Who is Matthew Spurr?
Hey folks,
Thank you for checking out my website, I hope you'll want to connect with me on social and perhaps our paths will cross at some point. Here's a bit about who I am, what I enjoy and what I'm good at...kinda.
I don't like to lead with business info, so here's a quick glimpse of what makes me tick outside of the 'office'.
I'm a keen amateur triathlete, I have done multiple Ironman 70.3 events overseas and am currently in training for the full Ironman. I love doing sprints and Olympic distance triathlons too, but I tend to use these for training and fun, as I get less of a kick out of them than I do with the more daunting challenge of an Ironman race.
I am an avid golfer, on and off since the age of about 4, and more recently my handicap is 5.9, although if you ask some of my friends at the club what my handicap is, they'll probably give you a somewhat non-PC, and definitely more offensive retort.
I love being outdoors, and I enjoy the inclusivity of golf, being able to have a competitive contest with anyone you meet, as well as the personal battle to constantly improve yourself.
I'm a proud father and a very attractive husband (Sources not available for comment).
I love people and doing charitable work, food & wine, prefer cold weather and enjoy being near water. I play a lot of poker, used to play A LOT of poker, and my only criticism of the game is that it just doesn't scale well. The better you get, the harder it becomes, and that's not a great business model for me. It's labour intensive, but boy, what a game!
I like to think I'm quite good at English, most of the time, but I also studied languages at university and so I can speak Spanish, Italian and Portuguese with relative fluency.
The Business Matt
When I graduated from Cardiff University in 2010 I started my first business in Digital PR. I recently did a short TikTok video about how "fake it to make it" was applicable with this first venture, and how it ended with me selling it to an existing client at the time. This first startup was called PokerFacePR, and it was PR specifically for poker professionals, during the 'poker boom'.
This whet my appetite for business, entrepreneurship and, above all, got me fully addicted to controlling my own time. But, in hindsight, to have launched a first business and sold it in 2 years was a massive anomoly; so rare and completely absurd really.
Around 2012-2014 I tried my hand at helping my father-in-law, Nigel Croft, a 'big cheese' in the world of Quality Management Systems, namely with the world-famous, ISO (9001). This took me around the world with him and taught me so much about managing large projects, and communicating, in a business context, with people of many varying cultures and backgrounds. Not to mention, crucially, the importance of continuous improvement and how to assess it and physically ensure it in a business context.
I also became a Marketing Director for two popular exhibitions in the legal and accountancy worlds, including Accountex, the world's largest (at the time) accountancy exhibition, directed by Scott Hider, still a very close friend of mine. I absorbed so much from my experiences working on these events. Tom King, Director of Legalex, and Scott, passed-on so much of their experience and wisdom to me. I learned about pretty much every form of marketing, on the hoof, while doing this, and the result was huge growth at both events.
However, working for a company, at this point of my life, wasn't for me!
It was a useful 2-years of experience, but was time to go it alone again, and this is where I met Daniel Kempe, who became, essentially my business husban...I mean partner.
Me and Dan set up our own branding agency called InfiniteVisions, doing websites, design and brand explorations for some really interesting startups.
This went well, even winning regional awards and coverage in the local news for our quick growth and notable work for businesses in the area. But it was tough to scale by ourselves without huge capital backing. In the end, one of our clients, an angel investor, asked us if we had any business ideas we'd want funding.
As it happened, we did.
We went and pitched for a product called ResellMyService. This was a masterpiece of a business plan, beautifully branded, detailed presentation, well-presented, it was a big idea.
Aaaand, they didn't share our vision and turned us down for seed funding.
But they urged us to come back to them with a more simply modelled business, as they wanted to invest in us both, Matt and Dan, as opposed to X idea.
This was when, from necessity, we created Quuu.co in 2015, we returned to the board room with one sheet of A4 and an existing MRR of $20 ($10 of that was Dan paying for his own product lol). Quuu provided content suggestions for social media. The unique selling point was that we hand-curated/reviewed each and every suggestion we sent to users to ensure quality and shareability. We created a bulletproof set of rules that we stuck firmly to, and it worked so well.
For this idea we got £30k funding to test the concept. The meeting was an instant success and we were over the moon that we were going to be running a startup together, with funding. After 6 months, we were sky-rocketing. We came 1st on ProductHunt, were mentioned in Forbes, Entrepreneur.com and just above every major publication you can think of; it was so exciting.
Almost a decade later, and we're still running Quuu. After about 3 years we hit a roadblock or three. Then after 4 years we were in full-blown stall, we had plateuad. This is the death knell if you want to sell a business.
We had some really exciting ideas for businesses along the way, sold a small AI company called MagicBlog.ai which has loads of potential and a great brand, it's still going strong and we wish them all the very best.
But going from my start of '1 for 1 with starting and selling a business, I found myself in more of a 2 for 50 type scenario.'
However, 2024 is going to be different. Quuu is on another level of sophistication. It's still firmly routed in the social media software world, but it's pushed AI-implementation to its limit, and the product feels like magic to use. I truly believe that we're sitting on one of the best social media tools in the world right now, and we just need to get the marketing right to reignite the growth behind it that we had in those early years after launch.
Currently we're focused strongly on 4 products. Quuu.co, GrowthPanels.com, DealsOnSaaS.com and Mentioned.ai (An AI tool that let's people in your blog content know they've been mentioned so you can reach out to them to get more information or encourage backlinks to your post, which is imperative for improving domain rating and SEO performance). Mentioned was spotted by business services behemouth Semrush in 2023 and we partnered with them to appear in their Partner Store as their first outreach tool.
There have been so many ups and downs in this journey, and I tend to share much of it on social media, so follow along on Instagram, LinkedIn, X and TikTok and tune in to our podcast, Conversations With Quuu on YouTube.
I appreciate you taking the time to learn about my story, please reach out to say 'hey'.
Best Wishes
Matthew Spurr
