My Quarterly Update: Q3 2025
Fifteen years ago, I considered myself a “portfolio entrepreneur” who had several very small online businesses together that made up a full-time income. I had personal finance websites, a press release distribution service, a SaaS that helped animal shelters raise money (GoGo Photo Contest), an online audiobook directory, and several other random websites. Between 2010 and 2015, I learned that trying to juggle several online businesses was probably the wrong approach. Unless you’re Elon Musk, it’s very difficult to run several businesses at a time and do it well.
Between 2010 and 2015, my entrepreneurial career came into focus. Most of my businesses never got past $200K/year in revenue, but my personal finance websites evolved into investing websites and continued to grow. Eventually, a website called Analyst Ratings Network became the center of my online business empire, making more than $1 million in 2014. Ten years ago this summer, Analyst Ratings Network got a new name – MarketBeat. So, in a way, it’s MarketBeat’s 10th birthday as a brand. So, happy birthday, MarketBeat!
I guess I share this with you to remind you that doing anything well takes consistent effort over an incredibly long time. Don’t think in terms of weeks and months to achieve your dreams. Think in terms of years and decades. It took me seven years of wandering to land on MarketBeat’s business model, then another ten years to grow and evolve it into a mature, stable, and highly profitable business.
This stuff takes a long time, and that’s okay. The key is to stay on the path, not get distracted by shiny objects, and enjoy the journey. Joy comes from climbing the mountain, not reaching the peak.
Family and Work Travel
We had a busy travel schedule in Q2. I spoke at Perry Belcher’s Driven Mastermind in Las Vegas in April and got to spend some time with his crew.
In May, I traveled to New York City with some MarketBeat employees to attend The Newsletter Conference. It was a good event, but I found it to be more focused on traditional media and less focused on digital-native media outlets.
As soon as school got out, our family spent several days in Florida at an Airbnb. Micah and I attended WWE’s Saturday Night Main Event taping, and Ady really enjoyed going to a Tesla store in the mall.
Later in June, we spontaneously took a family trip to Boston. Karine has gotten very into the Karen Read murder trial (which took place in Dedham, a suburb of Boston), and she was excited to see some of the locations important in that trial. We also flew up to Minneapolis for a day in MarketBeat One to visit U.S. Bank Stadium. I am now a Vikings suite owner and will be going to most home games this year.
In July, I’ll be spending a day or two in Fargo to network with some startups and venture capital funds up there. Karine and I also plan to take a “no kids” vacation before school starts this year.
Introducing Homegrown Capital Fund II
Homegrown Capital, the venture capital firm that I run with my partner Tim Weelborg, launched its second fund in May.
Homegrown Capital Fund II will be investing in early-stage, high-growth technology companies located “between the coasts.” We have completed a first closing and are targeting a $30 million total capitalization for our second fund. Our Fund II strategy is very similar to our Fund I strategy; however, we can make slightly larger investments, and we are loosening our geographic criteria since most new technology companies are remote teams with employees in multiple geographies.
We made our final investment in Fund I, Chipp.AI, earlier this year. Overall, the companies in Fund I are performing very well. On average, the companies we invested in have increased in revenue by 120% since our initial investments in them. We currently have two companies in due diligence for Fund II and will likely make our first investment out of Fund II sometime this summer.
MarketBeat Updates
MarketBeat focused heavily on developing new AI tools and features during the second quarter. We have gotten good at prompt engineering and leveraging our internal data to summarize what is happening in the stock market. Users can easily see a narrative summary of why a particular stock is trading up or down today (example here) or what the key takeaways were from an earnings call (example here).
We also use AI models to generate marketing creative and aid in our content team’s editorial process. I believe that AI will be transformative to many categories of businesses, and we want to be at the front of that wave.
While users have quickly adopted the new AI-powered tools on our website, we recognize that not every project we create is going to be a hit. One such project that never took off is our mobile iPhone and Android app. It had about 5,000 monthly active users, and we decided to sunset it at the end of last month. The reality was that it was a less useful version of our mobile website, and it took a lot of development resources to keep it active and improve it. Most businesses simply do not need dedicated mobile apps, and it turns out that we didn’t either.
