Matt McBride

Operator turned builder | 15+ yrs scaling teams & shipping products | Built ... hand-curated lifetime tool vaults for AI

[Matt McBride @mattmcbride1]

Shipping 12 things and watching 10 underperform is not failure, it is the price of finding the 2 that work.

You cannot think your way to which idea lands. You launch, you watch the numbers, you double down on the survivors.

[Matt McBride @mattmcbride1]

Founder cadence in May: 12 Stripe links shipped, 80 X posts published, 14 catering frameworks documented, 4 agent specs drafted. The output isn't the goal. The system that produces output without me babysitting is.

[Matt McBride @mattmcbride1]

10 years in restaurants taught me one thing about software: 90 percent of operators run on Excel and paper, not SaaS.

The opportunity is rarely replacing their tools. It is making the spreadsheet they already trust less painful.

[Matt McBride @mattmcbride1]

Curation isn't ranking. It's deletion. Each Good Stuff Vault starts with 1,000 to 3,000 candidates. 70% get cut for being abandoned, paywalled, or affiliate spam. What survives gets named and ranked. The cuts are the product.

[Matt McBride @mattmcbride1]

The best tool I shipped this year is not AI. It is a 50-line vanilla JS scorer that ranks a headline in real time.

No API, no latency, costs nothing. Half the time the honest answer is that you did not need the model.

[Matt McBride @mattmcbride1]

Vegas pilot starts today. 90 days of in-person catering audits. Hotels, casinos, multi-unit restaurant groups. Built the framework over 8 months. Now we see if it converts in the wild. Day one log incoming.

[Matt McBride @mattmcbride1]

Indie hacker portfolio status: 12 vaults (~4,000 picks), Catering Audit (Vegas pilot June 1), missedleadscan, three agents in alpha. Daniel Vassallo small bets approach. None have to be perfect. They have to ship.

[Matt McBride @mattmcbride1]

Most best-of lists are 100 percent affiliate. The author never tested half of it, and trust erodes one bad pick at a time.

I wanted a vault where I personally vouch for every entry, get paid once, and never feel weird about a recommendation. So I built it.

[Matt McBride @mattmcbride1]

Ran a 45-cover bistro for 4 years. The person who tracked 8 modifiers per ticket and a $400 line-cook delta builds the same way in software. Operations is operations. Different stack, same arithmetic.

[Matt McBride @mattmcbride1]

Built 12 paywalled niche directories in 90 days. Reality check: 2 of them carry the whole portfolio.

The other 10 cover hosting and tell me which 2 to go deeper on. The math only works because launching got cheap. Default to action.

[Matt McBride @mattmcbride1]

What I shipped this week: 12 new $4.99 Stripe links, 7 hourly X posts, 4 distinct account identities, and the foundations of a Vegas catering pilot. The next 14 days I'm testing whether multi-mouth distribution beats single-mouth.

[Matt McBride @mattmcbride1]

Started Good Stuff Vault because I had 4,000 bookmarks I never opened. Tested 2,400 in 6 months. 70% got cut. The remaining 30% became 12 vaults at $4.99 lifetime each. Curation isn't ranking. It's deletion.

[Matt McBride @mattmcbride1]

I just signed up for Dr. @davidasinclair's new test that will tell me how fast I'm aging — thought you would want to know too! Don't worry, I won't tell! https://t.co/mwQ4ykNgoU