Mateo Price Has The Launch Codes

How a cold email helped the 22-year-old grow a six-figure creator analytics startup

Mateo Price pictured outside of Wrigley Field in Chicago (Photo by Nathan Graber-Lipperman)

This piece is the cover story for our first edition of Creator Mag. To read the rest of the magazine, click here.

As we’re walking back from the cover shoot for this story, Mateo Price stops for a second, reflecting. “I think both my biggest strength and weakness as an entrepreneur is that I’m happy,” he tells me.

The wind is howling in Chicago. It’s a chilly day in late November, like many of the days before it and many of the wintery days to come.

I first interviewed Mateo for this story back in February, but his life has changed dramatically since we talked then over Zoom. After graduating from Northwestern University in March, he’s been working full-time on Authentic Media Ascension (AMA) — the creator analytics agency he started in 2019 out of his dorm room — for several months now. His clients are an eclectic bunch, from productivity master Ali Abdaal to basketball creator Kristopher London, yet there’s a consistent story they share after working with AMA: more views on their channels, and more money in their pockets. 

Things are going well. Soon, Mateo will be travelling to Paris to meet with some clients and expand his network; he’s excited for some of the sight-seeing he’ll do in between meetings, too. He’s also expanded to a team of nine, bringing on a lead designer, developer, and content strategist, meaning he needs to allot more time towards managing. The new additions are already exceeding his expectations and then some, though, and with the quality of their work improving, 2022 is looking bright.

But not too long ago, Mateo was at a crossroads. His co-founder had moved on in the spring, and he had no idea what direction he wanted to take with his life and career — much less what to do with AMA. Some mentors balked at the idea of dropping a company that had cleared nearly $500k in revenue in less than three years. Nevertheless, the decision to pursue the venture by himself loomed large.

Once we’ve sat down indoors, away from the bitter cold, Mateo continues his thought from before. “[My happiness] is a strength because it allows me to focus on what really matters, but it can also be a weakness because I don’t know when to keep pushing.”

He pauses again before resuming. “I don’t want that to come off as I’m always happy though. Because I still do get caught up in the rat race from time to time, and I have bad days. And to some people, hearing what I’ve done and what AMA has done, $450k is nothing.”

If you told him three years ago, though, how much his life would change based off of one cold email, he probably wouldn’t have believed you.

“The short answer is, I genuinely had no expectation of being here. And so when I say, like, it started by accident, it really did.”

I met Mateo when we played pickup basketball together during our first year at Northwestern, but it wasn’t until I reached out the following February that we sat down and dove into what he was up to.

Huddled in the basement of my dorm, Mateo told me all about the digital sports publication he worked on throughout high school, TheLeagueNews (TLN). Growing up in Libertyville, IL — a suburb forty-five minutes north of downtown Chicago — he was a huge NBA fan, pulling for his hometown team in the Bulls. With TLN, he was able to cover the sport he loved while gaining invaluable experience in the world of online publishing and social media.

After starting as an unpaid staff writer for TLN, he quickly worked his way up to a position as Co-owner and Chief Growth Officer. By partnering with meme accounts and NBA Facebook Groups, Mateo was able to grow their following from 800 to 237,000 views per month…in just two years. They were even able to secure interviews with NBA players like Jabari Parker and Justin Holiday.

Upon gaining this experience, Mateo considered applying to journalism schools, but ultimately decided to double-major in economics and psychology due to his interests in business and marketing. When he got to college, he described wanting to “feel like he belonged,” joining various clubs and working hard to earn good grades. But it was his experience at The Garage, Northwestern’s incubator for student startups, that acted as a consistent through-line during his four years in Evanston.

Mateo on a school trip to San Francisco (December 2018)

Melissa Kaufman, the executive director of The Garage, remembers meeting Mateo during his first year. She described him as a “pretty outgoing guy” that was “interested in entrepreneurship and had some ideas, but didn’t know where to get started.”

Mateo got involved with an accelerator program called Launch and ended up working on Roominate, a startup offering poster subscription services to college kids looking to redecorate their dorm rooms every month. 

“It was very classic college in that, like, we made $85 in revenue and won $250 in prize money, and we thought we were hot shit,” he said.

Mateo laughed before continuing. “And then we, like, tailspin out due to equity conversations. You know, classic college startup.”

Not everyone found it funny, however. “Our operations manager has to deal with disseminating funds to students, and the Roominate team was causing her a lot of problems,” Melissa recalled. “They were pretty disorganized…I think they were young and didn’t know what they were doing yet.”

