Catch up on our Understory Unfiltered episode where Eli Rubel shares how he scaled MatterMade to $4.2M EBITDA, why VCs are not doing good in the AI era, and how he vibe-coded a SaaS product in seven days.
Eli Rubel sold his first venture-backed SaaS company, realized chasing billion-dollar exits conflicted with the life he wanted, and built a portfolio of agencies generating over $10 million in profits since 2019. After scaling MatterMade to $4.2 million EBITDA in 2021 with 40 employees, the market crash forced him to cut down to five people and rethink everything.
Listen to this episode to learn why he believes VCs are not doing good in the AI era, how he vibe-coded a complete SaaS product in seven days, and the strategic hedging that turned No Boring Design from a survival play into a business larger than his original agency.
Eli Rubel is the founder of MatterMade, No Boring Design, and Profit Labs. After exiting his first venture-backed SaaS company and an e-commerce business, he shifted from chasing massive exits to building agencies optimized for profitability per hour worked.
MatterMade scaled to serve clients including Dropbox, Loom, Oracle, and Yelp before market conditions forced a dramatic restructuring. No Boring Design launched as a hedge during the 2022 downturn and now exceeds MatterMade in revenue. Profit Labs represents his newest venture helping other agency owners achieve lifestyle-focused profitability.
[00:37] How Eli went from art school dropout to serial entrepreneur after a "horribly wonderful failure" in SaaS
[02:34] The lifestyle business epiphany: why a modest acquisition shifted focus from billion-dollar exits to maximum profit per hour
[04:57] Why VCs are not doing good: the case for bootstrapping when AI enables MVPs in days instead of months
[10:40] How Eli vibe-coded a complete customer feedback product in seven days and got his first paying customer
[17:55] The "tricycle life" vision: designing business operations around Wednesday morning freedom
[22:15] How MatterMade peaked at $4.2M EBITDA in 2021 and nearly sold for $40-80 million
[24:35] The 2022 market crash: cutting from 40 employees to 5 and the emotional toll of timing-dependent success
[28:34] How No Boring Design launched as a strategic hedge and became larger than MatterMade
[30:14] Pricing evolution: from unsustainable $1,000/month unlimited design to $6,500 retainers
Eli built a complete customer feedback SaaS product in seven days of "vibe coding" at his cabin, acquiring his first paying customer within a week. "I built it for my own agencies, but then I was so blown away with how well it was working that I put up a marketing page and sent the link out to a couple of agency people. And we had our first paying customer through Stripe in seven days," he explains.
As we discuss in the episode, we've experienced this shift firsthand. Alex built a pre-call research tool in roughly eight hours that the team now uses multiple times daily for sales prep. After sharing it on LinkedIn, over ten people asked to pay for access. When Alex showed it to a friend who's an AI software engineer at Meta, the engineer was skeptical OAuth integration would work, then was shocked when it did. The product was more sophisticated than Eli's previous venture-funded startup that required six months of engineering work and $1 million in funding.
MatterMade peaked at $4.2 million EBITDA in 2021 with private equity conversations valuing potential exits at $40-80 million. When market conditions shifted at the end of that year, the business crashed despite no change in execution quality. "You could do everything right at the wrong time and have little to no success, or you could do some things right at the perfect time and have a shit ton of success," Eli notes.
As we discuss in the episode, we've experienced similar dynamics at Understory. During the initial tariff announcements when Trump came into office, we watched our pipeline shift from extremely robust to noticeably tighter almost overnight. The macro effects hit quickly, though thankfully the contraction was short-lived. SaaS marketing leaders should recognize that agency results correlate heavily with broader tech funding patterns. When VC funding cycles contract, marketing budgets get cut regardless of campaign performance.
Eli's trajectory from agency operator to SaaS builder reflects a pattern common among agencies deeply embedded in their clients' tech stacks. His customer feedback tool emerged from a gap he couldn't fill despite extensive searching: a way to gate deliverables with surveys so clients would actually complete them instead of ignoring Typeform links in Slack.
As we discuss in the episode, this evolution from services to software feels inevitable when you're working with dozens of SaaS products daily. You learn where the gaps are and how to plug them. At Understory, Ali and Alex discuss this possibility constantly. The deep familiarity with tools like Clay, Fibbler, and HubSpot that comes from running coordinated campaigns reveals integration opportunities and workflow friction that pure software companies miss.
