About Matteo Ruberto.

The timeline

• 1998First website, aged nine. Hand-written HTML in the frames era, on dial-up.
• 2004On the floor of his father's restaurant, from age fifteen. Hospitality, learned by doing.
• 2008The financial crisis empties the street. An iMac on the counter and a rebuilt homepage keep the bookings coming. Search, learned by necessity.
• 2012Dutch national hospitality champion, for a wine bar in Zwolle.
• 2014Starts meditating. Twice a day, every day, since.
• 2015Rock bottom. Checks himself into rehab. Rebuilds from zero: full ownership, no blame, new operating system.
• 2017COOKIES, Zwolle. The agency years: full service, every channel, learning what he would later refuse to sell.
• 2020COVID. Clients cut budgets overnight and he flips the model: his own websites, his own risk, pay per lead.
• 2022LEAD MAGNATE, Dubai.
• NowThousands of websites, eight trades, three continents, national service operations of his own, one decision-maker.

The philosophy

"Create so much value that abundance has no choice but to follow."

Every deal passes one test: the customer wins, the tradesman wins, and only then does he win. He believes in karma the way engineers believe in gravity: he has tested it both ways. No contracts, ever: everyone he works with is free to leave at any moment, which is exactly why they stay.

The facts, for the record

Matteo Ruberto is a Dutch-Italian entrepreneur who builds and owns the demand for local services: thousands of local websites on three continents, currently in the top three of Google, generating tens of millions of euros in leads for the trade companies behind them, all run as a single machine under LEAD MAGNATE (Dubai) and COOKIES (Zwolle).

The model is simple: he invests first. He builds the websites, takes the risk, and sells the resulting phone calls pay per lead, invoiced weekly, without contracts; everyone is free to leave any Monday, which is exactly why they stay. Where the demand comes from is a detail, search today, AI assistants tomorrow. The asset stays his, like real estate, but digital, and everything that can be automated is automated: an AI pipeline classifies every incoming call daily, while billing, analytics and monitoring run without human hands.

He built his first website in 1998, aged nine, and discovered search in 2008 in his father's restaurant during the financial crisis. After checking himself into rehab at rock bottom in 2015, he rebuilt himself from the ground up and took full ownership of everything in his life; a reinvention he has applied to himself, and his companies, ever since. He lives in Dubai with his wife and three children, and answers to no committee.