Matthew Gohl

What is healthy water? It’s contaminant free, contains added minerals you’re body requires to thrive and tastes great so you can consistently hit your hydration targets. Healthy water is 🔑 to long-term wellness.

@mbertulli We use it!

Anyone in DTC using Omnisend over Klaviyo?

@codyplof Company data layer with a corresponding slack bot for internal use (more data visibility)

What is the most valuable thing someone on your team has vibe coded?

⁠Santevia has been building water filtration out of Delta, BC for 18 years. This federal investment is what takes us into the UK, EU, and Australia while keeping manufacturing in Canada. Thanks @JMcknightDelta and @gregorrobertson. Excited to build!

@Seanfrank Awesome! Welcome to fatherhood. You’ll enjoy it!

New character alert. Happy, healthy, ready to start a supplement brand.

@AaronOrendorff @Seanfrank Huge! Congrats Aaron!!

Single greatest text of my life. And I waited 9 months to say yes. I am now CEO of The Operators. Chief Executive Officer (Yeah, holy f****** s*** 😬) Never thought I’d wear that title. Wasn’t even in the realm of possibilities. Like everything in my career and life, one stumbling foot in front of the next … miracles get born. Two years ago, almost to the day, @finn_radford DM’d me to ask if I knew anyone who could build the Operators Newsletter: “Of course, I’d love you to do it but I appreciate this may not be worth the squeeze for someone of your caliber.” I told him it would be. Off we went. From the newsletter to online events, I got deeper into the mix. But last Jul, when Sean asked if I wanted to be CEO … I knew I wasn’t ready. Neither were the Operators. I came on as Chief Content Officer in Sep. It felt safe. Something I knew how to do; something they needed. Around the same time, @mikebeckhamsm stepped in as interim CEO. There is no other word to describe who he is and what he did than “godsend.” Over the next 6 months, I rode shotgun with one of the greatest living leaders in any industry. Mike poured himself out, cleaning up + setting foundations. Little by little, then more and more, he showed me what he was doing, explained why and how, and began handing things over. Last month, Mike announced to the partners, “I’m ready to transition to board chair and have Aaron step in as CEO.” My heart leapt. What’s next? What do I do as CEO? Don’t f*** it up. We’re growing the team. We’re launching new shows. We’re developing more partnerships. We’re building new properties. We’re QAing to the hilt. I’m nothing if not a maniacal, ruthlessly meticulous, attention to detail + quality content person to the core. This is the only CEO role I feel built for. To the growing cast of Operator creators and leaders, thank you for trusting me: - @finn_radford - @mikebeckhamsm - @mbertulli - @JasonPanzer - @seanfrank - @codyplof - @couuor - @connorrolain - @MehtabKarta - @KatyMimari - @hwoperator - @ChereneAubert - @Mike_R_Blanke - @FoldesCraig - @BenFlohrOG There’s more, but they’re not on social. To three of the people who have supported and guided me the most, thank you for being my friends: - @MacCoyMerkley - @andrewjfaris - @EmmettNaughton I have never been more excited, more intimidated, more honored, more humbled, more LFG in my professional existence. We’re just getting started.

@mbertulli Yeah, this is the side of entrepreneurship that not many people talk about. Companies build communities. They're little growth engines that fight and win money for your community. Its a team effort!

Over the last 8 years, my company has put 10s of millions in payroll into the Okanagan. (My local community) I’m very proud of this.

Got my 15th "you should use AI for operations" vendor email pitch this month. Meanwhile the email was auto-archived by my email agent so I never saw it.

