Seven Bizarre Things That Happened to Me While Building Online Businesses

Hey guys, Matt Paulson here. In this video, I want to talk about seven weird things that have happened to me in the course of building my businesses. I don't really have a big message behind this video, but hopefully you'll find some of these experiences emblematic of what can happen when you put yourself out there in the world and begin to develop a brand. Whether it's a personal brand or a business brand, there are some unique and interesting and weird people in the world. And when they interact with you and your brand, you'll interact with these people's fears, hopes, insecurities, strengths, weaknesses, generosity, greed, and all sorts of these things. People kind of reflect themselves back on you on the Internet, and you'll tend to see that in some of these stories. I've had plenty of good experiences with people I've met online. In fact, I hired a guy I met online, my employee. Don't met him kind of by, I think he tried to sell me something once and we kept chatting or buy something for me once, we kept chatting. Eventually I offered him a job. But this video is not about the good experiences like hiring Don that I've had. It's just about some of the weird and funny and mostly inconsequential things that have happened to me in the course of building my online businesses. So here are seven weird things that have happened to me as a result of building my online businesses. Number one, Somebody made an illegal translation of one of my books, Email Marketing Demystified. So I got an email offering me translation services for my book Email Marketing Demystified once, and I ignored it because I thought it was spam and I thought they were just emailing. Every offer turns, they emailed again, like a lot of spammers do, and I ignored it again. But it turns out it was just a guy that really, really wanted an Italian version of of email marketing demystified it to exist. So he translated the book himself in tattoo Italian. He published it under my name. I had it checked out. Turns out it was actually a pretty good translation. I emailed him after the fact and said, hey, what the heck, you're stealing my content. But then I also realized that, yeah, maybe I don't care that much because that just means people in Italy can benefit from my book and maybe they'll get some value out of it. He did agree to split half the commissions with me from Amazon on his book sales, which, fine, I don't care, whatever. But of course, they never saw any one of those payments. So the illegal Italian translation of email Marketing demystified was item number one. It was interesting. Item number two is that there is an older gentleman that threatened to beat me up from Oklahoma City. So last year, I think it was last summer, there was an older gentleman. He could. Couldn't unsubscribe from MarkerBeat for the life of him. Apparently he kept getting push notifications from his browser from MarketBeat. Didn't know how to turn him off. We actually can't turn those off on our end because of how the technology works. It's all anonymous. So we couldn't, let's go find him and delete him. It doesn't work that way. So we sent him the instructions to unsubscribe and he just couldn't fathom that there was no way for us to unsubscribe him. And he just couldn't follow the instructions we gave him. He just got meaner and meaner and angrier and angrier. Started leaving just nasty, threatening voicemails, lots of curse words. He said he was going to drive up to Sioux Falls and pay me a visit. He found my address and my phone number and said, hey, it would be a shame if I showed up at your house at this address and something were unfortunate happened to you or it would be unfortunate if you had an accident. And he used all kinds of nasty language. Used all kind of language that was kind of a threat, but not a threat. I ended up recording the voicemails and his calls and I sent them out to my lawyer saying, hey, what do I do about this? I don't really think this guy's a threat. I think he's probably in his 80s. But my lawyer called the guy and suddenly became a lot less brave with his language. And Paul was actually able to talk him down from the ledge and get him unsubscribed and hopefully we never have to hear from him again. So that was item number two. Item number three is that I got accused of manipulating penny stock trading bots. You heard me right. There are different software bots that trade penny stocks and try to find ways to identify which penny stocks are going up and down. We don't have anything to do with these bots, don't run any of them. Don't really know anybody that does. But we were accused of manipulating them by somebody. Anyway. One of the things MarketBee does is for marketing purposes is we create content using natural Language Generation Technology, or NRG that we developed. And when a company announces their quarterly earnings, we don't write that article. The computer writes that article. And then we publish that article on our website. So we end up publishing stories about a lot of small stocks that most financial journalists are never going to write about it because most people don't care about these stocks because they're just small and boring. So we end up writing about a lot of stocks and somebody thought we. I guess the reason we do that is so that people can come to our website, read the article, sign up for our email list, click on an ad, all the usual stuff. But somebody thought we were pumping fake news stories into social media feeds to manipulate kind of trading bots that use these social media feeds for their algorithms for stock trading purposes. So the idea behind the bots is that suddenly if all of a sudden there's chatter