Matt Paulson on marketing tech, venture, building mass investor traffic, and more.

Foreign. Hey everyone. I'm here today with Matt Paulson, founder of MarketBeat, which, just in case you don't know, They've got what, 20 million monthly page views?

Yeah, not quite, not quite that anymore. We're probably closer to 10 to 15. We peaked at 20 during the GameStop AMC craze, but haven't hit that in a while.

That was amazing period of time.

Yes, we all made lots of money.

But you still got. We did, we did. It was like boom times. But you've got like what, several million email subscribers. You've got, you've been ranked in the Inc. 5,000 seven years running. Is that right?

Yep, seven years running. We have 3.1 million email subscribers. You know, we're kind of 30 day active numbers, about 1.4 million. We have over 100,000 SMS subscribers, about 700,000 people that have opted into browser notifications. So lots, lots of, lots of people subscribing in a lot of different ways.

That's awesome. And I have to say, so I did a conversation with Charles Flagle and Kenny Hsieh and Flagle was like, I look to market wise and Legacy and those guys for what are the thematic stuff. But when he thinks about technical marketing, he's like, MarketBeat is pretty much where I always go. Like you guys are at the top of the list of what's working in his mind. And I've heard that from a lot of people actually. And just to illustrate that I want to walk people through what I think is possibly the longest lead offer stack that I've seen. I went to opt in on your homepage and the opt in process starts like you would expect with a here's an opt in box with an offer. Then it goes to a co reg page. You skip that, it goes to a second co ridge page, you skip that, it goes to a different type of co reg page for free investing guides. Then you go past that and you get an SMS opt in page that then goes to a text ad page. And now we're on like step seven where you get to like a thank you page which has an offer for a 30 day free trial. Right. And on that free trial of course you have two offers. The annual versus the monthly. I'm assuming I didn't buy. I'm sorry, but I'm assuming there's upsells behind that. But before we get to that, there's an exit pop when I close it for again, it was an sms. And then because I didn't subscribe, I got an abandoned cart email from you very quickly. So I think that's like 12 or 13 steps all in. And I'm assuming again there's upsells. So it's safe to say that you're going after opt in and that you think email is important.

Yep. I mean we think of ourselves as a kind of a media legion company. You know, we are never going to be kind of the top of the subscription sales list because that's just not the business we're in. But you know, we're in the business of attention and monetizing that attention and I think we do that very well. You know, you've done a good job of explaining your funnel. One kind of caveat to it is not everyone will get the same experience. So one thing I recognized a while ago was that depending on the day or the week, like you know one cohedge unit might perform better than others. So we kind of sort them dynamically by performance. So like you might see our co internal core unit one day but like on page one but you know, a week later you might see investing media solutions or after offers because their co edge units have been performing better because they've got the advertiser inventory. So it does change frequently and it does change kind of all, all dynamically and with software.

That's interesting. Just, that's interesting. So you're working with a lot of different people then who are also in the advertising business and so you're, you're kind of aggregating attention then in advertising from across the industry, is that right?

Yeah. And when you have the, just the volume of opt ins we do, it would be tough for any kind of one provider, even, even us like to really generate the advertising demand for all of them because you know, get ten tens of thousands of options a month and you know, not everybody is, can handle that volume.

Yeah. And, and I mean that is, I mean you do have an enormous amount of volume in the space and it's, it's interesting to me because you, you, you know, when I go through your site you also do a really good job of keeping everybody on the site. Like I've seen other sites where people, if you have a stock ticker they're you, you as a link, you're clicking to somebody somewhere else to look it up. But I mean everything's internal to the site.

Right.

And so you're getting a ton of page views and then on every page you know, you're obviously like you said, you're in the media business and so again you have you know, a Ton of ads. You have tons of places, not like intrusive but like they're just ever present. I noticed on one page, I think on the how to page you had you know, checkboxes for opt in for like 11 different letters and you're just like very, very, I would say like reading. It's just very disciplined about getting the opt in on everything. Which I think on the subscription publishing side we don't always have that same discipline. It's almost like the website is treated because most of it's email and external advertising marketing. I feel like there's a lot of, a lot of missed. It just doesn't get the attention.

But yeah, like when you're a lot of your, you know, if you're primarily you're generating email signups through paid subscription kind of stuff or Google AdWords, you know, you care about your landing pages and what happens after that you're not as concerned kind of about your main website. So I think, you know, people spend a lot of time in their funnels but then they don't spend a lot of time on the rest of their website.

