Building interesting online tools and services that spark my curiosity and solve problems. 20 years of experience in web development.
Joined January 2024
- Tweets 281
- Following 231
- Followers 33
- Likes 2,108
14 Photos and videos
Matt Wilkins retweeted
May 7
The less MRR I had, the more I "knew" what I was doing.
Now my MRR is higher than my follower count. But ironically, I feel less confident giving advice.
So many nuances. What truly works? What doesn’t? What was luck?
But one thing I do believe:
Being lucky never hurts, but if you are building in a validated market, making money becomes a question of skill, persistence, and time.
Still incredibly hard. But possible.
Don’t give up. Keep going.
May 7
If you're a software engineer and looking for a business idea, I beg you to read THIS:
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Matt Wilkins retweeted
Apr 18
claude —dangerously-skip-permissions
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Matt Wilkins retweeted
Apr 17
Your pricing page is doing more damage than your bugs.
Per-seat, per-token, per-API-call, usage-based with 4 tiers and a "contact us" plan. Your users open the pricing page and their brain goes blank.
Fixed-tier pricing is still winning in 2026. When people instantly know what they get and what they pay, they buy. Simple.
Per-usage pricing sounds smart on a spreadsheet. In reality it gives people anxiety. Nobody wants a meter running in the background.
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Matt Wilkins retweeted
Apr 16
A lot of people describe their perfect day, and then build a career that makes that day impossible.
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Matt Wilkins retweeted
Apr 1
Normalize not needing to come up with an excuse to say no to doing things you don't want to do. "No thanks!" is a perfectly reasonable response.
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Matt Wilkins retweeted
Mar 26
You need a quest. It's tempting to pursue ease, but one thing I've come to learn: The easy life can quickly start to feel like the meaningless life. The least happy people I know are those who lack challenging quests in their lives. There's nothing better than hard-earned progress. The struggle. The pain. The grit. The resilience. And then, the breakthrough. The knowledge that you paid the cost of entry to achieve the growth you went after. Hard, meaningful quests are good for the soul. Learn a new skill. Start a side business. Travel to a new place with no plans. Take on a difficult physical endeavor. Just do something hard. You need a quest.
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Matt Wilkins retweeted
Mar 25
Everyone needs to hear this...
Michael Caine on his defining philosophy for life:
Use the Difficulty
As a young actor, he was rehearsing a play when a chair got stuck in the door and blocked his path. He told the other actor he couldn't get by the chair to enter the scene.
The actor's response:
"Use the difficulty...if it's a comedy, fall over it, if it's a drama, pick it up and smash it."
This idea became a defining mantra for his life.
"There's never anything so bad that you cannot use that difficulty...if you can use it a quarter of one percent to your advantage, you're ahead, you didn't let it get you down."
I can't stop thinking about this...
How can you use the difficulty you're currently facing? How can you embrace the struggle? How can you find flow through the friction?
As with everything in life, control the controllable:
The difficulty is already there. You can't control it. But you can control how you react to it. You can control your response to it. You can control your attitude towards it.
Lesson: Difficulty is inevitable. Use it.
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Matt Wilkins retweeted
Mar 18
I'm going to call this right now. We are going to have a large population with absolutely no critical thinking skills if they blindly trust AI for everything.
We have all already seen it.
They don't validate outputs. They don't really understand anything. They just ask questions, it looks good, and they go with it.
There are going to be huge issues in every company as this continues over the years. The amount of technical debt and knowledge gaps are going to be insane.
So much opportunity if you actually know what you're doing.
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Mar 18
Hell yes! Share this far and wide…
Mar 16
Please please please take a few minutes today and read this
stopsloppypasta.ai/
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Matt Wilkins retweeted
Popular advice: start building now ship fast and you'll get rich.
Real advice: work a regular job in a boring b2b industry to get experience, gain unique domain knowledge and save money. Then start building a b2b app in the same industry as a side project.
Mar 12
I’m 22 and building solo! any advice for me?
