Diogo Matos

Diogo Matos (born 2 January 1998) is a Portuguese entrepreneur, growth marketer and startup adviser. He is the founder and chief executive of Ecommerce Leads, a business-to-business sales-intelligence platform that identifies online stores exhibiting problems or changes associated with purchasing intent. He has also founded the scheduling product Batchcal and previously created Talentun, Landing Audit, Growth Tips and the Damn Good Marketer newsletter.

Matos began his career in digital marketing and growth strategy, working at the Portuguese agency Happyfact before moving into independent consulting, startup mentorship and software development. His work has largely focused on customer acquisition, conversion optimization, market validation and data-driven sales systems. At Ecommerce Leads, he developed a platform that monitors hundreds of thousands of online stores and combines advertising, search, traffic, review, application and social-media data to detect potential commercial opportunities.

Early life and education

Diogo Matos was born in Porto, Portugal, and is Portuguese. His early professional development combined business education, university leadership, event organization, marketing training and introductory web development.

Matos studied Business Administration and Management at the University of Minho. During his degree, he became active in ADEGE, an organization associated with the university’s economics and management community. He began as a collaborator in its external-relations department in October 2016, became the department’s coordinator in May 2017 and served as president of the board from June 2018 to June 2019. He also collaborated with the University of Minho students’ association and served as a Spark Agency ambassador.

His university projects included the Jornadas de Economia e Gestão, speed-interview activities and the UMinho Trading Cup. The first edition of the trading competition, held between February and April 2018, was open to students from all academic fields. It ran for four weeks and attracted more than 130 participants. Matos subsequently helped organize a second edition, held during the 2018–2019 academic year, with approximately 70 participants.

Matos also completed Erasmus+ studies in Business Administration and Management at the University of Passau in Germany. In March 2019, he published an article titled “Three Important Lessons I Took from My Life-Changing Exchange,” reflecting on the experience.

Alongside his formal business education, Matos pursued practical training in digital technology. In 2017–2018, he completed the Google Front-End Web Development Challenge through Udacity after receiving a scholarship from Udacity and Google. The program covered HTML5, CSS3, jQuery and JavaScript. His additional training included digital marketing, search-engine optimization, growth hacking, Facebook advertising, writing, pitching, leadership and meeting management.

Early career in marketing

Matos’s first recorded paid employment was a summer position as a cashier at an E.Leclerc Express supermarket in Viana do Castelo in July and August 2017.

In the summer of 2018, he joined PICUS for an international-sales assignment. The original objective was to attract more international customers. When that effort did not produce the intended result, the engagement shifted toward digital marketing. Matos remained for a second month and planned and executed a digital strategy across the company’s channels, reporting substantial growth in its online following.

In June 2019, Matos joined Happyfact, a digital marketing and growth-hacking agency, as a digital strategist and data analyst. His responsibilities included developing and executing growth strategies, managing projects, planning and publishing social-media content, and operating Facebook and Google advertising campaigns. He worked with e-commerce businesses and technology startups and later became the agency’s Head of Growth.

Matos associated his Happyfact work with projects that produced more than 100% year-over-year sales growth for e-commerce clients, as well as product launches and digital strategies for startups. He remained at the agency until October 2022. The experience later influenced Ecommerce Leads, which he initially developed in response to the difficulty agencies face when trying to identify prospective clients at the right moment.

Early entrepreneurial projects

Talentun

In May 2020, Matos founded Talentun, a career-development initiative aimed at university students. The project sought to help students make decisions about their professional lives through access to mentors and reflective resources. It expressed a long-term ambition of contributing to one million careers by 2030. Matos operated Talentun until September 2021.

Landing Audit

Matos launched Landing Audit in September 2021. The service supplied early-stage founders with on-demand video audits intended to improve landing-page conversion rates. Its work focused on evaluating messaging, structure and other elements that could prevent visitors from understanding or adopting a product. The project continued until May 2022.

MATOSDFM and Growth Tips

In November 2021, Matos established an independent advisory practice under the MATOSDFM name. Drawing on his agency experience, his own products and his analysis of other companies, he began helping startups with traction, growth strategy, positioning and product development.

He founded Growth Tips in April 2022 as a marketing-inspiration and educational resource. The project operated until June 2023. During the same period, Matos broadened his work as a mentor and adviser. He joined Build Up Labs as a startup mentor in July 2022, advising companies on go-to-market strategy, acquisition, scaling and product improvement. Between January and June 2023, he served as a growth and marketing adviser to Web3 startups through Pace Ventures.

Writing

Matos began publishing Damn Good Marketer in July 2023. The newsletter was built around concise marketing essays intended to offer practical advice in a format that could be read in approximately three minutes. He maintained a weekly publishing schedule during its active period and concluded the project in September 2024.

