2024: A year of building foundations

I always get reflective around the new year. Not the highlight-reel version, but the actual story of what happened, what worked, and what didn't.

2024 wasn't what I expected. There were no big viral moments or massive launches. It was a year of laying foundations, making connections, getting clarity on the work, and positioning things for 2025.

Here's what that looked like.

Finding my people

Building online can be really lonely.

You're sitting at your desk late at night, working on something you believe in, and you start wondering if anyone else gets it. If any of 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 right. I found them on X first, where I spent most of the year engaging with other creators and founders.

But things changed in November.

I discovered a totally different energy on Threads. It 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.

This year didn't bring immediate collaborations, but it brought something better: real connections with people like me who understand the journey. That's the kind of thing that makes me excited for what's ahead.

Making a creative home at Switchyards

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

View on Threads

I'll be honest, I haven't taken full advantage of the space yet. Life gets in the way sometimes. But each visit reminds me why I wanted to be part of it. It's exactly what I've been looking for: a place to connect with other creators, recharge when working from home gets isolating, and focus 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 that for me. This year I focused on making it better, not just different.

First came the new logo: a geometric, flowing "MD" mark that feels modern but 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. 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 the design and build updates aren't the real story. The real story of 2024 is the writing.

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

Testing the waters with coaching. Again.

I'd run a successful asynchronous coaching beta the year before. The reviews were great. 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 people signed up: course creators, founders, designers. Each with their own challenges and their own ideas about 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. Coaching creates deep change, but it's still trading time for money. Now I'm thinking about 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 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.

This year, that evolution sped up.

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

I also made a tough call: I pruned the subscriber list substantially. A bigger audience isn't always a better audience. Sometimes you need to focus on the people who actually want to be there. So I chopped over 50% of my subscribers and decided to start the year fresh.

Moving to Beehiiv was another big milestone. The platform has everything I need: a built-in ad network, great publishing tools, and it's founder-led, which matters to me. 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?).

View on Threads

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 that 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

Here's 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 fix, but it 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 anything special: 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, which started with a frustration.

My frustration was with AAWP: the tool everyone uses for Amazon affiliates. It works. It does the job. But it looks and feels like it was built in a different era of the web. 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. 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 AI code pairing tools like Cursor, it's been manageable. And when you're building something you believe in, the headaches are worth it.

Q1 2025 is when it all comes together. I'm planning to launch JASIN officially and get it in the hands of Amazon Affiliate marketers who can give me feedback and help 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, and learning what matters. Every project, every conversation, every late-night coding session pointed toward something bigger. Not just what to build, but who to build it for.

That's the kind of progress I can be proud of.