Alumni Spotlight: Matthew Feola

For this month’s Alumni Spotlight, The News checked in on alumnus Matthew Feola ‘25. Feeling unsatisfied with his experience at the University of North Carolina, he decided to search for a way to find economic and entrepreneurial fulfillment at this stage of his life and dropped out of school. That is when he discovered user-generated content (UGC). A form of content creation, with UGC, a corporation pays a creator to promote their product. This sort of advertising has existed since the dawn of time, but, because of short-form-based algorithms on Instagram and TikTok, the scene has recently grown substantially more popular.

Matthew started this endeavor during winter break of the 2025-2026 school year. As of right now, he has allegedly made $100,000. He originally was introduced to it through Oliver Sung ‘25, who caught Matthew’s interest when he showed him a check for $2,000 from Turbo AI. With a mentor’s advice, he started up his career, and then scaled it to a sizable amount per month. 

Moreover, Matthew and Oliver eventually decided to become mentors themselves. Matthew’s reasoning behind it was simple: “I would say I started mentoring other people for three reasons…I had a mentor when I got started so I really wanted to start my own mentorship because I knew that I could do a lot better job than he [did] starting out. And I would say the second reason was as I was making good money with UGC, but honestly, I didn't really feel like I was having an impact. Number three is I wanted to learn real business skills…Doing UGC, I learned some skills, but I wasn't really learning how to actually build a business, manage people, and skills I could bring to other parts of my career in my future,” Matthew commented. 

The UGC career is very simple to infiltrate, but difficult to master. The only requirements, per Matthew, are a willingness to talk to a camera, time, effort, and a desire to learn. It is usually twelve to fourteen hours of work per day, but it could be more or less depending upon how many corporations one is making videos for and how many people are hired to help streamline the process. After a certain point, videos can be repurposed to be used on multiple accounts. Although Matthew used to primarily just post videos for corporations, he has recently been focused on helping his mentees streamline creating their own videos so that they might become successful. Along these lines, Matthew says that he has been “straying away from posting as much [sponsored content], but [I] still keep one to two brands to get insight on the bottlenecks and problems my students struggle with.”

Moreover, his time at Gilman has heavily contributed to his success in this modern, unusual field of work. “The discipline Gilman taught me through the rigorous coursework has benefited me greatly. The lacrosse team also taught me how to manage people and keep my clients/team members motivated. I also ran doughnations where I sold donuts everyday, and that helped me with discipline and understanding how to run a business,” he reflected.