Matt Potts joins Sunny Ray for a fast paced introductory conversation about his unlikely path from underground coal mining in Australia to building an eight figure email marketing business. Potts explains how he studied geology purely for the high pay, became an underground coal geologist, then discovered Facebook ads in 2011 and used his mine redundancy payout to fund a brutal self taught crash course in media buying. After early losses and a breakthrough campaign in Taiwan, he and his wife Sarah went on to build Goodness Lover, a health and wellness company that reached 1.8 million people through free events and grew an email list of over a million subscribers. The conversation shifts to AI, with Potts describing his first encounters with early LLMs and how he now views the technology as a symbiotic tool rather than a replacement for human creativity. He shares how feeding an AI deep context about a brand or person, rather than superficial prompts, produces dramatically better content, while humans still excel at cross domain thinking and avoiding predictable AI patterns.
From underground coal geologist to Facebook ads gambler to AI powered email entrepreneur, Matt Potts shares his wild pivot story.
Where did you grow up and how did you end up becoming an underground coal geologist?
I grew up in Australia in a standard middle class family and hated school and authority, though I could coast through it. When I enrolled in university, geologists were getting paid second only to dentist graduates, so I studied geology purely to make good money. That is how I became an underground coal geologist, which is a strange origin story before doing something radically different.
How did you go from mining into entrepreneurship?
I watched my dad work from home growing up and always wanted that. A friend told me about Facebook ads, so I bought an ebook in 2011 to learn how to run traffic to affiliate offers. Eventually I trained someone to take over my mine duties and took a redundancy payout of about twenty thousand dollars to fund my Facebook ads learning, going all in.
Did it work out right away?
No, not initially. It was a horrific crash course in ads psychology, like watching my money get cut down while my campaigns kept failing. Eventually I hit a green campaign promoting an app in Taiwan using online translation tools since I did not speak Chinese. I made about a hundred dollars that day, less than mining paid, but I never forgot that feeling.
What did that transition from a secure career to entrepreneurship feel like emotionally?
Coming from early six figure income in my mid twenties, I had a certain story around myself, and moving into an uncertain world was emotionally very difficult. Losing four or five hundred dollars on ads felt like losing a day rate of hard mining work. I was ashamed of feeling like a failure while others quietly doubted what I was doing, but I had to trust the path would work out.
When did AI enter the picture for you and your company Goodness Lover?
Sarah and I built Goodness Lover, a health and wellness company, putting on free events with experts that grew our audience to 1.8 million people and a list of over a million. The content demands eventually caused fatigue, so when early ChatGPT API access appeared, I knew we had to invest. That first real conversation with an LLM felt like my first time using the internet as a kid.
Where do humans still excel compared to AI when it comes to writing and content?
An LLM only understands you as deeply as the data it has about you, so most businesses are underusing an incredibly powerful tool by giving it superficial prompts. Humans excel at creatively switching across domains and feeding the AI real context about their story and worldview. AI also defaults to predictable patterns like problem agitate solution, so a human has to steer it toward more original, less formulaic output.
Building something daring? Sunny talks to founders like this every day. Fifteen minutes to see if your story belongs on the stage.
Claim your pre-interview