I Make $50M/Year With My Newsletter | Matt Paulson

The people that kind of chase the trend and go thing to thing to thing, they tend not to make it because they're chasing the trend more than like having an original idea.

2 million revenue per employee. What does that kind of team structure look like?

So we have kind of three teams. We have a tech team, software development, product team that kind of does, you know, the backend CRM, but it also does like all of our websites. That's six people, maybe seven.

Today's guest built one of the most profitable newsletters in the world and turned it into a $50 million a year media empire.

It's compounding relationships, it's compounding like business knowledge of like the industry. And then you just kind of figure out all these things and they all kind of compound upon each other and then you can, can scale more where others can't.

His name is Matt Paulson and he's the founder of MarketBeat, a financial publishing powerhouse that reaches tens of millions of investors every single month.

I would say there's kind of two inflection points in the business.

The first one, and in today's episode, we unpack the acquisition engine behind MarketBeat from Google or meta ads to Coredge and internal cross promotion.

Yeah, we run Google Ads, we run meta ads, we run Bing ads, we run ads on YouTube, we buy placements and other people's emails. We spend like a couple hundred thousand a month on a newsletter and that money gets spread out a lot of different places.

Why? Staying in his lane has allowed Matt to run a lean, wildly profitable company and design the lifestyle that he actually wants and how he thinks about monetization, cross subscription ads, affiliates and multi brand expansion.

We knew that like to make money on our email list, we were either going to need our own products to sell people or like have some great affiliate relationship. Basically anybody who's a financial advertiser, like we'll work with and like anything that's not investing related, we just don't touch because it never works.

So if you want to learn how one operator built a media machine that prints eight figures, just 20 employees, and this is the episode for you. Matt didn't grow up around money. He didn't have connections, investors, or a safety net. So he started the way most real entrepreneurs do, through trial and error and figuring it out one win at a time.

Yeah, you know, I've kind of. We grew up lower middle class, we had a home. It was pretty small, but you know, a lot of it was that, you know, we needed money and like money wasn't going to come from my parents, I had to go get it somewhere. So as a kid I'd go collect aluminum cans from the park and recycle them. And then later on, middle school, high school, I figured out how to make some money on the Internet. And not very much, like 100 bucks a month, but like from a little website that I had that had ads on it. And when it, you know, woke up in college one day and like needed money to pay tuition. And where I was in a small college town, as I was like, okay, I need to pay tuition, like that money is just not there by working at McDonald's or at a gas station. Like, I need to go figure out how to make more. And so I had to, you know, I kind of started my online business because of that, just to pay tuition and from the business, really grew up from there.

Cool. And I think you grew up pretty quickly, right? Did I read correctly that within the year of leaving college, you were doing about 75k from the kind of online stuff? Is that, is that true?

Graduated 2008. And I think 2008 I made like 60 grand. And maybe 2009, like 75 and 2010, 130. So I was making a full time salary kind of right out of college with it. And it's certainly grown from there and out the gate.

Was there an experimentation period where you were trying a bunch of different business models or what did that kind of initial period look like?

Yeah, when I was first getting started, I was really trying to follow like the portfolio entrepreneur model. There's a guy named Rob Walling on Minneapolis who his current thing is called Tiny Seed, but you know, he's kind of runs the microconf event. And like what he was teaching back then was like, you can start all these little online businesses to add up to a full time salary. And I was doing that. Like I had a press release distribution business that I grew it to like 200 grand a year in revenue. And then I sold it. I had a software business that helped animal shelters raise money called GOKO Photo Contest. We grew that to about 500k a year in revenue. I had two partners in that and I sold it to them. I had a little media business in the golf space called US golftb. I ended up selling that back to the two partners that I was in it with. And ultimately what happened was like, you know, you had MarketBeat and then the other things, but then MarketBeat got really big and I just, it didn't really make sense to keep putting time into the Other things. So I ended up getting out of them and either selling stuff to partners or just to other people so I could focus on MarketBeat more and more.

And MarketBeat didn't become a powerhouse overnight. It grew through a couple of pivotal moments, the kind that decide whether a business stalls or explodes. And here are the two inflection points that changed everything.

I would say there's kind of two inflection points in the business that, like, there was one that got me from six figures to seven figures, then one that got me from seven figures to eight figures. The first one kind of dates back to 20, 20, 11, 2012, 2013. We figured out how to do automated financial content, like, long before, you know, ChatGPT existed. But we would take kind of structured financial data of, like, here is like, here are all the numbers from, like, an earnings announcement, company analysis, or quarterly earnings. They're public. We could take that, put it into a template, make an article from it that sounded pretty good, publish that on our website, get it picked up by, like, yahoo. Finance&msn money and google Finance, and get people to our website. So we could publish, you know, a hundred articles a day, get a lot of free traffic that way, collect the email signups, collect the ad revenue. And that, that was really a shortcut to, like, get to the million dollar a year mark. And that was awesome. The second one was during COVID Like, there was a big macro trend there of everybody was staying at home, get free money from the government. Robinhood just came on the scene. The Wall street bets was like the huge thing. So there's a lot of meme stock kind of activity. So we really rode that way from 5 million a year to 25 million a year in three or four years. So, like, had a huge kind of growth pivot from that. We've been able to maintain it and grow from there. This year we'll probably end up at like, 48 to 50 million. And hopefully we can grow from there.

