studios, a content creation studio that creates photos and videos for direct-to-consumer brands.

We are building out a small team, but I still have my hands in sales, production, and project management. I focus on how we can give clients an incredible experience working with us and great content that converts viewers into customers.

We work with brands in three ways. The first way is an original production, where we shoot high-end photos and videos on cinema cameras. The second way is remixing and editing photos and videos to optimize for ads on platforms like Facebook and TikTok. The third way we work is by creating TikToks and User Generated Content for organic and paid media. We are doing around $25k/month.

What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?

Growing up as a kid, I trained as a ballet dancer and became a professional dancer once I graduated high school instead of going to college. I thought starting a blog and writing about my journey and travels would be cool since my journey was different than most. I took photography in high school, and part of sharing my journey was taking pictures of my travels.

On the side of dancing full-time, I started to pick up making videos during the time of Casey Neistat’s vlogs. I began making vlogs- they are cringy, but you can still see them online here!

Unfortunately, my dance career ended early due to a back injury. I didn’t have a college degree, and most people wouldn’t even look at my resume for marketing because I had no experience outside of dancing. I had two photos in my portfolio and one video I created for my dance company when I was injured, and I thought I could get companies to hire me.

I would go on Google Maps, pick a street, and email businesses. I would email hundreds of businesses in Austin until I got a yes. While trying to get gigs, I was doing food delivery to get cash. I would charge electric scooters in my apartment to get more money.

I started this business by myself as a freelancer in Austin with my camera ($350 Nikon D3400), a laptop ($1,100 Dell laptop), and a subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud ($68/month).

Eventually, work started to pick up, and I became known in Austin and was shooting top events like SXSW and Austin City Limits. Well, Covid hit, and all of my business evaporated. This time forced me to shift my focus to e-commerce and product businesses, where I found a ton of success. I saw how my content could change business revenue and loved working with brands. That’s when I started to build a team of fellow creators to help me create content for brands.

My first ever gig:

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Take us through the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing your first product.

Some people start a service business because they already worked in a similar business and they want to go on their own. I didn’t know anything about business, systems, or offerings. I was just desperate to have a business say yes to needing photos and videos.

Over time, I met more business owners, understood their content creation problems, and started to build packages that fit those needs. I am still constantly learning the needs of brands and how we can position ourselves to help them while also helping our own business.

The hardest part for service businesses is systems. Since I never came from a traditional work environment where you have a team and manager, I am doing things for the first time. It took me a long time to understand how to put together systems to streamline the services we provide to clients. Not having systems has delayed my growth, but now that we have systems in place, I can scale the business a lot easier.

The beauty of a service business is that you can constantly change the offerings versus a product business with way more upfront capital investment. I have used this to my advantage to craft the right services for brands.

Reputation and influence are powerful, but if the service doesn’t follow through, none of this matters. So as much as I try to network, the focus will always be mostly on the service we provide people.

Describe the process of launching the business.

The hardest part about any service business is getting client #1. I didn’t have a niche target audience I was trying to reach. I was just trying to get a yes. I would email lawn service businesses as well as food trucks.

I had my blog matthewgattozzi.com for my portfolio, and a super cheap $350 Nikon D3400 camera. I spent over a month emailing thousands of businesses before I got my first client, Briggo, acquired by Costa Coffee later.

I would go on Google Maps, pick a street, and email businesses. I would email hundreds of businesses in Austin until I got a yes.

Getting that first yes was a game-changer for me. I was able to leverage the name of Briggo and create some legitimacy for myself and this got the momentum going for me.

Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?

There are so many tricks and hacks to get new customers, but no one refers you if your work is not good. The service itself must be the most essential part of the business. Your work creates your reputation, and then everything else follows from there. Referrals are the lifeblood of a service-based business and have opened up many opportunities for me and Goodo Studios.

Twitter has been a massive success for the business. It is my brand on Twitter that has allowed me to network and meet people to shoot content. When someone is looking for content, I get recommended on Twitter a lot, which is truly humbling and incredible.

I have been writing a weekly newsletter since March 2020 called Your Content Should Sell. It is now at a little over 900 subscribers, which is fantastic. This newsletter allows people to understand the thought process and beliefs of Goodo Studios. Not everyone is ready to buy, but when they are, they will remember the newsletters we wrote and come to us.

We did have a podcast, How to Market Your DTC Brand, which was great on top of the newsletter, but we are reworking it to make it better (stay tuned.)

The last successful marketing strategy has been communities. We have located our ideal customers, and there are online communities where these people hang out. I get on those and start talking about content or answering questions. Over time, similar to Twitter, my team gets suggested for projects.

Reputation and influence are powerful, but if the service doesn’t follow through, none of this matters. So as much as I try to network, the focus will always be mostly on the service we provide people.

How are you doing today and what does the future look like?

We are in an exciting time with Goodo Studios, where we are starting to bring on team members so people can focus and provide an even better service to clients. Before we scale to more projects, I want to tighten our systems up so that the service is exceptional even with more projects.

We will also be jumping into some smaller events to help build a community around Goodo Studios, educate brands on content creation, and bring in partners like software companies to arm brands with tools to succeed.

Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?

If I were to do it again, I think I would try working with a brand or team first to get systems. My biggest hurdle is learning how to manage people because I have never been managed in a business environment. I don’t think working at a company is terrible if you take advantage of the experience and learn to lead.

The other part is that I should have hired sooner. When I have hired people, the projects get better than when it was just me. You need to hire the right people but don’t hesitate to do so. I also know I can charge more for the work we do because I have teammates.

I come from an intense training background in ballet, so I have been utilizing that experience and lessons to my advantage here. Even though I don’t have business experience, the 14 years of training built me as a person I could not have received working another job.

What are your experiences? Use those to your advantage versus sulking about what you haven’t learned yet. Your journey is unique, just like mine. There is no right path to being an entrepreneur, but I know that you have to find what makes you unique because that will be your strength to inject into your business.

What platform/tools do you use for your business?

For contracts and invoicing, I use Bonsai. This is more of a freelance tool but I think it gets the job done for contracts and invoices.

For our newsletter, we use Beehiiv! I have been a beta user and have helped develop this product. The simplicity is unmatched and has helped our business tremendously.

For CRM and Project Management, we use Airtable! We had a system built out by my friends at TALOS (tell them I sent you).

Slack is how we communicate with our team internally and in client relations.

For content creation, we are all about Adobe, but for graphics, we started dabbling with Figma. Also, don’t sleep on Canva for simple deck creation.

For content management we use Air.inc. This is way better than Drive or Dropbox, and we can get feedback from clients directly on the videos.

What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?

Traction: Get A Grip On Your Business by Gino Wickman is the book that taught me how to build and think about a team. My team isn’t at a size where we can fully do everything in the book, but I know how I will build my team and keep people working towards the same goal. You don’t have to come up with a new team system, this book has you covered.

This Is Marketing: You Can't Be Seen Until You Learn to See by Seth Godin is a book that taught me about marketing. I reference this book a lot with clients. Anything from Seth Godin will help you stand out as a company in a sea of competition.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?

Do not be afraid to get started. My lack of experience was my advantage because if I got a job, I might have waited too long to start my business. I had no option but to start, which was hard but beautiful. I don’t think you need to go to the extreme like my circumstances made me, but don’t wait to start.

Work while getting your business started so you aren’t reliant on business income and instead focus on hiring or building systems. I relied on business income, so it made it harder to invest in the business. If you can work while getting your first customers, do it!

Where can we go to learn more?

If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!