$50M Business | Private Jet | Seminary Degree: Matt Paulson of MarketBeat

Matt Paulson built a business doing $50 million in revenue and $25 million in profit with a handful of employees. Matt Paulson has a private jet. Matt Paulson runs a venture capital firm with $40 million under management. These accolades about my guest today are all true. In fact, there are many more like this, and I do want to touch on these things, but because other podcasts have covered them and because numbers get outdated anyway— ironically, if you look at a YouTube history, you'll see Matt Paulson's business brings in $25 million in revenue. Matt Paulson's business makes $40 million in revenue. Now it's $50. It's hopefully going to be a little higher in the years ahead. I wanted to step back and talk about, drill down into the more timeless principles of what really makes Matt, Matt. Principles that might be just interesting to hear about and maybe principles you can use yourself. So, Matt, Welcome.

Happy to be here. This is— this will be a fun conversation to have.

I hope so. I hope so. I hope you're not overestimating me. I'll disclose you and I met last year in person. You very graciously hosted us for a day at your office there in Sioux Falls. And I am a shameless proponent of South Dakota. I don't know what it is. It has some it factor with me. It's unhurried. It's uncrowded. I feel like I can air out my thoughts a little bit there. And every time, literally every time I go to the Berkshire Hathaway meeting, which you do every year, I now make some kind of a pilgrimage to South Dakota.

Yes, South Dakota is a really nice place. It's big enough to kind of have, you know, all the amenities you'd want to have in a modern city, but also not so big where you start to have big city problems. And, you know, everybody knows each other. You want to call the mayor, you can call the mayor. You want to call the governor, you could probably call the governor if you really wanted to. And just, you know, it's a very kind of community-oriented state and You know, it served us pretty well.

Got to love it. I love the Black Hills, too. I know that's the other side of the state, but my first thought is, where are all the people? This place should be packed. This is so awesome. It's photogenic, it's beautiful. There's like 2 people walking around. It was a great problem to have.

Yeah, the Black Hills are amazing. We drive there about every summer, spend a weekend, long weekend there. But it's very kind of mountain resort, but also like hasn't become overcrowded in ways that some other places have, and it's just a special part of the country.

It's a magic state. I love it, Matt. So on business now, let me just frame this with a broad question out of the gate. You primarily run an investment media business, let's call it that, that's superb at collecting and monetizing emails. That's how I define it. How would you define what you do? And more importantly, why do you think you've been successful at it?

Yeah, I think one thing that's really important is to understand what business you're actually in. And what business that I thought I was in has changed probably 4 or 5 times. Like, first I thought I was a freelance writer, and then I thought I was a personal finance blogger, and then I thought I was an investment blogger, and then I thought I ran an investment research website, and then I thought I ran a premium investment research subscription business. But it turns out I'm actually in the media arbitrage business. Like Markabee's whole business is to generate attention, to get eyeballs on whatever platform we can do that, email, SMS, website, YouTube, push notifications. You can build an audience somewhere profitably, we'll do it. And then redirecting that attention to our 40 or 50 advertisers that we have on a monthly basis and saying, hey, these people have this great thing, you should come check it out. The fact that we can do this, you know, kind of get 6 million subscribers and then send them to our advertisers has turned this into a very nice business. As you mentioned, we did $50 million last year. This year looks more like $60 to $65, could be $70 if things go awesome, but probably more like $60-ish.

I see a trajectory in the future YouTube thumbnails of interviews of Matt Paulson. Business making this much per year. People describe you in some of those YouTube videos as a monetization genius, how does that make you feel?

I think if I do have a superpower, it's digital advertising. And I think maybe what makes me a little bit unique is I have a real technical depth of understanding of how these things work. And I was dealing with a backlink issue over the weekend where some of our emails for what we call more corporate email service providers or universities, the.edu emails, they were clicking through at a rate 10 times higher than Yahoo and Gmail. And it's like, well, these can't be real clicks, so let's figure it out. And turns out they weren't. So we put extra checks where if we think you're a bot because you're a.edu address and the same IPs click through a whole bunch of times within the last 24 hours, we'll make you go through a CAPTCHA to prove that, yep, you are a real person. And normally you would never think of this, right? Because like you have a Beehive account or a ConvertKit account, you send out an email and like, oh, that's my click count. But like people don't really dive into the depth and like you don't understand what problems people have because of bot clicks. Like, but we do. And like we just go to that level of detail in ways that most people don't. And that's one of the reasons we're successful.