Congrats. Every media company lives or dies by its traffic. And MarketBeat survived because Matt learned very quickly what happens and what can go wrong when you rely on one single platform. So let's dive into the evolution of his traffic strategy.

We've kind of ridden a lot of different waves. We were. So we got hit by Google algorithm updates really early, like the first Panda update, the first Penguin updates, and really realized, like, okay, we don't want to build a company that is dependent upon a big tech company to exist. So I thought, like, I need to build owned media channels Whereas like I'm not building on a Facebook group or Facebook can change the rules and then I can't reach my Facebook group or Facebook page anymore. I don't want to build an app where Apple kind of decides if I get attention in the app store or not. So that really led me to focus. Initially it was all web Traffic and Google AdSense and made some decent money doing that. But I thought, okay, this is, it's building on quicksand. Like Google could change the rules any day and I'm done. So that made me think, okay, I need to get as many people on an email list as possible because if Google stops sending it to my website, I can, you know, send an email and tell people, hey, come to the website and check this thing out. So that was kind of the first own media channel was that you kind

of pushing site traffic to the email list or what did that kind of evolution look like?

You know, people would go to an article about a stock like say Wells Fargo, and then there'd be a pop up on a page saying, hey, do you want news about Wells Fargo delivered to your inbox automatically fill out this form. And I think the next kind of evolution from there, 2016 or so, was kind of the browser notifications that you kind of do through one signal. And companies like that. We were really the first kind of company in the finance category to implement them. And first couple years we printed a bunch of money off them because nobody else is doing it. And it hadn't gotten really annoying yet.

What does that look like? So these are the push notifications, right?

Yeah, like Google Chrome or Edge or whatever, browser notifications. You know, something pops up saying, hey, do you want these? But we would send out ads on them and we would make a bunch of money doing that. I think over the course of the last 10 years we've made between 5 and 10 million through those and like it definitely like peaked like probably through 21. Now Chrome and Edge and others make it a lot harder to like get those opt ins. So like that category has fallen off. But like, like the fact that we jumped on it early, like was really helpful. From there we kind of realized like there's like this gravitational force that limits an email list from being above a certain size because like you get more than a million people on an email list, it's really hard to like get a million of the same email delivered to an inbox. So like your unsubscribe rates go up, your bounce rates go up. You know, you get filtered into promotions or even spam sometimes. So I thought, okay, maybe the play is to not have one email list, maybe the place to have five email lists. And you know, we did that with some other sites like Early Bird Publishing or the Early Bird. Like that's a huge list for us. Now we have dividendstocks.com, insidertrades.com and I've tried to make the same business four or five times in slightly different angles and that's worked pretty well for us. And then more recently SMS has become a huge thing for us. So like on every opt in forum we have a phone number field now and we just try to collect as many SMS opt ins as we can because it just makes us a lot of money.

What are we talking kind of conversion rates on the SMS side once you've got an email? Is that substantial or is it a small number?

Well, kind of. For comparison, you know, the email list is about 6 million subscribers and we have 400,000 SMS subscribers. So you know, it's 10% maybe. But what you also find is that SMS subscribers are worth way more. It used to be the case that you wouldn't want to put anything other than the email address form on your opt in because it would tank your opt in rates. That's not really true anymore, at least in my experience. You can put a phone number field on there that's optional and not really lose anything on your conversion rates. And I think a lot of it's because autocomplete fills your email on your phone in four years so it just happens automatically. So like that's been been great for

us in terms of the messaging or the delivery to sms. Obviously the open rates are super high, but what kind of content will you send out, you know, in comparison to an email?

Yeah, what you find with SMS is that you gotta be a lot more sensitive on volume. Like you probably only want to send one text a day for the most part. So typically what we'll do is we send like one content piece out a day. That's kind of the value that they get. It's kind of like maybe a stock of the day and not like we're endorsing the st recommending a stock. But it's like here's an interesting company if you want to learn about it. And then like maybe later in the day we'll send out an ad for something and you know, does really well with that.

And then in terms of the YouTube organic I saw you guys got to, I think it was 400k subs insane quickly, first question here is how do you kind of evaluate adding like a new traffic source or a new kind of channel in, in that way?

