Meet the Writer: Matthew Proffitt, ESG & Disruptive Tech Consultant

So let’s start! Tell us a bit about yourself. For example, name, profession, and personal interests.

I’m a six-figure freelancer and I work primarily in the disruptive tech space. I provide management and value consulting services, content marketing, and strategy, and aid my clients in securing funding to launch their businesses or new product lines. I’m a CFI-certified Financial Modeling and Valuation Analyst (FMVA), and I’ve been working in fintech and disruptive tech since 2016. I prefer working with startups and microstartups to help them scale profitably and bring their products to market.

My personal interests are a bit eclectic. The other day, I planted a couple of bushes in front of the house and dug a spot to plant a cherry blossom tree. I love listening to music, and recently I’ve been working toward making it. I’m very interested in drill and trap hip-hop, boom-bap, and horrorcore—Tech N9ne, who started as a horrorcore rapper, has been massively influential on my taste in music. Tech was actually my “Spotify Most Listened Artist” every year between 2015 and 2021.

I also enjoy breeding monsters on Koei Tecmo’s Monster Rancher 2 (DX) which was re-released in 2021. The original game was released in 1999 on the PS1, when it was just Tecmo. I have a lot of fond memories of the game. Since they have added online PvP, I intend to make a few more as well!

I have a fiance, two daughters, and a St. Bernard mix named Lola. She’s full of personality.

When I was younger, I was really into dirtbiking, jetskiing, marksmanship, and giving my Jeep a bath in the mud of the mountains. I won first in the Appomattox state 4-H shoot with my team of two other minors when I was in the fourth grade. It was a single competition tier, so we were competing against adults in their late teens through early fourties. I found my desire to become a US Marine through the 4-H program.

I learned a lot about life (read: “resilience”) when I was diagnosed with Scoliosis at 16. I was aspiring toward a career in the Marine Corps. The doctors told me that a career in the USMC was permanently out of my reach. So I went toward engineering, cybersecurity, and then, ultimately, disruptive tech.

Interesting! What was your latest Hackernoon Top story about?

My post was about the “Metaverse” and the technology that I see which underpins it. I was surprised and elated to learn that it was chosen as a top story. It was actually my first Hackernoon post.

I discussed things like nuclear power, battery technology, quantum computing, electric vehicles, autonomous robots and machine vision, AI/machine learning, and a bunch of other stuff at a really high level.

The world is looking really cool, in terms of advancements over the next 10-20 years. I don’t think anyone can see exactly where we will be, summarily. There’s too much advancement in too many places at once to keep track of it all.

Do you usually write on similar topics? If not, what do you usually write about?

I do and I don’t. I work a lot with startups and disruptive tech businesses, but I spent a lot of the last year working with mid-market businesses, mainly service-based businesses, just to help level our finances out after a rough 2020 and buying a house. I never quit working, but I did have several clients and contacts fall away due to COVID.

Everything shut down right after spring break when I was supposed to start the second part of a Fortune 500 marketing contract. The client was focusing on university systems, so when the universities shut down, they lost all of their ability to follow through with me. I’m sure you can imagine how much that impacted things.

I also write about the importance of understanding your priorities. I’ll be porting a couple of shorts over to Hackernoon over the next couple of months, and may publish some new ones. The last one that I published was about a father

Great! What is your usual writing routine like (if you have one?)

My writing routine is super chaotic. I make a point to sit down and do something every day, barring weekends, when I only work on personal ventures. A few months back, I was averaging about 65k-100k words per month for an enterprise contract, writing between 3-7 hours per day. On my fastest days, I made around $400/hour, knocking out multiple short-form posts per hour. On my slow days, I only cleared about $150/hour, though.

I would say that my routine looks like this, to pull some order from chaos:

Step One: Ensure I write something every day.

That’s all.

Sometimes I only get like 20-50 words down. I am often able to snowball the momentum and produce at least 1-2k words per day. On my better days, I do somewhere between 15-20k words per day—usually in a ten-hour “sprint day” with a handful of structured breaks in-between focus sessions. Sort of similar to the Pomodoro method, but taking a break every 45mins can end my productivity for the day, so I usually do 1-2 hour sprints, then go for a walk, drink some water, and get some food.

That’s also after having to write a few thousand words per day most days to ensure we could eat, while my fiance was doing the same, though. I’ve put out something dumb like 1m words over the last year, over 300k words for just one (non-enterprise) client

(Those 1m words translate to about 660 hours of writing, including research and edits for me when I’m in the swing of things).

Being a writer in tech can be a challenge. It’s not often our main role, but an addition to another one. What is the biggest challenge you have when it comes to writing?

I was diagnosed with ADHD at 24, after hiring a black-bag physician. Upon first meeting him, he had me screened for ADHD, and the next thing you know, I was getting medicated. It made a huge difference in my life, just coming to understand that the struggles I’ve had focusing aren’t just failure on my part. That there was something else going on.