Yeah, yeah. And, and with you. So you have, from what I understand you have a very strong organic presence. Right. So you're getting all this because you've really put the effort into organic in ways that most like the subscription publisher tends not to. With that. What does that look like then as a business? Because um, I know you have from our previous conversations, you have a really robust dev team. And so how do you, how do you, when you're thinking about just building your own traffic? I mean what does that look like just in terms of like a general like structure of the business, like how many people are focused on that piece and then how does the content team approach like thinking about that?

And yeah, I mean we don't do a lot of kind of paid editorial content. So our content team is really focused on kind of the front end content on a website. So that means keyword research, creating pages to match those keywords and you know, really good pages too. Like one thing we're doing now is like we're launching a bunch of new like investment calculators. So we might have a, you know, a you know, back, you know, a calculator tool. But then there's like a couple thousand word article with it and then we SEO optimize it and like one of our best keywords is dividend calculator or dividend yield calculator. So we're trying to build out a bunch of calculator pages that we write the code for and then we write content with it. And we found pretty good success ranking with those. You know, for us, you know, we've got a good domain. You know, our domain Authority is like 73. So if we can build a kind of a relevant page or tool that we know people are searching for, we've been able to rank for new stuff pretty consistently.

That's interesting. And just that, that kind of phrase like dividend yield calculator, I mean the intent on that is obviously like you have to be an investor to even understand that and to think about that. And so that's an interesting like because I think I've seen a lot of like sites that went after organic and their approach was to go pure consumer finance and not necessarily investor finance. And so then, then the, the quality of traffic for our space tended to be lower. But you're doing it in a way that is much more focused on the intent for investors. It sounds like.

Yeah, we don't try to focus on any kind of personal finance keywords. It's strictly kind of stock tickers, stock and then kind of some of the, you know, list of stocks, like say you want to see the list of dividend aristocrats or dividend achievers. You know, we have those pages built out and we rank pretty well for them.

Nice, nice. And like the, the one, the one area that I was surprised I didn't get an opt in was when I went to look at your media kit. So it was like that was the one place that you were just like, here it is.

Those people know how to get a hold of us.

Yeah. And so email, like I'd love to talk to you more about the. Because I mean, for anyone who doesn't know. Matt, also you've also written a book on email marketing that's been reprinted many times at this point.

Yeah, it's called Email Marketing Demystified. Just published a third edition a couple months ago. And you know, it really is kind of the 101 for email marketing. But I think there are definitely tips in there that people in our industry would, I really benefit from.

Yeah. And it's one that you've got like a ton of five star reviews and But I will say that my, my favorite review is the single one star review.

Yes.

And the reason for that is it's obviously somebody who's like maybe a corporate marketer, maybe somebody who's like thought about marketing and like you just read the whole thing and it's like, okay, this is almost this is almost the best endorsement for anyone who knows marketing.

Yeah. So I don't know, it was accused, accusing me of like recommending illegal things like three or four times. Yeah, yeah.

That's not illegal. That's not illegal. That's not like, it's just, you know, but it is like. So the question of like the state of email marketing. I think you're obviously one of the perfect people to ask about this. We, you know, we've had all these people who over the years have talked about like the death of email marketing and we know that's kind of nonsense in a lot of ways, but it has gotten different.

It's gotten, it's changed, especially in the last few years with the privacy stuff. It's really changed the game.

Yeah. So how would you, how would you describe like kind of how the game has changed and kind of where you think the, the, the, the area of like success is that from, from a focus perspective, like where should people be looking at and what, what are some of the old kind of like rules of thumb that maybe don't apply anymore.