And as an aside, that strikes me, Matt, as something that AI, at least LLMs, which work kind of like a big autofill or a big autocomplete, you know, predicting the future based on the past. That strikes me as something they probably wouldn't have flagged just yet. Do you agree with that?

Um, yeah, you would, you would really need access to the granular data. Um, like, we built our own CRM that ties into SendGrid, and most media companies, like, aren't dumb enough— like, are either too smart or not smart enough to do that. I'm not sure which which is the case, but like you need access to the raw data and like you typically don't have it if you're just using an email service provider.

So I might, I wanna, go ahead, sorry.

Yeah, yeah, so the AI wouldn't even have access to the data to figure out there's a problem.

Got it, got it. I want to drill down into TalkShop in a second. Let me first hit you with another broad question, very, very broad question. As a wild guess, someone says, my God, Matt Paulson, this guy's awesome. I want to be like Matt Paulson. What would you say? How much of your success is attributable to replicable factors versus how much is just kind of how you're wired?

Hmm. You know, I don't think I had any special wiring. I think like anybody could go make a MarketBeat and do reasonably well with it. I think MarketBeat is uniquely successful because the unique combination of skills that we have in terms of like, we understand the marketing aspect of it, but we also understand the deep technical underpinnings of how all this stuff works. And that combination you don't see everywhere. Because normally if a website's running ads, it's like, oh, I should run Google AdSense and they'll give me the code and I'll put it on my website. Yeah, that's part of it, but it's a very small piece of it. The real money is made on email and SMS and kind of more owned audience platforms and they're very large rabbit holes to go down. And I think what's really fun about this business is that there's a very quick feedback cycle of like, you can try something and see tomorrow, did it work or not? That's one thing I really love about it.

You're a smart—

Yeah, you just get so many iterations of like, Tried this today, didn't work. Okay, try this thing tomorrow. Okay, that worked. Let's keep doing more of that. And like that over 10 years is like how you get to MarketBeat. Like you need to try stuff all the time. You know, it could be a new ad channel, could be a new ad placement, it could be a new advertiser, could be a new medium. Like a year and a half ago, we didn't have— like we were 100% on SendGrid and like we didn't have lists anywhere else. We're like, wow, everybody's doing Substack and Beehive these days. We should just try a list on each one of these and The Substack one didn't really do much, but the Beehive one did really well. And like, okay, we should probably do another one of these. And now we've got like 4 Beehive lists and a couple million subscribers on Beehive. And like, that didn't exist 18 months ago, but it was a— this is a trend, we should try it and see if it works. And we did.

If I were your agent, I would say that one of the things that's most charming about Matt is that he breaks stereotypes, he breaks rules, but without overtly trying to be someone who's breaking the rules. He just kind of does his own thing. I'll give you a quick example that I want to step back for more. I come from 25 years in the investment research/investment newsletter space, and there are certain laws of physics that I know to be true that I'm actually questioning now after seeing your business. You know, you're— just to be direct, you guys are more aggressive, let's say, with the customer, with acquiring emails than many in the industry are. And my perception is, well, okay, well, that's going to last a year or two and they're going to burn through their audience and then that's it. But it's not. So maybe it's actually not too aggressive after all. Maybe I'm wrong. And, you know, obviously I am wrong and you've got the better grasp of reality. But that's something where you're kind of— you're alone in that perspective, and that's why it's working out for you. Similarly, I mean, geographically, you're in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. You're an introvert. You're frankly the most introverted CEO that I think I've met, Matt. I mean that in a positive way. I'm an introvert, too. You're a straight shooter. You have a small team. You run a content business, but content kind of isn't king in your content business in a weird way, right? So you do a lot of things differently from conventional physics, so to speak. Do you think you've succeeded Despite doing things differently or because you do those differently?

Um, we do all the things that we do, which are unique kind of for, for reasons. Um, like I know MarketBeat is a leaky bucket and we have a higher unsubscribe rate than a lot of other channels. Like that's not a surprise to me. Um, my theory is like you could probably send somebody 50 emails before they unsubscribe on average. So you can send all of those over a year or you can send them all over a couple weeks. But also we spend $1.5 million a month on advertising, so we're constantly getting, refilling the bucket. So it's, do you want to make the money quickly or do you want to make it over time? And all of the testing that I've done over the years shows like, yes, there's diminishing returns as you send more email, but like net-net, you're still making more money.

Is that $1.5 million? It's a multi-channel spend. I'm guessing you've got some kind of baseline and some ones you test periodically to see if this new thing works.

