This Guy Makes $1,500,000 PER MONTH From Texting

**Matt McGarry** (0:00)
Do you feel newsletters are still worth it?

**Matt Paulson** (0:01)
Somebody tweeted me the other day and said, are newsletters still gonna be a thing? Everybody's using AI agents to summarize news now. And I was like, hold on, you're doing that. Not everybody's doing that. We're getting 100,000 clicks on email a day. So yeah, it's working great. People say, I get a 60% open rate on my email. And it's like, yeah, most of them are automated. That's not a real number. If somebody clicks on a link in your email, they're engaged with it. That's the real engagement number these days.

**Matt McGarry** (0:28)
You said, I wish ESPs would stop trying to be the everything app for creators.

**Matt Paulson** (0:32)
This is me saying, I love Beehiiv, but you guys got to get your act together on some things. The fact that you can't copy an automation from one newsletter or a segment from one newsletter to another is criminal at this point. And then they're coming out with podcasting. And it's just like, really? Make email great and then worry about podcasting.

**Matt McGarry** (0:51)
Hey, everybody. Welcome to New Media, the podcast for founders, publishers and creators who want to better grow and monetize your audience.
We had a cool conversation today with Matt Paulson. If you don't know Matt, you should. He is like the go-to guy, one of the most well-known marketers and founders in the financial media space, the Finpub space. He's the founder of MarketBeat. And they're like one of the 800-pound gorillas in financial media. They do north of $50 million per year in annual revenue with a very high profit margin. They've got over 6 million email subscribers, I think north of 500,000 to 800,000 SMS subscribers.
And we spend a lot of time on email, but we spend even more time on like, how does Matt do SMS marketing? Because he's doing it better than anybody and at a higher and at a bigger scale than anybody in the media space. They're spending, what was it called, how much per month are they spending on just sending text messages?

**Kolby Hatch** (1:50)
300 to 400,000, which is insane.
But he said it generated upwards of 1.5 million a month just on SMS offers, which blew my mind. It was cool to hear exactly how they do it.

**Matt McGarry** (2:05)
Yeah, and we really broke that down step by step, got into all the weeds on how to do SMS, what to actually send, because you can't just duplicate your email strategy to SMS. It's way different. So that's what we'll get into first along with a bunch of other stuff. So I hope you enjoy. Okay, Matt, welcome to the podcast. I want to start with this.
You said SMS is like how email was 10 years ago. I think everybody has been like fumbling to figure out their SMS strategy since you said that a couple months ago, including us. So just start with that. There's a lot of concerns about email. Maybe we'll talk about some of those later and like the email challenges, but like what's going on in your world with SMS?

**Matt Paulson** (2:46)
It is a little bit different of an animal than email. So if you just treat it like email number two, like it's not going to go very well. But if you treat it as its own thing and kind of use it accordingly, like you can do really well with it.
One of the keys is to collect the SMS opt-in at the same time as your email opt-in. So your landing page should be like required email, optional phone number, and then you do an API call to whoever your SMS provider is to like make the opt-in happen. Like there's that element. So like it shouldn't cost you any extra money to get SMS leads. They should be like gravy or you could like have it on your second page or you collect the email on your landing page and then have an SMS opt-in after that. Like this should really like not cost you anything to acquire these leads. The real cost is more just to do the sending. Like our Twilio bill is $350,000 to $400,000 a month just because of the crazy volume that we do. But I mean, it makes us a million five to a million seven five every month. So like we're happy to pay that, pay that, pay the Twilio tax to get access to those people.
What you can't really do is just send content on SMS because it's too expensive to do that. Like most of your tech should be some kind of an offer to sell something. So you can do that and you'll cover back the cost and then some.