The common thing that people do wrong is they focus on their cost per subscriber. Some of our most profitable channels, we pay $10 to $15 a sign up, but over the course of a year, we're making three times our money back and like happy to do that. There are other channels where I only pay a dollar and it's cuz the lead quality is just very low. We need to shift our thinking on metrics from like what does it cost per subscriber to get that number down to what is my ROI on a given channel on a given month? How did December do? How did November do? How did October do? kind of look back in time and see like, okay, we're breaking even at three months. I'm very happy with that. I'm gonna increase spend. All right. What's up, everybody? Welcome back to another episode of Letterland. Today, we have another guest, a great guest, uh the most recent addition to the newsletter symposium uh down in Austin in February. We have Matt Pollson with us today of Marketbeat, the CEO and founder. Thanks for being with us today, Matt. >> Happy to be here. I think it's the New Media Summit is the event. >> Okay. Yeah. I wasn't sure. I know he McGary changed the name on us, so I was like, I don't know exactly what it's called. >> Yeah, New Media Summit. That should be good. >> Yes. Yes. We're We're excited to see you down there. >> Yeah. No, it's going to be fun. Hearing a lot of people going. A lot of people told me they want to go cuz I'm going, so it'll be fun just to meet a lot of people in person that we haven't met before. >> Yeah. Um I I guess maybe just a quick bit of of background here. When me and Tyler started the podcast, we made like a short list of guests that we would find really exciting to get on the podcast one day. And Matt was was up there as one of the the very top of the list. And I think when you have someone who like has done so much in the industry and has like been very successful, but also shares a lot of that online. I mean, for context, I think markets are like 6 million newsletter subscribers, about 50 million in annual revenue, something like that. >> Yeah. uh about 6 million total subscribers. That is people that have subscribed and never unsubscribed. The active number is maybe like half of that. Uh we'll do 49 to 50 million this year. It's unclear exactly where we're going to land. Last year in 24 we did 41 million. So have grown nicely since then. So you hate to say like we're $50 million business until you achieve that number, but like fingers crossed I think we're going to get there this year. Uh 425,000 on YouTube, another 400,000 SMS. uh maybe seven 800 thousand people that get browser notifications from us. 10 to 15 million page views a month on a website. So uh a lot of different channels and we just try to make the best use out of all of them that we can. >> Yeah. And so one of the things I think when we put you on that list I was like okay we really want to get Matt on but like you know you can't have Matt back every week. I don't want to talk to him about the same stuff that we hear from him on other podcasts. Like can you tell us the story of Market Beat and blah blah blah blah blah blah right? The same thing over and over again. And so I think we were kind of waiting for that sort of like perfect moment of when do we have something where like really it has to be Matt that talks to us about this. And I think what was great is that we were always kind of nervous and didn't quite get to that moment. And then Matt Tyler I don't know if you you know this he reached out like a couple of weeks ago and was like hey basically I think a bunch of people I don't think you said everybody but like most people are doing newsletter acquisition wrong. We should talk about the right way to do it. And I was like well that's perfect. You've done my job for me. Please. Yes, please come and talk to us about that. So, um I guess that's what we're here to talk about mainly, right? >> Yeah. No, absolutely. >> I imagine Matt's first thing is to stop using Spark Loop. Is that um is that it? We'll see. >> Uh well, no. Um so, when it comes to moni or acquisition, it really depends on what type of business you're going to build. Like, we all think we're in this media space and maybe in the newsletter business, but there's actually a lot of different types of businesses that kind of fall under that umbrella. And like it really comes down to like what is your end goal that you want people to do. Like for us, we would call ourselves a diversified media company. Like I don't need you to buy anything today or even in the first month. Like I just want you to buy something eventually. So we can buy a lot cheaper leads from a lot more places because I have just lots of different ways to monetize people. Um so I'm just happy to get people who are kind of in our TAM on the list because I know that eventually we'll make money off of them. But if you're like a e-commerce business, physical products business, or if you're a membership business, and you really only have one or two things to sell, that really changes how you do acquisition. And and Matt, I know we said we weren't going to talk about the the market be business model, but could you just walk us through like just quickly what the, you know, kind of top ofunnel like? You get people into newsletter, you capture their their phone number, and then like what is the ultimate goal to upsell them to? >> Yeah. So typically our funnel is Google Adwords, Meta anywhere um to a landing page for a free report, best stocks to buy in December, something like that. We collect email and phone. Um you know, phone's optional. So we'll get you on the email list. We'll hopefully get you on our SMS list. We'll send you kind of through what we call, you know, basically a co-funnel of like here's an after office co-registration unit. Next page might be investing media solutions. After that might be some of our own stuff. you know, we can typically make $2 back um on people kind of going through that initial funnel and then at the end of the funnel is the sales page for market all access. So, some of them might sign up for Mark All access right away. Otherwise, you're just on the email list. You might be on the SMS list. You know, we send out ads for our advertisers. We send out content every day with ads interspersed. Then eventually, our goal is to get you to click on an ad from our advertiser and buy something or sign up for our doll access. >> Nice. And I think two things when I when I think of like marketbeat and what people tell me about market beat like I don't know how much of this is true so it' be interesting to dig into it but like the two things that come to mind is like an example of a company or a newsletter business that pays for a lot of its growth. Uh like I don't know I get the impression there that it's like a huge a huge percentage of it comes from from paid I guess. Is is that is that fair? >> Yeah. Um, right now, at least in terms of like where the revenue comes from, um, 80% of it is from paid channels now. And it used to be entirely organic, but we've transitioned more to paid. We're at about a million a month in spend right now. Um, just because that's where the scale