Yeah. So we do a monthly cohort analysis of all of our channels, which is basically just, okay, for the month of March, we spent X dollars on meta and made back Y dollars. And then we do that for all of our channels, you know, going back in time. So like, you Typically like 30 days ago, I want to have made half my money back on those. And by month 3, I want to be above breakeven. And you can just tell by the performance curve of a different channel going back in time of is it performing well or not? And we'll do, there are some channels that are like very deep oceans that you're fishing in. Google, Meta are that. But there are others that are more like fishing in ponds where eventually you fished it out and you've got all the leads there. Then it stops performing. So it's really, you kind of have to know that, 'cause like something could be performing awesome and then it could fall apart 'cause you like bought all the good leads. So by looking further back in time and then like seeing how that curve looks, you can kind of tell like, okay, we've maxed out this channel, we should give it a break or not. Honestly, like my, I think my future with media buying is more focusing on the networks. Because the co-reg stuff that's out there, the lead share stuff that's out there, there's just not enough depth to it to the scale that we operate at. We've already bought, we're one week into the month, we've bought 57,000 new leads already. But there are only so many people signing up for financial newsletters at once. Really to get beyond the scale that we're at today, we have to generate new demand. And the way to do that is in the ad networks. It's not through the traditional channels that the financial publishers have relied on for years. If I want new subscribers, I got to go to Google or go to Meta and create them.

It's a first world problem to have though. I mean, like Alexander the Great wept when there were no more worlds left to conquer, right? So Code Red is too small. You're the Warren Buffett. Of the investment ad industry, right? You have to— you're so big, you move the needle too easily with the small stuff.

Yeah. And like, there are channels where we'll buy 30,000, 40,000 leads a month from. And then like, after month 4, like, you bought the entire database and there's just not anything left. So then the quality just drops.

Before I move on, let me go back to this idea of like, you guys kind of marching to the beat of your own drummer. And how— I guess I'm asking, how idiosyncratic is your experience? I mean, could it be that there are some people like you or like Warren Buffett, who famously is in Omaha doing something that like most people traditionally equate with New York City, right? But he's in Omaha and that probably helps him. Do you think some people benefit from being away from the fray, whereas other people just by virtue of their personality may need to be in the middle of the action to succeed? Do you think that's accurate or is it depends on the thing?

I think there are some benefits to being in a smaller community. Like I try to think like what would've happened had I like grown up in California or like moved to the Valley, like right after college, like I probably would've gotten a job at a startup. I probably wouldn't have like stuck with MarketBeat, or if I did stick with MarketBeat, I probably would've like taken VC money and maybe not spent it very well and then had the business like either go sideways or blow up and like, The fact that when I was in college starting this thing, venture capital was not a word I knew. It meant nothing to me. I knew it existed, but it wasn't for me. So that wasn't a choice I had available. So I just kind of bootstrapped it, and then that kind of forced me to— every decision had to be a profitable decision. And then we continued to operate that way, and here we are. Almost 20 years into this thing of like, you know, now it's a business that's north of $50 million with a 50% net margin on it. Like, you just don't see that.

It's amazing. And you're probably happier too. I mean, obviously you're happier in Sioux Falls. You chose to stay there. But studies show that people who live in smaller geographical areas tend to be happier than those who go to the city where there's just too many anchors for comparison. There's always somebody doing better. Bigger, better than you are, whatever it is you're doing. Right. But if you're in a smaller area, you just, you don't have that mental comparison pressure to the same extent. Yeah.

There's definitely like a maximum dollar amount you can spend on lifestyle here. Because like the most expensive restaurant is like a $200 dinner. Right. And like, yes, there are people with nice cars and yes, there are other people with planes and there are a couple of people that have bigger planes than I do. But I don't know. I don't worry about it. I've got all the money I ever need and then some.

You don't seem like you're someone who worries about that, Matt. I'm wondering, do you think— I mean, when I just kind of see your demeanor, you strike me as someone who might be less prone to temptation, let's say, than the average person. I mean, I'm wildly speculating. Maybe you're not. But do you feel like you're in better control of your emotions than most people and that equanimity has helped you in business?

I think there is something to that. Like, I don't drink much alcohol. I've never smoked in my life. I will get mad about something, but then, like, by the next day, it's like I just don't let it stop me from doing stuff. I think one of the things that is unique is like I can get hit in the head with a baseball bat by something and then the next day I'm kind of back up ready to go. I've had bad stuff happen in business, had dealt with stupid lawsuits over, let's say professional plaintiffs, stuff like that. Or I've had sites get kicked out of Google. SendGrid suspended us on Thanksgiving Day one year by accident. That was a bad day. So I don't let stuff keep me down. I guess this may be the point. I just get back up and keep going.

