Hello, I'm Matt Haughey

I'm a writer with over 25 years of experience building products. In that time I've worked as a designer, coder, company founder, and senior writer.

I recently spent 7 years in Marketing at Slack, lending my skills to the platform, developer relations, and people ops teams as well. I've worked at educational institutions, built and sold companies from the ground up, and worked with dozens of freelance clients. I have over a decade of experience in podcasting and I'm an investor and technical advisor to a dozen different tech ventures.

Check out my work

Highlighted Work

How to be a writer on a marketing team without sounding like a jerk: An op-ed I wrote that describes my approach to writing clear, helpful marketing materials without getting mired in industry jargon or typical approaches.
How to reach any of your devices from anywhere with Tailscale: This is about a very nerdy set of networking protocols that can be used to build personal private networks, but it aims to be understandable by the masses. Taking complex, technical subjects and making them readable and appealing to anyone is my speciality and this is a prime example.
Shrinking the haystack: How to narrow search results in Slack: One of my ongoing "get better at Slack" user education posts (I wrote 50+ pieces like this) about how anyone can improve their search skills in Slack, with tons of examples and screenshots and tips anyone can use to better find what they're looking for.
Other bylines at:: Slack's blog, Zapier's blog, books I've co-written, and NY Times tech columns.

Professional experience

2015-2022: Slack/Salesforce, Senior Writer, Marketing: Started at Slack as the second writer ever hired, watched the company grow from 125 people to over 70,000 at the end post-acquisition, and worked on pretty much every piece of copy before settling into an editorial team writing blog posts for the main Slack blog, Platform blog, as well as editing the Engineering blog.
1999-2015: MetaFilter, Creator/Founder/CEO: What started as a side project to learn programming databases and dynamic websites turned into a 16 year project that became a S-corp with eight employees. I took it from inital idea to working website to a community with tens of thousands of active members and hundreds of millions of pageviews annually.
2002-2005: Creative Commons, Creative Director: I joined Creative Commons in the pre-launch days as the first designer and worked with illustrators to develop our branding and logos, then built our website and original designs for the Creative Commons licensing system.
2000-2001: Blogger, Front-end Designer/Developer: Joined a small startup that launched one of the first web apps for blogging. Designed templates, help build BlogSpot.com from the ground up, and worked on a variety of front-end design projects.
1997-2000: UCLA, Web Designer: In 1997, I joined a team at UCLA focused on building a free, open source online courseware content management system. I designed CMS templates for the look and feel as well as the all the UX on the application itself. I also built dozens of sites for UCLA's Social Science departments and programs.

Social links

As someone that helped kick off the blogging revolution, I'm pretty much on every social network out there, including:

Get in Touch!

Email me at: mathowie@gmail.com