✦ The Founder's Story ✦
About Etherical Media
Every company has a founding story. This one begins not with a business plan or a market opportunity — but with a diagnosis, a song and a lyric that changed everything.
Matthew
Founder, Etherical Media
🇬🇧 United Kingdom
In Matthew's Own Words
I have worked across many industries throughout my career — most recently in the welding industry. I am not a tech entrepreneur or a wellness influencer. I am an ordinary person who decided, for deeply personal reasons, to build something meaningful.
In 2006 I was diagnosed with depression and anxiety. It was a difficult period — the kind that reshapes how you see yourself, how you see the world and what you believe is possible for your life. I have lived with both conditions every day since then. I still do today.
But around the time of my diagnosis something else happened. A band called My Chemical Romance released a song called Welcome to the Black Parade. And buried within that song was a lyric that I heard for the first time and have never forgotten:
"Will you defeat them, your demons?"
My Chemical Romance — Welcome to the Black Parade
Those five words became something of a quiet compass for me. Not a cure. Not a solution. Just a question I kept returning to — one that felt honest in a way that most wellness messaging never does. It did not promise me I would be healed. It asked me if I was willing to try. And from that day I knew that whatever I did with my working life, I wanted it to point in the direction of that question. I wanted to find a way not only to help myself — but to help others.
Etherical Media is the result of that desire finally finding its form.
The Vision
Why Etherical Media
I have spent years using digital tools, apps and platforms that promised to help with mental health and wellbeing. Some were genuinely useful. Many were not. And what struck me most was how rarely any of them felt like they had been built by someone who actually understood what it felt like to struggle — not in theory, but in lived experience.
I wanted to build something different. Not a faceless wellness brand making clinical promises it could not keep — but a portfolio of tools created by someone who genuinely understands what it means to carry something heavy through the day. Someone who knows that a two-minute tool that leaves you feeling even slightly more grounded is worth more than an hour-long programme you abandon after day three.
Every Etherical Media property is built with that understanding at its core. Moment Mantra exists because I know what it is like to need something gentle to hold onto at the start of a difficult day. Somnuscape exists because I know what it is like to lie awake at night with a mind that will not quieten. Flipin' Choice exists because I know what it is like to be so paralysed by a decision that you cannot see what you actually want.
These are not products designed for a market segment. They are tools designed for real people in real moments — because I have been that person, and I still am.
The Dual Mission
Help Others. Champion Passions.
From the beginning Etherical Media has had two equally important parts to its mission — and I think it is worth being honest about why.
To Help Others
The wellness properties — Moment Mantra, Somnuscape, K9 Mind Hub, Somnacare — are built directly from my own lived experience of depression and anxiety and my genuine desire to create tools that make people's inner lives a little lighter, clearer and more manageable.
To Champion Passions
Uncool Rule — our celebration of niche and unfashionable hobbies — exists because I believe passionately that the things people love, the things they are enthusiastic about in a world that might consider them uncool, are a vital part of what makes life worth living. Those passions deserve to be celebrated, not apologised for.
Together these two pillars — helping people through difficulty and celebrating what makes them feel alive — capture everything Etherical Media is trying to do. They are two sides of the same coin: a genuine belief that people's inner lives matter, and that the right tools and the right community can make an extraordinary difference to both.
The Name
What Etherical Means
The word etherical — derived from ethereal — describes something intangible but deeply felt. Something that cannot be held but whose presence you are completely certain of. The shift in mood after you have read a mantra that truly landed. The calm that follows a night of genuinely restorative sleep. The clarity that comes when a decision you have been agonising over suddenly becomes obvious.
These experiences are etherical — and they are what every property in this portfolio is trying to create. Not products. Experiences that leave you feeling genuinely different.
What Guides Every Decision
Our Values
These are not corporate values written by a committee. They are the principles that come directly from my own experience as someone who has used, needed and been failed by wellness tools — and who is determined to build ones that actually work.
Lived Experience
I build from real experience, not theoretical understanding. Every tool is created with genuine empathy for the person who might need it.
Honest Purpose
I will not build something just because it will generate traffic. Every property must pass the test: does the world genuinely need this?
Exceptional Quality
People deserve beautiful, thoughtfully crafted tools — not something thrown together. Quality is a form of respect.
Privacy & Trust
The people using wellness tools are often sharing something vulnerable. I take that trust with complete seriousness.
Responsible Growth
I would rather build fewer things well than many things poorly. Every new property is added only when I can maintain the same standard.
Evidence Grounded
Wellness content must be honest about what research actually shows — not make promises that can't be substantiated.
Where We Are Now
The Journey So Far
Building Etherical Media has been one of the most challenging and most rewarding things I have ever done. Starting from scratch — learning web development, SEO, digital publishing, DNS, email systems, brand strategy and everything else it takes to run a modern digital media business — while working a full-time job and managing my own mental health has tested me in every possible way.
But the three live properties — Moment Mantra, Flipin' Choice and Somnuscape — are things I am genuinely proud of. They are beautifully designed, evidence-informed and freely available to anyone who needs them. And with Uncool Rule, K9 Mind Hub and Somnacare in development, the portfolio is only just beginning.
The goal is clear: to build a portfolio of genuinely excellent digital properties that make a real difference to real people — and to prove that you do not need a venture capital firm or a team of fifty to do it. You need a clear purpose, a willingness to learn and a reason that matters enough to keep going when it gets hard.
Mine is a lyric from a song I first heard in 2006. I think about it still.
"Will you defeat them, your demons?"
My Chemical Romance — Welcome to the Black Parade
Every day. One tool, one property, one person helped at a time.
Explore the Portfolio
Discover the tools Matthew has built — each one a small act of the belief that digital experiences can genuinely help people feel better.