You know, a lot of it was like, we just kind of knew, like we kind of feel like email is tapped out for us for now. It's harder to get in the inbox. SMS is regulated, so it's great, but like you could trip up a role and just kind of be done the next day, so that would be bad. We kind of felt like we had done what we could with the web, so we tried a podcast and like, that didn't really take off. So we thought, okay, let's try YouTube because like it was great discoverability there. Um, so we, you know, we like, we knew it worked because there are other investing YouTube channels. We kind of knew what we had to do in terms of like, go find talent, you know, find guests. And then like we had to point all of our other traffic at the YouTube channel to grow it. So like, you know, get people on email list to go to the YouTube channel, get people on the SMS list to go to the YouTube channel, you know, all this stuff like that. So like, that certainly helped from an organic perspective. The other thing that we did on YouTube that really helped us grow is we, we took all the adsense money we were making and just put that back into YouTube promotions to promote our own videos so they get a lot of extra discoverability that they would normally get.

And on this kind of ecosystem piece you mentioned there, you're kind of pointing traffic all over to the new channel, to different channels, et cetera. How do you view this kind of ecosystem of the different channels that you've got? And how do you kind of segment out the viewers or the kind of different pieces?

Yeah, I mean, we call this kind of cross channel pollinization of, you know, we're just trying to build audiences on as many kind of owned media channels as we can. And you know, if you get something new, like can you get people from your other channels to sign up on that channel? Because like the more channels that somebody subscribes to you on, like, the more valuable they are to you. So if, you know, if somebody's on email, you want to get to the website and sign up for browser notifications, or maybe you want to send them an email to get them to opt into SMS, or maybe they're already in SMS, you want to get them your YouTube channel to subscribe over there or you want to follow you on social media just trying to get people to bounce to all the places and, you know, maybe they're like, oh, I'm getting too much email from Archipe, but I love the YouTube channel. I'm going to go subscribe over there just like to get people as many places as we can.

And you mentioned they're kind of trying the podcast and that not working. Contrasting that with kind of YouTube, when you're launching a new channel, what, what signals will tell you, like, this is working or this isn't and kind of, you know, whether it's a double down or not.

I would say that the thing that we'll look for is like, is there discoverability on the channel? Like, can you get people there like that you don't bring there on podcasting, that's really tough to do. But on YouTube, like, they'll show your videos to other people if they're good, right? So, like, we look for that. We also look for like, you know, do we have any unfair advantages that we can use to grow it? And like YouTube, we felt like we did because we have a lot of money, so we could spend a lot of money on promotions to grow the channel until we decide we want to make it profitable. We also, like, there's a lot of local news talent here that would love to not be on the local news. So, like, we found a great host. We felt like we had a lot of guests that we could interview between our writers. And then like people in our industry just had a ton of connections. So, like, we're building out a studio for that now and like putting a lot of money into it. We think we can just keep growing that.

Nice. From like a analysis of the data. This feels like a bit of a kind of spider's web. How are you kind of tracking that of, you know, someone's reading an email, going over to YouTube, you know, they're worth a certain amount on what channels. And then how do you kind of analyze the success of the kind of individual channels?

Yeah, well, we built a custom kind of CRM system over the last 15 years. So if somebody is subscribed on email and SMS and browser notifications, like, we know all of that in our system, YouTube is kind of more of a, you know, it's its own bucket. Like, you can't really, you don't really know if somebody's subscribed on YouTube or not, but that, that's totally fine. So it's like you kind of had your core data set and then of people, but then like, you're willing to, you know, use those to push people into Other buckets that are maybe, like, less. We have kind of less knowledge of the situation, but, like, there's value there, so you're willing to do it.

Okay, but how are you tracking the kind of. Or are you kind of basing these decisions based on, like, you know, LTV or cacs and things like this on email estimate?

Sure, definitely. Because, like, with all of our paid spend, the goal is to get email signups. So, you know, what I'll do is for, say, all of our AdWords leads, for the month of November, we spent X dollars. And then we know from that cohort of people, we made Y dollars. So we can measure Prof. Really, really, really easily on all of our paid spend. Really, the only paid spend we usually can't is kind of the YouTube stuff.

Okay. So you just kind of leave that. It's a new channel. You're trying to push the growth, and you just kind of segment that out almost.

Yeah. Like, I know what it costs us to run it and what we spend on ads every month and how much it makes, but, like, from a granularity perspective, that level of detail is not there.

Okay, and on the paid side, like, how often are you digging into these numbers? Is this kind of like a, you know, you're adjusting ad spend every hour or, you know, monthly views? What. What does that kind of window look like for YouTube?