And maybe the corollary to that, I'm guessing you don't overparty perhaps when you succeed. You know, there are companies that I'm familiar with, for example, that when they've done well, great, you know, spending tons of money and they go poorly, everybody's got to tighten the belt. The level-headed way is probably the better trajectory. I mean, it seems like a Warren Buffett kind of thing. I think he succeeds at investing partly just because— largely because of his temperament. Yes, he's a super smart guy too, but he's not the kind of guy that swings wildly one way or another. And you strike me as being in kind of a similar mold. Would you agree on that?

I don't want to compare myself to Warren Buffett because there's no comparison there. But like what Warren Buffett has done great, like is He will buy great businesses, just hold onto them forever. But the key with that is they have to be a great business on day one. My philosophy is I want to go build a great business that makes lots of money so that I can pay my people really well and do a lot of cool stuff in the Sioux Falls community where I live.

Let me shift gears and read you a quote. Uh, this is from one Matt Paulson in Email Marketing Demystified. Every now and then I'll hear someone that runs a website say something like, I hate pop-ups and I hate marketing email. I would never use them in my business. What they're really saying is, I hate making money, because email marketing is an incredibly effective marketing strategy. They just can't get past their personal biases against advertising to recognize the opportunity that's for them. So there's going to be a bias in how I ask this question. And I mentioned earlier, like, I'm from the traditional space, right? In fact, kind of downstream in the funnel. I ran a newsletter for 10 years at Motley Fool. I built the research department, but running the newsletter was kind of like where I spent most of my time. And that's all about retention. That's all about making the customers that have gone through all the steps in the funnel, like, super delighted so they pay again the next year and the next year, right? So, I guess you kind of touched on it earlier that while you'd like your unsubscribes to be a little bit better, a little bit lower, better equals lower in that metric. It's a free world. I think you would say that people can unsubscribe if they want to. If they're not happy, they'll leave. And meanwhile, if someone's engaging with your emails, as I found out, like, you guys increase the frequency of the sending. And so it's kind of like choose your own adventure, right? And so it's a libertarian sort of approach. Is that a way to fairly describe it?

Yeah, I think the difference is that like Motley Fool is a financial publishing business. Like we are not that. We are a financial media business. Like we're a publisher's clearinghouse. We have all the offers and we want to send them to all of the people. Publishers Clearing House is not worrying about their unsubscribe rates and neither am I. My goal is to send as many customers to Motley Fool, MarketWise, Agora, and everybody company like them. That is how MarketBeat makes money. And the more that I can do that, that's what I want to do. My customers are my advertisers. They're not MarketBeat email subscribers. My goal is to make my customers happy, not necessarily have subscribers that just love MarketBeat and can't wait to open up the MarketBeat email every morning. Like, yes, we like make good content and we want people to enjoy the content, but like our primary goal, our primary goal, and frankly the primary goal of every business is to make money. So like I'm never going to be apologetic for like a thing that's gonna make us more money. Like that's what we're all trying to do here, right? And I'm just—

let me be more specific on that. Yeah, let me double-click on that. So you went to seminary school and asked this to someone who is a Christian himself. Is it possible for you to give an industry example, if possible, of what's something that you wouldn't do because of your Christian values? Like, what is there? Do those things eventually intersect?

Yeah, I mean, there's plenty of opportunities to, like, do shady stuff in our industry. Like, people give you Maybe they give you a customer file and you could abuse the crap out of that, but I won't do that because it's not ethical. There's shady stuff you could do and other people have done them and there are just lines we won't cross of the golden rule really applies in the financial media publishing industry because it's a pretty small space and if you burn people, you get a reputation pretty quickly. There are people that just can't get anybody to work with them anymore because they've burned so many bridges or burned down. Like, there are a lot of companies that got big in our space and no longer exist, like Money Map Press. And there are not just them, Agora Financial, Legacy Research Group. And there are people that have been associated with these things. And like, you can kind of point the finger like, yeah, that's kind of your fault. Like, I don't want to be that guy where like some bad industry event is my fault.