is, and if you want to become a big company, you just have to be where the scale is. >> Yeah. And the I guess something that I want to dig into is is you you said, you know, you don't have to monetize subscribers on day one necessarily. you're looking for people who you're going to be able to monetize over the the slightly longer term as as a media company. Um, do you think that's just a function of like the scale of the business and the existing revenue that you already have or is that something that sort of holds true even for someone starting off like a new uh media company? Like does that how how much does that change? >> Um, there's kind of two components to it. One is like if you are operating at scale and have a lot of existing revenue, you can wait longer to break even, which means you can advertise in more places, right? Because if I don't care if I break even till like, you know, 3 months after a cohort is finished, like say December's leads, if I don't care if I broke an even on them till April, like that really opens the funnel of where I can advertise at. So, like that's one piece of it is like your cash conversion cycle of like if I put $1,000 into advertising in December, when do I need to break even on that to like not run out of money? So, that's part of it. The other part of it is how many different things do I have to sell? Um, if you only have one or two things to sell, like you have to have a very tight um, targeting window of like, okay, um, my product is I have a here's how to start a newsletter course and like I better only be targeting people who want to like start a newsletter this month, otherwise I'm not going to make any money off them. Um, but if your target is like, uh, anybody who might ever be interested in newsletters because you got a million things to sell them, then you can do a much broader broader targeting window. >> I'm curious on um on some of the growth stuff, just kind of getting into it, right? So, I think I think you said that there were, you know, a handful of things that you you think everybody kind of, you know, gets wrong about growth or maybe maybe we could all be doing, you know, a little better. I'm curious, you know, if you uh if you have some some wisdom to share there. >> Yeah. Um the the common thing that people do wrong is they focus on like their cost per sign up or their cost per subscriber. Um you know, our some of our most profitable channels, we pay $10 to $15 a sign up. Like on Meta, we're paying $9 to $10 for a email sign up in the finance investing category, but like hey, over the course of a year, we're making three times our money back and like happy to do that. Um, there are other channels where I only pay a dollar and it's because the lead quality is just very low. It's like you can't pay very much per lead. But we need to shift our thinking on metrics from like what does it cost per subscriber to get that number down to what is my ROI on a given channel on a given month and start thinking about like monthly cohorts of like okay of all the people that I signed up from Meta during the month of December, I paid X dollars for them and I made Y dollars back. And then for a given channel, you can say, okay, how did December do? How did November do? How did October do? How did September do? And kind of look back in time and say like, "Okay, we're breaking even at three months. I'm very happy with that. I'm going to increase spend." >> So, you're you're obviously a finance guy. Um or, you know, interested in finance. And so, you know, I imagine numbers are are kind of your thing. What what data or analytics are you guys looking at on the, you know, on subscribers? I guess on like maybe an individual basis, a cohort basis, like overall like what what metrics like are your north star. >> Um there's a few things. Um we do track like revenue like down to individual subscribers. So for a given channel, we know like how much we spent on a given channel in a given month and how many people we got and then like how much money we made from them. So I kind of think the revenue versus cost number really incorporates all the other metrics of like you know it it really subsumes your like clickthrough rate, open rate, your engagement rate like like that the revenue number like really contains all of that. So that is really the only number um that you need to look at. There is kind of um I don't know a little bit of a wrinkle to that in that like sometimes we know like from conversion post backs exactly how much somebody made us and sometimes it's an estimate based off clicks. Um, so we also like look at how many like hard conversions did we track for a given cohort. So we really know like um, okay, we spent, you know, our cost per like confirmed like sale is X in a given month and that is a metric we track as well just to really be looking at hard data. >> It's interesting. One of the the things that comes to my mind like I'm thinking about people who try and do what you're saying not to do, which is to spend as little as possible on on subscribers or as little as possible on people who are, you know, opening and clicking and stuff like that. And I think part of that challenge comes back to having a bunch of stuff to sell people or a bunch of a bunch of different ways to monetize, right? Like if you can do that and you have all those different ways that people could be monetized in the first 30, 90, 120 days, whatever. Um that's you have a lot of opportunities to to figure out if a subscriber is going to be valuable or if there's going to be a good ROI or not, right? And I imagine there's a lot of people out there who I'm thinking of who have maybe slightly smaller uh budgets or spend less per subscriber. they they don't necessarily even have those opportunities to figure out if someone is going to be a valuable subscriber or not. >> Yeah. I mean, if that's the case, if you're getting started, like really I think where you want to get started now would just be on meta because you can really target the people you're looking for and kind of know you're getting them even if you don't have that backend kind of conversion data initially. Um, >> how would you what would you be targeting on for that? Like how would you be like assessing whether you're spending on the right people? Because I know a bunch of people who've spent six at least six figures on meta subscribers and they've been basically worthless. Like they were probably going to be good subscribers for somebody, but there was absolutely no connect between like the ad and what that person ended up trying to sell them. >> Yeah. Um I'd say two things. Um like one, you really want to get the geography right of like make sure you're only hitting people in the United States and not targeting Europe and I don't know weird places in the world. Um, you want to make sure demographics are right and like I think I should be selling to 60-y old men, like am I actually hitting 60-y old men? Um, and then just from there, interest targeting. And then make sure that whatever like your actual ad is for your lead magnet or whatever kind of lines up with what you're selling. Like if your lead magnet is like here's how to plant a