@johnfdoherty.com yo! Congrats on selling EditorNinja, just scheduled a call and then started putting the pieces together when I saw the guy I was scheduled with had a proofed.com email

There's a B2B lesson in here somewhere

We've made some big improvements to the MetaMonster crawling and onboarding experiences over the last month! You no longer have to wait for a crawl to finish to start queuing up your first workflows. This makes the overall experience of getting started with a new project WAY faster. Next up:

Three years ago I sold my agency to one of our long time clients and went to work for them. I made it 11 months before I got fired. I wrote about the experience, how it felt, and what I took away from it: www.andrewaskins.com/how-to-get-...

Something we've found helpful when testing prompts for MetaMonster: have the LLM output it's "rationale."

Pretty cool: - I crawled our site - Told the AI to analyze my page titles and generate an engagement score from 1-10 - Filter to < 5 - Generated optimized titles - Had the AI score the optimized version and provide a justification

The MetaMonster WordPress plugin is live! You can now: - Crawl your site to find missing metadata - Generate optimized titles and descriptions w/ 1 click - Publish directly to WordPress That's 3-5 clicks to update titles and descriptions for every page on your site. wordpress.org/plugins/meta...

Rolled out handy little feature in MetaMonster this week to let you export all of your page content as markdown.

I think I may have taken the "bootstrappers need to charge more" advice a little too seriously and overpriced the MetaMonster beta... 😬 Don't want to overreact to small sample sizes just yet, but seriously considering cutting the price by 50% (add increasing what's included in each plan)

This season of Tiny Seed Tales with @leenyburger.bsky.social is so good because THIS is the hard stuff!! It's easy to keep doing what's working. It's easy to shut down something that obviously isn't working. But so many businesses spend time somewhere in the middle.

Some stuff is going well. Some stuff isn't. This is true of everyone, all the time. Which stuff is which, changes. The magnitude changes. The nature of the puzzles change. But there’s always stuff. So don’t get discouraged; get used to it.

Loved talking to Benjamin and Marie on Grief & Pizza. We got into a lot of great stuff around mental health and the ups and downs of being a founder.

LOVE this newsletter CTA from balsamiq

Really appreciate the real talk from @leenyburger.bsky.social in the latest episode of Tiny Seed Tales www.startupsfortherestofus.com/episodes/epi...

Over the last 6 months, @amy.stackingthebricks.com & I have worked on a handful of high-profile (and high revenue) product launches that *aren’t our products.* It’s been a lot of fun, & it’s inspired some new resources for us to share! Here’s the first: stackingthebricks.com/email-ideas/

I've been in a season of bad ADHD lately and this week I've been using Cursor Composer in Agent mode to help me just get started. Big unlock. Helps that: - Our code is a monolith (API context) - My cofounder already had components and styles built out - I'm working on super simple stuff

Just closed customer number 1 for MetaMonster 👀 It's a friend, but they fit our ICP AND they're using the heck out of the product and getting a lot of value from it. Lot more to do from here!!

We just released directed crawls to alpha users! 📋 Now you can choose to crawl your entire site or crawl a list of pages you specify This is a great way to narrow suggestions only to the pages you care about, or break a large site into batches

Why did no one tell me building a web crawler would be such a pain in the ass? 😂

We got path planning working on our robot today! Now the students can design an autonomous routine in the pathplanner UI by drawing lines on a field map. Super cool open source tool.

Looking through analytics this morning and this looks like it was actually coming from our google ads campaign Not sure why our ads were showing up on youtube... they aren't video ads and I thought they were restricted just to google search But that makes more sense

Hot take: I don't hate Jira They've put a lot of work into updating it, and it's a powerful tool that can be really effective in certain circumstances

If you can't build a good remote culture that's on you, not your employees. Honestly the push back on remote work makes me want to build a team again. It's going to be so easy to compete for great people and give them a better environment than 90% of what's out there.