When MatterMade faced market-driven contraction, Eli launched No Boring Design based on a hypothesis about design talent layoffs. "I had a theory that probably most designers were getting fired too. And then my theory was, okay, if that's the case, what's gonna happen is the CEO in three months time is going to go to the marketing team and be like, hey, why aren't we getting new creative?"
The design agency became profitable within two months and eventually grew larger than the original paid media business. At Understory, we've seen similar dynamics where coordinated allbound execution across paid media, outbound, and creative provides natural hedging against channel-specific budget cuts. When one channel faces pressure, the integrated approach allows reallocation without starting from scratch with new vendors.
Eli's approach centers on strategic hiring rather than developing every capability personally. "I know that my skill so far has been that I'm good at hiring people who are smarter than me, who have more credentials than me. So I'll be a marketer, but I'm gonna go hire people who are actually much better at that than I am," he explains.
This model allowed rapid scaling in unfamiliar domains like B2B marketing and design. SaaS growth leaders can apply this framework by identifying capability gaps and bringing in specialized talent rather than attempting to develop every skill internally. The key distinction is between managing specialists as a coordinator versus partnering with an integrated team that handles coordination internally.
Having experienced both funding models, Eli strongly advocates for bootstrap approaches in current market conditions. "If you've already done that, just bootstrap the thing. Use the money from the customers, grow slowly at first. And then you're just gonna have so much more leverage," he recommends.
As we discuss in the episode, Understory is entirely bootstrapped and we've seen firsthand how this changes decision-making. Without overlords breathing down your neck demanding enterprise pivots, sales team hires, or arbitrary growth targets, you can optimize for sustainable profitability. Even half a million dollars a year in profit goes a long way as income, and you don't need a massive business to reach that threshold. Bootstrap funding eliminates external pressure for growth-at-all-costs strategies and allows more strategic decision-making around both profitability and lifestyle goals.
No Boring Design started at $1,000 monthly for unlimited design work, which Eli acknowledges was "wholly not sustainable." The current $6,500 baseline pricing reflects understanding of actual value delivery requirements. "How much value do we need to deliver and how can we service that value such that $6,500 makes a lot of sense for the right type of buyer?" demonstrates pricing as a product positioning tool.
As we discuss in the episode, we experienced the same learning curve at Understory. When we first started, Ali had a client paying $750 a month for paid media work, and that client stayed with us for the first year in business. Looking back, that pricing was completely unsustainable for the value delivered. The sustainable price point isn't the lowest competitive rate; it's the rate that enables consistent delivery quality while building a business that can weather market cycles across paid media and GTM engineering services.
After realizing traditional Silicon Valley success metrics conflicted with family priorities, Eli developed what he calls "tricycle life" thinking. "It's the middle of the work week, it's a Wednesday at 11 in the morning, and I'm chasing my kid down the street on the tricycle and there's a tree lined street and everything's beautiful. And I don't have to be anywhere," he describes.
This vision became the operational foundation for designing agencies around maximum profitability per hour worked rather than total revenue or team size metrics. For SaaS growth leaders drowning in specialist coordination overhead, this principle applies to evaluating whether current vendor relationships enable strategic focus or consume strategic time.
The transition from planning $40-80 million exits to cutting 87% of staff created significant personal challenges. "I was super depressed and just like my sense of identity had gotten tied up in the success that I was having and I had to painfully and slowly untangle that," Eli shares. Building No Boring Design provided "almost therapy and a good diversification when the times were tough for MatterMade."
SaaS growth leaders should prepare for cyclical downturns by maintaining psychological separation between personal identity and business performance metrics. Building operational systems that reduce coordination stress and vendor management overhead creates resilience for both business continuity and personal sustainability.
Want more insights on building profitable, sustainable growth operations? Listen to the full episode on YouTube and subscribe to Understory's podcast for more conversations with founders and growth leaders.
Ready to eliminate the specialist coordination overhead consuming your strategic growth time? Book a call with Understory to explore how coordinated paid media, outbound, and creative execution replaces vendor management with unified growth strategy.
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