Sometimes, I still fall into the dopamine-enriched ADHD rabbit holes that permeate the internet. They’re wonderful and certainly help me overarchingly, so I’ve structured my life in a way that allows me to indulge my curiosities often. Sometimes, however, it’s immensely frustrating, not being able to focus.

What is the next thing you hope to achieve in your career?

Launch my own agency. I’m calling it “Launchicorn” because I’ve been able to help a lot of businesses launch things and secure a collective, few hundred million dollars of funding. Who doesn’t love meeting a unicorn every now and then?

Author’s Note: The site is still a WIP, but I send it and adjust on the journey.

For interested parties, I’ve set up a secondary site and landing page while I finalize the primary site. (See my CTA)

I’ve had some blind spots, but the last couple of years have been very transformative for me. I’ve seen the way forward with scaling passive income and learning to work through trauma and mental illness.

I’ve also made a lot of progress with launching my own ventures. I held a contest with my fiance a couple of months ago, “Launch-a-Thon.” I ended up getting bogged down in client needs and we had to call it off, but she was able to launch four projects this last month. I’m hugely proud of her personal progress and incredibly grateful for her support on my own journey.

I’ve learned a lot from working with Ken “Magma” Marshall, currently the Chief Growth Officer of RevenueZen. I initially started out working with him with a smaller boutique firm. He’s a wonderful guy and he’s worked with me during some of my greatest challenges in life, like being a new homeowner and getting my late-in-life ADHD diagnosis.

There haven’t been many people to stick around in my professional world as long as he has. I also want to work on building long-term, attuned, and high-quality connections—something I have become increasingly effective at over the last four years or so.

I’m also working to publish a discourse and response to the FED’s RFC on the recent Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC)-related executive order. I don’t much care for politics, but I have seen some VERY disturbing talks recently. Particularly, interviews between web3/crypto-related people and policy-makers. I feel that my voice, my vote, is in my content these days.

These come alongside turmoil in Myanmar and present massive human rights concerns.

A CBDC isn’t decentralized. It’s centralized by definition.

Wow, that’s admirable. Now, something more casual: What is your guilty pleasure of choice?

Initially, I started to talk about Key Lime Pie, but I came to realize that it’s not “The Thing”

Learning is the thing. There’s a reason I have been able to develop the career that I have. It’s because I love to learn things and form connections between ideas. The possibilities set my brain alight and flood my Dopamine pathways. My fiance and I often spend time bouncing ideas back and forth, discussing business models, market data, and which things we think would be fun to start.

Do you have a non-tech-related hobby? If yes, what is it?

Two years ago, I would have said Aikido, but COVID killed our dojo, and our sensei retired 🚕. I can’t blame him, though. He was a tenured surgeon in a teaching hospital and there was a lot of tension around then in the medical field. I probably would have too. He was truly one of a kind. The others in our small satellite dojo, like Mick had been doing martial arts for decades.

Bill, a Judoka of like 30 years was a Jazz musician and traveler. I haven’t spoken to him since our last practice, in 2020, but I’ll probably never forget him. He was involved in the founding of the Tri-Cities Judo Club and was very active in the community.

Holmes King, the presiding practitioner of Capitol City Aikido, has a deep wealth of knowledge of the art (Iwama-Style Aikido.) He’s authored several essays on the art, its applications, and its history. Obtaining senior ranks in his dojo requires studying teachings from O’Sensei (Morihei Ueshiba) and attending requisite association meets each year.

All things accounted for, however,

At the most base level, totally unplugged, I have come to enjoy landscaping. It’s cathartic and it allows me to better appreciate the home I share with my growing family. I’ve always loved working with my hands and that’s pretty much all you can do for landscaping with a mindfully and intentionally small house.

What can the Hacker Noon community expect to read from you next?

I plan to cover topics like the upcoming NWSC Crane Tech Expo + PROPELS Accelerator and other tech-related topics, as well as some blockchain/crypto/NFT items, and of course, more on the metaverse.

I’m also working to release some tips and tricks for freelance writers and consultants-to-be. It can be scary starting out, but it’s definitely worth the effort.

I may miss the Tech Expo coverage opportunity, but I am certain that my time will be well-spent if I do.

Thanks for taking the time to join our “Meet the writer” series. It was a pleasure. Do you have any closing words?

Thank you, for building a platform that allows people like me to connect with like-minded individuals. Thank you for investing in the editorial team that reviews all of the content we submit. And Thank you for the opportunity to spread my voice and message across the globe.

I appreciate you and all of the readers, as well as the businesses and community members that support your team in making it all possible.

I have a vague idea of how much work would go into something like this, and I’m so glad that you all have made it happen!