I'm, you know, a lot. It's entirely kind of discoverability ads, you know, promotions of our videos on YouTube. There's not really a whole lot of science that goes into it because it's just like you're at the whims of the platform. But it's, you know, we try to get a new subscriber for a dollar, and then they. I don't know. We're in kind of a. A restricted category of, like, we're talking about investments. Um, so, like, a lot of videos they won't approve to promote. So you just kind of have to, like, go through videos until they approve one and then put some budget behind it. And, like, are we getting the cost per lead that we're looking for? Yeah, and then we just keep putting money at it. But then, like, eventually the video will get kind of dated because who cares about what happened in the stock market three months ago? So then you can't promote that anymore. And then you got to go get a new video and get that approved and throw a budget behind it. And one of our. A gal named Lacey does that for us. She kind of keeps an eye on it and allocates the budget and she knows what she should spend every month.

Now most founders panic when acquisition costs rise, but Matt went the other way. He started spending over a million dollars a month to scale faster and now he's going to break that figure down for us.

So Initially we were 100% organic SEO traffic to the newsletter. And that's really shifted in recent years. Now we're 80% paid at least in terms of where the revenue comes from. And that money gets spread out a lot of different places. You know, certainly all the usual suspects of like, you know, we run Google Ads, we run meta ads, we run Bing ads, we run ads on YouTube. Then we also buy a lot of co registration ads of like, you know, networks like after offers in Sparkloop, like we have offers on kind of those networks and then we buy placements and other people's emails because like you're an email subscriber on one investing list, you probably want to be on another one. So we spend like a couple hundred thousand a month on newsletter ads and other people's newsletters. Yeah.

What's the split between those other paid sources roughly?

Let's see, so meta is 150amonth right now adroids is probably like 300amonth, that's 450, 650 with the newsletters by 250. Encore, 100 of miscellaneous stuff.

Now traffic is just half the game. Monetization is key. And in this section we're going to break down how MarketBeat makes their money, the engine behind their eight figure revenue and what they don't do.

You know, early on it was all kind of programmatic network display ads, Google adsense, stuff like that. And obviously like there's no big kind of ad network for email. It's not like you can just stick AdSense code inside an email and like doesn't exist. Right. So like we knew that like to make money on our email list we were either going to need our own products to sell people or like have some great affiliate relationships. And over the years we've just developed some great affiliate relationships. We also do some lead gen for kind of other companies in our space do some of that. We'll do some investor relations work for public companies. Basically anybody who's a financial advertiser we'll work with and anything that's not investing related we just don't touch because it never works.

How do you decide which kind of products to push and where to push them?

You know, everything's, almost everything we do is performance based. So like we're going to try to find the stuff that converts the most and pays the most. And there are a few media companies in our category and we talk to them all the time about what's working and what's not. And you know, it's like, hey, are you working with the Oxford Club? It's like, no, we're not working with the Oxford Club. Should we. Yeah, you should go work with the Oxford Club. And then like, you go, go find those people and you kind of get a Slack channel going and set up the affiliate relationship. And then if it does well, you just send a lot of it. If it doesn't do well, you don't send a lot of it. We have a big tracking system. Like we built our own ad server as well, because everybody in the financial media space uses an ad tracking software called Everflow, which works pretty well. So our system ties into Everflow. So every time we send out a link, it's got UTM parameters in there. So we know like this link came from this email campaign. And then we can track the revenue back to that email and know how much we made. And eventually like, you kind of see which offers are performing well and which are not, and then you can focus on the ones that are doing well.

Okay. Are there certain types of kind of products? I guess here I'm talking kind of like price point. Is it low ticket, high ticket? What type of stuff do you focus on?

Yeah, it tends to be more on the low ticket side of like initial checkouts of maybe like 49 on the low end to 199. And then kind of, you know, there tends to be like an average cart value, you know, probably two to $400 because there's always upsells behind it. Right. And then, you know, we only ever get paid on kind of the front end stuff. But then, you know, our advertisers know, like They've got a $2,000 product on the back end and that's where they, where they make their money.

Okay. So they will kind of continue that relationship with a customer to boost their LTV.

Yeah. So like there may be a $200 transaction and they give us our $200 because, you know, they're looking to generate the back end sale. Okay.

And in terms of. Yeah, kind of benchmarks, do you have any kind of data in terms of, you know, conversion rates that you would expect for a campaign or a product that is doing good?

You know, it's really all over the map. You know, from a click to conversion is, you know, 1% on the low end to 5% on the high end. And so much it depends on like, you know, is it where'd the traffic come from? Like, web is almost always the least, like lowest conversion and like SMS tends to be pretty good. Email tends to be pretty good. Push browser notifications is not as good. YouTube tends to be pretty high conversion, but low volume. So it's really, you're just trying to figure out what are the hot offers that are pay well and convert well and then send a lot of traffic to those. So we're kind of in a regulated industry of where like if you say the wrong thing, the FTC will sue you. So like, we have almost no control over the advertising copy. The advertisers write the emails and get them approved by their attorneys and then give it to us. And like, okay, send this out. And like, you're not supposed to mess with them at all. Like, you will get in trouble for doing that.

My next question is in terms of your own product, have you guys ever looked at that and are you doing it at the minute?

