Hello. My name is Matt. I’m a Husband, dad, full-time truck driver, and what I have always jokingly called myself… an “imaginary entrepreneur.”
I have been driving a semi-truck for more than twenty years, and for about the last fifteen years, I have also been experimenting with blogging, internet businesses, digital products, and whatever other ideas happen to wander into my head. Some things work. Some things fail. Most of it is just one long experiment.
Rambling Fever is where all of that ends up.
The tagline of this blog is “a blog about nothing.” That is a small tribute to Seinfeld, which was famously described as a show about nothing. But if you ever watched the show, you know it was never really about nothing. It was always about something. Just not one specific thing.
That is the idea behind this blog.
Rambling Fever works a little like an old-fashioned newspaper, just in digital form. Different topics live in different sections depending on what I happen to be writing about at the time. Some articles are about travel. Others are about money, business experiments, products I like, family life, or the occasional opinion about something happening in the world.
Writing has always been the one type of content I truly enjoy creating, so this blog gives me the freedom to do exactly that. Ramble.
If you enjoy reading about travel, money, online business experiments, everyday life, and the occasional random thought from a truck driver who probably spends too much time thinking about things, you will probably enjoy Rambling Fever.
And if not, there are plenty of other corners of the internet.
Why the Name Rambling Fever?
Rambling Fever is the name of this blog, but the story behind it actually goes back quite a few years.
Believe it or not, ramblingfever.com was the very first domain name I ever purchased. That was sometime around 2011 when I first started experimenting with the idea of building things on the internet.
Since then, I have bought a ridiculous number of domain names. I could not even guess the exact number, but it might be pushing a hundred by now. Some turned into real projects. Some turned into half-finished experiments. And some were probably terrible ideas that sounded brilliant for about twenty minutes.
But after all those years of wandering around the internet trying different things, I somehow ended up right back where I started… writing on ramblingfever.com.
Over the years, the blog has gone through several different phases. I published on it for a while, then stopped. Later, I came back to it again, wrote some more, and then let it sit quiet for another stretch of time. Eventually, I decided to rebuild it and turn it into what it is today.
The name itself came from two different ideas that seemed to fit together perfectly.
First, I have always been a big fan of Merle Haggard. One of his songs is called Ramblin’ Fever, and that title always stuck with me. The idea of having a bit of a restless spirit and wanting to keep moving just resonated with me.
Second, the word rambling also describes something else pretty well. Talking or writing at length about whatever happens to be on your mind.
Put those two ideas together, and Rambling Fever felt like the perfect name for a blog.
The tagline of this blog is “a blog about nothing.” It is a small tribute to one of my favorite sitcoms of all time, Seinfeld.
But anyone who watched the show knows it was never really about nothing. It was about everyday life. Observations. Small situations that everyone can relate to. Random conversations that somehow end up connecting together.
That is the spirit I try to capture here.
Rambling Fever works a little like an old-fashioned newspaper, just in digital form. Different topics live in different sections depending on what I happen to be writing about. Some articles are about travel. Others are about money, business experiments, products I like, or everyday life.
In other words, this blog really is about nothing in particular. But at the same time, it is always about something.
Meet Matt
I was born and raised in Michigan, specifically in Grand Rapids in West Michigan, and I have lived here almost my entire life.
The only time I really left was for a couple of years when I attended college at Lake Superior State University in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. I did not finish college. I am a proud college dropout.
Grand Rapids is a great place to live. I have always lived in the northern suburbs, but the overall feel of the city is what I like to think of as a small big city. There is plenty going on, but it still feels manageable and familiar.
Becoming a truck driver was never part of some carefully planned career path. It mostly happened because I discovered that I genuinely enjoyed being on the road.
While I was attending college in Sault Ste. Marie, the five-hour drive between there and Grand Rapids became something I actually looked forward to. Around that same time, my college girlfriend’s dad and stepdad were both truck drivers. That helped break the stereotype I had in my head about what truck drivers were like. They were just regular guys who happened to drive trucks for a living.
After dropping out of college, I worked on a shipping dock at a factory and made a point to talk with truck drivers whenever I had the chance. Eventually, I enrolled in a five-week truck driver training program at Lansing Community College to earn my CDL.
Ironically, that program gave me 14 college credits, which left me only a few credits short of earning an associate degree. I did not care about the degree, though. I just wanted to drive a truck.
Not long after that, I started what has now been more than two decades of working as a professional truck driver.
The internet entrepreneur side of my life started much later, and it began in a very simple way.
I had bought a new computer and had heard that people were somehow making money online. One day I literally typed the phrase “how to make money online” into Google. That simple search ended up sending me down a rabbit hole that changed the direction of my spare time for the next fifteen years.