After that experience, Mateo interned in a marketing and biz dev role before he began prepping for consulting recruitment during the fall of his sophomore year. Anyone who’s gone through that process will tell you how intense and cutthroat it can be, especially at a school like Northwestern, where students foster an ultra-competitive culture amongst each other. Mateo described the anxiety of shuffling into a room with 70 other bright-eyed 20-year-olds jockeying for a position at Deloitte. Slowly, that room whittled down to 35, 15, 6, 3, then 2.

Mateo was one of those final two. He didn’t get the internship.

Feeling burnt out from recruitment, Mateo withdrew his various applications to consulting programs and thought about what came next. He’d visited companies like Google, Lyft, and Dropbox on a school trip to San Francisco as a first-year; in 2018, he was the one organizing it. So, maybe there was a place for him in the startup world — after all, even if Roominate wasn’t a success, working with the team was a ton of fun, and he really liked the marketing side of it. Plus, he’d run a pretty sweet project with one of his favorite creators the previous summer, and he thought that it might be worth taking more seriously.

For years, Mateo had been watching a YouTube channel created by Jesse “Jesser” Riedel, who uploaded basketball-related content such as trick shots and NBA reaction videos to an audience of 1.5 million subscribers as of 2018. Given his time building TLN, he decided to shoot Jesser a cold email and pitch the creator on how he could help grow — and engage — his fanbase through a focus on analytics.

Mateo didn’t really have the expertise for this, but he felt confident in his knowledge of social media and familiarity with Jesser’s community — he was a member, after all. But he tried a little too hard to personalize what he calls an “aggressively long email,” and was met with radio silence.

Upon following up a couple times, however, he refreshed his inbox to find a new message:

I’m a bit confused what you are trying to do and why you want to do it for free, Jesser wrote back, yet the creator still offered to hop on a call. They agreed to work on a pro bono analytics project together, and after Mateo presented his findings on September 1, Jesser was so thrilled that they extended their working relationship for the next three months. Only this time, the creator paid him $1,500 to do it.

“In a way, it felt like getting paid to learn,” Mateo said. “And that just kicked off the roadmap for this company that otherwise would have ceased to exist.”

He officially had his first client.

Around the time we first talked, Mateo was still trying to figure out how to tie all of these different threads together into one, coherent vision. Given his luck with Jesser, Mateo and a friend he’d met through The Garage, Jihad Esmail, scoured the internet, searching for who they could cold email next.

Rapper Sheck Wes’ track “Mo Bamba” had recently become a party anthem for college kids across the country, so the duo half-jokingly decided to reach out to NBA lottery pick Mo Bamba, who served as the inspiration for the song.

They pitched Bamba on an interview for their podcast (it didn’t exist). Surprisingly, Bamba emailed them back, saying he was interested.

Though the thread would eventually die, Mateo realized that he was getting pretty good at this cold email thing. His dream internship was to work in digital marketing for the Chicago Bulls, and after several weeks of reaching out to the right people, he landed a role.

Mateo described how that quarter, he would wake up at 4 a.m. to take the train down to the United Center and scramble back to campus for midday classes. Three hours of daily travel was leaving him pretty exhausted, yet the excitement in his voice was palpable as he described working on a new Instagram page for the Bulls that featured never-before-seen archival photos, which now sits at 103k followers just three years later.

But he knew there was still more to be done with Jesser. At the end of their first contract that previous December, Mateo wanted to meet his client in person, as he thought it would be a difference maker in their relationship moving forward.

Melissa agreed, and argued it would be a cool experience as a fan, too. “I’ve given that advice to students [to meet clients in person] a number of times, but very few have taken me up on it,” she said. “You kinda have to put yourself out there, and it’s a little scary.”

The creator wasn’t very committal, however, until Mateo mentioned that he would be in Jesser’s hometown of Los Angeles and would love to link up. “It’s kind of a sales trick,” Melissa said. “If you really want to meet somebody in person, you tell them that you’ll be in their city for a week…if they agree to the meeting, that’s when you actually book your trip.”

Jesser promptly responded that Mateo could stop by his place, and Wednesday afternoon sounded great for him, too. And with that, Mateo reserved a flight 24 hours before the plane took off and returned to Chicago a mere 48 hours later.

“Things were happening so quickly, I forgot to tell my mom,” he jokes.

A screenshot of Jesser’s YouTube channel, now at 3.5M subscribers three years after Mateo first met him.

During that trip, Mateo’s 15-minute meeting with Jesser quickly turned into two hours, as their conversation spanned topics from content strategy to growth to even simply career goals. In Mateo’s mind, the bet paid off — and then some.