Yeah, the thing that's really gotten difficult actually. You know, there are two things. One, there's kind of all the privacy regulations in terms of the CCP California and the GDPR in Europe and you know, what you have to collect with an opt in, you know, the bar has gotten higher in terms of like, you know, you really want to store their IP address and their location and have kind of the right disclaimer language to say, yes, I'm actually opting in. I do want your emails and, I don't know, collect enough information so that you can prove it was them because even if you have their IP address, it's hard to prove it was them. So you really want them to type in their name and their email if you can. Especially when it comes to like SMS opt in stuff. You know, there's a lot of litigation around that. So you really need to prove, and you know, John actually opted in to get SMS alerts and you know, that's, you know, become, you know, challenging. The other side is just tracking the data. You know, Apple really kind of threw a bomb in everybody's email marketing plan by blocking open data. So you can't really accurately tell when somebody opens an email on an Apple device anymore. You're using the Apple Mail app because it marks basically every email is open. So what most ESPs have done is they just say, okay, those aren't real. We're going to block that data, which you can do but then it's basically like the people that have Apple Mail are never opening your email. And then you think, oh, this person's inactive. They're not opening my email. And then your, your active segment, you know, becomes much smaller. So we've really had to learn how to work around that and I think we've done it pretty well. And really the way you do that is you kind of think of like all of your points of signs of life on your subscribers. So if they come to your website and you're logged in, you update their kind of last active date. Or maybe they click on a browser notification or they tap on an SMS ad, you update their last active date. Or if you can confirm a view that's not an automated view, you update there. If they click, obviously then you update their last active date. So the, the data collection's gotten harder, but at the same time, like, yeah, the other thing is like bot traffic has just gotten awful in the last few years. We think we finally found a solution and be happy to talk about it in detail at some point, but we use Cloudflare to really kind of keep a lid on that and we're really happy with kind of how that's worked out.

Yeah, that, that does seem to be the thing is it's kind of like, are you then cleaning off actual readers versus people who are not? And so where do you think like the, I mean, the reason everyone who was saying that email is dead is the basic thesis of that is that social channels are taking everything, that chat is taking over, SMS is taking over, that younger people are not using email as a communication tool. And but my thought on that is that, you know, among other things, one, everyone I know who has a social audience as their primary business, they're one of their biggest that actually sells things that doesn't just sell advertising on, on their social channels. The ones who actually sell things, their primary move is still to get them into an email address or email list. And the, the, the thing with the like, there's moves to things like Slack communities, but like the, when somebody goes professional, like the intercompany communication is still not, it's still email, it's still kind of this, this technology. How do you think about that and where do you think we are in the cycle?

Well, I kind of think about it as building audience on channels you own versus channels that you rent. You know, Facebook and Twitter, you know, they all control your communication with your audience with email and with SMS and browser notifications to some extent. That's really Kind of a one to one thing where, you know, let's say mailchimp kicks you off, you still got all your email addresses to the people that opted in so you can sign up somewhere else and you know, email them again. And you know, I've just seen too many people build kind of an audience on somebody else's platform and then the platform's priorities change and then your business just disappears. Like none of us are playing Farm Bill anymore because Facebook decided they didn't want Facebook apps from third parties. So like I, I don't want to get stuck in, in a situation where there's, my ability to communicate with my audience is determined by some big tech company. I kind of learned that lesson by being too SEO focused early on and just decided like not going to do that again. So, you know, email, sms, that kind of stuff where it's doesn't matter who the provider is, I can still, you know, communicate with the audience.

Right. So, so even with your big focus on organic, it's still like get them into the email because you can get slapped at any point. Like what other, what other kind of areas when it comes to like the advertising cycle that we're in right now. And you know, it's, it's one of those weird spots where we see attention is still there, conversion is difficult, we're seeing bright spots. But what do you think is, what do you think that people should be thinking about in terms of like what are you seeing working out there right now?

I mean the new offer that we've had a lot of luck with is Porter Stansberry's kind of new Porter Co. Brand. You know, he's kind of had that I'm coming out of retirement pitch. He's selling a product for, you know, I think $1,000 or something like that. And we've had really good luck with that. You know, we continue to have good luck with legacy and Stansberry stuff month after month. We've had good luck with IR advertising, but that volume's been down lately. It's about 20% of our advertising business. So it's, you know, we really want to try to run everything and then we'll prioritize just the stuff that does the best.

Yeah, yeah. No, it's interesting that I see that right now in this market like the legacy, Stansberry, Porter, those promos, those are like, even the thematics tend to move right now towards like resources in energy and you know, not like heavy trading stuff right now. We haven't seen. Go ahead.

Do you Think that's kind of because energy is top of mind with the problems that Europe is having or what do you think is driving that?