garden, but you're selling financial newsletters, like obviously there's a disconnect there. So, you just want to make sure that those are in alignment. And uh you can do like in your ad copy like attention stock market investors and like really call out who you're trying to target and um that way people that like read that say like oh I'm not a stock market investor I'm not going to click that and or you read that it's like oh I am a stock market investor I am going to click that. >> Yeah. I mean, when when you put it that way, and I've I've heard similar things before, like it it sounds really simple and really easy, right? Like, you should go and spend more to acquire new subscribers, but you should only acquire once like in a way like the one you should spend more to acquire subscribers who are going to be more valuable to you and you should monetize them like very heavily uh to make them to make that that spend back within the you know, within the first couple of months. Why do so many people not do this or not do this effectively? Like what's the is it just like the actual implementation is super hard or do people not necessarily realize they should be doing this or what's missing? >> I I I think it's really a focus on vanity metrics of like you know you hear oh market beat has six million subscribers I want to get big like them and it's like uh you do and you don't like um it is really hard to email six million people and get all of those messages delivered like that is not an easy thing to do at all. Um, you really want what people kind of miss like yes, you focus on vanity metrics and that's the wrong thing to focus on. Um, but when you're getting a lot of not well not leads that don't engage well with your stuff and you get a lot of them, like that really hurts your deliverability and then your stuff's not getting delivered and then you have a whole new set of problems. Like you really don't want these high volume, low engagement channels uh because it just makes it really hard to get your stuff in the inbox over time. Um, it's better just to not run them than to have a bunch of unengaged subscribers. >> I can I can imagine like retention is is pretty top of mind for you, right? When you're because you mentioned, right, there's pretty long uh period, right? It might be a couple months before you're able to monetize this person. So, how are you guys thinking about, you know, retention? How important is that for you? How are you making sure that people are staying on your list? Like, is it just great content? Is it giving them free b freebies and like bribing them to stay on the list with like more reports? Like what are the tactics that have, you know, kind of worked for you guys? >> Um, I mean, retention is important. Um, it's probably not the most important metric that we track and we send out kind of new new original content every day. So, it's articles written by our writers, edited by our editors that like have never seen light of day before. So, for deliverability, like we're always sending out original content. We think that's good. um our subscribers like reading your article. So like that's a reason for them to stick. Um but when I go back to like did I make money on these leads like it's really more like did I make money on them versus like retention numbers like the revenue number really like incorporates everything including retention. Uh what you do find is like with like a co-re channel like Spark Loop versus um AdWords or Meta like with Adwords and Meta you get more of a payback day one because you're getting them through your co-rege funnel but tends to be less overtime um and co-ed you kind of make less in the first month and more over time um because the leads are cheaper there's more of them they tend to stay longer but you don't get them in your co-edge funnel so I kind of have two different benchmarks for like Adwords and metal like I really do want to break even month one and then everything after that's gravy co-edge. I'm willing to be more patient and wait till like month three or four because I know over time I'll be making money off these people. >> And is is there a certain like uh date in your like in your mind you guys have some sort of sort of metric that's like okay this person or average you know subscriber is monetized at two months or something like that or two and a half months time. >> Yeah. uh you know for you know organic it's immediately because they're free for kind of the PPC networks metab adwords you know we want to break even month one 30 days and co-ed you want to break even about 90 days >> I mean the or the organic that I is is a b a bunch of that for you is that the YouTube channel >> um the YouTube channel is some of it but the bigger component is people coming to our website from Google and Yahoo and places like that um tons of organic traffic like market content is syndicated to like Yahoo Finance and MSN and Google News and all those places and you get quite a bit of free traffic from those if you can get them set up. >> Nice. How have you ever looked at um whether there's like what the I guess what the difference in in revenue per subscriber or like on a cohort basis is of people who consume your like either audio or video content and people who don't. Um I do know the YouTube kind of cohort it's pretty high per user. Um when we had our mobile app it was also very high when people would like sign up through the mobile app um like on an iPhone but we killed that because it was more headache than it was worth >> really like the technical headache like it wasn't working properly or >> um I mean we had an you know we we built it like three times over the years had an agency do it. We had like 6,000 active users on it and like we were just kind of tired of messing with it because it was a pretty small channel for us and thought, "Okay, this is just not worth it anymore. We're going to stop it." >> But but do you get do you get concerned about that at all? Like not obviously you have six million email addresses, but not having your your audience kind of captured, right? Do you do you think about that now more with with AI and kind of killing uh SEO? Like is that is that like oh oh we need a we need an app again? >> Uh no I mean we get as much search traffic as we did two or three years ago and if not even more. Um we get great referrals from Chat GPT. Um you know helps being an established brand with your content in a lot of places because then the LMS think that you're kind of an important brand and you get cited often which is very happy for that. So, um I honestly think apps are getting less important over time cuz um mobile websites are better than they used to be. Um you know, people are not going on the app store looking for apps on a daily basis anymore. Like I think that data has largely come and gone. And like yes, if you need to be an app, you should probably be an app, but like if you're a newsletter like or a media company, you don't need to be an app. >> It's interesting. That's interesting. I I you're the first person I've spoken to who's who's said that. I' I've heard from a bunch of people, I think maybe more focused on like the the Gen Z uh