His earlier writing included “How to Develop a Social Media Action Plan,” published in July 2018, and his 2019 article about his exchange experience. His writing has generally concentrated on growth strategy, product positioning, customer acquisition, conversion optimization, search-engine visibility and the operation of independently built software companies.

Batchcal

Matos founded Batchcal in December 2023. The software was designed to reduce the disruption caused by meetings distributed throughout the working week. Rather than presenting every unoccupied calendar period as available, Batchcal allows users to group meetings into preferred blocks and preserve larger periods for focused work.

The product represented a shift toward independently developed software. Matos continued operating Batchcal while working on other projects, including Ecommerce Leads. His public development updates also referred to experiments such as Webflow Leads and SpeedyAudios, although Ecommerce Leads became his primary business.

Ecommerce Leads

Origins and product model

Matos founded Ecommerce Leads in September 2024 and became its chief executive. The idea emerged from his experience working at an agency for more than three years and independently serving clients for another three years. In both settings, he encountered the problem of finding companies that not only matched an agency’s target market but were also experiencing a problem that made them likely to purchase outside help.

Conventional lead databases generally organize companies according to relatively static attributes such as location, estimated revenue, technology or business category. Ecommerce Leads instead focuses on changes and problems. A customer describes the circumstances faced by its strongest clients immediately before those clients bought a service. The platform translates that description into detection criteria and monitors online stores for matching conditions.

The system combines information about search performance, traffic, paid advertising, reviews, social-media activity, applications, e-commerce platforms and other operating signals. Examples include stores that have lost a large share of their search-engine positions, stopped spending on Google advertising, received growing numbers of complaints about deliveries, launched a subscription offering, changed platforms or experienced divergent paid and organic growth.

When a store begins matching a defined condition, Ecommerce Leads can send an alert through email, Slack or a customer’s sales system. The alert is intended to explain what changed, why the change may matter and which decision-maker is associated with the problem. This approach positions the product as a continuing detector rather than a one-time list of companies.

Growth and development

Matos publicly documented Ecommerce Leads as it developed. During an early growth period, he reported that monthly recurring revenue rose from $45 to $1,700 in two months. He also wrote about periods when revenue stabilized and he lacked a clear direction for the next stage of the company. That experience led him to sharpen the product’s positioning around buying signals and to make more of its underlying data available to customers.

Product development included improved identification of decision-makers, monitoring of Google Shopping campaigns and tracking changes in the number of products carried by stores. The latter could signal new inventory requiring advertising, search optimization or product-feed work. Matos also worked on a dashboard intended to give customers broader access to historical signals instead of relying exclusively on weekly curated reports.

By 2026, Ecommerce Leads stated that it tracked more than 250 million data points across approximately 500,000 stores. It maintained more than 50 categories of information per store and as much as 24 months of historical data. The platform stated that it served more than 100 customers.

Published customer outcomes included a campaign that achieved a 13% total reply rate and a 4% positive-reply rate through a combination of cold email and Instagram outreach. Another case study attributed $18,000 in new sales pipeline to the product in less than three months. A further customer reported converting approximately 10% of supplied leads into meetings. These results became part of Matos’s effort to position the company around qualified opportunities rather than the volume of contacts delivered.

Strategy

Matos has described data quality as central to Ecommerce Leads. In addition to increasing the number of signals tracked, he emphasized joining those signals to appropriate decision-makers and retaining enough historical information to distinguish temporary changes from meaningful trends.

He has also discussed the limitations of treating the company as a conventional lead-generation service. The system identifies companies facing relevant conditions, but customers remain responsible for developing an appropriate message, contacting the prospect and converting the resulting opportunity. This distinction informed efforts to align customer expectations, improve retention and refine the algorithms according to successful conversions.

Startup mentorship and professional approach

In September 2024, alongside the launch of Ecommerce Leads, Matos began mentoring founders through Startup Lisboa. His stated areas of work include growth, minimum viable products and validation. He has continued his mentoring relationship with Build Up Labs and his independent MATOSDFM advisory practice.

Matos’s career has combined agency marketing, startup advising, writing and the repeated creation of narrowly focused products. Talentun addressed student career decisions; Landing Audit addressed website conversion; Growth Tips and Damn Good Marketer distributed marketing knowledge; Batchcal addressed fragmented schedules; and Ecommerce Leads addressed the timing and relevance problems involved in business-to-business prospecting.

Across these projects, his approach has emphasized identifying a specific operational problem, testing it with users, measuring practical outcomes and iterating on positioning and product design. Ecommerce Leads represents the most extensive application of this approach, combining his background in agency growth with independently developed software and large-scale e-commerce data.