Andrew: Not artists, writers have told me that. So, I see that youre in the community. We also talked about SEO. Of its 1,531 customer accounts, 76% belong to high-net-worth investors who have at least $1 million in investable assets. Inman has produced a series of Oatmeal books with content from the webcomic and previously unpublished material, related board games, and other merchandise. Clearwater, FL. And then when The Oatmeal started to pick up speed, I did a second order of a couple thousand copies, and I sold all those in three weeks or something. Andrew: I saw it. Matt: I think it was probably right in the middle because I think traffic was pretty good last month. I think in comments about this Economist article on Hacker News, people were talking about the comments that were said about you and search engine optimization on Reddit. Thats huge. I know it, but Im sure my audience doesnt. What did you learn about selling in the early days? How do you get your ideas out there? When I heard that that was when I was like, thats how I want to be. Cool. With Twitter and Facebook, those are my own fans who have committed to following me. Right now, I'm busy making an animated TV series at Netflix. I feel like with The Oatmeal, the further I can distance myself from that industry, the better. Where did that come from? I think comics who go on stage, people who look like Zach Galifianakis, just his appearance itself lends to his humor. I was a developer and a designer and I built a lot of SEO tools, but, as far as what SEOmoz offers now is such a different animal, its probably just wasnt that relevant. Andrew: What about optimizing sales pages, landing pages, the way you present what youre selling? Matt: Yeah, its the first time Ive ever had that happen. Ive been meaning to do some kind of split test or something to figure out what will make the posters sell better or whatever, but I put most of my energy just into making better comics. On one hand, Inman sees himself as a comedian, an artist who has to answer to nobody, a guy who works for himself and is thus finally free to mock people who dislike his work. And one of the questions I asked him was what kind of feedback did you have on your work and did it change your work. What was the revenue breakdown between the two of them? I created one when I was working for Mingle2 called How to Tell If Your Cat is Plotting To Kill You. The goal of it was kind of to build links, but it didnt really work as an SEO tool. Matt: I didnt have any problem with that. The final question is this. Andrew: Why didnt you degrade the quality of the images? [15], The success of the game prompted Lee and Inman to found a company in 2015, also named Exploding Kittens. When youre working for yourself and a mistake can cost you personally money and cost you the business that you love, wouldnt you be more cautious? Matthew Inman is a certified financial planner who works out of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, who has 18 years of professional experience. Whats your full process from nothing to something that everyone Diggs and interacts with? Whats the value for readers who see the content online in buying the book? Ive had much better luck hooking them with Twitter and Facebook and my RSS feed than I have with e-mail. So I found that if I can just get the warehousing and the distribution out of the way and deal with that, then I can actually make real money with it, rather than just chump change. As far as traffic. What do you do? We dont want him to have to work with clients, so lets go buy his book and that way he can.. Andrew: Yeah, a lot of writers have told me that they have no control over the cover. Matt: Im not sure, really. Andrew: How do you go from having no idea, to suddenly getting the idea, to drawing it, to putting it on the computer and getting it out? Seed it on Facebook. Matt: I figured, close enough, same month. View FREE Public Profile & Reputation for Matthew Inman in Roseville, OH - See Court Records | Photos | Address, Emails & Phone Number | Personal Review | $60 - $69,999 Income & Net Worth I do this. So I actually made a lot of cool connections that way. There are 100+ professionals named "Matt Inman", who use LinkedIn to exchange information, ideas, and opportunities. What You'll Learn: How Inman "Brain-Farms" his content Why "SEO has no bearing on The Oatmeal" How The Oatmeal attracts email subscribers without an opt-in box Matt: How do I get ideas or how do I get them out there? Homepage . It was a great story. If You Still Think That Success Online Is About Building The Best How Russell Brunson solved the biggest challenge of online sales, How a list nerd grew Ranker.com to 27,000,000 monthly visitors, Physical Product Case Study: How two guys are competing with Yeti, How to persuade potential customers into becoming customers, How Dollar Beard Club is hitting $8M in its first 8 months. Well, it was a mix. That was a big part of it. Matt: Yeah, sometimes I do. Two, theres some new material in the book, so theres that. Why would someone who knows so much about SEO just push it aside? Inman alleged that FunnyJunk, a content aggregator website, repeatedly infringed The Oatmeal's original content. Andrew: In that lull, when you werent getting a lot of traffic and it didnt seem like it was going to be a business, why did you continue with it? Whether that be something that we have a problem with, like the BS that we have to go to through getting onto an airplane or something minor like when you walk through a cobweb and the worst part isnt that you have cobwebs on you, its that you think theres a spider on you. Andrew: Lately Ive been thinking the Tumblr system is probably best. Andrew: Thats one of the benefits of video. I think it was four or five months after I launched. Andrew: You said October 2010 is when you stopped doing client work and went full time. Andrew: You mean, in the first book there was new material? Theres no perfect representative of my comics on pencil and paper. Webcomic and humor website by Matthew Inman, United States District Court for the Northern District of California, "COVER STORY: The Oatmeal, he's a cereal killer | Brand X | Los Angeles Times", "Cartoonist Matthew Inman will step away from the Oatmeal after his latest and possibly final book", "The Oatmeal beat Funnyjunk, but other cartoonists aren't so lucky", "Nikola Tesla Wasn't God And Thomas Edison Wasn't The Devil", "I wrote a response to the Forbes article about my Tesla comic", "Tumblr Adds Suggested Tumbeast to 404 Page", "The State of the Web - Winter 2010 - The Oatmeal", "Cartoonist Matthew Inman To Step Back From 'The Oatmeal', "How Two Of The Internet's Top Comics Names Turn Creativity To Cash", "Exploding