We welcomed a new back-end software developer to our team, John Franti, last quarter. We also welcomed back one of our interns from last summer, Savanna Osowski, for a second-year internship. Savanna is working under Rebekah Van Maanen and doing front-end web development work. We currently plan on hiring another associate editor sometime this fall as Jessica Mitacek takes the helm of our editorial team and Don Miller eyes retirement (at least from full-time work). We are currently at nineteen employees. There aren’t any obvious gaps in talent or capacity, and I think we are sitting pretty well in terms of the team right now.
The major challenge we dealt with last quarter was deliverability to Yahoo and AOL subscribers. Yahoo made some major changes to its email deliverability criteria in April, and lists that send out a significant volume of promotional affiliate content found their messages getting deferred or delivered to the spam folder. We worked with two deliverability consultants, Ashley from SendGrid and Chris Miquel from Audience Bridge, to diagnose the issue and resolve it. We got (mostly) back in Yahoo’s good graces in early June.
My takeaway from this experience is that if you are going to build an email-driven business, it’s probably not a good idea to rely on one email service provider, one sending domain, and one set of IP addresses for all your email. For this reason, we started a Substack list called The Markets Daily and a Beehiiv list called American Market News. While these projects are early, they are generating about $2,000 per day in advertising revenue. It’s also been a good learning experience to play with different email platforms than I normally use and take learnings back to the internally developed CRM tool that we use to manage our primary MarketBeat lists.
Overall, I would say things are good at MarketBeat. Our team is well aligned, and our company culture is in a great place. We have a good product roadmap for the remainder of the year and have made some positive changes that will ensure the long-term success of our email program.
Introducing AI Matt
My current weekend hobby is playing with whatever the hot new AI tool of the week is. In my last quarterly update, I highlighted some ways that I am currently using AI tools. Of course, the tools are getting better every week. One tool I have been experimenting with is Delphi, which allows you to make an AI clone of yourself. I uploaded all my books, my blog posts, my interviews on YouTube, and my social media accounts to create a digital twin of myself. It’s currently based on about 800,000 words I’ve either written or said on an interview in the past. If you want marketing, business, or even personal advice in the way that I might answer it, feel free to give AI Matt a try ->
Upcoming Events
We (MarketBeat) are helping with or sponsoring several events throughout the rest of the year. I thought it would be worth listing them out so that you can add any that are relevant to your calendar:
- Lallycooler Music Festival (July 11 and 12) – This is an outdoor music festival that we are the main sponsor of. It’s being put on by the Washington Pavilion and is headlined by Sam Hunt and Pitbull.
- Levitt at the Falls (ongoing) – Levitt at the Falls puts on 50 free outdoor concerts each year during the summer. MarketBeat is the season sponsor for Levitt this year. The season goes through the end of August, and there are still many more great shows to come.
- YPN Crossroads Summit (August 21) – This is perhaps my favorite local business event. It is a business conference for young professionals, and as a 39-year-old, I still technically qualify as a young professional. When they last held this event in 2023, I was one of two keynote speakers (listen to my talk here). This event is always very well organized and has great speakers, too.
- Innovation Expo (September 18) – This is a local event for venture capital-track startups and angel investors. I often help recruit speakers for this event, and MarketBeat sponsors it as well.
- MarketBeat Open (October 19-26) – This is a USTA professional tennis tournament in Sioux Falls that we sponsor. This year the tournament has been upgraded from a 75-level tournament to a 100-level tournament, which should attract more higher-level players.
- AiEDGE (October 30) – This is an annual event run by my friend Andy Jorgensen that teaches businesses how to implement AI tools to improve productivity.
Wrap-Up
If you are still reading at this point, I’d encourage you to check out MarketBeat’s YouTube channel. We recently passed 200,000 subscribers, and MarketBeat’s own Bridget Bennett has significantly leveled up the quality of our content this year. We’ve interviewed public company CEOs and well-known financial publishing authors, including Marc Lichtenfeld, Jeff Brown, and Marc Chaikin.
