Today we’d like to introduce you to Matt Kundo.
Hi Matt, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
My first real marketing job was at Lucky Robot, the sushi place on South Congress. I was still at UT then, studying international relations, and I figured I’d end up in trade or policy or international law somewhere. Instead I was working for a restaurateur who now co-owns Nomade over on South 1st, and that’s the part that stuck.
You can be right about the plan and still lose if nobody executes it. I’ve always been drawn to that intersection. I can build the roadmap, but I can also get my hands dirty implementing it.
From there I went to Massachusetts to run marketing and sales for a small company, then to an agency in Connecticut doing SEO, paid media, and account management. Agency work taught me speed, and it taught me how a client feels when they’re three people removed from whoever is actually doing the work.
I came back to Texas in 2018, Houston first, and started Matt Kundo Digital Marketing that July. Austin came in 2020, in the middle of Covid, which turned out to be the turning point for the whole thing. Brands got comfortable doing business over video almost overnight. Or they got forced into it, and the result was the same either way.
The model hasn’t changed since. One strategist, one relationship, one scoreboard.
Most of the work is search, paid media, and the measurement underneath both. A lot of it is energy. Most of Texas is deregulated, though not here in Austin, where you don’t get to pick. Everywhere else people are fighting over the same customer in the minute before they choose a plan.
This past year I’ve spent as much time building as consulting. What I built handles a lot of the routine execution: 29 agents, each with a written job description, sharing close to 400 tools and about a hundred recurring jobs. It runs on one laptop in my office that I never let go to sleep, with backups, obviously. It doesn’t run the operation. It drafts, I send, and no client report goes out without me reading it first.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
It hasn’t been smooth, and I don’t think it is for anyone.
Here’s the part that still gets me. The work has never been the hard part. I’m good at delivery. Things go out accurate and on time, clients stay, and that’s the piece I’d back myself on any day of the week.
The part I’m still working on is the front of it. Getting in front of people who’ve never heard of me, understanding what’s actually going wrong in their business, and working out where I’d slot in to help. Word of mouth is the best channel I have and it’s also the slowest one to build. You can do everything right for a client and still wait a year for that to turn into a conversation with somebody new. It’s the one part of this I don’t get to set the pace on.
Which is a strange thing to admit as a marketer. I spend my days making other people findable, and my own marketing is the thing that gets pushed, because it’s the only work on my desk with nobody waiting on it.
What I’ve landed on is that it isn’t really a marketing problem, it’s a conversation problem. Every good client I’ve had started with somebody describing something that was bugging them, not with a pitch. So that’s what I go looking for now, and I’ve come to like that part a lot more than I expected to.
We’ve been impressed with Matt Kundo Digital Marketing, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
Matt Kundo Digital Marketing. It’s me, and it has been since 2018.
What I actually sell is judgment about measurement. Plenty of people can run ads. The harder question is whether the numbers on your dashboard describe your business, and most of the time they don’t.
Here’s the kind of thing I mean. An alert told me a client’s call tracking had broken and was crediting calls to the wrong place. I’d seen that exact pattern before, so the obvious move was to rerun the old fix. I pulled the raw call records first. The tracking was fine. Of 376 calls to their local listings, 373 rang and rang and never got answered. Calls coming from their ads went through the same phone menu and got picked up normally. It wasn’t a software problem at all. The fix was staffing and routing.
That’s the job, really. Checking what’s actually happening before fixing what you’ve been told is wrong. You get the person who did the work, and you get told when a number is off, including when it’s my number.
How can people work with you, collaborate with you or support you?
Honestly, the best thing anyone can do is just talk to me about what’s going wrong.
I like problems, and that’s most of why I do this. If you run a business and something in your marketing isn’t adding up, I’d rather hear about that than pitch you anything.
My favorite part of this job is one specific moment. It’s when a business owner stops guessing and starts making decisions with real confidence, because the numbers in front of them finally describe what’s actually happening. The better version comes a month later, when the revenue you can trace back to marketing goes up and nobody has to take anyone’s word for it.
If you’re building with AI agents in your own work, I’d like to compare notes too.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://mattkundodigitalmarketing.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattkundo
- Other: https://www.strava.com/athletes/755145
