This content was created by Matt Paulson. This content was uploaded by Matt Paulson. This is a YouTube video titled "How MarketBeat Grew by 71% in 2018" (created 2018-12-04) featuring Matthew Paulson presenting a first-person account of MarketBeat's growth from about $3.5M to ~$6M in revenue. Paulson explains the primary drivers: personally focusing exclusively on MarketBeat (no side projects) and materially increasing advertising spend based on proven lead economics (paying ~$1–$3 per lead and earning roughly $7 back over two years), and he offers practical lessons on prioritization, unit economics, and scaling via advertising. The content is a single-speaker monologue directed at entrepreneurs rather than a multi-person conversation.
Questions this video answers
About $3.5 million last year and about $6 million this year.
About $300,000 last year and about $1,000,000 in the current year.
Acquisition cost: about $1–$3 per email sign-up; revenue return: roughly $7 over two years.
He aims to break even on the lead in 90 days and to double his money by the end of the first year.
Chapters
Hey everyone, Matthew Paulson here. And I wanted to record a quick video today to talk about something exciting that's happened in MarketBeat this year. Last year we did about $3.5 million in revenue and this year we've been able to grow it up to about 6 million. And that's, you know, a pretty good growth rate by any means. It's almost, but not quite double the business. And I wanted to talk a little bit about how we've been able to do that. There are a lot of traditional kind of growth levers that help people kind of grow their companies. And really none of those things were what caused our growth to happen this year. First, our marketing strategy really didn't change. We didn't advertise in any new places in any big way. We didn't change the copy. We didn't do some amazing conversion optimization, anything like that. Our marketing strategy has been very consistent. We get traffic from our news websites, we get traffic on MarketBeat from people researching stocks and we buy leads through co registration advertising on many different websites. Second, we didn't change our prices. Our prices have stayed flat. So we're charging the same amount for our premium products and basically the same amount for our advertising, same CPC rates as we were pretty much a year ago. So that really hasn't changed either. The market hasn't been super hot. It's not like the industry is just going crazy right now. The stock market is down a little bit. So honestly, there are probably fewer people looking at our product and our advertisers products than there were six months ago. It's not any of those things. We haven't hired any new employees this year. I'd like to hire a couple next year. Honestly, we need them. But it's not like we've had some new talent that has been infused into the company that's really helped us grow. It hasn't been that. Honestly, what has helped our company grow this year has been really two things. First, I have done zero side projects this year in the past. Last year, the year before, I was doing a lot of side projects to make money off them. Writing books was one of those things. I was doing a podcast for a while, Start Q and a podcast. Honestly, I quit all of those things because the opportunity cost for them, which is simply too high. I didn't start any new businesses this year. I've tried to tone down some of those commitments that I have for volunteer things. And I've really put the emphasis of my time and my energy and my money on marketbeat this year. And that has done amazing. What I'm finding is that to grow, say my book business, which makes maybe 50 grand a year, to grow that by 10% is really the same amount of energy it takes to grow market beat by 10%. So do you want to grow the thing that's making $50,000 a year or do you want to grow the thing that's making $5 million a year? And for me, obviously the choice is $5 million a year business. So I've been saying I'm not going to do anything for financial reasons other than Build MarketBeat because that is my best opportunity. So I'm following all of my time into my best opportunity. And I'm just saying no to side projects, no matter how good they sound, no matter how easy money it sounds like the answer is no. I've got to stay focused on MarketBeat. The second thing we've done is we have significantly ramped up our advertising spend over the last several years. We've kind of figured out that I can pay anywhere from a dollar to $3 to acquire an email sign up, kind of depending on the quality of the lead. And then I know over the course of about two years I'll make $7 back. So we really have that honed in. And I kind of know that I need to break even on the lead in 90 days. I want to get double my money back after kind of the end of the first year and, and then after that anything else is gravy. So we really have those numbers down. I know that for any given lead source in any given month, I know exactly how much those leads cost me and then how much revenue they generated from me from say a dedicated email send or a newsletter sponsorship, or them clicking through to a slideshow on our website or them buying premium subscriptions. I know those exact numbers. So I can say, okay, this lead source is working really well and this lead source is not working at all. So because we've been able to get those numbers down hard, I know I can just pour money into advertising right now. So we spent about 300 grand in advertising last year and we're going to by the end of this year we're spent to have about a million dollars in advertising. So obviously that's more than threefold increase. And honestly of that six million, I could probably say one and a half to two of that is directly from that advertising this year because we're kind of in a scale up year, we'll actually benefit more from all the ad spend next year. Than we did this year. Certainly going to keep that moving forward. But that's easily 1 to 2 million dollars in revenue has showed up because of that ad spend. And of course, that will increase next year as those leads progress. So that's how MarketBeat has grown so much this year. It's really been those two things. No side projects, and more advertising spent. Hopefully you can pick something out of this video and figure out how you can apply that to your business. Really, what I hope you guys get out of this video is that there really are no magic tricks to growing your business. It's doing the work. It's figuring stuff out. It's figuring out what your customers want, how your marketing works, how to deliver your product, and then how do you scale that? It's focusing on business. It's doing the work. It's figuring out the advertising and then advertising it. It's not figuring out some amazing marketing strategy. It's not the best pricing. It's not getting the best employee. It's none of those things. It's just identifying a solution for your market, delivering it, and then figuring out how to advertise at its scale. That's really what MarketBeat as a business is. And honestly, that's what most businesses are. So hopefully you can take that away from this video. Thanks, everybody.