audience who are kind of going a little bit the other way and that they, you know, it's not very common for them to be consuming content via email and they're like, why won't this play uh, you know, why do I have to go into my inbox where work happens? Why is there no video that just plays in the app? Like, why is it, you know, why can't I comment and reply here like I can on other places? And then they, you know, they look at the cost of like doing SMS or something and go, "Okay, well, this would be too expensive for us to do every day, but we can have an app and 20-year-olds love apps and do it that way." >> Yeah. Um I mean, our audience is all older people, so like I have no comment about how to market to young people other than my own kids. And you know, they're on Snapchat and Instagram every day. So, >> can you walk us through that a little bit more? Like I I guess if you were maybe slightly earlier stage and looking at at on the paid growth side of things, would you would you still also then like I guess firstly would you start with paid growth or would you start with something organic and then what would you do on the paid growth side? >> Um I don't think you do paid growth on month one because you don't really know if you have anything anybody wants yet. Um >> okay. Um, you probably want to do organic for a few months of like just clawing and scratching your first thousand subscribers from somewhere. Even if it's just like hitting people up individually and saying, "Hey, can I add you to my newsletter?" Like you really want to see like does anybody actually want my content before you try to start selling it, right? >> Okay. you think is is it important to discover whether people want it like organically or because I I like my concern is always like I can get like when I sell if I sell like a product I I always think about this this something I thought about with Spark Loop was like it's really easy to go out to a bunch of people you know and people who are like want you to do really well and as soon as you get past college like it's pretty easy to get anyone who like knows you and likes you to give you like $100 or $1,000 or whatever to like you to to support you on your way to building that product. But even the ones who give you $1,000, it's really hard to then get them to actually use the stupid thing once you've built it, right? And that's kind of what I was thinking like one of the challenges with email is if you don't have like a product that people can buy or like use every day is like are my opens real? Are my clicks real? Like if I go and ask a random like 100 people like get like a thousand people from Reddit, like are they actually reading and opening and clicking or not? Like in some ways like I almost feel like maybe it would be maybe there's something on the the paid side or at least like strangers that you don't know like can I even get anyone to bother to sign up for this in the first place kind of thing. >> Yeah. And really it kind of depends where you're starting from. When I did started my internet business on December 26th of 2006 I had no money at all. started a blogger.com blog and like you know Claude scratched and kicked my way into getting like you you know this is before people were doing email list so it was like a blogger blog and like trying to get people to subscribe to my blog through their RSS reader and like you know if you got if you if you're starting with some money like yeah it's way easier to start with money but like a lot of people don't have any so you gota do what you can for free. >> Yeah. >> What year did you collect your first email address? uh 2010. Oh, >> okay. So, so very very early. >> Yeah, I got kicked around by kind of the Google updates and thought like this is dumb. I need to like capture these people. And um it was like the internet business mastery podcast back in the day telling me how to start an internet business of like um you should collect email signups and have have a product for people to buy. And these are just very novel concepts to me at the time because like nobody was doing it back then. One of one of the I I guess a question that I have for you is like when I talk to a bunch of people who've built very successful newsletter businesses like you know millions of subscribers uh eight figures in revenue kind of thing. A lot of them have like times at which like for some of them it's just a function of having been around for a long time and just continued to sort of do it and been consistently good over a long time. But there's a bunch of other people who like they got a lucky break somewhere. Either like they managed to profit off like some connection or they were in the right place at the right time or they got in on Facebook ads for a period of time where it was stupidly cheap and no one else was doing it or something like that. Um is there anything like that in like the the market beat history where you're like, "Oh yeah, we you know we we really rode this wave or we were able to jump in on this one thing or like is that not really part of the the market?" Oh yeah, I mean there were really two waves that really propelled us. One was um in like 2013 or something like that, we figured out how to do automated kind of financial content before really anybody else did of like you know take data from some kind of financial source of like here's an earnings announcement. Take all of that, put it into a template, make an article out of it and do it 500 times a quarter for every company in the S&P. get the story in Google News, Google Finance, people back to our website, email opt-ins, lots of email optins, Google AdSense revenue for free basically. So like that was the first wave and we still do it. Still works. Great strategy. Uh don't copy it though, please. Um but it works great. Uh second wave that really benefited us was like uh the GameStop AMC stuff of like 2021 co the co investing wave. Like we were kind of a fiveish million dollar a year business before that which you know is still impressive but like to get where we are today we went from like 5 million a year to 25 million a year in like three years and it was all the co investing wave everybody was staying at home doing nothing had free money from the government and Robin Hood was taking off and like that wave really helped us as well. Was that is that a function of like just faster audience growth since then or like better monetization of existing subscribers or a mix of both? >> Uh I'd say it's both. I mean >> both the the number of people that like were not invested in the stock market that suddenly invested in the stock market like that market doubled overnight and it was wild and like that time will never happen again but we were glad to be there for it. >> Yeah. >> Yep. I uh I would say it was the only reason that you know I sold the water coolest right is because I always think co right uh it was it was the same thing right there all of a sudden overnight everyone wanted to become a stock investor and if you had some sort of product out there you know was a similar thing and I know I know the guys over at Benzinga right and they're obviously you know kind of a similar thing