2024: A year of building foundations

When the new year rolls around, I find myself drawn to reflection. Not the quick highlights or the surface-level wins, but the real story of a year spent building.

2024 was different from what I expected. There were no massive moments or viral launches. Instead, it was a year of laying foundations, making connections, finding clarity in the work, and getting things positioned for 2025.

Here's what that looked like.

Finding my people

Building online can be a lonely journey.

You know the feeling—sitting at your desk late at night, building something you believe in, wondering if anyone else gets it. Wondering if it matters.

I spent most of 2024 looking for those people. The ones who understand why you'd spend hours tweaking a line of code or reworking a sentence until it feels just right. I found them on X at first, where I spent most of my year engaging with other creators and founders.

But things changed in November.

I discovered a different kind of energy on Threads. A community that felt more... real. Less about metrics and growth hacks, more about community, friendship, and building things that matter. The conversations there reminded me why I started building in the first place.

While this year didn't bring immediate collaborations, it brought something better: real connections with people like me. The ones who understand the journey—the kind of connections that make me excited for what's ahead.

Making a creative home at Switchyards

You know that moment when you walk into a space and everything just feels right?

Switchyards finally opened a location near me this year—a move I'd been waiting for. The environment is different. Calmer. More intentional. No forced networking or startup buzzwords. Just people in my community focused on creating good work.

Admittedly, I haven't taken full advantage of the space yet. Life has a way of getting in the way sometimes. But each visit reinforces why I wanted to be part of Switchyards. It's exactly what I've been looking for: a place to connect with other creators, recharge when working from home feels isolating, and focus on working without distractions.

I'm spending more time there in 2025—because sometimes you need more than a home office to do your best work.

The evolution of my personal site

Every creator needs a home base. A place that's truly theirs.My personal site has always been mine. This year, I focused on making it better—not just different.

First came the new logo: a geometric, flowing "MD" mark that feels modern yet personal. I also worked on a simple new color palette that I'll roll out across the site in early 2025.

Then there was MD Radio. A side project built with Next.js that wasn't about growth or numbers or any of that. It was about experimenting with a framework I've been wanting—and needing—to learn for a while. I change the music with the season, so it's a way to keep my chops up while building something fun just for the heck of it.

But these design and build updates aren't the real story. The real story of 2024 is about the writing.

I published 36 articles this year. Not for SEO. Not for metrics. But to explore ideas that needed more room to breathe and to give other creative founders answers to the questions they're struggling with and that I've already tackled.

Testing the waters with coaching. Again.

I'd run a successful asynchronous coaching beta last year. According to the great reviews I got, the beta was a success. But two questions kept nagging at me:

• Was this program actually helpful, or did I just get lucky the first time?
• Could I see myself doing this long-term, or was it just a nice experiment?

So I tried it again. Six brave souls signed up—course creators, founders, designers. Each with their own challenges. Their own dreams of building something meaningful.

The feedback was great. "Matt's a very smart guy," one participant wrote. "He's got a lot of experience across the whole gamut of digital marketing, product creation, audience building, and more."

But the biggest lesson wasn't about the feedback.

It was about scale. About the tension between impact and reach. Coaching creates deep change, but it's still trading time for money. Now I'm wrestling with a bigger question: How do you scale impact without losing what makes it special?

I'm still offering my Spark plan for folks looking for an immediate impact, but I've paused adding any new members to the program until I figure things out.

Refining Digital Native

Digital Native has been around in one form or another for years.

And like everything worth building, it needed to evolve. To grow. To become more useful to the people who matter most—our subscribers.

This year, that evolution accelerated.

Reader feedback pushed me toward producing more tactical, practical content. Last week I sent out the final email of 2024, letting subscribers know that there will be less stories about what I've done (which are great, but very specific) and more content shared to support modern creative founders—resources, links, interesting articles, and—yes—some fun along the way.

I also made a tough decision: substantially pruning the subscriber list. Let's face it: a bigger audience isn't always a better audience. Sometimes you need to focus on the people who truly want to be there. So I made the hard decision to chop over 50% of my subscribers and start the year fresh.

Moving to Beehiiv was another key milestone this year. The platform offers everything I need: robust features like a built-in ad network and seamless publishing tools, plus the confidence of being founder-led. My small angel investment in the platform reflects my belief in their vision, but more importantly, the product itself makes creating and sharing content a joy.

I even got to flex my dev skills by building a custom login form with their API (because why use the default when you can make something fun, right?).

Digital Native is changing again in 2025. Less about my journey, more about yours. More curated resources. More tools creative founders can actually use to move the needle and make this the best year yet for their business.

If this sounds like it's up your alley, you can sign up to get the first issue of 2025 on Saturday.

Learning from 1,000 sales

Want to hear something embarrassing?

I made over 1,000 Super template sales without a proper post-purchase email funnel. No upsells. No follow-ups. Nothing. Just silence after the sale.

It's one of those things you know you need to do something about, but it just ends up on the back burner staring at you for months—judging you.

So this year, I finally did something about it. The implementation isn't revolutionary—it's just a simple 3 email sequence. But it's done and it offers an upsell that wasn't there before. Sometimes that's enough.

There was another bright spot this year: my Solo template for Super. It almost instantly became one of my bestsellers and people from all over the world are using it to feature their work. That's still so cool to me.

Building JASIN: The modern Amazon affiliate toolkit

The success of Solo taught me something important: when you solve a real problem with thoughtful design, people respond.

That lesson led me to my next project. Because every good product starts with a frustration.

My frustration was with AAWP—the tool everyone uses for Amazon affiliates. Yes, it works. Yes, it does the job. But it looks and feels like it was built in a different era of the web. That's because it was.

So in late October, I started building JASIN—a way to turn boring Amazon Affiliate links into beautifully branded templates.

It hasn't been easy to build: the Amazon API feels like it was designed by a committee that never met. Building a user-friendly interface over something that complex sometimes feels like trying to gift wrap a cactus.

But with the advancement in AI code pairing like Cursor, it's been manageable. And when you're building something you believe in, all the hard work and headaches are worth it.

Q1 2025. That's when it all comes together. I have plans to launch JASIN officially and get it in the hands of Amazon Affiliate marketers that can give me feedback and help me shape the future of beautiful, personalized Amazon listings for everyone.

The year that was...

Looking back, 2024 wasn't what I expected.

It was better.

It was about building foundations. Making connections. Learning what matters and what doesn't.

Every project, every conversation, every late-night coding session has pointed toward something bigger. Something clearer.

Not just what to build—but who to build it for.

And that's the type of progress I can be proud of.