“I don’t know if it was the most ethical thing of all time,” he said. “But I think both of us have been really happy in our relationship and where it’s taken us since.”

That trip also gave him something else on top of a new contract: A name. When Jesser asked how he should refer to the business, Mateo responded with Authentic Media Ascension, or AMA for short, a nod to Reddit’s popular Ask-Me-Anything series with influencers.

By April, through working with the creator and a couple of other projects, Mateo had officially hit $10,000 in revenue. All of a sudden, this thing had legs, and on April 4th, AMA officially became a LLC in the state of Illinois.

Yet Mateo needed some help. He was trying to build an automated script in Python that could send a weekly analytics report to clients, so he tried to rope Jihad in due to the latter’s (albeit limited) experience with software development.

On an Uber ride back from a friend’s apartment, Mateo made the pitch. “He had been telling me about all of this stuff he had been doing in the creator economy, though we didn’t even know the term ‘creator economy’ at the time,” Jihad said. “He was feeling pretty overwhelmed with everything going on…when we were in that Uber, he was like, ‘We should do this together. Here’s a specific idea that I have for us to work on.’”

“It was very ironic how, again, pitching something I knew I could probably learn but couldn’t do at the time led to meeting my co-founder,” Mateo said. “Like, that’s crazy to me.”

And just like that, the duo had a company to run.

During the summer of 2019, Mateo and I grabbed lunch a couple of times in Evanston. At that point, he was interning for the credit card company Discover. While he was learning a ton and gaining great experience, his heart wasn’t totally in it.

It turned out that his brain wasn’t, either, as a good chunk of his computing capacity was spent researching just how much he was impacting the growth of Jesser’s online presence. 

When he completed his first project with the creator, things were pretty simple. “So early on, understanding his audience meant two things,” Mateo said. “From a qualitative perspective…I was just gonna think about myself, about what I want as a member of his community. And then from a quantitative standpoint, I wanted to break down the different types of content he posted across social media and see how people responded to it.”

This meant categorizing social media content into different buckets, such as distinguishing between how videos performed versus photos and whether posts included other influencers or not. It took Mateo a long time to crack the code, but upon utilizing “IF” statements and sharpening his Excel skills, he developed a repeatable process that churned out consistent results.

Since Jesser was making the majority of his money through YouTube’s Partner Program, by September 2018, optimizing that function of the creator’s business had become the primary focus. There was only one problem: Mateo didn’t know anything about YouTube, other than consuming videos on the platform.

“When I first opened YouTube Studio to view analytics, I was like, ‘This is the coolest thing ever,’” Mateo said. “I just did one of those inevitable deep dives [googling and watching YouTube videos], and I was very disappointed. It genuinely felt like there was nothing [valuable]…I was, like, 32 pages deep into a white paper on tags, which I regret reading now but it is what it is.”

Jesser had worked with an agency in the past, so the creator sent Mateo some of their reports (“I read that thing, like, 10 times over, trying to think of what they were missing,” Mateo said.) Upon doing some more research, he then put all his thoughts into a deck — along with bringing in a quantitative piece to make it more action-oriented — and presented it to Jesser.

The creator loved it, and from that point on, he took Mateo’s findings and ran with them.

By the time we talked during the summer of 2019, Mateo had determined that through their analytics-focused analysis, AMA had brought Jesser an extra $160k in revenue over the previous six months. So when September rolled around, he wrote a proposal to get Jesser locked down on a “fat contract” (Jihad’s words). AMA was starting to experiment more with things like data visualization, and as they slowly began to appreciate the value add they brought to the table, they realized they could ask for much more compensation — even if it seemed nuts for them as college students.

“What the details of that proposal were, I don’t remember,” Jihad said. “I just remember thinking, like, ‘Holy shit, there’s no way we’re gonna be able to get this much money out of this guy.’ And lo and behold, we did get that much money out of that guy!”

Jihad followed up. “That was the moment where it was like, ‘Okay, this can be a sustainable, legit business.’”

Heads down, the pair started picking up work with some of Jesser’s creator friends. They couldn’t believe how much money they were making, but when they saw that a lot of the work AMA did was repeatable with other clients, they knew they were on to something. 

On top of that, a first-year student, Lainey Dow, reached out to them about joining the team. “Freshman fall was really difficult for me…I was super homesick and had no connections at Northwestern,” Lainey said. “I looked on The Garage’s website and saw that AMA did marketing and data. And I thought, I’m pretty good at those things.”

Lainey sent Mateo a cold email with her previous experience and asked if she could join the team. He wrote her back, saying We’re not really at a stage where we’re hiring just yet. Let’s find a time to talk, and maybe we can figure something out?

