In this interview, Matt Paulson explains MarketBeat's strategic decision to keep an in-office team in Sioux Falls and to stop hiring remote employees, citing difficulties in providing a good remote work experience. He points out the scarcity of local talent capable of managing large paid‑ads budgets (e.g., half‑million‑dollar‑per‑month Facebook ad accounts) and the high salaries such experts command. Because of these constraints, MarketBeat outsources its paid‑ads work to agencies, allocating $25k‑$50k monthly budgets that can be scaled up if the agency performs well or dropped with minimal disruption if not. The company currently works with external specialists for Google Ads, Meta Ads, and newsletters, a model that has supported its growth.
Chapters
What are the pros and cons of working with agencies versus in-house advertisers? Because people like Hormozi suggest or recommend people to take advertising in-house, whereas you're probably gonna reach $100 million in revenue within the next 2 years, but you're still working with agencies. So what is your thinking behind that?
Yeah, you know, MarketBeat as a business, we decided a few years ago, like, we are gonna be an in-office team. Like, people can work at home a couple days a week, but we're primarily in office. which means we decided to not have any remote employees. We found that the employee experience for people in Sioux Falls versus people that are away just wasn't the same thing. It wasn't a good experience for remote people. So we just decided we're not going to have remote employees anymore because we can't make a good place to work for them. In doing that, we also kind of limited our talent pool to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and just the number of great marketing people that I could hire to work here that know how to run a half a million dollar a month Facebook ads account, that person probably doesn't exist in Sioux Falls. Yeah. And if it does, they already have a job or they're already making $300 grand a year somewhere. So it's very difficult to hire that person. And you might hire somebody where you think they're decent and it turns out they're not very decent. And then you fire the person and it just For me, it's easier to hire an agency where it's, you can give them $25,000, $50,000 a month budget to start. If they do good, scale it up. If they suck, they've got other clients, you can get rid of them and it's not that big of a deal. Just for our setup, that's worked pretty well. We've got a Google Ads person, 2 Meta Ads people, a couple newsletter people, and that's having different people work on different things. It's worked pretty well for us.