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Mar 10
Stellar advice here for founders👇
Mar 10
the best startup founders in 2026 won't be the best coders
they'll be the best Product Managers
here's the full playbook:
1. pick a problem you personally have. you need to understand your user better than anyone else, and the easiest way to do that is to be your own user
2. spin up a landing page with AI fast. make it about the pain and the fix, no fluff. and make signup 2 clicks max, remove every possible friction
3. learn to write specs, describe features and explain edge cases. that's all you really need now
4. let AI build the first version. your job is to direct, not develop
5. use whatever stack you're most comfortable with. just ship. don't overthink the tech decision - that's not your job anymore
6. host on the simplest platform possible - Vercel, Railway, whatever - don't touch servers
7. test thoroughly - especially edge cases. you're a QA now
8. charge from day 0. free users give you nothing but false hope
9. list your product on every directory you can find. it compounds your SEO and builds DR over time
10. start building in public. share the micro wins, the losses, everything. invite people to try it through DMs. I did this for all my products
11. do customer support yourself, always. redirect questions to your socials, never automate this. every support request is a product insight - that's why you do it yourself, always (I still do this for all 5 of my products)
12. automate everything else you do more than twice
13. improve one thing in your product every single day once users start coming in. watch your competitors' G2 and Trustpilot reviews closely for ideas
14. a PM's most important skill is deciding what NOT to build. for every feature request you get, say no to 9 of them - build less, but build it right
15. every week, build one free tool targeting a keyword that benefits you. it compounds over time
16. work your SEO early. build your affiliate setup early. only run paid acquisition after you're sure about PMF
every day your only 2 priorities are:
- get more users
- and keep the ones you have
that's it. everything else is noise
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Matt Wilkins retweeted
Feb 1
Gas Town, Clawdbot, Moltbook, Ralph, CLIs, terminals on your phone, AI operating systems, self-mutating code…
The coolest thing AI has brought us is the feeling of endless possibility, just like the internet once did.
In my career it’s served me to well to lean into the eccentricity and embrace the edges. Enjoy these times, try it all out, ship cool things.
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Matt Wilkins retweeted
Mar 8
The challenge didn’t go anywhere.
Build software that works. Fix all the issues. Polish it. Make it work faster. Make it reliable.
Share it with the world. Get feedback.
Improve it till you don’t need to do marketing and your customers want to share your work or feel they have a competitive advantage when using your tool.
All that is still hard. Even with LLMs. The only thing that is easy now is to produce slop or generate boilerplate code.
I am not a hype seller, but now is the best time to build great and quality software.
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Matt Wilkins retweeted
Mar 9
I don't think AI will be the 10x or 100x multiplier that people say, because I think there are natural checks and balances in place regulating everything.
You can code 10x faster now? Cool, do that for a week straight and you'll fry your brain. You will need to take breaks and regulate yourself.
You can build a product 10x faster now? Cool, but it takes just as long as it always did to get people to care, get customers, etc.
You can tear through the entire backlog in one day? Cool now there's no more work to do and everyone is fired. Maybe lets not tell the boss this is possible.
You can generate any image of anything you want? Cool, but your friends can only take so many custom meme images before they disown you.
You can send 10,000x more AI-enhanced "cold outreach" emails looking for clients? Sure but it takes just as long as always to gather requirements, discuss timelines, etc. None of that is any faster.
Only a very tiny % of giga-chad geniuses will have both the intellect and the agency to employ AI in a way that actually 10xs or 100xs the value that they generate.
The rest of us will be limited by organic or bureaucratic guard rails.
Personally I'm very grateful for the role AI plays in my life. It allows me to code 10x faster with the time I allocate, which frees up other time to do things I enjoy in my personal life. My output is more than before, not 10x, maybe 2x. And my quality of life has improved.
That's well worth $200 a month!
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Matt Wilkins retweeted
Mar 6
Nobody tells you this: There's an inverse relationship between talk and execution. The people who constantly talk about their plans rarely execute them. Learn to work without validation. Stop telling people what you're going to do. Just go do it. Let the results make the noise.
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Matt Wilkins retweeted
Mar 4
Honestly, I'm terrible at staying focused while traveling. Here's how I still manage to ship consistently - my 6-step process:
1) Close Slack, X, and email before touching any code or copy. Notifications are productivity poison.
2) Grab a coffee, open a notebook (not a laptop), and sit somewhere without WiFi for 10 minutes.
3) Write down the 2-3 things that have been living on your to-do list for more than 3 days. Those are always the ones that actually matter.
4) For each one, ask yourself:
- "If I only did this today, would I feel like I moved the business forward?"
- "Does finishing this make everything else easier or irrelevant?"
5) Pick ONE. Not two.
One.
6) Give it a minimum 2-hour uninterrupted block. Not 15 minutes between calls.
A real block. New cities and co-working spaces make this harder - which is exactly why you have to protect it harder.
The grind isn't actually about doing more stuff, it's about not succumbing to procrastination.
That's the whole system.
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Matt Wilkins retweeted
Mar 3
Your entire life will change the day you realize discipline is the highest form of self-respect. It’s choosing what you want most over what you want now. It’s keeping your word. It’s an act of service to your future self.
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> be Anthropic
> lost the $200M Pentagon contract to OpenAI
> climbed to #1 on the App Store anyway
> ChatGPT uninstalls surged by 295%
> shipped “Memory”to pull chatgpt users over.
Memory is now available on the free plan.
We've also made it easier to import saved memories into Claude.
You can export them whenever you want.
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Matt Wilkins retweeted
Mar 2
Your favorite founder uses THIS FORMULA to reduce churn rates and increase revenue:
ALT Reddit
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