I hear you. Yeah, I mean, I've always felt that it's almost ironic because for asset management, it's very, very tightly regulated. Some might say almost too regulated, but investment newsletters are almost too unregulated. The FTC is the primary regulator. Once or twice the SEC has stepped in, but that's kind of an aberration. And that unregulatedness coupled with the fact that really underneath, I mean, optically you're giving people stock ideas. That's the problem you're solving. But you could argue that underneath people, because investing is a social science, it's a very ambiguous area of life that affects your life. People kind of want this alpha male who's going to come and pound the table and tell them what to do. And relieving the pain of that uncertainty is one of the biggest value adds. And there are people who do that responsibly. And there are, I mean, I'd like to think I was one, maybe I wasn't, but I hope I was. And there are people who abuse that. And there are companies that abuse that also.

And I, yeah, there's this, I don't know, belief on social media that like financial publishers should only exist if like they're consistently outperforming the market, like with your recommendations. And like, I don't think that's the industry. I think it's, I think it's much more like Sports Illustrated than it is like And, or an RIA. I think a lot of it is, you know, I don't know, is it Gore or MarketWise, but they, you know, they surveyed their audience of like what percentage of their people like actually trade based off the information they learn. And it's pretty low. Like, you know, I think people want to learn about companies in a way that people want to learn about sports teams and other hobbies. Like a lot of it is just like people want to be educated about the world they live in and like what the trends are and We know what are companies doing in the world. It's not always just like, "I need trade recommendations. Tell me what stocks to buy." There's much more to it than that.

Yeah, I agree with that. I agree with that as someone whose newsletter actually beat the market for all 10 years that I ran it. So I have weight to throw around in that department if I want to, but I think you're right. It's more like a buffet. I mean, at Fool, we surveyed our customers in my newsletter one time and 88% of people said, oh, updates on my stocks are very important to me, but only like 20-something percent actually read those updates, right? People answer based on the type of investor they perceive themselves as being, but then in reality it's different. And yeah, even though they're paying for all these stocks, and even if the, you know, I could show my track record, it beat the market, like people should be buying my stocks, probably a lot weren't. But if they do, that actually helps with newsletter retention. We found it's huge. You want to get them into stocks if you if you can. Let me just roll back the script really quick, Matt, on one question. In terms of those unsubscribes and those people and you're getting people in the door, is there a risk? Have you thought about the rate that you're getting new people into your funnel? Some are, you know, going off and being buyers of products. Some are unsubscribing. Some are just kinda hanging around. The rate that that's happening versus new people aging in or gaining enough wealth to come into the demographic. Is there a risk that you guys will move too fast in this, in the hopper, so to speak, and not eventually, not enough people will keep coming in to replenish?

No, I mean, nobody really knows the TAM of the financial media publishing industry. The old Agora number is like 15 million people at any given time.

MarketWise says 88 million self-directed investors, whatever that Yeah.

And like I have 18 million records in my database, 6.2 million actively subscribed, never unsubscribed. Of those, maybe 2 to 3 million are really kind of actively opening and clicking on emails and like not inactive. Like there's plenty of room to grow. Like Yahoo Finance is out there and they're much bigger than we are. So like, as long as they exist, like I know there's room to grow. So I'm just, I don't worry about that.

Yep.

And plus like MarketBeat is not just MarketBeat. It's the Early Bird. It's dividendstocks.com. It's insidertrades.com.

And like we have all these different brands out there and the American, what was it? Banking, your original one, right?

The, yeah. American Banking and Market News. Yeah.

You still have one. Yeah.

Which is now a Beehive newsletter called American Market News.

Like, cool. Cool.

Yeah.

Um, all right. What would you say? We talked a lot about your success and it's deserved and it's big. What's your biggest mistake that you're comfortable sharing in business so far?

I think the mistake that I've made a few times is getting distracted by opportunities that aren't big enough. Like, I've always kind of had Markabee going for the last 19 years now. But over the years, I've had friends that wanted to start businesses or friends that wanted me to buy into their business. And when I got in, and I would say this is true about my book publishing too, or I had a press release business for a while. I was in a golf media business. I had this software as a service business that helped animal shelters raise money. None of them were a big enough opportunity for me to really mess with. And I should have realized that ahead of time and I didn't. So over the years I've had all of these distractions and you could even put the VC stuff in that bucket a little bit where it's like I've got my main business and if I were only focused on that, I would definitely make more money. But I let myself get distracted by either side businesses or community projects, And maybe that's what makes life enjoyable. But from a purely business perspective, I let myself get distracted way too often.

