iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Andrew Askins @andrewaskins.com · 11/12/2025

- MetaMonster will automatically identify topics, keywords, and page categories -> which unlocks internal linking and more advanced workflows - Improved integrations so you can deploy all of your updates in one click!

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Andrew Askins @andrewaskins.com · 11/12/2025

- More guidance and education on your first run - Easily test workflows on a small subset of pages so you don't burn through your credits - Add workflows to a queue so you don't have to wait on one to finish to queue up the next

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Andrew Askins @andrewaskins.com · 11/12/2025

We've made some big improvements to the MetaMonster crawling and onboarding experiences over the last month! You no longer have to wait for a crawl to finish to start queuing up your first workflows. This makes the overall experience of getting started with a new project WAY faster. Next up:

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Andrew Askins @andrewaskins.com · 26/11/2025

If you're ever been in a similar situation or know someone who has I hope it resonates and you find it helpful.

Andrew Askins @andrewaskins.com · 26/11/2025

I tried to write about this as soon as it happened. But everything was too fresh, and the drafts I wrote weren't coming across the way I wanted them to. So I've let it sit and percolate in the back of my head for the last 2.5 years, and last week I sat down to take another crack at it.

Andrew Askins @andrewaskins.com · 26/11/2025

Three years ago I sold my agency to one of our long time clients and went to work for them. I made it 11 months before I got fired. I wrote about the experience, how it felt, and what I took away from it: www.andrewaskins.com/how-to-get-...

andrewaskins.com

How to get fired

“There’s no easy way to say this, so I’m just going to get into it.” Ah, shit. As soon as I heard those words, I knew what was coming next. I was being fired.

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That's another key to prompt engineering: LLMs are probabilistic, so you need to test prompts across a decent-sized dataset to get a real understanding of how well they work.

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Maybe it's weighting a certain word heavily, or associating it with something you didn't consider. (at least I think that's what's happening) The new UI makes it easy to generate this at the same time as the output from your prompt inline, and then review them at scale.

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While LLMs aren't really thinking, this can help you understand how its model may have "interpreted" your instructions and at the very least give you ideas for what to tweak to get the output closer to what you're looking for.

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Something we've found helpful when testing prompts for MetaMonster: have the LLM output it's "rationale."

Andrew Askins @andrewaskins.com · 07/06/2025

Pretty cool: - I crawled our site - Told the AI to analyze my page titles and generate an engagement score from 1-10 - Filter to < 5 - Generated optimized titles - Had the AI score the optimized version and provide a justification

Andrew Askins @andrewaskins.com · 07/05/2025

At the moment it's typefully, it's simple, low on distractions, and has good previews. And it's bootstrapped. Support for features like polls/slideshows/etc are limited outside of twitter which makes sense, it started with a focus on twitter

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I use it because I want to write code and use AI at the same time and it has better controls for feeding the AI relevant context within my codebase than others I've tried

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I probably wouldn't recommend Cursor to a non-dev. You could definitely use it, but it's better for someone who wants to at least dabble with and understand the underlying code.

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Are you thinking about building something in one of these spaces next or just wanting better tooling for yourself?

That's actually part of the value prop we're hoping to emphasize for MetaMonster: - Audit your website (and scrape your content) - Generate optimizations - Publish directly to your CMS All from one tool

Hm, yeah, I guess neither of the tools I mentioned have an option to publish directly to a CMS (although it looks like Lex might be working on that) in the way that Cursor is integrated with my git workflows. But neither did Google Docs which is what I used before.

I use ilus.ai to create most of the illustrations for the MetaMonster site

I'm using lex.page a lot like I use Cursor. I have a lot of my content in the tool, as well as a voice and tone guide, and use the Claude within lex to generate a rough draft of new marketing emails, blog posts, etc. which I then heavily edit

I don't know, I've been using AI a lot in my marketing workflows And talking to SEOs they're all heavy users too

Andrew Askins @andrewaskins.com · 21/04/2025

The MetaMonster WordPress plugin is live! You can now: - Crawl your site to find missing metadata - Generate optimized titles and descriptions w/ 1 click - Publish directly to WordPress That's 3-5 clicks to update titles and descriptions for every page on your site. wordpress.org/plugins/meta...

wordpress.org

MetaMonster SEO – AI-Powered Metadata Optimization

Fix missing metadata in minutes instead of months. MetaMonster's WordPress plugin helps you generate and manage SEO-optimized page titles and met …

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Andrew Askins @andrewaskins.com · 17/04/2025

Under the hood, we store HTML and markdown of your page content for every page that we crawl. We use the markdown in our prompts so that the AI has your page context when generating titles and meta descriptions.

