Make Lemonade

How Matt Paulson scaled MarketBeat to $25m a year

Episode Notes

Today we’re joined by Matt Paulson, who is the founder and CEO of MarketBeat, a financial media company with their main newsletter, MarketBeat Daily being sent out to over 4m subscribers. They do over $25m in revenue and has over 15 employees and have seen rapid growth over the past few years. JR and I speak to Matt about his origin story, how COVID almost 4x’d the business, Matt’s advice to people starting out with a newsletter today and why he’s so involved in the local startup community.

Timestamps

• 00:00 Intro
• 00:58 Why Matt has a private jet
• 03:55 Matt's origin story
• 08:45 From finance blogger to MarketBeat
• 10:24 Avoiding platform risk
• 11:39 Why Matt left his job to go full-time on MarketBeat
• 15:19 Growing MarketBeat
• 17:13 How a $25m newsletter business operates
• 20:24 Huge growth during COVID
• 25:02 Spending $3m on a new office
• 27:10 The newsletter craze
• 29:14 Different advertising models for newsletters
• 33:45 Matt's advice on starting a newsletter
• 37:39 Why Matt invests in the Sioux Falls startup community
• 43:21 How Matt spends his free time
• 44:04 Final takeaways

As always thanks for being a listener of the Make Lemonade show. Hosted by @jrfarr & @jmckinven— brought to you by LemonSqueezy.com. 

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