I guess you could frame that more positively too. Let me step back. I've always felt there are kind of two archetypal decisions that are just hard for humans. One is how to know when to keep going a little bit more versus when to give up on something. And the second is how to know when to go wide versus when to go deep. And it sounds like you're saying you tend to go a little bit wide when you've got something that's really good if you go deep. But I'm guessing that— I don't know if it's your curiosity. I mean, there are probably some fringe benefits you're getting from pursuing some of those side projects, right? Where there's optionality, whether that's learning, network, something else that you're searching for as you're subconsciously, at least, that you're that you're on the lookout for, is that correct? Yeah.

I mean, I've definitely learned stuff and definitely make some new relationships. There's probably some optionality there. Like if MarketBeat went away tomorrow, I could probably spend more time doing some VC stuff than I do today. So gives like a good plan B career if I ever need one for any reason. But I think I've gotten smart enough now where it's like, okay, I should stay focused on MarketBeat and anything else that like isn't just for the love of the game or for fun. Like I did 20 podcast interviews in the first quarter and like that was a lot of fun. Like that was for the love of the game. It's not really gonna help MarketBeat, but I love doing it. Like how I had a lot of fun with it. So I gotta do more stuff that's like just fun. Like there might be a business component to it, but it's gotta be a lot of fun otherwise, like there's no point to. Doing it.

It's just kind of funny because, you know, you mentioned focusing more on MarketBeat versus, you know, doing these backup careers. You strike me as someone who has both a more fantastic main business than 99.9999% of humans who have ever lived. Yet also, you could do 8 other different careers if you needed to. Like, you have that kind of optionality and you have wide and deep, I guess, is what I'm getting at in a world that most people frankly have neither. It's just pretty amazing.

Yeah, I think that's fair. I mean, I'm kind of a psychopath, but I'll work all day and then come home and feed the kids supper, give my daughter a bath, and then get inspired, be like, okay, I just want to work for another hour because I got a good idea.

Do you have hobbies, many hobbies outside of work and your charitable organizations that you support?

I used to, like I'll walk my dogs. I do that a lot, but like I used to bike a lot. Don't do that as much anymore. I used to play video games. Don't do that as much anymore. I don't really watch TV. It's just those things are not as fun as like playing the game of business to me. Like, Like, I— like, every time a new World of Warcraft comes out, like, you know, I played it in college because like that was the thing to do back then, like through Wrath of the Lich King, you know, it was awesome. And now like new expansion comes out and like I'll buy it and install it, I'll play for 2 hours and then like, yeah, maybe I'll come back to this, and then I just never do. Like, it's, uh, those things are not nearly as fun as the game of business to me.

That's great. I mean What you're saying is it's not that you've lost— it's not that the game is less interesting per se, it's just your something else has just gotten so much better. How much time in a week do you spend with your kids typically?

I don't— I'd say a lot. I walk my daughter to school every morning. I typically drive my son to school. They have different start times, maybe once a week. I mean, Most, most, I don't see 'em every night, obviously. Like, you know, I'm usually in charge of supper. Weekends I'm hanging out with my kids. So I mean, for, I think as much as I could for somebody who's got a full-time job, I'm pretty male. Like, so in Sioux Falls there's always, there's like these 7:30 AM events that like go to like 9:00 AM and they want you to come at 7:30 and I don't go to any of them 'cause I take my daughter to school at 7:45. Or I'll just show up late and nobody cares because everybody knows I'm like super rich and they don't want to piss me off. So like, you know, we're having a mayoral election in June. We're going to get a new mayor for the first time in 8 years. So they had like a—

this—

the Chamber of Commerce had a debate this morning and like doors opened at 6:45, program started at 7:30 and it went till 9. I was like, well, I'm just going to show up at 8:15 and I'm sure there'll be a chair for me somewhere. So I got there at 8:15 and the gal from the chamber waved at me and I just went and sat down at an open spot and like, well, I heard the second half of it and I'm happy with the choice that I made this morning.

You've got pull. People say wealth exaggerates people's personalities for better and for worse. And it sounds like it's certainly better in your case. If you get to a point where you wanted to do a little less of MarketBeat, I've heard you say in other podcasts, you want to do it the rest of your life and that's great. But let's say, you know, maybe you want to scale down your hours. Would you see yourself ever doing more in the church? I know you have a seminary degree. Would you pursue any of that or other causes instead?