Yeah. So we have MarketBeat All Access, which is kind of a software product. It does, okay. It's kind of 3 to 4 million a year in revenue. Um, but it's, it's like not, not the, like we've tried to grow it, we failed at it. It's like being the marketing, the marketing company for kind of the financial media industry and then like being the financial media industry, like two entirely separate businesses. And like, we're great at the media side and like, we're not great at the product side and like just, it's a different, it's a very different business.

Okay. And so when you kind of come up across these kind of walls where you're like, you know, this isn't us. Why don't you just kind of push through and try and figure it out? Because you said this with the kind of, you know, outsourcing of the media buying and kind of some of these other things that you don't view as a core competency. Why do you kind of stop with that?

We certainly could. A lot of it's, you know, we've got a pretty good thing going here. And what I've found about like, like on the media buying side, like, yeah, we could hire an internal person and maybe they would do a better job, but maybe not. And like what we have now works so like, there's no reason to upset that apple cart. And then unlike the financial kind of publishing company side of things where, like, where we become Our own advertiser. Um, the companies that get really big really quickly, they almost always blow up and like go out of business. Like it's happened like at least three or four times. Or like companies that get to 200 million a year in revenue. And then like they've made so many promises and sold so much, like they can't possibly deliver on what they sell. So if like anybody's heard of like Agora Financial or Money Map Press, like these or a legacy research group, like these were huge financial publishing companies and now that they just don't exist, it's a very fraught kind of category because like you can get really big really quickly if you have something that hits, but then you gotta like actually deliver on that. And the companies that get really big, they tend to take some shortcuts along the way and then it's just like blows up the other thing. Like with financial publishing companies, like they operate 20% margins. Market B operates at a 50% margin. So it's just a less profitable kind of industry because you just need a lot more that goes into, you know, think like what goes into a financial publishing company. You need analysts who are experts on a topic. You need copywriters, you need salespeople, you need like phone salespeople, you need marketing people. It just tends to be very people intensive kind of thing. And what we do is just much less people intensive.

Now on the upside, most people assume that MarketBeat has a giant team, but they're actually doing close to $50 million a year in revenue with just 20 staff. And now I wanted to talk to Matt about how they operate with startup efficiency at enterprise scale. Touching on that then. So team, I think you guys have, is it 20 full time people?

Yep, we've got 20 right now.

What does that. Firstly, that is insane. Right? So that's like 2 million revenue per employee, which is, is not. What does that kind of team structure look like? Where do the people sit?

Yeah, so we have kind of three teams. We have kind of, we have a tech team, software development, product team that kind of does the backend CRM, but it also does like all of our websites. I think that's six people, maybe seven. And we have a content team that's kind of the written content on MarketBeat and then our YouTube channel. And they also can do some of the marketing stuff. So kind of content to marketing team. And then we kind of have an admin team that's kind of finance, hr, our customer support and kind of all the miscellaneous support things. And they're breaking out pretty evenly of like seven, seven and six people. So.

Okay. Do you work with any kind of external agencies?

Yes.

Contractors?

Yeah.

What do they do for you?

So all of our media buying is kind of through agencies. We've never successfully been able to do that in house at scale. So we have like two meta ads agencies. We have Google Ads ad agency, we have a neta, a newsletter agency, we have link building agency, and then a technical SEO agency. So a lot of different people doing different things for us. And, you know, we'll pay 10% of ad spend as kind of their fee. And a lot of companies do pretty well off that. And, you know, it works for us. We're happy to do it because, like, the talent doesn't really exist locally and it works well for us.

And how do you kind of managing that process?

Mm, you know, it's, you know, frankly, we're, we're pretty hands off on it. Like, we do all the landing pages and kind of the lead magnets and stuff and kind of give them like, okay, here's all the lead magnets, here's all the landing pages, and we'll optimize them, test different headlines and kind of do that all on our side. But then we kind of leave it up to them of like, how they promote it. And then like, we know if it works or not because we have the data and we give, we share the data with them. So, like, they have the numbers to optimize against. And that's worked pretty well.

Okay, and I think you said you had kind of two meta agencies. Is that true? And if so, kind of are they, you know, bidding against each other or are they working on kind of separate initiatives?

Yeah, two agencies. One is a guy named Gunner Home, and then the other one is Nathan May and his team at the Feed Media. We each gave them a budget and they're running the same ad account and it's just like, okay, who can do a better job here? And I think that makes sense because I think meta probably has the most scale and upside for us out of kind of any of the networks right now. And I thought, like, I want to have multiple at bats at this and like, multiple strategy attempts. So, like, they have access to each other's data, they can see what each other are doing and just like made the strongest person win.

How do you manage that kind of interaction?

Told them both we're going to do it and they were both okay with it. And just like, you know, they want our money, so like, they kind of have to Deal with it.

And it's I guess semi collaborative. Right. If you're sharing the data and they can kind of learn from each other's mistakes.