I experimented with all kinds of ideas over the years. I tried writing articles for websites that paid tiny amounts of money based on page views. That eventually led me to blogging. Blogging led me to WordPress. WordPress opened up a world of possibilities that I had never imagined.
I built content websites, experimented with affiliate marketing, worked with advertising models, and even launched my own physical product on Amazon through the Amazon FBA program.
My most successful venture was a software business that I co founded with a partner. We built a WordPress plugin called AmaLinks Pro that helped website owners insert Amazon affiliate links into their WordPress sites more easily. We grew the business to several thousand dollars in monthly recurring revenue before eventually selling it for a low six-figure exit.
Even after trying many different types of online projects, I always seemed to come back to one thing. Writing.
Blogging today is not quite what it was ten or fifteen years ago, but I still enjoy it just as much. Writing has always been the form of content that feels most natural to me.
Outside of work and the internet, most of my time revolves around family life. If I am not doing dishes or laundry around the house, I am usually driving kids to practices or attending one of their sporting events.
Two of my kids play travel sports, which means we spend a lot of time on the road following Elena’s volleyball tournaments and Eli’s lacrosse events around the country.
My son Ethan and I also share a pretty serious disc golf hobby. We spend as much time as we can practicing on courses around Michigan so we can compete in PDGA sanctioned disc golf tournaments.
More recently, I have developed another unusual hobby. On Ethan’s eighteenth birthday, I took him to Little River Casino in Manistee, Michigan. That is one of the casinos in the state where you can play at age eighteen. That trip sparked a new curiosity for me.
Since then, I have been studying how advantage players try to gain an edge on casinos. I have been learning how to count cards in blackjack and even studying how certain slot machines can occasionally enter advantageous states.
In other words, I am slowly working my way into the strange and fascinating world of casino advantage play.
So if you ever see a truck driver quietly counting cards in the corner of a casino somewhere, it might just be me.
My Entrepreneurial Experiments on the Internet
My journey into internet business started sometime around 2010.
I remember the moment pretty clearly because my second son, Eli, had just been born. While sitting around the hospital for hours, I found myself reading article after article on my phone about people making money online. Eventually, I did the most obvious thing someone could do.
I Googled the phrase “how to make money online.”
That search sent me down a rabbit hole that I have been exploring ever since.
At first, I tried writing articles for websites that paid based on page views. Those paid pennies for thousands of views, but they introduced me to the idea that publishing content on the internet could actually turn into money.
That led me to blogging.
Blogging led me to WordPress.
And once I discovered WordPress, a whole world of possibilities opened up.
Over the years, I experimented with all kinds of different online business ideas. I built niche websites. I sold keyword research packages. I experimented with SEO strategies that worked for a while and then stopped working. I tried Amazon FBA and even imported my own physical product from China to sell through Amazon’s warehouses.
Like most people who spend enough time in the internet marketing world, I also accumulated a ridiculous number of domain names along the way.
Most of these ideas followed a pretty familiar pattern. They sounded like a great opportunity when I first discovered them. I would spend months building something. And eventually, I would either lose interest or realize the idea was not quite as good as I originally thought.
In other words, most of my internet business ideas have failed.
But every once in a while, something actually works.
The most successful project I have been involved in was a software business called AmaLinks Pro. A business partner and I created a WordPress plugin that helped website owners insert Amazon affiliate links into their content more easily.
My partner handled the coding and development. I handled the marketing, website, tutorials, and everything on the business side.
We launched the plugin in 2018.
The first launch produced almost nothing. Just a handful of sales.
But we kept working on it, improving the product, and building an audience around it. Over time, the business grew into several thousand dollars per month in recurring revenue before we eventually sold it in the summer of 2022 for a low six-figure exit.
One of the biggest lessons I learned from that experience is that most online businesses take far longer than people expect.
Ideas fail all the time, but you learn something every time you try something new. The projects that succeed usually come from sticking with something long enough to give it a real chance.
In the case of AmaLinks Pro, having a business partner helped with that. We held each other accountable and kept pushing forward even when things moved more slowly than we hoped.
Over the last fifteen years, I have probably tried dozens of different online business ideas. Most of them never went anywhere.
But I keep experimenting anyway.
More recently, I even taught myself how to “vibe code” and built a working web app called Vibe Tips. I had absolutely zero coding experience when I started. I mostly built it just to prove to myself that I could figure it out.
Whether any of these experiments turn into something big someday is still an open question.
For now, I am still doing what I have always done.
Trying ideas. Learning from the failures. And occasionally stumbling into something that works.
Life Outside the Internet
For as much time as I have spent experimenting with online business ideas, most of my life still revolves around pretty normal everyday things.
I am a husband and a dad first.
A lot of my time outside of work is spent doing the same things most families do. There are always dishes to wash, laundry to fold, errands to run, and kids to drive somewhere.