I do, I do. I think that's a big part of it. I think that, you know, Matt Werder and I have done a couple of conversations about kind of the macro environment and keyword research and how those things start to, to predict. And we, he did his first one for us back in the 2021 FMS and he's been pretty spot on about thematics that will be converting about six months out if you, if you use kind of that, that the, the model that he's been using. And he stayed pretty consistent on that. And the, the, definitely the, the news cycle has a, you know, because the actual events are impacting markets. I think that definitely the top of mind piece is huge, but it's there because it's real in the market. And I think that the news cycle and this is. Sometimes I get worried that I tend to push my view sometimes in these conversations more than I should. But I think that in the previous, like pre Covid period, we had these big thematics like crypto and 5G and everything stayed in those things. And then if it wasn't that, then it was a trading promo, right? And it was like X thousand percent gains and that kind of stuff isn't working right now. Then the regulatory environment changed and so kind of figuring out, well, what's going to convert in this environment. Topical news stuff that is focused on like, there's a lot to say about, about energy and about resources right now, you know. Yeah, I'd love to get a few other copywriters on that. Sorry, go ahead.

No, I agree. I feel like the, you know, the, the active trading stuff is really hard now with the regulatory environment. And you know, it's very difficult to say, you know, you've had X percent gains over this period of time because Even if it's 100% true, you know, the FTC or, well, you know, take issue with that. So it's, it's tough to come up with compelling story for the trading promos from what I've seen. And it really is kind of the topical stuff that seems to be working of like what is in the news cycle, what's everyone talking about? The thing that I'm kind of surprised there isn't, you know, a big promo around is really inflation. Like I have yet to find like the big inflation promo that is really driving attention and sales. I'm surprised that doesn't exist.

I'm with you on that one. It's interesting to see what I see people testing too because it does feel like there's a lot of tests that are going out that we've seen this. Like I said, there tends to be a channel of thematics that are just working. And so if you're not testing in that channel, then I think your chances of success are much lower. And so inflation and there's so much story there too around inflation, both from a topical side and from an investing side to talk about that. I think there might have been one. I could be wrong, but I think I remember there was a Bonner promo earlier in the year that worked really well that played off that story. But yeah, I haven't seen nearly as much of that storyline. Do you ever, do you, do you ever notice that like with. Because you have that big search component that you can start to see kind of like pockets of increased traffic that then correlate to promos that thematics that might work or not or is that too disconnected to really predict it all?

You know, we haven't really seen that as much. Our top keywords tend to be pretty consistent. The only time that really got got shaken up was when the GameStop AMC stuff was happening. Like those keywords just totally blew up because we ranked for like GameStop short interest and AMC short interest. And like it was very, very. It was very clear why people were googling Googling that those couple months.

Yeah.

But in general, like you know, energies like somebody sort of, you know, the energy stock volume, it's just there's not enough of it really to show that trend.

Yeah. Now. So like I, I wanted like I love actually like you're one of the people on social that I actually love. Kind of following you post a lot of really cool stuff. An interesting thought provoking stuff and one of the things that you posted recently I thought was really cool just because it's so true. The issue of like leverage in business and how you use leverage. Do you want to walk through like your. Your view on what leverage is in like as an entrepreneur and how to think about that?

Because are we talking about trying to think what posts we're talking about? Are we talking about kind of financial leverage or business leverage or.

Yeah, you were talking about. Let me see if I have this here. It was. You said this was a great line. Unless you're a trust fund kid, you've got to outwork most other people in the world. We all know that. But you also have to work on things that compound and Generate leverage.

Yes.

And you had things like other people's capital, other people's labor, technology, and just kind of thinking that through as like a basic operating principle.

Yeah, because I mean, we, you know, we all know people in our lives that work 60, 70 hours a week. But if you're working 60, 70 hours a week in a restaurant or doing construction, like, you're not going to get anywhere because there's no leverage there. You need, you know, multiple things that play off each other to drive big business results. And you know, especially things that compound over time. Like I know if I buy some real estate today that's going to, you know, generate wealth every year as we pay down debt and there's appreciation and cash flow and that stuff will snowball and grow over time. But you know, I think it's true in business, you know, as well with, you know, your technology and your systems and you get better at copywriting and you get better at conversion optimizations. You know, all these kind of things along the sales funnel. If you get better at them, they do compound and add up.

Yeah. And with that, like one of the new technologies, I mean, everyone's talking about the AI stuff and the Chat GPT and all that kind of thing right now because you're such a tech focused marketer. What have you looked at? Have you dug into that and kind of what are you thinking about? Like, there's a lot of cool stuff, there's a lot of overblown stuff, there's a lot of interesting kind of angles that I've seen people take on it. Have you looked that much at this point?