Kittens Raises $30 Million From Peter Chernin's TCG Capital", "Exploding Kittens Laps Up $30 Million Investment | Los Angeles Business Journal", "Exploding Kittens is the most-backed project on Kickstarter to date here's how a $20 card game became an internet phenomenon", "Exploding Kittens to Get Netflix Series With Lucifer Star", "Paperback Advice & Misc. He just wrote what he liked and what he thought was funny and that humor coincided with his fans. Matt: I didnt know how to use one. A lot of times, I write the humor as I draw it and it all changes. [39], In June 2019, Exploding Kittens Inc. announced the planning of a live gaming convention. Matt: Oh, I was terrified. Matt: Just because the success of my comics doesnt bank on people searching for keywords. Matt: And it might be just that what I did then is irrelevant to what they do now. But I only did donations, that was not a long-term goal. Theyll actually have a cover designed and the publisher wont allow them to use it. Right now, I try to do one comic a week. Andrew: I thought I saw an expression on your face when I said 2010 and then that made me realize I had the wrong date. I know what Im getting out of this interview. Matt: In what way? And Ive found lately, that if I submit my own comic, it gets more negative feedback than if I just leave it alone and if they want to get it on the Reddit homepage, they can. So with that I saw, this is the type of book that I want to write, these guys, I know they wont try and screw with it, so lets work with them. Matt: It just drove traffic up for me. Matt: When I launched the site, I think I was doing one to four comics a month, maybe less. And they rewarded me for it, so thats awesome because now Digg, they like having me on their website. Even though Im on a plane and the ticket was $600 and the Starbucks before I got on the plane was $7. Im wondering whats in it for you? But when I learned how to code, I kind of just put it on a back burner for a while. So mostly it was formally exposing me to way more publishers, because some still didnt even know who I was, and then negotiating for a better deal. Last week The Economist magazine profiled Matthew Inman about the creation and revenue of his comic, "The Oatmeal." They said that he did $1,000 a day in sales on a typical day and that he earned $70,000 in sales on a single day last year on Black Friday. Andrew: Right. So thats what sort of changed. Ive also noticed this with standup comics. There was a sense of urgency, as apparently there was an offer from another party to buy the site for commercial use. And seeing the success of the comics that I did before, I realized that I could probably make a comic website and have it do okay. Im not sure where that comes from. When people know that there are going to be more frequent posts, theyre more likely to come back more frequently and then that just builds on itself. Sounds like you had the same experience? Matt: I think, with donations, youre not getting product and youre giving somebody money. Actually, no, I just banned from Digg the first two months The Oatmeal was online, which is funny now because now Diggers love me. Oatmeal Studios holds the trademark for their name and after The Oatmeal worked with another company to make greeting cards based on the comic, Oatmeal Studios argued that this was too similar and likely to cause confusion. Ping me if you think its taking me too long to post it. I read online, Im looking here at my notes, where you said that you were miserable there for a few years. Find Matthew Inman's phone number, address, and email on Spokeo, the leading people search directory for contact information and public records. Shopify Remember the interview I did about how the founder of DODOCase sold about $1 mil worth of iPad cases in a few months? Matt: Yeah. Its just an issue of how you look at it. [4], Inman lives on Bainbridge Island in the Seattle area, . [77], The Oatmeal was created by Matthew Inman (born 1982 or 1983). Rand was the CEO and his mom was the Vice President and we grew the company together. A fundraiser to develop and produce a card game called Exploding Kittens raised $8.8 million,[15] and a game company co-founded by Inman received a $30 million investment in 2019. Matt: I used to submit to Reddit. Musk then donated $1 million for the development and construction of the museum. I see that thats often an issue for writers. If you read my Twitter account, it is like Hitlers port-a-potty. Theyre usually pretty responsive. [31][32], Revenue from The Oatmeal includes the sale of wall posters, greeting cards, calendars, clothing, coffee cups, signed prints, stickers, magnets, and badges. The two-day event was to take place in May 2020 in Portland, Oregon, U.S. Its kind of an embarrassing thing. Andrew: Whats the story behind you Rickrolling the people at Reddit? What about some simple search engine optimization tactics, like with Mingle2, you created quizzes that people could embed the results of on their websites and right underneath it, youd have text that linked back to your site with the right anchor text. Im not going to try to sound greedy, but I know you have a good following. And he said, I can almost quote him exactly, he said that he worked in a tiny little dark hole for 15 years with zero feedback, didnt do a book tour. I've been publishing comics on this website since 2009. I dont know offhand, but Im guessing, usually the average is between three million and five million uniques. Its kind of old and I actually wouldnt recommend that people draw comics with it. It was around October 2009. The goal would be, if I can just keep making great comics, thats the real goal rather than a specific number. Andrew: And so was it always going to be a business? Andrew: Thats kind of a tough question for me to ask because it feels like Im confronting you with that information, but it just occurred to me, and I figured Id bring it up. If I can do two to three, thats amazing, but usually its about one. I read Reddit. Matt: I dont know. Matt: Yeah, I did everything. In a matter of hours you launched this online dating site, you showed the sketch of it online, you came here to talk about how you built it, how you grew it, how you got traffic for it. Usually, Ill semi-script something, loosely into a notepad. It wasnt that big a deal. As you can tell from The Oatmeal, Im a very creative person, very visually oriented, and at SEOmoz my tasks were mostly code, dev, system admin. Matthew Inman is 61 years old and was born on 06/21/1961. I did even all the layout inside and everything. Join Facebook to connect with Matthew Inman and others you may know. I cant live off this. 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