Andrew Askins @andrewaskins.com · 17/04/2025

You can use this to help with a site migration, or load all of your website content into another AI tool to run prompts against it. I like to use this personally to add website content into @nbaschez.bsky.social's tool lex.page so I can provide more context to the AI when I'm working on content.

Andrew Askins @andrewaskins.com · 17/04/2025

Rolled out handy little feature in MetaMonster this week to let you export all of your page content as markdown.

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Andrew Askins @andrewaskins.com · 15/04/2025

Ohhhhh interesting, I should reach out and see if they're willing to give me some more feedback

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Also surveying the market again One of the tricky parts is our market is going through a bit of transition Traditionally crawls were cheap, but the companies adding AI generation features to their crawl capabilities are mostly charging a good bit for those features (bc AI has directs COGS)

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100% We've seen several people cancel their trials and site "too expensive" as the main reason, but we also have 2 still on higher plans that are ongoing So I want to wait and see how those play out I also have several demos this week, good chance to get live reactions to pricing

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I think I may have taken the "bootstrappers need to charge more" advice a little too seriously and overpriced the MetaMonster beta... 😬 Don't want to overreact to small sample sizes just yet, but seriously considering cutting the price by 50% (add increasing what's included in each plan)

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Did you buy a cabbage and leave it outside of Paul's house though?

Andrew Askins @andrewaskins.com · 07/04/2025

I pay $20 per month for a Planet Fitness, but pay an extra $120 per month for a virtual personal trainer to create workout plans for me and keep me accountable At various times I've paid: - $80 per month for a climbing gym membership - $150 per month for CrossFit classes Happy to pay if I use it

Andrew Askins @andrewaskins.com · 27/03/2025

if you find them let me know i thought sam's list was going to finally solve this, but seems like every firm on there is targeting venture funded startups

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Andrew Askins @andrewaskins.com · 13/03/2025

That's terrifying! We once spent a week searching for our cat, and it was awful (eventually found him) Really glad your pup made it home safe

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Andrew Askins @andrewaskins.com · 13/03/2025

This season of Tiny Seed Tales with @leenyburger.bsky.social is so good because THIS is the hard stuff!! It's easy to keep doing what's working. It's easy to shut down something that obviously isn't working. But so many businesses spend time somewhere in the middle.

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Andrew Askins @andrewaskins.com · 11/03/2025

Yeah! My parents met in journalism school, and my mom worked for the state newspaper until I was in high school. I seriously considered trying to become a photojournalist when I was in school, but my parents spent my whole childhood strongly suggesting I not follow in their footsteps lol.

Andrew Askins @andrewaskins.com · 10/03/2025

human, but i come from a family of journalists

Jason Cohen @asmartbear.com · 10/03/2025

Reposted by Andrew Askins

Some stuff is going well. Some stuff isn't. This is true of everyone, all the time. Which stuff is which, changes. The magnitude changes. The nature of the puzzles change. But there’s always stuff. So don’t get discouraged; get used to it.

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Andrew Askins @andrewaskins.com · 06/03/2025

Loved talking to Benjamin and Marie on Grief & Pizza. We got into a lot of great stuff around mental health and the ups and downs of being a founder.

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Andrew Askins @andrewaskins.com · 27/02/2025

LOVE this newsletter CTA from balsamiq

Our monthly emails will make you better at your job

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Andrew Askins @andrewaskins.com · 25/02/2025

Smart way to make it easier to leverage chain-of-thought! Excited to try this

Andrew Askins @andrewaskins.com · 25/02/2025

Hahaha that's a great line!

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Andrew Askins @andrewaskins.com · 20/02/2025

Nice to hear someone talking openly about similar struggles

Andrew Askins @andrewaskins.com · 20/02/2025

I've been feeling the weight of hitting month 6 on MetaMonster lately We only have 1 customer and while I like the product, it's not where I hoped it would be at this point Combine that with a slow month of progress and just *gestures at the world* and feeling my emotional runway dropping a bit

Andrew Askins @andrewaskins.com · 13/02/2025

One small piece of feedback about your CTA I had a split second where I was like "is this the same thing I'm signing up for?" Wonder if it would be clearer if it said "Get your 123 free ideas"

Alex Hillman @alexhillman.com · 13/02/2025

Reposted by Andrew Askins

Over the last 6 months, @amy.stackingthebricks.com & I have worked on a handful of high-profile (and high revenue) product launches that *aren’t our products.* It’s been a lot of fun, & it’s inspired some new resources for us to share! Here’s the first: stackingthebricks.com/email-ideas/

stackingthebricks.com

123 free infinitely reusable ideas to earn trust and make more sales with your newsletter

Get your free cheat sheet: 123 free infinitely reusable ideas to earn trust and make more sales with your newsletter

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Andrew Askins @andrewaskins.com · 13/02/2025

Ohhh heck yes, was just feeling stuck in that rut today