Get out and visit the markets you want to win. In my early 20s I moved from Vancouver to Brighton to work at a Canadian tech company's UK office. That experience is a big reason we launched Santevia in the UK. We've been selling online there for over a year. Strong traction. A few months ago we decided to push into retail too. IFE London was the first step. We met great stores over three days. But today I went back to Brighton, where it all started, and made a point to walk into every store I'd heard about at the show. Before this trip my idea of the "right" stores was completely wrong. Having walked the aisles, I now have a totally different picture of who to target and where the real opportunity is. In a world of ChatGPT, thousand dollar lead lists and market reports, there's still no better intel than standing inside the store you want to win. Seriously stoked on the UK. Great people, extremely receptive to better drinking water. Can't wait to deliver the same experience we do in Canada and the US.

@phantom @Ryanair It’s April 1 in the UK 🐥

@Ryanair intern prefired april fools

Update...

We already sell Santevia in the UK. But walking the floor at IFE London this week is a reminder: you cannot scale internationally from a spreadsheet. The retail landscape, the consumer mindset, how people talk about water and health. All different. Book the flight.

My neighbour got a phone call from their "son" at 2 AM. He was in jail and needed bail money wired immediately. The voice was his. The panic was real. It was a scammer using AI voice cloning. They almost sent the money. This is happening right now, to normal people, in your neighbourhood. The scams aren't bad grammar emails from Nigerian princes anymore. They sound exactly like your kid.

The feeling when your claw buddy’s brain gets nuked deep into a project 🤯😭

@andrewchen This is real. It’s a new way of working, which for some of us who want to master it, means putting in our 10,000 hours to become experts.

AI is supposed to save me time, but now I find myself building stuff all evening and weekend and it's actually increasing my time in front of the computer WTF

@mbertulli 100%. We started building AI agents internally 2 months ago and the number of ideas we can test now vs a year ago is insane. The bottleneck used to be dev time. Now it's just whether the idea is worth 2 hours of prompting.

Scrolling through your feed it seems the most overstated piece of advice is: "Focus." Go narrower. Say no. Protect your time. I believe we should be doing the opposite. This runs counter to even my own thinking. I'm normally an "inch wide, mile deep" kind of guy. But I think now is the time to go really wide, to start building and doing the things we've always wanted to do. We've got such a long-developed muscle of saying no to 99% of ideas that it's probably a good idea to start saying yes more often. The cost of testing ideas is damn near zero now. Just in the last several weeks I've been able to build things we've had in our backlog for years. Ideas we've wanted to test are now entirely viable and no longer a distraction. Want to scale out your product seeding program? That's mostly coordinating messages back and forth, and it's perfect for AI. Want to build more landing pages and test more angles - Done. Want to analyze data from software you pay for but never really pay attention to - Done. Want a daily Slack notification on yesterday's performance without logging into multiple tools - I built that in less than an hour. If what you want to test is digital, it's far more approachable today than it was even a year ago.

@larasupplychain Learned this the hard way shipping pitchers to the UK. We realized shipping to international markets requires way more thought than in our home-base in the US/CA.

Enterprise vs DTC product launches: Enterprise brands figure out logistics BEFORE they finalize the product. DTC founders move fast. They design it, sell it, and figure out shipping later. Closing that gap protects your margin. Free weekly fix → unboxedweekly.beehiiv.com

@mbertulli We sell a $60 pitcher and a $320 glass filter system. The pitcher sells better in retail, the glass online, because it's what has the margin that allows us to compete on META. Pricing strategy differs by channel.

I've been thinking about pricing a lot lately. Most brands aim high by default. Every founder wants to build a premium brand and charge the most for what they sell. But that might be wrong. I wrote up my current thinking below.

Every operator wants to hire an AI person right now. Most of them have no idea what they'd actually do with one. We built 3 AI agents internally before hiring anyone. Figured out the use cases first, then built. The job description wrote itself.

Claude is down, time for lunch

@mbertulli The CS bot alone saves us 15-20 hours/week. But the real unlock is the analytics bot surfacing insights no one was looking for.

What’s the most valuable use of AI in your brand? Seriously. What’s making you more money or cutting costs?

@jacob_posel nothing like the smell of molten plastic being extruded in the morning

The ultimate pursuit of man is obviously to build and sell something physical