Eyy! I'm Matt Burns.

It started with a game

When I wanted to get better at a competitive team-based game called Overwatch, I realized community was the answer, but there was none out there where people could share strategies, help one another, and team up. So I built one. r/CompetitiveOverwatch grew to over 150,000 members before I passed it to the moderation team.

After nearly a decade helping monday.com hit a billion dollars in annual revenue and building communities with thousands of real-life attendees, I kept coming back to the same question. Why is it so hard for passionate community builders to prove what they've built really helps people? That question helped me answer my lifelong obsession, and the answer became ProveWorth.

The decade at monday.com

I joined monday.com as employee number one in the US when the whole company only had a couple dozen people. Nearly a decade later, we took the company public and had grown to nearly 4,000 people. I was fortunate enough to wear a few hats along the way: four teams built and run from scratch, hundreds of people hired and onboarded, more than 150 managed.

My previous work along the way got covered by Fast Company, Forbes, NBC News, Built In, and CIO. The links live on the press page.

What I'm building now

These days I'm based in Austin, TX, and the work comes in three flavors. ProveWorth is verified reviews for online communities: if you run one, it's how you show people it's worth joining. Digital Gravity is the consulting studio I co-founded with my wife Nicole, where we help companies build communities worth sticking around for. And I advise early-stage founders at Antler on community strategy. Mostly I tell them to stop treating communities as marketing channels.

Why this site exists

I built ProveWorth, a review site with real users, without an engineering team. AI wrote most of the code. I made most of the decisions. Learning to split the work that way is the whole skill, and it is learnable. I'm biased of course, but I think it is the most useful thing a non-engineer can pick up this decade.

Meanwhile, most writing about AI is either a prompt tutorial or a sermon. I kept watching creators, coaches, and community builders carry a list of ideas that all died at the same sentence: "I'd need a developer for that." That sounded true five years ago. The barrier moved, and nobody updated the reflexes. This site exists to update the reflexes.

A few rules I run on

My personal site keeps the full list of ten at burns.gg/values. The ones that explain this site best:

• "I don't believe in 'follow your passion.' Passion burns out. Curiosity doesn't."
• "Every business sells trust whether they know it or not."
• "People really only remember the weird."
• "If the problem doesn't break the laws of physics, it's solvable."

How the writing is made

Every guide comes from real work, not a content calendar. I research the way you would: I read what people are actually asking on places like Hacker News, Reddit, and community threads, then I compare it against my own builds and write the version I wish I had found. If a claim is not something I have done or verified, it does not go in.

One more rule I hold myself to: every piece proves one belief with one real build. When I get something wrong, the correction becomes content too. Evidence is the marketing!

What being AI native means

A small change of mindset, backed by behaviors. Build before you brief. Ship the ugly version. Let AI write the first draft of anything and never the last. Keep the judgment human, because judgment is the job. Show receipts. Update loudly. And every so often, take a step back and ask which belief about what you can't do expired without telling you.

So here is the question this whole site runs on: what assumption are you still living under that no longer fits the world?