Matthias was earning a low wage at a cinema with his friend. Then he saw his friend make 4x more by learning to code! So Matthias learned as well and became a Full-Stack Developer. He is now working on a side project, SaaSFYI, alongside his full-time job. You can read his interview below.
Code faster with Claude!
I've used Claude to make Chrome extensions, financial calculators and improvements to my websites. Last night I showed someone at a hackathon in Edinburgh how to make their personal website with Claude. And I'm just scratching the surface of what's possible.
So I'm going to make a course for coding with Claude.
Interested?
I want to make something valuable for you so I'd love it if you complete this 30-second survey
Hey, so can you introduce yourself?
I’m Matthias, currently working as a Full-Stack Developer in Munich, Germany. I’ve worked as a developer for the past five years. I originally started my career by bootstrapping a company with a friend for about two years, which we eventually shut down. Afterwards, I freelanced for a while before looking for something more stable and landing a full-time role.
The company I work for has around 1,000 employees, and I’m part of their innovation team, where we identify new product ideas, build prototypes, and test them with early users. My team is distributed across Germany, and I work fully remotely. It’s actually a really cool job. My main tech stack is Python for backend development (mostly FastAPI these days; I used Django extensively before), some JavaScript for frontend work (mostly React, depending on the project), and a lot of cloud infrastructure on AWS.
Why did you learn to code?
Originally, a friend of mine who also didn’t study CS started coding a video game by himself as a side project, simply because he wanted to. He didn’t know any code before starting, but after a few months he had a really cool video game we could play. That was incredibly inspiring. What’s more, with the coding experience he gained during those few months (around 3–6 months), he randomly landed a freelance gig as a VR developer that paid a lot at the time. We used to work at a cinema together, earning about €13 per hour, and all of a sudden he was making €50–60 per hour.
Watching him do all that, I thought to myself: if he can do it, why shouldn’t I? At the time, I was practicing a lot of meditation using visualization techniques, and I had an idea for an app to support this type of meditation. So I started writing some C# in Unity (tbh the worst choice for starting to learn coding, but oh well). I told myself that if I could build this idea in about three months, that would already be a huge success. After just 2–4 weeks, I had a working app, and that really gave me the confidence that I could build whatever I wanted.
How did you learn coding?
As described before, I started with C# in Unity3D and just googled anything I needed to know, watching a ton of YouTube tutorials to get through the first few steps. Looking back, this was really just the starting point. I didn’t enjoy C# or game development / VR that much. At the time, I was far more interested in data science and AI, so I started learning Python. I fell in love with it right away and never looked back.
The real learning started when I dedicated myself full-time to building a software startup with a friend. We were fortunate to receive a startup grant that helped us pay rent for a year, and that really kick-started everything.
What software projects are you working on just now?
On nights and weekends, I work on SaaSfyi.co. It’s a product for folks selling products or services to SaaS companies, helping them find leads and build outreach lists. It’s built with Django, React, and TypeScript, and deployed on Render.
I want this to become the tool you go to whenever you want to sell to SaaS companies, with the most in-depth data on a company’s hiring activity, web traffic, tech stack, employee data, and more, basically anything that helps identify companies and people worth reaching out to.
Other than that, I’m currently brainstorming some ideas with my brother, which I’m super excited about as well, but nothing is live yet. In my day job, I work on a bunch of different projects broadly in the space of domain parking and traffic arbitrage.