um but I I'm curious on you talked about the automation that's that's crazy that you were doing that in 2013 what I'm curious what that looked like and then I'm curious ious what it looks like now. I imagine it's a lot of AI that you're using, but like what did it look like in 2013 when you were automating these things? >> Um, you can still see it if you Google marketed incident alerts like they come up. Um, there's no AI in at all. This is all preI technology. So, it's not like we're using an OM to summarize stuff. Um, >> and how were you guys doing it on the back end though? Were you were you like copy and pasting stuff? like did you have some sort of >> um initially initially it was like uh copy and pasting stuff into a form and then they would like generate an article and then I'd use like XML RPC to publish it to WordPress and then over time it got more automated of like oh I don't need to like hand enter these analyst recommendations I can like go scrape them from this website >> and then put them in a database and then generate the article and publish into WordPress. Um and now now it's all very automated. >> Yeah. Yeah. And so how are you guys using using AI on on that and then like everything? Obviously there's been uh I would say especially in the financial space, everyone's trying to kind of beat the market for for lack of a better word here to to get the news live, right? And there's been quite a few people who've gotten called out for kind of AI slop and stuff, but how are you guys using, you know, AI to I guess across your business on content and other things? Um, so we tried to do like take SEC filings and make AI articles out of them. Like the is it 10 I forgot what the form number is, but like if you have like unscheduled news that you need to publish as a press release, there's some special SEC filing for that. So, we're going to take all of them, make articles about it. And what we found was that this is about a year and a half ago when we did this, like the OM would really just make stuff up to fill any gaps. And like um when you're talking about public companies that people are trading stocks on, you definitely don't want to do that. Um so we we can that like as soon as like oh this company like named John Smith to be their CEO is like I'm pretty sure that didn't happen. Like we better not do this. Like it's too dangerous. Uh so code that. Um, now we're using looms a lot more for kind of like summarization of like, you know, with any big company there's 200 new stories a day and how do you kind of summarize like what actually happened that impacted this stock today. Um, so like we have a giant database of like new stories from because we, you know, take every RSS feed on the internet we can find, index them, tag them by stocks and we just feed all them to an LM and say like, "Okay, um, you care about this stock. here's what really like mattered today for it and then we put that on kind of the news section of our website for any given company. Um do a lot of summarization stuff like that. Um anything where it's like you know you could listen read the hour earnings transcript or you could read the AI summary that takes two minutes. Uh do do a lot of stuff like that. Um we use it on the marketing side. We use it to generate subject lines. Um and then we'll test them dynamically. Um a lot of stuff like that. Um, our writing and editing team uses AI to edit stuff. Um, we're not trying to like do AI from the ground up and like be kind of the AI stock research tool. A lot of people are of course trying that and maybe one of them will succeed, but um, it's just more like how do we use AI to like make our existing business processes better? Like um, we have a customer support system. We built it in house and now whenever like a ticket comes in like there'll be a dynamically generated like AI response pre-filled in for the support person and they can like if they like it they can just send that response or if they want to like edit it they can edit it or if they want to like submit their own prompt to like make a better response they can do that. It's more like how to use AI to do what you're already doing better. >> So so not going to lean into like you know hey here's here's AI stock picking stock advice sort of stuff. that's that's not the route you want to go. >> Um I mean we do have something that does that and like the results are kind of mixed on it, but um what I've seen happen over the last say 10ish years is like there are a lot of companies that have set out to be like we're going to be the Bloomberg terminal for retail investors and none of those companies have really made it. Um because they don't understand that like you can build the best tools in the world, but nobody's going to give a crap about it if they don't know about you. Like the the moat is distribution. Like how do you get a million people on your list to like care about your thing? Cuz like the stock research tools business unless you're Bloomberg like not a great business. It's a great way to make two to five million bucks a year and that's basically it. Like there's a ton of companies in our space that like aren't willing to play the advertising game that only want to do the product side of the business and like that's great. You're going to make 2 million topline a year and good luck to you, but you're not going to grow past that. So you think it's the obviously there was there was the GameStop you know 2021 stuff that you mentioned but you really think you know the differentiator between you know where you guys were $5 million business and a 49 million soon to be $50 million business is really the distribution. >> Uh yes uh definitely um so much of it is that we just have a giant list um across a lot of channels a lot of eyeballs and then we have a lot of advertisers and we we connect the two. Sorry, I have one more followup there. All these questions, uh, I'm not going to copy paste your business, I promise. But, uh, on >> I'll say good luck. Many people have tried. >> Well, let me jump in real quick because that was going to be my question is like, do you think it's possible to build an email list of this size like in a niche like this starting today? Or is this something where you just had to be there like 5, 10, 15 years ago? >> Um, you could absolutely do it. You'd probably need about 10 million bucks worth of ad spend. um you could totally do it today. You just have to like have the money to do it. >> I mean I I I can say right like I've uh I've dabbled in this business. I've launched multiple kind of paid products like in the you know markets in finance space and yeah it's true. It's like I can convert I can always convert you know a couple percentage of my list but the biggest barrier is I don't have a big enough list to to convert enough people to make a real business right. So, I've shut it down both times and I I think there's an appetite for this stuff, but I I totally agree with you. If you don't have the distribution and you don't have the capital for that distribution, it's uh it's a very difficult business to to crack. And obviously, you have to have a great product, which you know, you guys do. >> Yeah. There