Show Notes Matt Paulson is an entrepreneur. His journey of entrepreneurship started at an early age. In fourth grade he made a website that gave him a passive income of $25 – $100 per month. Like most of us, he went to college, graduated with a degree, went on to his masters, and finally landed a good job. After a few years working in that job, he believed that he could do so much more with his skills. He quit and went on to start his own company. Since then he has made several successful online companies. Market Beat; a financial media company, send out daily investment newsletter to about 445,000 people GoGo Photo Contest; helps animal shelters raise money US Golf TV; publishing company in the golf industry Falls Angel Fund; regional angel fund to invest in high growth companies in South Dakota and surrounding states In this episode, Matt talks about being a Christian Businessman in this industry, managing employees that are stationed around the world, and about his own superpower – automation. Follow these links to learn more or get in contact with Matt Paulson. mattpaulson.com twitter.com/matthewdp facebook.com/matthewpaulson ICQ: 4370199 Show Description The Business Design Podcast helps entrepreneurs design and build businesses that succeed on their own even if you take a 6 month vacation. Hosted by John Hwang and Scott Andersen, they share their successes and pitfalls and equip you to make daily progress in your business. Transcription [00:00:00] Welcome to the business design podcast. The podcast that helps enterpreneurs design and build businesses that succeed on their own even if you take a six-month vacation. We are your hosts, Ian, John, and Scott. We’re here to share the successes and pitfalls of many enterpreneurs like you and equip you to make Daily Progress in your business. V1 John: can you introduce yourself to our audience and tell us a little about yourself? Matt: Sure my name is Matthew Poston. I am the founder of a business called Market. It is a financial media company. We send out a daily investment newsletter to about 445,000 people. I have a few other businesses GoGo photo contest helps animal shelters raise money. And then Us Golf TV is a Publishing Company the golf industry. And finally Falls Angel fund is a regional Angel fund to invest in high-growth companies in South Dakota and surrounding states. Wife two kids. I live in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. I think that’s it. John: Awesome, can you take us a little bit back to the beginning. And shares a little life story about, kind of how you got to where you. Are trying to look into your childhood and a little bit about yourself. Matt: Yeah, so my first internet business happened when I was in fourth grade. This would have been like 1995, back before nobody knew, anybody knew about the internet really. But I had a little website about SimCity 2000 and all the other Sim games. I played at cheat codes that we’d used and screenshots, and little apps that worked John: wihat year was that. Matt: It’s probably ’95, ’96, ’97 somewhere in there. John: Oh my God, who taught you how to write or like build it a website at when your fourth grade? Matt: nobody. kids can learn anything if they put their effort into it. It’s easy to learn stuff as a kid. [Fair enough] Harder learn stuff as an adult. So while I really got started with HTML like on message boards, like you could, you know, putting the HTML tags, I figured oh that’s how you bold text. That’s how you italic text. And that’s how you do an image. You know fourth-grade Matth picked that up, so I mean my SimCity website hosted on geocities, and I put little ads for an ad Network that was then called Save Thought, and it had actually like free hosting from somewhere else. I get like a buck 50 if anybody ever clicked on it, and I think I was making maybe 25 bucks a month as like a middle school student, or as a grade school student. Middle School student getting checks in the mail, and my parents are like how the heck are you getting these checks in the mail, and I kind of told them, it’s like oh that’s interesting. So for my middle school years I was making between 25 and hundred dollars a month with a little website, and that that was, that was the origin story of the original. You know Matt Paulson business. John: Did you have anything else like in high school or college that you kind of dabbled in because of that experience? Matt: Yeah, so most of my high school years I spent on the debate team which is an all time consuming kind of thing so I didn’t have time for a business. I worked at Burger King High School. I didn’t really enjoy it. Then I worked at a gas station my senior year and had a lot of free time to think about internet business. Didn’t really do anything with it. I really got to start in college again when I was a sophomore this talent. I went to school with 7,000 