The AMA team, from left to right: Lainey Dow, Mateo Price, and Jihad Esmail

They ended up bringing her onboard, forcing the co-founders to focus not only on growing their early returns, but also on managing their first team member other than themselves. “That was a really fun experience,” Jihad recalled. “We were like, ‘Can we train someone to do what we’re doing?’ That forced us to build a deeper understanding of what we were doing and establish [more consistent] processes.”

Jihad labelled it as a “huge learning experience” for both him and Mateo. And as they figured out how to manage, the AMA engine kept on running, grossing six figures in revenue by January 2020.

Lainey, now the Chief of Customer Success, laughs when she thinks back to joining the team. “They gave me a shot. And then yeah, from there, I guess they never told me to leave.”

As we sat down to talk for this interview in February of 2021, Mateo and I were both just one month away from graduating, swapping college with the exciting-yet-nerve-wracking world of being in your mid-20s.

Of course, for the last year, we’d been forced to adjust to life during the pandemic. Other than going for some walks and chatting over Zoom here and there, I hadn’t seem him much, so I was curious to hear more about how he and AMA were doing.

On the surface, things were going great. They had hit their milestone of $250,000 in revenue three months prior, as well as continued to grow their network in partnering with new — and even bigger — creators. Additionally, their team kept adding more faces; even though I’d watched AMA evolve since the beginning, at this point, Mateo was name-dropping people that even I didn’t recognize.

There were clearly some other things that were on his mind — it’s not like he tries to hide it much, either. “When he walks into a room, it’s like, ‘Okay, Mateo’s bringing some energy,’” Jihad said. “And when he’s not bringing the energy, you know something’s wrong.”

Like many of us, he hadn’t been able to see a lot of the people he cared about throughout parts of 2020. Balance has always been a huge priority for him, yet when he logged off for the day during the pandemic, he could no longer be with his girlfriend or hang out with his roommates. Being a social, empathetic extrovert has always been a huge part of who he was; all of a sudden, he was incredibly lonely.

On top of that, the AMA team took some swings during the previous summer, such as launching a gated Discord community to share their resources with smaller creators. After a recent history of consistent hits, some of their swings missed, even as they were working harder than ever.

“We started off the summer really strong, but like a lot of other companies and people during that summer, it was just so mentally taxing,” Lainey said. “All of a sudden, YouTube didn’t seem like the most important thing in the world anymore.”

By August, Mateo decided that they should all take a step back, rest up, and regroup when the new school year started in the fall. And regroup they did, as evidenced by the results they saw in closing the year out on a high note.

But I could tell something else had been gnawing away at him. Something bigger, more present, hanging over his mind like a dark cloud. It was a question he kept asking himself, one that he couldn’t seem to shake.

What the hell am I gonna do with my life upon graduating?

Mateo, pictured at Lake Crescent in Washington, after his co-founder decided to move on (Photo by Clara Siebert)

Yes, AMA’s reputation as a boutique analytics agency that creators loved was only getting stronger. Yet the leap from college passion project to full-time job was a big one to grapple with, especially as he debated whether or not he truly wanted to spend his time pursuing their existing model.

For most of AMA’s short history, when talking about what he was doing, people Mateo was loosely connected with wouldn’t take him seriously. They’d treat it like a “cute idea” and a “fun way” to get hands-on experience in influencer marketing.

Nevertheless, at some point along the way, a theoretical switch flipped. “I don’t know what that [revenue] number cut off was — it’s different for different people,” Mateo said. “But it’s not only that they, like, take you more seriously. All of a sudden, they want to share their opinion much more intensely with you. Like, ‘Well, it’s super cool you’ve gotten to this point. Are you doing this now? Have you thought of that?’”

This dynamic wasn’t always the easiest to navigate as his company became more and more real by the day. Plus, several dominos started to fall. Jesser, the client that had essentially forced AMA into existence out of thin air, had to back out of their most recent contract because of revenue concerns. 

Jihad was still deciding if he wanted to go full-time at that point, too. And in March, he informed Mateo that he would be pursuing other opportunities due to a host of external factors (though the Jesser deal falling through didn’t help, either).

“A lot of the decision-making during those last six months — especially on my end — was about how we could ensure we’d make enough money over the next year to sustain ourselves if we went full-time,” Jihad said. “And that’s an unrealistic burden…most startups are just trying to stay afloat, period!”

He elaborated. “It came from this fear of jumping into the unknown, and I wanted as much stability as possible…I had convinced myself that I could always go into a startup later.”