about a specific small stock in the Internet, maybe there's a reason for that and that stock's going to go up pretty soon. So maybe somebody makes a bot that if there is five times as much chatter as usual about a penny stock, that you buy it, you hold it for 24 hours and then you sell it. And somebody thought we were trying to manipulate some of these bots that buy and sell penny stocks. And they even went as far as at least what they said. I had no idea if it's true or not. They said that they reported us to the securities and of course we never heard from the securities and Exchange Commission. And when in reality we were just trying to get email signups for our mailing list, not trying to manipulate penny stocks or the bots that trade penny stocks. Item number four is I got recognized by a subscriber at Yonkers. So my wife and I are frequenters of the Empire Mall. And one day I had a markup T shirt on when we were shopping at Yonkers and we were checking out and the woman working the cash register recognized my shirt and she said something along the lines of, oh, markipede, I love that website. Do you happen to work there? And I told her I ran the company. And then she told me how she loved using the website, using it to research different companies. Typically our audience is a 50 to 90 year old male and almost all of them are out of state and some of them are out of the country. So I was pretty surprised when a female checkout worker at yonkers, maybe about 50, told me she was a subscriber to our mailing list. I do know there are some subscribers to Markbeat and Sue follows, but not that many. I certainly didn't expect to meet one at the Yonkers checkout Weird thing number five, I briefly outsold Donald Trump's books on Amazon. So Amazon has the list of best selling authors in each category and they usually rank in the top 100 of the business category. I've had a book out recently and I think one time or so, one time I got up to, I think it was number eight when one of my books came out. I think it was online business from scratch, but it could have been a different book, I can't really remember. Anyway, there were all the usual business authors on that top 10 list. You know, Seth Godin, Jim Collins, Stephen Covey, Tim Ferriss, Dave Ramsey. And there I was at number eight or maybe a seven or nine, I don't know. And right behind me was the President of the United States. So I can say that my books briefly outsold Donald Trump's on Amazon, at least for the week that that report was out. Weird thing number six, somebody impersonated me on Quora. So some of you know that Quora is a question and answer platform where people can type in questions and then any kind of professional or expert can answer those questions. Well, if somebody wanted to do an experiment and see what kind of engagement that they could get by using a prolific writer's ideas on Quora. So I took one of my 500 or so blog posts or many of my 500 or so blog posts, grabbed paragraphs from them, maybe some stuff in my books, and they copied and pasted them as answers on Quora using a fake Matt Paulson Quora account. I think he answered several dozen, maybe even hundred or hundreds. I don't really know how many questions using my content as the fake Matt Paulson account, but I guess maybe it was free marketing for me in a way. So again, I didn't care all that much. After he was done with his project, he kind of, he emailed me and said, hey, I made a Quora account for you. Here you go. Asked me if I wanted to take it over. He was done with his experiment. He was pretty good natured about it, even though he was steering my content. It was rather neat to see Matt Paulson very active on Quora even though it was my content and it wasn't me. Weird thing number seven is that I won an award that I wasn't nominated for and nobody told me about. This actually happened last week. There's a website called Ahrefs that shows you when somebody new links to your website. And I saw an inbound link from a domain called globalgurus.org and apparently they named me as one of their top 30 global gurus in the category of startups for 2019. I'm not really sure how legit this website is since they just copied and pasted my bio from LinkedIn and the site didn't really look all that professional. But it is nice to be recognized even if it's from a questionable, maybe spammy looking website. As far as I know, nobody nominated me for this award. Not really sure how I was put on the list to begin with. I did find one email from them in my inbox and I think it went to spam or maybe I just didn't answer it. I don't know what the deal was, but it's kind of fun to see an award that you won. And the only reason I found out about it is because they link back to my website and my SEO tool told me about the award. So those are the seven weird things that have happened to me over the course of being an online business owner. Number one, somebody made an illegal translation of my book. Two. An old man threatened to beat me up. Three. I was accused of manipulating penny stock trading bots. Number four, I met a customer at Yonkers, your subscriber. 5. I briefly outsold Donald Trump's books. Number six, there was a fake Nap Boston on Quora. And number seven, I found out I won an award through my SEO tool. So you know, you just tend to get a lot more interesting experiences, some positive, some negative when a lot of people know who you are even if you don't know who they are. I can only imagine that celebrities have to deal with stuff like this to a factor of 10 or even 100. No strong message in this video, but hopefully you found these stories entertaining and insightful to some of the stuff that you might have to deal with when you begin to build a recognizable brand.