Yeah. But they're each kind of making their own ad creative and kind of own like you know, attempts on it, so.

And after 20 years in the game, Matt has seen and learned a whole lot of entrepreneurial and business lessons and his advice for founders is super simple but brutally clear.

You know, I think the biggest challenge we faced over the years is really like channel risk of like initially every, like all the traffic we had came from Google and like, you know, how many SEOs are there that like built Google dependent businesses that like doesn't work anymore, I think thanks to the helpful content update. Right. And then have gotten out of it and moved to AI or whatever the next thing is. So really like channel diversification has been a big, big issue over the years and like thankfully, you know, we've just tried everything and stuck with the stuff that works. Trying to think if there have been other issues like email deliverability has been a real challenge for a lot of people, including us in the last year, like yeah, who blocked or email us for a couple months and that sucked. So we just went out and hired the best email deliverability consultants we could find and worked our way through it and now we're kind of back in Yahoo's good graces where like you know, as a media company with a lot of reach, like there are always going to be somebody that can like stop you from communicating with your customers. Like maybe you'd be make Verizon upset and then they'd like block your messages and like obviously that would be bad. So like we just try to be as diversified as we can and manage those risks as best we can.

Okay. And has there been any kind of difficulties with like figuring out your path? So you know, you talked about before about staying in your lane almost and kind of focusing on certain things. Was that a learning process or was that something you've, you've kind of, you know, figured out ages ago and just kind of start to.

I mean we probably figured it out in 2015 like you know, email list plus performance advertisers plus maybe some other channel is like. I felt like we kind of figured it out then and have really just like, okay, this works, let's just keep doing it. And like I know there's room to grow because Yahoo Finance exists and they're way bigger than we are. So like we haven't maxed out the opportunity. I don't feel like I need to get into crypto or, you know, the prediction markets or whatever kind of the hot thing is these days. It's because, like, I know the market is there. Like, there's probably 50, 60, 70 million people in the US that own individual stocks and 10, 10% of them are on my list. Like, there's 90% to go, so, like, there's room to grow.

Okay. And for. I saw that you were announced as the guest speaker at Matt's summit. For people that are kind of earlier on, specifically in this kind of newsletter journey, are there any kind of niches that you would tell them to kind of take a look at? On the kind of content topic side,

there's a great opportunity for somebody to be the marketbeat, like in prediction markets of like, what Kalsheet and Polymarket are doing. Um, I've seen several startups that are trying, but I feel like that's probably like a good greenfield space to go attack right now. Um, I mean, there's always an opportunity with crypto because it changes all the time. Um, I mean, you can do it about anything. It's just like, is there like, are the growth channels there? Like, can I get subscribers to my media company? And then like, is the monetization there? Like, how do I go make money off the audience once I get it?

Okay, and what would you say on the, the channels? Is there any kind of specific one that you point people to if they're getting started?

You know, it really depends where your audience is and like, who your audience is. Like, what are the demographics, you know, age and gender and interests. And, you know, certain types of people are on certain, you know, social networks. Like, you want to target stay at home moms, you go to Pinterest. But like, Mark, we can't advertise on Pinterest. So it's. I just. Were they aligning like, whatever the channel is with your audience and who your ideal customer is and where are those people online?

Okay. And in the 20 years since, I guess you've seen a lot of people right, in the business space come and go, what would you say? You know, the, the people that have stuck around, what, what is the common commonalities amongst those guys or girls?

Yeah, I mean, a lot of it is like, not chasing trends. Like, there's always a hot thing. You know, it's AI right now. It was Web three, it was VR, it was like Amazon E Commerce, it was blogging back in the day, and like mobile apps back in the day. The people that Kind of chase the trend and go thing to thing to thing. They tend not to make it because they're chasing the trend more than having an original idea. And the people that make it tend to identify an industry or a topic area or kind of a category and just stick with it for a very long time. And then eventually you kind of like you're in it long enough where you just understand the industry and kind of know what there is to know about it. And like, you just kind of know everything or almost everything. And then you bet you do. You do some 20 years, you can figure it out. Right? And the people that stick to the same thing for a long period of time are the ones that tend to do pretty well.

Is it as simple as, you know, compounding, obviously the business from a revenue perspective and profit, but also the kind of knowledge the industry connections and stuff is? Yeah. Is that what you're saying?

Yeah, it's, it's compounding relationships. It's compounding like business knowledge of like the industry. It's compounding like, you kind of figure out like little and, I don't know, strategies here and there that compound upon each other of like, oh, we can make X dollars per person from like having the money email list, but you can add Y dollars more if you get their SMS too. And then you just kind of figured all these things and they all kind of compound upon each other. Then you realize, like, oh, I make more money per email subscriber that allows me to pay more than other people on the acquisition side. And then you can scale more where others can't.