Two of my younger kids play travel sports, which means a good portion of our calendar revolves around tournaments and practices. My daughter Elena plays travel volleyball, and my son Eli plays travel lacrosse. Those sports have taken us on quite a few trips around the country over the past few years.
In addition to the sports travel, our family also enjoys taking regular trips whenever we get the chance. We usually try to head south for spring break most years, and we like to take at least one longer family vacation during the summer. We have also taken plenty of smaller road trips around Michigan and the surrounding states.
Spending time on the road has always felt natural to me, which probably makes sense considering my day job.
Another hobby that takes up a fair amount of my free time is disc golf. My oldest son, Ethan, and I are both pretty serious about it. We play casual rounds, participate in local leagues, and compete in PDGA-sanctioned tournaments whenever we can. A lot of our weekends involve visiting different disc golf courses around Michigan and trying to improve our games.
And then there are the occasional side curiosities that pop up along the way.
On Ethan’s eighteenth birthday, I took him to Little River Casino in Manistee, Michigan. It is one of the casinos in the state where you can legally gamble at age eighteen. That trip ended up sparking a new interest for me.
Since then, I have spent some time learning about the world of casino advantage play. Things like counting cards in blackjack and understanding how certain games can occasionally give players a small edge over the house.
It is more of a curiosity and hobby than anything else, but I have enjoyed learning about it.
For the most part, though, life outside the internet is fairly simple. Family, sports, travel, hobbies, and the occasional new interest that catches my attention.
And of course, plenty of time spent thinking about the next idea I might try building on the internet.
The “Millionaire Truck Driver” Thing
One topic that shows up on this blog from time to time is money.
More specifically, the slightly strange idea that I am technically a millionaire… even though my life probably looks pretty normal from the outside.
When most people hear the word millionaire, they picture luxury cars, beach houses, and champagne on a yacht somewhere. The reality is much less exciting.
In my case, it looks like a guy who still drives to work every day, mows his own lawn, fixes things around the house, and occasionally argues with his wife about how long someone was in the shower.
The truth is that becoming a millionaire for me had nothing to do with startups, crypto, or hitting some lucky investment at the perfect time.
I worked.
I saved.
And I invested.
For most of my adult life, I have simply contributed to retirement accounts like my 401K and IRAs, invested in boring index funds, and tried to avoid doing anything too stupid with money.
There were no clever tricks involved. Just consistency and time.
Somewhere along the way, after a few decades of doing that and making one solid real estate decision, the math eventually crossed the million-dollar mark.
Even then, it did not feel very dramatic.
Most of that wealth lives inside retirement accounts and home equity, which means it is not exactly money you can casually spend. In fact, there were moments when my wife and I joked about being “broke millionaires” because we still felt like we were juggling bills like everyone else.
But the longer I stick with the process, the more I realize the real value is not the number itself.
The real benefit is options.
Financial stability. The ability to handle surprises without panic. The freedom to think about the future without constantly worrying about money.
In other words, the goal was never to look rich.
The goal was simply to build a life with a little breathing room.
If you spend enough time on this blog, you will occasionally see me write about investing, retirement accounts, and the slow process of building wealth over time.
But don’t expect flashy financial advice.
Most of my philosophy can be summed up in three words.
Start early.
Stay consistent.
And try not to mess it up.
Why I Still Love Blogging
After all the different experiments I have tried on the internet over the past fifteen years, one thing has remained constant.
I always come back to writing.
I have tried making videos. I have experimented with audio. I have watched plenty of other creators build huge audiences doing those things. But for whatever reason, those formats just never clicked for me.
Writing does.
When you write, you get the luxury of thinking before speaking. You can ramble a little. You can hit the backspace key. You can rewrite a sentence five times until it finally says what you meant to say in the first place.
That suits me perfectly.
It also explains why Rambling Fever eventually became what it is today.
Instead of trying to force myself into one niche or build a website around a single topic, I decided to lean into the freedom of writing about whatever happens to be on my mind at the moment.
Travel.
Money.
Online business experiments.
Products I like.
Family life.
The occasional opinion about something happening in the world.
Or sometimes just a random thought that popped into my head while driving a truck down the highway somewhere in Michigan.
The tagline of this blog is “a blog about nothing,” which is a small tribute to Seinfeld. But just like the show, it is never really about nothing.
It is about everyday life. Observations. Stories. Experiments. The little things that happen along the way that are interesting enough to write down.
And if a few people happen to read those stories and enjoy them, that is a pretty good bonus.
At the end of the day, Rambling Fever is simply my corner of the internet. A place where a truck driver who has spent far too many hours thinking about things can sit down and ramble about them.
Sometimes the rambling turns into useful ideas.
Sometimes it turns into business experiments.
And sometimes it just turns into another story.
Either way, the Rambling Fever lives on.