Starter Story I Turned One Website Into $1M/Year | Starter Story
Oct 30, 2025
Matt Giovanisci, founder of SwimUniversity.com, shares how he turned his pool and hot tub care website into a $1M/year business. He discusses the power of SEO, YouTube, and affiliate marketing in a seemingly boring niche. Matt emphasizes the importance of content-first strategies, using videos and blog posts to drive traffic. He also dives into the challenges of maintaining work-life balance and managing burnout, while stressing the need for consistency in content creation and choosing niches you enjoy.
AI Snips
Chapters
Transcript
Episode notes
Fired, Then Fully Committed
- Matt got fired after his boss discovered he worked on a pool-care site and then invested fully in it.
- He grew the site from $20k to $40k the next year and then continued scaling into a real business.
Content-First Media Model
- Swim University is a content-first media company teaching pool and hot tub care via SEO, YouTube, and email.
- The business mixes ad revenue, affiliate links, and courses/books to monetize that audience.
Progress Monetization Gradually
- Start monetizing with simple ad networks to validate traffic, then shift to affiliate marketing for relevance and better UX.
- Iterate product offerings from small PDFs to fuller video courses and printed books as you learn price-product fit.