And to wrap things up, I want to dive into Matt's vision for the future. Now, most founders dream of exits or billion dollar valuations, but as the rest of the podcast shows, Matt is super clear and has a much different vision for the next few years.

Um, yeah, so I'm 40 right now. I think I want to work to. I'm 70 or so. I just want to grow MarketBeat by 5 or 10% per year for the next 30 years and call it a day.

Like, okay, so you kind of have found a model that works. Your goal is to kind of focus on your core competencies and kind of chug along at that, you know, 20, 30% clip. And you're happy doing that?

Is that, I mean, I mean, think about it like, I made 20 million bucks last year. Like, like, that's like what a good, that's like what a good NFL player makes. Like, why, you know, like, I have very few problems in life, so like, yeah, it, it works and does. I got a fancy office here that overlooks the river and I'm home by 5pm every day. Like, life's pretty good.

Can we talk about that then? So I got this from you on your, your Twitter. You know, you certainly seem to have a good balance. Can you just talk to that and kind of. Yeah. What life looks like outside of work.

Yeah, you know, I, I don't work more than 40 hours a week. I mean, maybe I'll work Saturday, Sundays before the kids get up, but like I got little kids at home. I have a special needs daughter and just want to be home with family and like not doing working all the time. And like when I was 23, like, yeah, I work 60 hours a week because that's what you do when you're 23. But like different part of life now. And like when I was little, like my dad was a police officer and had to work weird hours and you know, he'd be like sleeping when we came home after school because he had worked a night shift. And it's like, okay, I have the ability to be around when my kids are little and I'm going to be there. And that's just something I decided a long time ago, like when my kids were born and like going to change priorities and like I'm going to be a good dad one way or the other. And like if my business suffers because of it.

Oh, well, okay. So it was when you had kids that you kind of switched to this, this mindset.

Yeah, like I was doing way too much crap before my kids were born. Like I had my, had a day job, had my business. I was getting a seminary degree, had a few other things going on. I was like, this is stupid. Like I'm gonna get rid of half this stuff and be a good dad. Also, like had a kid that like that's when I quit my day job. Cause it's like, okay, I need more time in my life and the way to do that is to not have a day job and be full time babies and my business.

I think I also saw something from you about on the charity work side that you were kind of doing it for a bit. You didn't think it was the best usage of your time. Better to kind of spend financially and kind of allocate it that way. How do you view, how do you make these kind of decisions? Like, you know, the ones you just talked about and this one?

Yeah. So like Markbee gives away a million bucks a year or something like that. Maybe A little bit more now, and we support a lot of nonprofits in Sioux Falls. What I found is, like, a lot of that was taking up too much of my time. So then we hired a director of community relations that kind of takes all of the nonprofit meetings, and we set up a committee that gives away a lot of the kind of smaller dollar stuff. They've got a budget of, you know, 150, 200 grand a year or something like that to give away, because, like, it doesn't make sense for me to give away money, like, 5,000 bucks at a time, because it just takes too much time to do that. So I've kind of empowered my team to do a lot of that. And, like, you know, we do really well. Like, we're happy to kind of play our part in the community and give back and sponsor stuff and, you know, you kind of be part of, like, the answers to the community's problems. But, like, also, I know that the most. The best use of my time, like, let's say for the entire city, is not to, like, go beyond 10 nonprofit boards and, like, go to all the meetings and, like, do that stuff. It's for me to grow, Mark, to beat from 50 million to 100 million and give away even more money. Like. Like, it is not, like, it's unselfish of me to build a big company so I can give more money away. Like, that's the best use of my time. Yeah.

Community is obviously a big focus. Yeah. Have you always kind of lived in the area? And why is that special to you?

Yeah, I grew up in a town about an hour west of where I'm at now called Mitchell. Went to college nearby, and I moved to Sioux Falls, kind of the big city. A couple hundred thousand people. You know, for the first couple years, I didn't get involved, and I kind of did and just thought, like, there's a lot of things that just kind of felt like I could help with and just kind of got involved and really helped get our startup ecosystem up and going here in town through a variety of different organizations. Did that for a long time. Don't do that really as much anymore because the time doesn't exist to do it. And, like, I'm involved with our chamber of commerce and then some different organizations. We sponsor, like, outside my window over there, there's an outdoor concert venue. Every summer we sponsor 50 free concerts. We're like, the main sponsor for it. We sponsored a music festival last summer. We had Pitbull there and, like, TLC and a bunch of cool Bands like, that was a lot of fun. So a lot of it just like there's a science museum downtown for kids. And a few years ago I had the idea like, oh, this. You know, they have like three floors in science museum and the first floor is like the space and technology kind of floor where they've got a bunch of astronaut stuff. And I thought like, oh, this thing's kind of getting dated. So I was like called up the guy that runs in like how much to like redo this? And then like between like over a few years, like we've kind of figured out a plan and like now like brand new Florida science museum. And then we sponsored it and it was a lot of fun to do that kind of stuff.