is kind of a chicken and egg thing to this, too, cuz like if you don't have a big enough list, like all of the big kind of financial newsletter publishers that are your advertisers, like they don't really care until you have a couple hundred thousand subscribers. like they don't want to work with you directly because you're just too small. You won't generate any sales for them. Um, so you have to like crawl your way to a certain size, see if you can persuade them to like do a deal with you. Otherwise, you have to go to an agency that's going to take a 30 to 50% cut on your deal. And um, it's something you kind of got to climb your way into. >> Yeah. Before Louie cut rudely cut me off, uh, I was going to ask you about what's what's the split? I'm just curious on revenue between what you guys are selling for your own products and what you're doing for you know ad revenue. >> Um market all access is like a $3 million a year business. It is not large. Most of our money is advertising across a variety of different ways. >> And is that mostly you say a variety is that mostly financial products or is that a big the biggest chunk of it? >> Um I would say it's almost well it's all financial stuff but there's different categories within it. Like there are public companies doing investor relation investor relations campaigns that will advertise to our list. There's kind of the boutique financial newsletter publish publishers. Agora Marketwise they're a big part of it. We do lead generation for other people like us trying to do the same thing. Um I don't know there's kind of companies that um or are selling gold that want to advertise. It's just a lot of different stuff like that. We have companies that would teach you how to trade crypto. Um, but whenever we've tried like health offers or anything like outside of finance or even like credit cards, like they just don't work. Um, it's not the right audience for it. So, we've just kind of given up on like, you know, if you want me to sell lifelock or like that's great. It's not going to work. Maybe I'll try it, but I know it's not going to work because it just never works. >> Yeah. Selling selling athletic greens. Um, that that's super interesting. So, I'm I'm just curious like generally why do you why do you keep running market all access? Right. It seems like a very small part. Is it super high margin or is it just diversification? You know what what's the rationale there when it's you know a small chunk of your business? >> It would be pretty hard to get rid of it for one like it would be significant re-engineering of our website to like make it go away. So there's that. Um it does make us money. um if we were ever going to sell market beat like you will get X multiple on your advertising and a much better multiple on your subscriptions. So like I think about that um obviously the margin's great because really the only cost to run it is kind of my dev team. Um and I don't know sometimes you find like when the market for your advertiser stuff is weaker there's more demand for your stuff and there's kind of these waves of like interest. So sometimes, you know, if there's a weak month and kind of the affiliate stuff, then like maybe market access would do a little bit better. One of the things that I I I wanted to get on to is um I something that I just find super hard to to visualize and I think a lot of people struggle with especially when they're when they're starting or even when they're further along is like when you get to this kind of scale or really any kind of scale approaching approaching market beat where is like your time spent or where is like the team's focus spent on growth like how much of this is you thinking about like tinkering with the numbers for like existing channels And how much of it is spent like testing new stuff and like looking for like potentially the next wave or like a wave that maybe even you can create or something like that? How much is experimenting? How much is uh optimizing? I guess um so we've tried to like build an in-house marketing team a few times and have failed every time. Um we end up working with a lot of different agencies like we have two meta agencies that compete with each other. Um, we've got an AdWords agency, we've got an organic SEO agency, we've got a link building agency, we've got an agency that buys newsletter ads for us. Like, and you know, all these people and get like 10% of our spend. And like we're happy to do that. And what we do is like we give them say we work with a company called Net Effect that does our newsletter ads. We give them a dashboard with the same information we have so they can optimize towards the metrics that like we care about. Um, and that works really well for us. Like there's not a, you know, our team is all kind of in-house in the office at least some of the time. So like there just isn't a lot of like paid media expertise here in Sufal, South Dakota. And I don't really want to have remote employees. So like the agency thing works really well for us. Um, and then I don't like I don't think about our AdWords account very much. I don't think about our meta ads accounts very much. I don't think about the newsletter stuff very much. I'm more looking at a macro trend of like, you know, how did all of meta do last month and the month before and the month before that and if there are problems and I then I'll go to the agency guys and be like, okay, uh, we got an issue here like tell me what you think's going on and what you're going to do about it and that works well for us. >> Nice. So is there then like within so within the existing channels obviously you have experts that are doing the the testing and everything but are you do you play around with other channels as well or like how I guess how much sort of looking for new stuff are you doing? >> Um I'd say proactively not a ton. Um we're not looking to grow our ad budget currently. We're very happy with kind of the million to a million two a month per where we're at. Um, kind of what happens is like people in our our space talk all the time and then if I like hear something that's working well for somebody then maybe I'll go try it. And we also have a lot of people approach us um like there's a company there's a guy named Haral who runs this company called stock earnings and like he said hey we're launching co offering do you want to try it? It's like ah sure why not I'll give you a test budget like what do you want to do and then do it for two or three months if it keeps you know works well we just keep doing it as long as it keeps working. um if it stops working then we just stop doing it and call it a day. Um so it is a lot of inbound stuff at this point. >> Is there any uh I I think Lou might have tried to get at this before but is there any kind of uh secret uh thing that's working right now that you can share with us that you know before before you drop it at the newsletter conference? >> Uh secret thing >> you know on the growth side anything anything that's working super well for you guys right now that that you can share that's not you know part of the secret sauce. Um, honestly, everybody should just add an SMS optin form to