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About.

I’m Matthew O’Brien. Most call me Matty. Marketer by trade, builder by accident. US and EU dual citizen, currently camped in Barcelona.

$ matty --status

  > job:    head of marketing @ hevy
  > side:   founder @ mattymakes
  > base:   barcelona, spain
  > otp:    climbing, cooking, raising three kids
  > status: shipping

the day job

I run marketing at Hevy, the #1 free workout tracker on iOS and Android. Millions of people use it to plan their lifts, log their sets, and not lie to themselves about what they did at the gym. We’re growing fast, and the gym is a fun place to do brand work.

the side project

Founded MattyMakes in 2025. I ship small things in the evenings, mostly with AI-assisted dev workflows. ScopeHound.app, the Slack-native competitor watcher, is the one with paying customers ($29–$199/month). The rest are on the home page. Some are silly. Some make money. Some died.

before this

Most recently CMO at XPFlow (Alfie.io), an AI affiliate marketing platform. First marketing hire, helped close a $4M round, took the company to WebSummit Lisbon. Built the GTM engine and handed it off.

Before that, six years in chess. Director of Product Marketing at Chess.com / Chessable, where my team scaled Chessable from $3.7M to $18M and helped position the company for its $85M acquisition. Before Chess.com I was VP of Growth at Play Magnus Group / chess24, where I launched the Magnus Carlsen Invitational with sponsors including FTX, Puma, and Mastercard. We landed in the FT1000.

And before chess, I scaled performance marketing at The Book of Everyone from a £150K budget to £4.3M across four markets at 2.2+ ROAS.

a weirder period

For five years I co-owned a tattoo studio in Barcelona. Built it from concept, ran it, sold it in 2020. I started in tattoo marketing too, at TattooNow / Off The Map Tattoo, producing live webcasts and running lead-gen campaigns. It’s a strange path. I like strange paths.

what I’m good at

GTM. Product marketing. User acquisition and performance. Monetization. Lifecycle and CRM. Team building. Attribution and analytics. Experimentation and CRO. International expansion. Brand. AI-first ops. Reforge alumnus. Twelve years of the same problem in different clothes.

outside work

Climbing. Cooking with my wife. Building dumb little tools with the kids in the room (three of them). Coffee, mostly black, occasionally aggressive.

reach me

The contact form on the home page. It lands in my D1, I check it.
Or email me at msob413@gmail.com.

other facts

Education: BAT in Economics and Marketing, Greenfield College, MA (2007–2011).

Citizenship: US and EU dual.