Matt Paulson built a $50 million revenue business by mastering media arbitrage: growing audiences across email, SMS, and YouTube, then selling attention to 40-50 advertisers monthly. His subscriber base hits 6 million, with revenue projected to jump to $60-70 million this year.
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like this, and I do want to touch on these things, but because other podcasts have covered them and because numbers get outdated anyway— ironically, if you look at a YouTube history, you'll see Matt Paulson's business brings in $25 million in revenue.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. Uh, 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, it's very kind of community-oriented state and You know, it served us pretty well.
Gotta 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? Like, this place should be packed. This is so awesome. It's photogenic, it's beautiful, and there's like 2 people walking around. Uh, 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. Um, 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, um, on business now, let me just frame this with a broad question out of the gate. Uh, 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?
You know, 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 like, I was dealing with a backlink issue over the weekend where some of our emails for like what we call more corporate email service providers or universities, you know, the .edu emails, like 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.