their lead magnets. Uh, we're making a million and half a month with SMS right now. Like, so historically, like you wouldn't put an SMS optin next to your email optin because it would tank your your open rates or your conversion rates. Not for at least for us, that's not true anymore. And I think it's because like uh all the autocompletes now will like fill up both your email and your phone when you click. Um, so if you can collect a phone number at the same without any additional cost when you're collecting an email sign up like you should do that all day every day take the sign up and you will make so much money SMS but how do you guys think about uh SMS right because I think it's pretty still pretty cost prohibitive right for me like I send a a free daily newsletter right so the the economics are very different from what you guys are Um, and I I would love to send an SMS like you you know, you hear it's 90% open rate and like you know all this it's super engaging. Uh, you know what what would you recommend to somebody who who has a free newsletter? Is it something where you kind of could tap somebody for you know a reminder like hey this newsletter exists maybe send them ads you know is there a way that you would use it for from a free perspective? >> It is expensive. Um, our SMB bill last month in November, I kid you not, was $425,000, >> which uh that was kind of my fault because like the number went way up and turn like two SMS tips like one, make sure you're only texting like people who have clicked in the last 30 days. And two, limit your countries to like the US, Canada, UK, and Australia. because um what you find is like it might be half a cent to text somebody in United States and it might be 25 cents in some very expensive countries. So uh you definitely want to like geolo limit it to the cheap countries. Um you can keep the bill pretty small if you you try. Um but typically like when we're texting people um it's cuz we're going to make money off that text. So the text is then not a call to action to consume content necessarily. It's not like a hey, we published our blog and go click over here. It's more of a an opportunity, an offer, something like that. >> Well, it it can be content. Um like we have um like our early bird stock the day SMS list. Um you can you know we send a text every day to 60 70,000 people. Cost us $500 to send. Um, but they're going they're, you know, they're on their phone, so it's a mobile website. And then we've got ads from ISOIC in there. And we make way more than 500 bucks just off the banner ads on the website. So like, yeah, I'll make that trade every day. >> Do you find do you find people are making purchases from their phone? Something we run into a lot is that especially in like the higher ticket stuff, people really well like people who are buying ad slots really don't like to buy phone traffic. Um I feel like that >> that used to be true. Um we used to believe that. Um lately we find like people will watch a 45minute video sales letter and buy on their phone. Like it's it's it's not what it used to be. >> I'm shocked by that with your audience too being a little bit older. I feel like that's it's kind of like the cut off being right. It's like millennials and up, right? Like we want to make big purchases on, you know, on laptops. But it's interesting to see that that's changing. >> Well, I mean, what you find with older people is like they want to consume whatever they're seeing on the device they've already like got open. Like they don't want to try to like switch to their laptop. Like, you know, a lot of our more senior subscribers like they have an iPad, their kids set it up for them. Um, they like to get their email on their iPad and they watch the videos on their iPad. that if they're going to buy something, they're going to buy it on their iPad. >> Damn, that that's great for retention. They they don't they don't know how to get off the website. >> Yeah. I'm I don't know. No comment. I I guess something that that I want to talk a little bit about is would um market beats one of those ones is kind of really is feels quite unique to me in that I know a bunch of newsletter operators who run what I call like habit forming newsletters, right? Like a daily newsletter or something where you really want the the subscriber to be reading and consuming the the content every single day like a habit. And I know a bunch of people who run reasonably successful newsletters that send maybe once, twice a week, sometimes even less than that, but they have like a product or a service that they're selling. And really, they don't care if someone opens all the time or even all that much as long as they end up buying the the product or the service at some point whenever they're going to make that purchase. And market beat it feels to me like sits a little bit in between that where you you send a really high volume of email but also you're monetizing in so many different ways other than just ads in the newsletter that like how much do you care about whether someone is is reading every day or very often? >> We just want you to read some of the time. Um you know if somebody doesn't open for 30 days like we basically stop emailing you because we want to keep our engagement metrics really good. Um, like we know like you know our average open rate with MPP is like 40%. And like we're super happy with that. Like we don't expect you to read every email cuz like the email might be about a stock that you don't care about and like we don't want expect you to read it. Um, if you're reading, you know, we send out um a story about Walmart and you only invest in tech stocks, like no, we don't expect you to read it. So like it's it's fine. I guess one more thing for me is like I'm just conscious of time as well. Like what are some of the questions that you're sitting here and you're like, "Hey, I run this huge media business with a huge newsletter. We do crazy amount of revenue. I'm taking up an hour of my time for these guys to come and share some newsletter stuff." Like what are the questions we should be asking you? >> Um you should ask about how we do what are called triggered campaigns. >> Okay. You know something I've always wanted to know about is how does market beat do trigger campaigns? So, when we define a triggered campaign, if you open an email from us, you get another email. Um, and it is shocking how well that that works. If you um the way our system works is that like we'll send out a content email to any given list, you open that email or you click on a link um seconds later you'll get an advertisement from us in your inbox. And those those emails get 60 70% open rates because we know when we send it, you're in your inbox and it just works. >> It's amazing. is are they contextualized to the the content of the link or like related to to what the subscriber was just doing or is it just um it's typically like you would think yes um but the answer is no. Um initially we tried to like segment it of like oh we're going to send you an email about tech stocks and then we're going to send you an ad about tech stocks. Uh turns out like segmentation in the investing space like doesn't really