By the time April rolled around, Mateo was feeling lost, unsure if he wanted to keep pressing forward on this three-year odyssey that had started simply because he wanted to meet his favorite creator. Yet he’d submitted his last college assignment, and to celebrate, he had planned a six-week road trip with his girlfriend along the Pacific Coast Highway. 

And somewhere along the sandy beaches of California and the Northern Lights of Alaska, he found something that drew him back in.

We’ve only made it a couple feet from Wrigley Field when Mateo’s eyes light up.

It’s 33 degrees out. He’s just putting his coat back on after taking it off for pictures. And yet, in that current moment, nothing gets him more amped up than the mystical concoction of red dye and sugar, courtesy of the 7-Eleven’s Slurpee Machine across the street.

I can’t help but chuckle to myself, pulling out my camera to snap some photos. Here’s this 22-year-old kid who’s accomplished so much at such a young age, making more money than a lot of people make in their entire lives, and all he can think about is how good a drink that costs a dollar sounds. 

Mateo leaving 7-Eleven with a Slurpee in tow (Photo by Nathan Graber-Lipperman)

But that’s just Mateo for you. He’s one of the most unassuming, humble, and caring people I’ve ever met, and people who have been around him long enough tend to sing a similar tune.

“Mateo wears his heart on his sleeve,” Jihad said. “Who he is when you first meet him is basically who he is when you’ve known him for three years. That’s what most people — including myself — love about him.”

While it’s likely there will always be the game of what if, no hard feelings have lingered between the former co-founders. Jihad ended up taking a nonlinear path to a Web3 startup — the space he’s most passionate about — and they continue to keep in touch (in between nerding out about the creator economy, of course).

As for AMA, Mateo came back in the spring feeling rejuvenated. He often references a saying from one of his closest friends and mentors—Run fully to something that fulfills an absence as opposed to running away from something causing distress. With a renewed focus, he’s continued to take on clients as part of AMA’s agency efforts while also pushing the company’s limits, developing software solutions, partnering with industry leaders, and launching a revamped content strategy.

Of course, I have the privilege of seeing this all come together up close. By the end of college, Mateo had become one of my best friends, and when we both decided that we wanted to stay in Chicago, we found an apartment together just 10 minutes south walking from Wrigley.

Though I started writing this story in February, I stopped at some point along the way because I thought my clear bias would shine through; he is my roommate, after all. Yet on a train ride up to Evanston in October, I listened back to our interview and thought to myself, Man, this story is too good not to tell. And given I’ve been there to watch a decent chunk of the journey, why can’t I be the one to tell it?

I hopped off the train and started walking over to The Garage, a path I’ve taken more times than I can count. Mateo had started guest-lecturing on his journey to entrepreneurship classes, and while he had initially been nervous when it came to prepping, he looked right at home standing in front of The Garage’s current student founders.

“It was definitely a full-circle, proud mom moment,” Melissa said when I asked her about this event.

If you wanted to try and define Mateo’s success, you could just go by the stats. The initial analyses he started with Jesser have continued to evolve, with his clients gaining an additional 8 million subscribers, 250 million views, and $5 million after working with AMA.

However, numbers never tell the whole story. People do.

Lainey almost quit AMA due to the stress of her first quarter on campus, but she stuck it out after her mom convinced her the experience could turn into something really special. “But, like, the day before I left to come back for winter quarter, I had a complete meltdown,” she continued. “I didn’t like it [Northwestern] as much as I thought I would.”

The AMA team in Paris in December (Photo by Lainey Dow)

Yet when her mom offered to cancel her flight back, “the first thing that crossed my mind was, if I don’t go back…I won’t get to work on AMA anymore at The Garage,” she said. “I didn’t want to lose that.”

Two years later, she’s flying to Paris and meeting with clients alongside Mateo.

“As I got closer with him, I expected this trait [of constant excitement] to steadily decline. Because it’s like, ‘Okay, no one’s this excited all the time,’” Jihad laughs. “But as we worked together, it was always a pretty persistent thing. He was always bringing this positive outlook, and I came to appreciate that.”

Mateo told me that the person who beat him out for the Deloitte internship sophomore year now works there full-time, and we joked about how things tend to happen for a reason. Nonetheless, when he thinks back to where he was three years ago, struggling to figure out where he fit in, he’s appreciative of his good luck. He’s also proud of how far he’s come, growing up as his business matured next to him.

“Honestly, I don’t even think it was, like, a true dream of mine,” Mateo said. “Because it felt too far-fetched.”

Yet here he is, building the company that he started by accident, brick by brick, layer by layer.

One cold email at a time.

Coverage from Creator Mag.1 continues on! Plus, follow along with our work on Twitter here.