Celebrating 5th Anniversary!

I can’t believe it’s been five years since I created this website and posted the first review of Piporé Con Palo! Such a milestone makes me reflect a lot on this half a decade, and think about what the future holds for all of us. It has also been a pretty busy 12 months for me personally, which required my full attention and focus, that’s why I did not publish that much content lately compared to previous years. So this anniversary recap will be a little different and will be mostly me contemplating what Matexperience turned into in these 5 years and what direction I want to take it.

Thinking about our mission and goals

Matexperience started as an outlet for my passion about mate, yerba mate and everything related. The more I was drinking mate, the more I understood for myself how interesting and extraordinary mate really is. I wanted to create something that would allow me to share my experiences with mate so that it can also benefit and inspire other materos, and after a while an idea for Matexperience was born. What started as a website with some yerba mate reviews, eventually evolved into something more than just reviews, covering other topics, increasing exposure and expanding on other platforms.

With so many social media influencers, blogs, YouTube channels and online communities, all exploring the topic of mate and yerba mate in their own way, discovering and sharing their thoughts on particular yerba mate, preparation methods, tips and tricks, different gear and tools, etc. the question arose about the purpose of Matexperience, which led me to think about our mission and goals. After some significant time pondering about how Matexperience evolved over the last years, things started to become more clear about what we are and how we should move forward.

You will soon start seeing new small changes here and there that are going to reflect the main mission of Matexperience — discover the magic of mate, explore its nuances and intricacies and provide new and experienced materos alike with a curated, well-organized and educational, inspirational and entertaining platform-independent resource. First change is already live — content organization is simplified and is grouped by two main categories - Reviews and Insights. If you missed it, you can read a more detailed blog post about it. To quickly recap it — Reviews section is self-explanatory and is left untouched, and Insights now hold all the ideas, notes, stories shared by me or other people, grouped by main topics of interest - Yerba Mate, Accessories, Preparation, Health and Culture. As a part of upcoming changes I will also rethink the way that you can get featured on Matexperience, but for now - write us if you have something to share or promote.

I want to emphasize and embrace the fact that I strive to make Matexperience a curated, well-organized and platform-independent resource. On one hand we have communities on Reddit, Discord, Telegram and Facebook that have very raw, conversational and unorganized information and require you to be a part of that platform and that community; on the other hand we have blogs, websites, YouTube channels and social media influencers that present a very narrow, opinionated and one-sided information from their point of view. Think of Matexperience as a middle ground — we want to be an authoritative resource on mate, but not because I claim know it all (which is so, so far from reality), but because we gather and take into account multiple points of view, be it from my own experiences and thoughts, other authors’ opinions, readers’ experiences who left their comments, or inspired by a post from member of a community on Reddit or social media influencer or YouTuber — all highly curated in one well-organized place, to make it as useful and easy to discover and explore as possible, both for new materos and experienced aficionados.

We don’t want to be tied to one format or one platform and be at the mercy of those third-party platform with their shady privacy practices and their ever-changing rules and closed ecosystems, but at the same time we want to establish ourselves in all those platforms and communities to reach and communicate with as much people as possible, and make sure that we meet you exactly where it is more convenient for you. At Matexperience we value free and openly available information that is organized in a way that no other platform allows you to; information that is shared by people for people, not to appease algorithms and search engines.

What to expect from now on

As you can see, we’re not planning to change much, especially content-wise, but more of like aligning with our mission and goals to make your mate experience as enjoyable and hassle-free as possible. I’m still committed to do as many reviews for each yerba mate as possible and there are many of new yerbas that I tried in the past months that are waiting to be reviewed and published. There are also much more insights to come, especially on the fundamental topics, such as how to start drinking mate, various ways of preparing yerba mate, answering most common questions about mate and guiding new mate drinkers through the vast world of unique and confusing accessories and traditions around it. The main goal for me right now is to commit and stick to a schedule so that not only I have a time to contemplate and come up with content of the best quality, but also that you’re consistently having something new each week to learn from or get inspired by.

I am also continuing with making sure that technical side of things is well aligned with our goals. Having a bespoke and independent platform is allowing me to create and organize content with the most freedom, but it comes with a price of having to do a lot of heavy lifting myself in order to stay true to our values and give you, our readers, the most open, intuitive and helpful resource to learn, share and discuss all things yerba mate. One of such things has been a new commenting system to replace a currently used Disqus. It’s been in works for quite a while, and building something like that from scratch proved to be a pretty fun albeit long challenge, but I am happy to see it coming together. Release is coming in the next few months, so stay tuned for the updates!

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It’s been quite five years! Before starting Matexperience, I never imagined how eye-opening and helpful it would be to my personal experience with mate, and how much it would improve my enjoyment from this hobby, allow me to dive into it deeper than ever and truly make it a lifestyle.
I hope that it also brings you joy and helps you with exploring the wonderful world of mate. I am very much looking forward to next five years of Matexperience and what they will bring us!

As always, let me know in the comments, email or social media if there is something specific that you want to see and read in the next few months. Until next time, salud!