I think the skill sets to be a good lay church leader and a good business person are not the same at all. The men in my church who are elders are, they're older, they're wiser, they're more patient than I am. They probably read more scripture than I do. And then I think of what my business goals are and like, they're just very, very different things. Like I was the treasurer in my church for a few years and I was happy to do that. But when I look at me internally, like I don't think I'm elder material, like, I think if I were like a main church leader, like I don't think that's how I'm wired and I don't think that's how God created me to be. Got it. I think God created me to like go be awesome at business and then go do a bunch of good things for other people with the money the business makes. And like, I think that's my calling.

I think if I recall correctly, Warren Buffett has said something similar, like he's not that good at giving money away. He's much better at making money, so he wants to focus on that and then give it to people who are better at giving it away than he is. Now, church is a little different from charity, but there's a similar thread.

Yeah, you know, I think there's plenty of good people in our community to be church leaders. I don't think like we're short of church leaders who are like, I'm desperately needed there. I think like where I've kind of communicated with like my, the congregation I'm part of right now is like, you know, I'm probably like not the right person to be on a committee or like an elder or most of the normal church volunteers. But if you come up with a problem that's too big that nobody knows how to solve, like you call me and I will help and figure it out. Um, so like we planted a church probably 6, 7 years ago now and had to raise like a million bucks to do it. And like nobody knew how to run a capital campaign. It was like, well, I'll give it a shot. Like, I think I can do this. And we ended up raising like $700,000, $800,000. And like, you know, that was more than enough that we needed to do it. And like the church plant is still there and they're doing just fine. So it's like, like that's when I love to get involved with church is like when the skills that are needed are like my skills, like it's like when those are in need, like, I'm all there, I'm all about it. Um, but like in the normal day-to-day of like church where you don't want a crazy bull in a china shop entrepreneur, like, you should probably just kind of leave me off to the side where I won't cause any trouble.

What's interesting, Matt, about your answers, uh, not just self-awareness but restraint. A lot of people not everybody, but some people, as they get more successful in life, and we see this on Twitter now, they feel an obligation to weigh in on everything, whether they're expert on it or they're not, right? Because guess what? They're successful. They know everything. You are not afflicted by that. And that clarity strikes me as a rare blessing. So, I think you definitely have the gift, the blessing of discernment. Let me shift.

Go ahead. No, I've got strong opinions on the stuff that I know a lot about, and I very intentionally have no opinions about stuff that I don't really know anything about. Like, I don't know very much about the Israel-Palestine conflict, and like, I don't have a strong— I don't share strong opinions about it, and like, I never talk about it or like anything like that. Or like, what do you think about the war on Iran? It's like, I have no idea. I don't know anything. But like, what— I'm an advertising entrepreneur. Like, what would I know about it? Like, I've I don't need to have an opinion, and if I do have an opinion, I don't need to share it.

Before I go to some— one more future of the industry question, then a lightning round, we'll wrap up. Let me just get your take on one more general kind of question. What advice would you give both to a young Matt Paulson, if you talk to your, let's say, your high school self, or to someone selfishly, like my son, 17 years old, he's in high school, going to college pretty soon, like a typical kid. You know, he probably is on the phone too much, right? Screen time is very addictive. He's got some ideas about what he wants, but he's facing a different world than I was or than you were when we were coming out of school. You know, someone who wants to not just succeed but kind of find themselves and then succeed, because I think you've done a much better job at finding yourself than most people have. What advice on that would you give to a young person?

Well, I think the world that I grew up in and the world that you grew up in, like, long gone. It doesn't exist anymore. And I think the global economic order is going to be rapidly reshaped by AI one way or the other. And like, there are going to be a lot of people that make a lot of money because of AI, and then there are going to be people who don't have jobs anymore because AI does their job. And in that reshuffling of the global economic order, there's going to be great opportunities and you have to find your spot in that reshuffling. So if I'm my 13-year-old son Micah and I really want to take on the world, I play with every new AI tool that comes out as much as I can all day, every day, and try to figure out where there's an opportunity to be made. And there'll be plenty of opportunities. So, like, that's what I would do if I were 17.

Makes sense. I will tell him, too. My son, like your son, was also born premature. Actually, I read your blog about that. Speaking of the future, speaking of AI and media, Matt, when I was at Motley Fool, I started in 2004, and it seemed like all you had to do was write a catchy little or cutesy little headline and you get a lot of eyeballs. I mean, the internet existed then, but increasingly everybody who can be a publisher is, and frankly, got a lot of people who are publishing maybe shouldn't be. They don't quite know enough. I mean, they're exercising their freedom of speech. With AI, that problem seems to now have been exacerbated. We got just so much content. Are we at risk of kind of a dumbification of media, like a dilution? Like, in other words, it's not just the more fragmented pie, Right? We've got a bazillion Substackers, for example. But could the overall value be brought down because media could be such a mosh pit, a cesspool? There's no longer the professional— I mean, there could be still professional curation, but nobody wants to pay for it, right? So you got everybody popping out of everywhere. Is that a risk?

