In 2017, Matt Giovanisci announced to the world that he was going to turn his “silly little blogs into behemoths in their respective industries.”
Today he runs Swim University, a pool care business earning close to a million dollars a year.
It takes him about ten hours a week, and he’s spent years making sure it never asks anything more of him.
Somewhere between his promise to build an empire and today, Matt changed his mind about what a business was designed to do.
The empire builders would look at what he’s built today and call it small. It’s operated by two people. There are no high ticket products to scale up to and there’s no plan to scale.
But in Matt’s eyes, it’s exactly where it should be.
This mindset shift to think small goes back further than the pool business itself, to a kid in New Jersey who never wanted to be an entrepreneur in the first place.
A Rock Star Dream And a Pool Store Counter
Matt Giovanisci’s first job was at a pool store in South Jersey when he was 13.
In his own words: “I wanted to be a rich and famous rock star.” The money he made at the store was just his way of being able to pay for it.
Twelve years across three pool stores, he worked his way up from stock boy to store manager, answering the same questions from worried pool owners every summer.
By his mid-twenties, the band hadn’t made him rich or famous, but he’d noticed something about himself: he loved being creative and making things.
Songs, websites, animations. He’d taught himself web design the same way he’d taught himself music.
One day in a flash of inspiration, he realised that a website about pool care might be something that could fund the rock and roll lifestyle he had always dreamed of.
He had the knowledge from twelve years behind the counter and he had the design skills.
But what he didn’t have was the nerve to start, so he talked about the idea for three years until one day his former bass player snapped: “shut up and build it already! I’m tired of hearing you talk about it.”
So in 2007, Swim University was born. It earned $1,082.98 in its first real year of revenue.
Three years later in 2010, his boss at the pool store Googled him, found the site, and fired him.
Matt wasn’t deterred.
He landed a marketing day job until he was laid off in 2012, relying on unemployment checks of roughly $2,800 a month (he called it his small business loan from the government).
To get by on the little income he was bringing in, he sold his car, moved in with his brother, and cut his monthly costs from $4,500 to $1,300.
By 2014 though, Swim University was earning $40,000 a year and Matt had become a full-time business owner.
The site built to fund a rock and roll lifestyle had finally become something more than a side hustle, and it was all about to go to his head.
Twelve Hires, $40,000 of Debt, And The Year Everything Broke
By 2017, the site was earning over $200,000 a year, and Matt decided being a solo operator wasn’t enough anymore.
He announced the new plan on his blog: “I want to turn my silly little blogs into behemoths in their respective industries.”
So he hired twelve people in a year – an editor-in-chief, writers, video people, and ad sales.
He’d later describe the period as “years of business gluttony. I strapped on an oversized bib and kept hiring and buying.”
By now, Swim University had grown into a full content operation.
Articles, YouTube videos, and an email list taught pool owners how to fix their own pool issues, and the site earned most of its money recommending products through Amazon’s affiliate program.
The team was hired to feed the machine. The problem was pool money arrives in summer but salaries arrive every month, and Matt was forced to cover the winter gaps with a credit card.
By March 2018, he was $40,000 in debt and running a growing company that was somehow making him poorer.
Worse, the work had changed.
“I thought in order to grow, I needed to hire people to do the work for me. But it turns out I spent more time managing and work got done slower.”
And just like that, the nimble entrepreneur found he had built himself a day job working as a manager in his own business.
So he started backing out.
He sold a side project for $55,000 to clear the debt, let the writers go, and spent 2019 cutting expenses by a third.
Then, in September 2019, his younger brother Dan died by suicide.
Matt flew home to New Jersey and stayed a month.
“My life has been forever changed,” he wrote. “It forced me to take a hard look at how I balance work and family. As well as my own mental health.”
Seven months later, Amazon cut its affiliate commissions by 60% with seven days’ notice.
For a business earning most of its money through those links, that deleted $176,929 in revenue almost overnight.
Two years earlier, either blow might have had him double down and pursue growth even harder.
Instead, he and his partner Steph made a decision.
They would run Swim University the way a couple runs a corner store. Just the two of them, no new hires, and profits flowing to their life instead of back into the business.
In June 2020, his last employee left and wasn’t replaced.
Rebuilding the business around that decision meant rethinking what it sold, what it charged, and what it would no longer do.
The Business With a $198 Ceiling
The business Matt runs today starts with a single sheet of paper.
Pool owners find Swim University through Google or YouTube, usually mid-panic after their pool has turned green, and they’re offered a free one-page cheat sheet in exchange for an email address.
He tested that cheat sheet against an hour-long workshop, a checklist, and a series of videos.
The single page beat them all – a simple solution to a burning need someone wants solved quickly.
In peak season, it pulls in 600 to 700 subscribers a day.
