Software Is Nothing

About

Matthew Perry

I have unusually wide range for one person: a decade spent deploying physical products into the real world and building the operations to scale them, and — increasingly — the hands-on engineering that builds the systems those operations run on. Both halves are real, and they reinforce each other. I came up through marketing and international expansion; today the title says Director of Marketing and the work is as much APIs, identity flows, data pipelines, and AI agents.

Currently Director of Marketing at Bagjump Action Sports (Innsbruck) — and the person who builds the internal software the marketing and operations teams run on. That's a production marketing-analytics portal (a TypeScript monorepo wiring Google Ads, GA4, Meta, Bing, Zoho CRM, Zoho Campaigns, and Gravity Forms into one dashboard, secured by Bagjump's Microsoft 365 tenant), an internal operations portal with an "Ask BAGJUMP" Teams assistant over a retrieval-augmented knowledge base, a separate ops platform of automated client-health and drafting engines, and a 36-endpoint Zoho ↔ Power Apps integration service. Alongside the software, the marketing program itself — a 40% organic lift in the first year and campaigns contributing hundreds of thousands in revenue.

Outside Bagjump I run Software Is Nothing, LLC, home to tailharbor.eu — a European pet-adoption platform I built and run solo, spanning 40 countries and 16 languages, with native iOS and Android apps and a nearly-4,000-adapter scraper pipeline that self-maintains through a loop of AI agents. It's also home to a B2B deal-intelligence platform (a Python AI-agent system built for a specialist operator under hard compliance gates) and a local-first executive AI assistant.

The home lab

For the rigor of it, I run a self-hosted AI compute fleet — three mismatched machines (a GPU server and two laptops) unified behind one gateway into a single auto-routing inference pool. I operate it like production: every node benchmarked, Prometheus/Grafana monitoring, node-down and dead-man alerting, incident postmortems that turn into fixes, read-only safety rails around the automation, and every config versioned in a self-hosted Git. It's where I keep my hands on hardware and reliability engineering — and where I learn what actually breaks.

Earlier

  • The ABM Agency — Director of International Expansion (Jan 2023 – Jan 2024).
  • TIER Mobility — Senior International Expansion Manager: launched and ran European micromobility markets (Italy, Sweden, Ireland, the UK) and the on-the-ground Spin acquisition due-diligence (Oct 2019 – Jan 2023).
  • Lime — General Manager, Georgia: built the East Coast's largest market in <1 year — a 150-vehicle pilot scaled into a one-million-trip market generating ~$400k/month — and wrote the SOPs for scale (Aug 2018 – May 2019).
  • Frenik Marketing Group — Senior Digital Project Manager (Aug 2017 – Aug 2018).
  • Ecolab — Route Sales Manager: ran a route of senior-living and healthcare facilities (Jan 2016 – Jul 2017).
  • Frobot — Co-Founder: self-service frozen-yogurt kiosks; pitched and secured DC-based seed funding (Feb 2012 – Jan 2015).

How I work

I prefer building the small in-house tool over buying the bloated SaaS. I write Python, TypeScript, SQL, and whatever else the job needs, and I deploy with Docker on Hetzner, Vercel, or the cheapest thing that works. I benchmark before I decide, monitor everything, write the postmortem, and fence the sharp edges — I treat AI agents as a feature behind compliance gates and undo buttons, not as a category. And I know hardware and software deeply enough to troubleshoot a misbehaving machine, and when to fix it myself versus escalate.

Based in Innsbruck. English native; German conversational and improving. 35 countries, 45 US states, and 20 miles of the Grand Canyon under my belt.

Open to

  • Deployment / operations and platform-engineering roles where someone needs to take something technical into the real world and make it work — on-site or remote-EU.
  • Mission-driven teams putting hardware or AI in front of real people.
  • Independent consulting through Software Is Nothing — internal tooling, CRM/ERP integrations, marketing-tech systems, and AI-agent design.
  • Conversations with anyone solving similar problems.