Yeah, I've been playing with Chat GPT. I've asked it like some investing questions and the answers are frankly pretty good. Is it? You know, I think what somebody could do if they wanted to is let's say you wanted to write a long form essay on a topic. You know, let's say it's dividend investing. You could have somebody come up with kind of the content brief of like, here's all the headings. But then you can have Chat GPT kind of write the individual sections and then have somebody edit it afterwards. So like, right, you know, what is a dividend yield? What is the dividend payout ratio? And let Chat GPT write each of those sections, have somebody edit it. And honestly, like, if Google ever figured out a way to like figure out that was automated content, I would be very, very surprised because it is. It's frankly, it's good, you know, it's good. As good as like the person you're going to pay $100 to write that article is. So it's, we're definitely entering a new era of content chat. GPT is really, I think, the first example of something that's at least in certain topic areas, as good as something a human would write on. You know, very kind of clear and concise. You know, what, what is XYZ kind of topic?

It's, it's really good. Yeah, no, I think we're going to see a lot of copywriters using it too, to speed up their production, especially the ones who, I mean, from a research perspective, like. And you could use ChatGPT to pull a lot of research together really fast.

Yeah, we tried to use GPT for, for images in our articles so we would not ever like get hit up by somebody saying, oh, that's my image, you should show me, prove to me that you licensed it or you owe me a bunch of money. And I figured, well, if we have automated images, that'll never be a problem. But turns out the images just aren't good enough yet. So we pulled back from them.

Yeah, yeah, no, it's that. But, but it's, it's. I mean, it's, it's. Everyone's talking about it for a reason. It's, it's definitely like kind of a, a cool functionality. All of a sudden that seems to be like, oh, over the next five years, this is going to be really amazing if it keeps developing and going back to some of the stuff that you talk about on leverage and things like that. One of the things that I think is really interesting too about what I see you're doing is you're actually involved in a lot of things outside of market beats that are really cool. You guys raised a $17 million FEC fund, right? That's part of Startup Sioux Falls. Was that it?

No, that's actually a separate.

Separate thing. That's entirely separate.

Yeah. So I launched a venture capital fund. My friend Tim, he's kind of the operating partner day to day of it. He takes a salary from it. I take a small salary. But we wanted to raise some money to invest in tech companies in our region. You know, I've got kind of the credibility between my business and this, the entrepreneurial ecosystem stuff I've done. So we thought if there was going to be a next generation VC firm in kind of our region, we had a pretty good chance to do it based off just our experience and our relationships and, you know, my credibility. So we launched that earlier about a Year ago. We've invested in three deals so far, have a fourth kind of on deck and we're going to see if we can turn it into. We have had a couple other kind of private equity firms in South Dakota be in a situation where the founders have aged out and there's not really a next generation of leadership to replace them. So I thought, you know, what if we could launch a fund and I could get a reliable enough of a partner, kind of run it day to day and that could be a great. I don't say side business for me over the years. And it's something that, you know, it's very hard for anyone else to do because you need the credibility and you need to understand venture capital. So it's a very kind of high mode kind of thing. Right. And we're, you know, we look did fund one, we're gonna, you know, keep doing it and we'll see what the demand for a fund 2 looks like if we do well. And you know, I think there is an opportunity to be, you know, a firm that's got, you know, a billion under management over the next 10, 20 years if we play our cards right.

What do you, what do you mean when you say next gen VC fund?

Well, I mean, there was kind of, you know, South Dakota is a small state, you know, about a million people that live here. There's, you know, a handful of private equity funds in the state, like less than five. So it's not, you know, it's not super competitive. And then the other ones that are there, a lot of them were, you know, the people that run them are in their 60s and 70s getting ready to retire. And there's not necessarily a next generation of leadership just ready to take over. So we're very friendly with, you know, the people that are in our industry and said, well, you know, if nobody's stepping in here, maybe that's an opportunity.

That is a vastly better version of the story that I see A lot of the, there's like this whole new class of like influencers and marketing channels that are talking about like, you know, buying businesses and they're all talking about like laundromats and things like that. And but you're talking about the same, the same basic storyline of like, hey, you have people retiring in order to take over the business, but you're talking about it in terms of PE funds if you like, that's a, that's a vastly. Again, when you go back to leverage now you're talking about like, even if you could step into a existing firm like that and get a book of business. And we do think there's probably going.

To be an opportunity to, like, take over the management of some existing kind of funds where the organization that maybe set up the funds is ready to not do it anymore, and they don't really care about the money. So there's a chance we might be able to do that. Fingers crossed. Which would be a real win for us.

Yeah, that would be. I think that the intersection of kind of like.