Very cool. And you seem to take a lot of like personal satisfaction out of this as well. Of like giving back, right?

Yeah, I mean, I mean my business is getting people to click ads on the Internet and buy stuff. So like that's not the most exciting thing in the world. But I know like through that we make a bunch of money and can do a bunch of cool stuff in our community because of it.

Other ventures. So you kind of obviously at the start had a bunch of stuff going on. I think I saw you also looked at real estate. Are you now kind of a venture investor and still involved in real estate? And what does that kind of look like? If so, yeah.

So the three buckets, like for business or like MarketBeat is the main bucket. But then I also have a venture capital fund called Homegrown Capital that we invest in regional technology startups. It's pretty small. I mean we've got like by the end of the year we'll have about 40 million under management. So we have two funds, you know, seven. First, first one was 17, second one will be 20, 25. Somewhere in there. I just really enjoy doing that. It's kind of my way of staying connected to the startup ecosystem maybe at a little bit later stage. And it's kind of keeping my hand on the pulse of like or finger on the pulse of like new companies and what people are trying to do these days. And I feel like it makes me a better entrepreneur at Market Beat. And on the real estate side, it's more passive. I partnered with a guy named Kevin Tupy who kind of runs his own family office is kind of like he. His. So his claim to fame was that like he has started this chain of rising stores and now the chain is like 2,500 stores. And I think he owns like 20% of it still and like crushing it. But he kind of, you know, two private equity transactions later, he's kind of not CEO anymore. You know, he's on the board, he's shareholder, but like not super active involved with the company. So decided like, I'm going to go go build apartments and build strip malls. And like, I connected with him at like the right time where like I had money before he was ready to scale up and said, hey, let's partner on this and go do apartment projects together. And now we've got, you know, a couple thousand apartment units. We own a mall, we own just some random commercial buildings, sister mall, stuff like that. And you know, between the two of us, it's, you know, somewhere between 500 and a billion worth of real estate. And granted there's debt on all that, so it's not like we've got 500 million bucks, but like we control that much real estate for sure. Nice.

Are you operational in both of those ventures or is it main focus is marketbeat?

Real estate is probably one phone call or meeting a week. So it's very, very minimal. The venture capital side, I'm a little bit more involved. That's kind of a five to ten hour a week kind of kind of deal, depending on the week. Like when we're fundraising for a new fund, it gets more intense than that. But you know, when our fund is just operating and we're looking for deals, you know, you really only need to do four or five views a year. So like something interesting comes along, you look at the deck in your email, if it's interesting, then you take a phone call and then you kind of just kind of keep going down that process and stops making sense. You just kind of stop until the next one comes along. But it takes some time. And then like, I probably had four meetings for Homegrown this week, but nothing, nothing too crazy.

Okay. So is the venture capital more kind of, you know, something that interests you and excites you and the commercial real estate or the real estate stuff is, you know, a wealth vehicle? Is that how you look at it?

Yeah, venture capital. More time consuming, potentially higher returns. For the amount of money I'm putting in the real estate, it's primarily like, I make a bunch of money, I just need a place to put it. And the real estate's been. Been really good as a. Because we, you know, we did, we did a lot of our buying in 2020 and 2021 when a lot of people were like on the defense because of COVID and we bought Apartment complexes at like 150 unit that are worth maybe 225 unit now. So like great returns, you know, and there's we locked in financing really good when rates were in the threes and kind of had five and seven year windows on them. And we negotiated like rate cap increases on refinance. So like our rates can't get jacked up to 7% or whatever, you know, the market is now.

Yep.

So like from a debt stack, we're feeling pretty good about that.

Nice. How do you actually backing up a second. Are both of those kind of local to you as well or is that kind of nationwide?

I'd say most of the real estate's local. We do have some stuff in kind of other random places. Like we have some apartments out in Rapid City, South Dakota, which is the entire other side of the state. Venture capital is really more kind of regional and increasingly national because we have companies in probably eight states.

Okay, what is your kind of mental model for looking at an investment? How do you think it through?

You know, I like to look at the, like the trajectory of the company. Like you're okay, you're like X revenue now with X number of customers and X web traffic or like some kind of like funnel of people in there. I like to look at the growth really of like, okay, you're at a million bucks today, but you were at 900 last year and 800 the year before that. Like that's not very interesting. But like if you're at a million now and you were 500 last year and 250 before that, like, that's pretty interesting to like see that growth. You know, you look at retention like in a startup, you look at retention numbers of like, okay, of the customers you have last year, how many of them stuck around? Like did any of them, like, you know, did they increase their spend? Did they decrease it? Like, what are your gross retention net retention numbers look like to really look like what is the path of the company look like? And then like, you know, if I give you a bunch of money, are there growth catalysts that you can go pursue that will allow you to like double or triple over the next couple years?