He spends $1M per month on ads. And makes $50M per year.

**Matt Paulson** (0:00)
I think that's like the biggest mistake newsletter operators make these days is that's probably where our first 100k people came from.

**Dylan Redekop** (0:06)
So you went from doing 1 million a year to almost 1 million a month?

**Matt Paulson** (0:09)
Yeah.

**Dylan Redekop** (0:10)
That's wild.

**Matt Paulson** (0:10)
80% of the revenue that we make comes from subscribers that came through.

**Chenell Basilio** (0:15)
Everyone that runs paid ads needs to listen to that again.

**Matt Paulson** (0:17)
Anybody can go start a Beehive list and get some subscribers. It's going to be tough to just be an email list. Are you willing to do stuff that other people aren't willing to do? SMS makes us a lot of money. It's about a third of our revenue is SMS.

**Chenell Basilio** (0:29)
A third of all your revenue is SMS?

**Matt Paulson** (0:31)
Yeah, it's crazy. When I look at metrics, though, I think it really boils down to like two numbers. It's how much money did we make today? And then...

**Chenell Basilio** (0:42)
Welcome back to the Growth In Reverse podcast. Today, we have a very special guest named Matt Paulson, who started MarketBeat over a decade ago, probably close to two decades ago. And we are very excited to have him on the show. So Matt, thanks for coming on the show.

**Matt Paulson** (0:55)
Yeah, it's weird to like be the old guy in the room now because I was always the young entrepreneur and now I'm 40 and got a bunch of 20 and 30-year-old start newsletters and it's like crap, I'm the old guy now.

**Chenell Basilio** (1:05)
We just look young, don't worry. But yeah, I guess just to kick us off, do you want to give like a quick background story of like how MarketBeat got started way back when, yeah, where it is now?

**Matt Paulson** (1:15)
Yeah, so I've been making money on the internet since I was a kid in the 90s, long before Google AdSense was a thing even before WordPress existed. Like I had a little website on GeoCities and then another web hosting company called HyperMart, I think, had like an ad network on there that no longer exists. And I was making like 25, 50 bucks a month from it. So as a kid in middle school in the 90s, that was pretty sweet gig. Kind of picked it up again in college. I needed money to pay tuition and job opportunities where McDonald's, gas station or grocery store in my small university town and thought, you know, there's got to be a better way to make money. So I was doing like freelance writing on the internet. I found jobs like on the ProBlogger job board that would pay like $10 to $15 an article, which I'd much rather do that than make fries at McDonald's for $6.75 an hour. So I did that and that kind of turned into a personal finance blog because I was like really into Dave Ramsey at the time and like trying to graduate from college debt free, which I did. 2009, like during kind of great recession time, I pivoted more towards kind of investing content because like you could write about Citibank or Wells Fargo or any of the big banks and like you just get a ton of traffic on your articles like all the time like all day every day. Washington Mutual had gone out of business with Kobe and got out of business and everyone was like what's the next shoe to drop? You could write about Citibank and get thousands of people to read a story every day. It was awesome. So did that. Then I kind of stuck with the investing content for a while. Got the MarketBeat name in 2015 and that's kind of probably about the time we got the current business model of likes, the MarketBeat subscription product plus advertising. Then the business really blew up during COVID. When everybody was at home, the government was giving people free money to do whatever with. Couldn't go to the casino to gamble. Sports betting wasn't really a thing yet. So people were gambling in the stock market. This is like the whole GameStop AMC kind of mania that happened in 2021 Our website was getting a million hits a day when that was going on. I have never returned to that high in terms of traffic, but it was like the best year ever, 21-wise. I mean, we've surpassed that with revenue, but now we're kind of growing up as a company, kind of made eight figures in revenue. We have 20 employees. We've got like an actual legit office. But for the first 10 years, we're just kind of me and a couple of helpers kind of messing around. But today we're a diversified media company. Our niche is kind of stock market content, but YouTube channel, email, SMS, web push, any channels that we think makes sense to be on will be on. We've dabbled with direct mail even, or just trying to build the biggest audience around investing in the stock market and then monetizing that. That's worked pretty well for us. Wow.