Then the moment someone enters their email, they land on the highest-converting page in the business: the thank-you page.
It offers his pool care course at half price for a limited time, and around 3% of new subscribers buy on the spot.
The sales pitch on that page does something almost no other sales pitch does: it admits the whole course is already free.
Every lesson in it can be pieced together from his articles and videos, and the copy says so.
What the buyer pays for is the shortcut, everything in one place, in the right order, from a two-person operation just trying to keep the lights on.
In a market where every pool store is trying to sell you something you don’t need, the admission is honest and does the selling for them.
From there, the offer list is short: a $29 handbook ($49 in print), the video course at $149, or the full bundle for $198. Nothing more.
In 2021, he tested what the ladder could bear and raised the course from $49 to $97.
A year earlier, March had brought 143 sales and $6,767. The same month at the new price brought 190 sales and $12,459.
“Just increasing the price doubled my revenue for the month.”
Everything a customer buys is theirs for life.
The only subscription in the business is a pool care app at $49.99 a year, where the recurring fee pays for a tool: a calculator that reads water test results.
The whole offer architecture is then replicated a second time for hot tub owners, whose season peaks in winter. This carries the business through the months when pools aren’t operating.
The courses themselves are animated.
Matt builds the videos from illustrations and stock footage, which means updating a lesson never requires a camera, a pool, or his face.
Behind it all sits an email list of 195,000 people, fed by the free cheat-sheet, run on automated sequences timed to the pool calendar.
He describes what that list is worth in five words: “My email list is an ATM.”
Why He Killed a Podcast at $1 Million a Year
For nearly a decade, Matt ran a second audience alongside Swim University.
Money Lab was where he published his income reports, his experiments, and his opinions, and it earned him thousands of creator followers who wanted to learn how he did it.
In 2026, with Swim University closing in on a million dollars a year, he shut it down. The podcast that replaced it lasted three months before he killed that as well.
His explanation ran one word deep: “It all comes back to one word I keep coming back to: focus.”
The business exists to fund his life, and anything that eats into how he wants to live that life gets cut.
The $198 price ceiling exists because anything above it – coaching, cohorts, a mastermind – would be paid for with his own time.
The animated courses exist so updates never need his face.
The app carries the only subscription because a calculator renews itself with fresh data, while subscription content would require constant production.
The hot tub model exists so winter doesn’t force a growth push to cover the gap.
Companies email him monthly asking to put display ads on the site to earn extra cash. His answer: “I know… but I just don’t want to live in that world.”
We saw Ellen Yin discover what a business really costs to run at the peak of her success.
Her webinar funnel was earning half a million a year when she realized running it had consumed the life it was meant to fund, and she shut it down.
Matt learned a similar lesson.
The passing of his brother showed him how important it was to lead a full life.
The twelve hires and the debt showed him early what growth actually costs, so he built the machine around lifestyle rather than growth at all costs.
A creator’s business model is a bet on what their life will look like. Most people place it by accident.
Matt lost that bet once without knowing he’d made it. Everything he’s built since 2020 now comes with the clearest intentions.
The Hidden Cost of the Business You Think You Want
Matt’s story runs on a discipline that works at any size, in any niche.
It comes down to three moves…
1. Pricing under $200 reduces the obligation to give more of yourself.
A small commitment in price carries low expectations, whereas high-ticket products typically demand more personal, one-on-one attention.
That attention comes from the owner, which costs their time, or from coaches, who then require management (typically from the owner as well).
Revenue is higher, but the expenses to operate it and the time required from your own life are much higher too.
Maria Wendt runs one of the great examples of this: a low-ticket model doing millions every year, with a far more hands-off role for the owner beyond creating content.
Remember that price is an operating decision, not just a revenue one, so make sure you set the right intentions from the outset.
2. Design yourself out of the product.
Matt’s tutorials are faceless, animated video.
His content isn’t on subscription, so nothing forces him to keep producing.
Beyond writing production, very little requires him personally, and everything is delivered through digital formats.
Go through your own delivery and mark every point where the buyer gets you rather than the product.
Each one is a design choice, and each one can be rebuilt so the product carries it instead.
3. Check what you’re actually chasing before you scale toward it.
We can all get wrapped up in the ambition of scaling a business and what that might look like: the nice cars, the nice houses, big offices, lots of staff. It looks fast-paced and exciting.
The reality of that world can be different though. Suddenly it’s about managing people and staff, operations and margins, and meeting payroll.
The job role becomes very different, margins become tighter, and it’s no longer about the grassroots creativity that it was once born from.
If that’s your thing, fantastic.
But if you’re doing it to create a better life for yourself, that life might be reachable through a different means, in a much faster time frame, without giving everything to the bottom line.
Matt is still pulling in a million a year, respectable by any measure. He just made a conscious effort to stop paying for it with the life he was given.