Yeah. What some call the enshittification of content is like absolutely real, like totally happening. And I think the response to that is people are just looking for trusted voices to listen to. There are experts in every different topic and you're looking for your person that you trust. And so I think the value shifts from general brands like Markabee towards people that are the expert on a topic and you trust their voice and you trust their opinions and you trust their thinking. I think that's the trend.

To each man his tribe, right? Yeah.

And like, you know, you probably have like, you know, 5 or 6 different people you listen to and maybe it's their podcast or their YouTube channel or whatever, but you find kind of your tribe and you find your trusted voices and then like that's kind of what you limit your content to. I think a really good example of this was the the Artemis II kind of mission, um, there were a lot of photos posted on Twitter that like, like this, like, oh, Artemis II just took this photo. And then like in the community notes, it's like, nope, this is, uh, not from Artemis II. It's, uh, uh, you know, um, 3D rendered like image of screenshot from a sci-fi movie or so.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's like, it's not real. So like then you think like, okay, I can't trust this stuff anymore because most of it's fake. So it's like, I want to go see the art, like the actual photos. And so like, okay, I'm just going to go to the NASA photo archive and just like go look at the new photos there. So it's trying to find those places that you trust and not just kind of looking at the feed, which is increasingly like AI slop.

Yep. A buddy of mine, Alan Jagelinszor, I think Dean of the Business School at Cambridge now, originally an accounting professor, now runs the Cambridge Disinformation Summit. Like there's a lot of science now to decoding what's legit and what's not, and people all over the world have different motivations, and some of it's political, but, you know, people in Finland, for example, kids are trained to spot Russian disinformation at a young age, right, because that's like a big problem there. I did a lot of business with China for many years, and certainly there too, so it's just a sign of the times, the era we live in. Let me wrap us up, Matt, with a lightning round. This is your kind of, you'll see, very casual questions, no need to like ponder too deeply, just kind of a, you know, quick gut answer, keeping it lively. Long talks or long walks?

Both.

Nice, nice. Favorite TV show as a kid?

Star Trek: The Next Generation.

That came quickly. Last car that you bought?

Oh, I bought a 2026 G63 G-Wagon.

Oh, fancy. Would you rather hire or fire an employee?

Ooh, hire. That's way easier.

Fire can be better for the company, right? Sometimes. But yeah, it's fun.

And like, you have to do both.

But okay, one you've answered already. Yeah, I was going to say risk that media gets too diluted with AI slop. It sounds like that's meaningful. Legacy investment newsletter companies smaller or larger in 15 years?

Ooh, I think the business model will exist. Um, just fine. I don't know that it'll be the same group of companies. Yep.

Biggest regret in life or business that you're okay to share?

Hmm, I didn't brush my teeth when I was a kid and I got a bunch of fake teeth.

Wow, interesting. It's good to share too, because for kids out there thinking about not brushing their teeth. You go. If you had to have just one thought, just one thought for an hour, what would it be?

One thought for an hour? I don't know. I don't have an answer to that.

No worries. No worries. All right. More simple. Simply how to find Matt Paulson. Someone says, I like this guy. I want more of Matt Paulson. Where can they go to find him?

Two things. I publish a quarterly update, email newsletter, one email every quarter, mattpaulson.com. If you want to get that. And then I'm very active on Twitter. My new Twitter username, thanks to the handleless marketplace, is MediaKing. So look up MediaKing on Twitter.

MediaKing. Nice, nice words for a tombstone. Twitter. All right. MediaKing on Twitter. We will put those in the show notes and little notes on the screen so people can go to find you. Matt Paulson, it is great to talk to you. I'm a fan, as you know already, of you, of your business, I love South Dakota, your home state. We need more Matt Paulsons in this world. Nice, straightforward Midwesterners. And you do a great job helping to foster the startup ecosystem in the Midwest. I know various people in the VC space who, from different angles, try to come at kind of underserved segments or niches. And I'm happy to see you doing that. So thank you very much for taking the time to chat with me. I hope it was useful. And one of these days, maybe we chat again on this, on this platform. And thanks to you guys for watching us at home. Cool.