people not a lot of job opportunities though. I started doing freelance writing on a site called Associated Content, and they would pay like five to ten dollars for a 400 word article. So I started about you do 10 of them a day, something like that. I made a nice income of about 4,000 $2,000 a month doing that as a college student. Eventually that morphed into being that I could just do this on my own blog and see where that went. And like everybody else in 2007 or so had personal finance blog telling people how I’m going to get out of debt, and you know there’s a million those websites back then. And I can’t figure it out. It’s like wow people don’t really care about my content, but there are plenty of people that are going to buy links for me and people are clicking AdSense ads. So I made like four others just like it. So I had you know five personal finance websites that I’d tell blinks on the SEO agencies, and they’ll get a little bit of Adsense revenue and 2010 I grown that too. I think we did over Pike. I think we did 139,000 in 2010 in revenue from those five little websites. Which going great until February of 2011, which is when the panda update happened and everybody that had a personal finance blog in world just got creamed. So my traffic went half overnight. I mean that was really when you’re starting to punish you know link buying too. So people stopped doing, because site-wide links were not a good thing to do anymore. So that Revenue took a real dive, but John: just to interrupt real quick you mentioned, “we.” Is that just habit, or is there a partner? Someone you’re working with? Matt: No. I’ve, I’ve had team members since about [00:05:00] 2008. I and my first website that people that write for me. Now I have actual employees in my business, so not a huge team, but we’re at four employees including myself, and another five contractors. So though the whole Market B team’s currently nine people. [Wow!] So we’re growing up being kind of a real company now with a 401k plan and PTO and all those other scary words that most solo entrepreneurs don’t ever have to think about. John: Right are they all based in your hometown. Where you work out or where they are located? Matt: Sure. So two of my employees are in Sioux Falls, and then one of them is in Florida, and then my contractors are Guatemala, India, New York, Chicago, and Sioux Falls. So it’s just– people I work with– our people– people out– our employees are people, are you know mostly I’ve met in person. and Don, my guy in Florida, I’ve met him once actually, but you know I’ve been working and stuff for 10 years. He’s been doing so much for me is like, huh yeah, I better start calling you an employee. Yeah, so we’re in the process of getting him to be employed. V2 John: When that happened in 2008. When you’re having those sites, were you working a job while you’re doing that? Or did you– call –was that like a full income kind of source of income? Matt: Yeah, so I graduate from college in 2008. I had a full-time job that summer. I did a master’s degree the following year. And then after that I took a job at the little web design agency called Factory 360. I did dot net web development for them, and I did that until November of ’12. And frankly I probably quit way later than I should have if I were doing it over again. have probably never took the job and just done my own thing, but you know, it’s easy to look back and see how it worked out and think I could have done that sooner. But you know that you think I got this really risky internet business. You know. It could disappear overnight. I should probably keep my job. But eventually had enough revenue for enough months in a row, or I thought well, I suppose if it doesn’t work out, I just go get another job. And finally made that jump. John: Do you remember that kind of period where you were feeling like I couldn’t trust this and then and then finally seeing okay? What made you get the confidence about saying I can just go get another job and whatnot what was that? Matt: Yeah, so I was actually thinking about quitting maybe year and half before I actually did and I think I had gotten it up to about 25 Grand a month in Revenue. But some’n happened with one of my sites. I think I got penalized actuall, something like that, but I went from twenty five to 14 the next month, so it’s like. Oh well. I mean it isn’t so stable. [Sure] But then I kind of figured out what I did wrong. I fixed it. I kind of spread the money around a few different sites, so like wow if one of these get penalized, I’ve got the other. So it was less worried about it, then John: yeah, two years ago when we first met– micro comf yeah, I think. My recollection you said yet one employee, full time employee back then [yep] and some maybe two or three contractors is what I remember Matt: yeah, that sounds about right. John: okay. What’s changed so