work because your interests change over time. Like typically like everybody's interest is whatever the hot thing is right now. Like you know 6 months ago it was Nvidia. Everybody wanted to know about Nvidia all the time cuz like that was the hot thing and like six months from now it'll be something else. So if we just send an ad kind of related to whatever the hot thing is, it's going to work way better than any segmentation that we do. >> Nice. And do you do that just for email or do you do that for SMS as well? >> No, we do it for SMS and we do it cross channel too. So like if you click on a link in your email, you will get an SMS moments later. >> And do you do you don't find that that I guess you maybe don't have the data on that whether does that disrupt anything in sort of in the funnel after they've clicked on that original link? >> Um typically no because you're not looking at more than one device at a time. Um like if somebody clicks on an SMS link, we're not going to send them another SMS right away, but we might send them one 30 minutes later. >> Got it. Okay. Part of why you think this is so effective, right, is because the person is already in the inbox. Like they're already in that sort of like I'm open and interested in sort of consuming your content, opening emails from you right now. I'm in the bathroom or wherever I am. Do you then optimize like the send time for your normal sends based on when people tend to open? >> No. Um I mean, if if you're emailing five emails a day, like you're probably going to hit them when they're around, right? Um, so we've never thought that was especially important for us. >> Do you think other newsletters should email more often? Like cuz you're very aggressive. I love like taking people something I like to do if I'm ever talking to a bunch of newsletter operators. I just go and sign up for market beat and just like show them like here's what's coming in and it's a bunch of stuff especially if you put the uh the phone number in as well. And um like I use that as like a an eye opening like hey here's what other people are doing. you could, you know, you can send that second welcome email if someone doesn't open the first one or something like that. What do you think? >> So, I invested in a company called Points Path, um, which is like media company in the travel space and like the guy was sending one email a week and I was like, how about you just send like three or four and see what happens and then, you know, revenue, I don't know, almost doubled overnight by doing that. So, I would say most people like we are we are frankly we're too aggressive. We need to be less aggressive. We know that and like we need to tone it down a little bit and but most people are on the other side of the spectrum where they are not sending enough. Like almost everybody can do one email a day and be just fine doing that. Um but most people aren't even doing that. >> All right. But this is the uh this kind of the final question, the hot seat. Um what's your hottest take about the newsletter space right now? I love I love your takes on I I know you said at the beginning but when we were talking that you don't consider yourself a personality but I actually think that you are very much a LinkedIn personality and you have some of the best takes you know on on LinkedIn. So what is your favorite hot take right now about the newsletter space? >> I would say that you know there's a lot of messaging out there saying like you need to niche down be a very unique voice. Um I don't know I don't think that's true. Um, I think if you want to build a big business, you need to go find a big market that hits a lot of people. And that's like the opposite of niching down. Like you need a big market with a lot of people in it and then you just need to go reach everybody. >> Makes a lot of sense. So, who who do you who's your ICP? Investors. Is that is that the way you look at it? >> I would say it's anybody that has that owns an individual stock in the stock market. Um, it's not people who just have like a 401k through work and have mutual funds. Like that's not our demographic. But like if you have Robin Hood or Schwab and you've bought like shares of Brookshshire or Tesla or any any one stock like you're in your inner TAM. >> And how many people is that in the US? >> 50 60 70 million. Um, the TAM of like who would consume like financial newsletters is probably more like 15 million if you ask Agora. Um, I don't know exactly what it is. I got like 15 million unique emos in my database. That's probably close to the entire TAM has been subscribed at one point or another. Um, but it's it's probably not a lot bigger than that. >> Um, yeah, that would make the niche down crowd uh make their heads explode. So, that's uh that's a good one. I appreciate that. >> Well, I mean, think about like what you know, Alex Ramozi's like the hot guy in our space now, right? You know, initially he was doing education in the gym space and like we realized like this is a small pond. I need to be in a bigger pond and now he's doing business education for every business owner. It's like he went and chose the broader bigger market cuz like that's where the scale is. It's an interesting so many people end up I always see that with YouTubers and all different kinds of content creators where they end up in like the how to make money space sort of almost accidentally like they'll be they'll get as big as they can with fitness videos and then they'll start talking about how they started making money with their fitness videos and it's like I guess it must be an easier one to monetize as well. But it's just interesting how many people end up there once they've sort of like tapped out on the the sort of initial niche that they they started with. Tyler, you got anything else burning? >> No, I think uh we can we can let Matt off the hot seat, but we uh we certainly appreciate you joining us in in Letterland and we look forward to seeing you in Austin and in just a couple months. >> Yeah, that'll be a good time. Uh make sure to follow me on Twitter. It's uh Matt Pollson SD SD for South Dakota. Love to see you there. >> It's uh one of my favorite follows. Not really for the newsletter content. the the newsletter related stuff is amazing, but I just love the uh the the wrist shots of the different watches. That's my >> people people should know I'm not a serious person on Twitter. A lot of my posts are like, you know, just trying to see what generates engagement and not like actually serious stuff. Like if I post some stupid picture of a private jet and like comment about it, like it's not because I'm trying to be an I'm trying to see like can I get 200,000 impressions on that post? >> I I think that's what Twitter is, right? There's it's just it's just a game to see what impressions I can get. >> Yeah. I mean, if you think people like actually believe everything they post on Twitter, then that's probably not the right place for you. >> Awesome, man. Well, we appreciate your time. Uh, and, you know, best of luck in the future. Not that you need it, but we will uh we will chat with you soon. >> Sounds good. Thanks, guys. >> Thank you so much.