In this interview Matt Paulson outlines the dramatic revenue growth of his company, which went from roughly $7 million in 2019 to $25 million by 2021 and is projected to reach $47‑50 million in 2025. He attributes the surge to three major inflection points: (1) pioneering automated financial‑content templates that generated zero‑cost email sign‑ups; (2) a strategic shift from organic traffic to heavy paid advertising, now accounting for about 80% of revenue with monthly ad spends of $1‑2 million; and (3) leveraging SMS as a core monetization channel, contributing roughly one‑third of total revenue. Paulson explains their disciplined channel‑testing process—spending $20‑50 k to validate a new paid source, measuring cost‑per‑lead, conversion rates, and payback periods, which have shortened from 90 days to 45‑50 days in recent years. He also discusses the scale of ad spend, ROAS expectations, and the importance of data‑driven cohort analysis to sustain growth.
Chapters
I was reading a bit more about kind of the evolution of the company and you— it seems like, correct me if I'm wrong, but you went from basically $2 million to $50 million annually in 10 years. And I can't imagine that that was very smooth. So like, walk me through kind of the 2 to 3 kind of biggest inflection points for the business, things that you changed. Like, that just seems like a stratospheric rise in not too long a time.
Yeah. Before COVID we were maybe a $5 to $10 million a year business. So 2019, we made $7.7 million in revenue. 2020, we doubled. And then in 2021, we almost doubled again. So we went from $7 million to $25 million in like 2 years. I mean, we entirely rode like the COVID investing wave and really capitalized on that. Because when you search for GameStop short interest, GameStop short squeeze, like we were right there. Same for AMC, same for Silver, all of the stocks people were talking about. We were perfectly positioned. And I mean, honestly, we kind of got lucky because we just right place, right time, right? And '22, like the COVID money started slowing down, people went back to work, not a great year. But then we've turned it around in '23, '24, '25. Like we'll probably hit somewhere between $47 and $50 million this year depending on how the last 2 months of the year shake out. Um, last month was probably our best month ever. I think we did $5.2 million in advertising sales. So if we do that, if we do that again this month, we might hit $50 this year, which would be awesome. Yeah. Last year was like $41. Um, I think the, the, the inflection points, like there were probably 3 huge inflection points in the business. One was like 10 years ago, we kind of pioneered the idea of automated financial content of like company announces their earnings. We can kind of take that data, put it into a template, publish an article about it, get it to pick up in Google Finance, Yahoo Finance, MSN Money. People would come to our website, there'd be a pop-up ad on the article, they'd sign up for email list. Like our CPA on those email signups was basically zero. So like that was awesome. And then in more recent years, we've had a big shift from organic to paid of like these days, like 80% of our revenue comes from kind of our paid advertising spend. It's, we've much less based off organic these days. And that might not be the exact right percentage, but the majority of like the advertising revenue we generate is 'cause we spend $1 million, $2 million on ads a month right now to generate $5 million.
That is absolutely insane. I mean, I heard, or I saw you talking about this, that you're spending 7 figures a month on paid traffic. I've also like heard that you have a lot of kind of customized software tooling that you've built to do analyses on cohort analyses, ensuring like, you know, that they're able to return, you know, you get a return on those. Like, that game feels, I think, very foreign to a lot of creators in media, you know, just influencers in general and things like that. To what do you attribute the conviction to spend that much money? Is it basically just like very simple math here? Like, I'm spending this much and I'm seeing, you know, 5x ROAS or something on it? Or did you have a fear of shifting everything, you know, being largely organic to largely paid, that the quality would degrade?
Well, I mean, it happened over a period of a few years, right? So it's not something we did overnight. So when we onboard a new channel, what we do is we say, okay, I'm going to spend $20,000 to $50,000 to test a channel just to like know if it's going to work or not. So we'll run something probably $10,000 a month for a few months and kind of watch what happens. Like, okay, we paid $10,000. How many signups did we get? 5,000. We paid $2 a lead. Then, you know, from those people, how much money did we make back? Like how many of them signed up for MarketBeat All Access? How many of them bought something from an advertiser with a conversion postback, what's the open rate, what's the click-through rate. And then it's pretty easy to tell, like, when you have the data, like, which channels are good and which are not good.
What's your payback period that you're targeting?
Historically, like, we'd be happy with, like, a co-ed channel if we broke even at 90 days. In more recent years, that timeline has shortened up because, I don't know, the market's been hot. You know, these days we're probably breaking even by day 45 or 50. Some channels for breaking even in that 30 days, like our AdWords last month, like, we've basically already broken even on, which is great.
Say more about— I just want to go back to SMS for a second here. Like, how do you view— you were replying to someone on Twitter and you mentioned that like SMS is the new email. So like, how do you view email versus SMS in terms of your overall strategy?
So last month SMS was about a third of our revenue. It's kind of been that most of the year.
Whoa, a third?
A third. Yeah. So I had—
That's crazy.
I have a $300,000 to $400,000 Twilio bill a month. But then that makes 1.5 to 1.7 million. So like, send out a ton, a ton of texts, you know, our SMS list, 400,000 and change. There's no deliverability problems with SMS. Like, you have a shortcode and you send a text to somebody, chances are it's gonna go through and they're gonna see it, so.