We currently have 4 SUPER low production value videos on our @metamonster.ai YouTube channel that up until today didn't even have direct links to our site and we're still seeing a small trickle of traffic from YouTube That's hella encouraging

I dig this essay from Edmar Ferreira about the differences between building in AI versus traditional software startups. every.to/source-code...

New episode of Small Efforts is out! 🤖 My robotics team is upgrading our tech 🌶️ Sean's time at Shmoocon got spicy 👹 And I'm riding the high of a great prospect call for MetaMonster. share.transistor.fm/s/b13b6954

Currently hiring at Miscreants! Searching for our next product marketer, project manager, or Webflow developer 🎉 More details here: www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

Getting some really positive early feedback from our first MetaMonster users! Excited to start slowly opening up the alpha. Only problem is I have SO MANY IDEAS. I want to build all the things, but now have to focus and prioritize. Ugh.

Stoked for this season! Just listened to episode one this morning and can’t wait for more

Just did a lightweight SEO audit for a friend, really helpful for putting myself in the shoes of our @metamonster.ai users

A friend told me I was a rockstar because I got a shout out in the Outseta annual review. Does he have low standards? Maybe, but I'll take it and Outseta IS pretty cool.

The good part about LinkedIn being so cringey is that I feel way less stressed to post there Everywhere else I hyper analyze everything and stress about how it's going to be received On LinkedIn? Fuck it, it's better than 90% of the stuff on the platform I'm sure.

Thanks @seanqsun.com I hate it suno.com/song/32a0d02...

In our first podcast episode of the year, I talk about bringing on my first alpha users for MetaMonster. And as user number one Sean has LOTS of thoughts. Meanwhile Sean actually took some time off!! And started writing! share.transistor.fm/s/56c409c7

Does anyone know someone who has built a web crawler before? One that got a good bit of usage? We're playing a lot of whack-a-mole with issues for the @metamonster.ai crawler, and I would love to pay to talk to someone for a couple hours who already knows all the edge cases

Ugh just sent out an email to the @metamonster.ai list and left out two links So there's just a bit where it says click here and you can't click...

A friend of mine recently had to update meta descriptions for a client of his. It took him 11 hours for a site with 139 pages. We're building MetaMonster to automate THAT EXACT process (and more), but... you can technically do this today with Screaming Frog 🐸 Let me show you!

Sheesh

What's everyone using for product analytics these days? I tried June for ChartJuice and while it's super simple and pretty, I found some of the reporting to be a little awkward. But maybe that's everything when you don't have much usage data. #buildinpublic

Getting our first round of feedback for @metamonster.ai from some close friends before we bring on our first real alpha users Already catching some edge cases we missed, but also love getting messages like this

Today is the kickoff day for First Robotics! Today we'll find out the rules and mechanics of this year's game which marks the start of build season. We'll then spend the next 3 months working with the kids to design and build a robot that can outcompete 40+ schools

I've joined the retro homepage team. My new site is going for the HyperCard on Mac System 6 vibe.

It would be easy to look at this year by conventional metrics and see it as a failure. But this year was the happiest year of my life and I feel like my career is exactly where I want it to be. Here's my 2024 year-in-review www.andrewaskins.com/2024-year-i...

I’ve been thinking about my goals for next year Many will be similar to this year, but two things I want to do differently: - Backpack more, aiming for at least 5 trips - Make time for art, which probably means trying to get back into photography

Looks like my fellow procrastinators don’t have to file this BOI thing, at least not yet Shout out @csallen.com

Anyone have a design agency owner starter pack?

I love giving gifts. Making your mom cry or your partner shriek in excitement? Priceless. What’s your favorite gift you’ve ever given someone?

Merry Christmas Bluesky! Hope everyone’s day is full of good food, fun times, and little moments of joy

Just published a new article! 👇🏾 How do you find potential customers to interview before you have a product, a website, or even a name? Many thanks for spreading the love with ❤️ and 🔁!

One of the best engineers I’ve ever worked with never touched code outside of work One of the best SEOs I know has a one page website and does almost no content marketing Focus and rest are underrated parts of doing great work