When I was a student at Dakota State University, I paid close attention to the emails that were sent to all students. A lot of the emails were noise from student activities I was not interested in, but every now and then great opportunities were presented that any ambitious student could take advantage of. It …
The setting is Thanksgiving of 2010. Karine and I were engaged at the time and were planning a wedding the following summer. We spent the long weekend at her parents’ farm outside of Emery, South Dakota. The weekend was marked by energetic nieces and nephews, board games, walks on country roads and German chocolate pie. …
With 2020 mercifully coming to a close, I thought it would be a good time to highlight some of the non-fiction books that I have read this year. With two small children in our home, there is not a lot of uninterrupted free time to focus on a book. Consequently, most of my reading has …
A couple of weeks back, I was doing some routine monitoring of MarketBeat’s email engagement metrics and saw an interesting number appear on our dashboard: It turns out that MarketBeat has sent more than one billion emails in 2020 to our 1.75 million email subscribers with an average open rate of 21%. Any spammer can …
There are more than 500 registered non-profits that have 501(c)3 status in the greater Sioux Falls area, each with their own mission, vision, values, staff, and board of directors. Some non-profits operate on state or federal contracts or through grant programs, but most small non-profits rely primarily on charitable contributions from individual donors. One consequence …
2020 has been a year of growth for MarketBeat. Our email list has grown by more than 500,000 subscribers since the first of the year. We brought on two additional employees. We just crossed $10 million in revenue for the year and expect to see 75% year-over-year growth for the year. While we did see …
Every now and then I receive an email from someone that is looking for advice about building a mobile app for their business or non-profit. These conversations usually start along the lines of, “Hey, I have a great idea for an app. Who do I talk to?” or “Do you know any good app developers?” …
As I write this post, COVID-19 numbers are spiking across the Midwestern states and there are more active cases now than at any point during the pandemic. While COVID-19 numbers do not look great in South Dakota currently, there does still seem to be a sense that things are slowly returning to normal. Micah and …
At the beginning of the year, it looked like 2020 was going to be a big year for the Sioux Falls startup community. We had gotten into a groove of running 1 Million Cups weekly, doing monthly startup events for Startup Sioux Falls and Zeal, and were planning a couple of bigger events as well. …
For the last twelve years, I have largely worked in solitude in front of a computer screen. First as a remote employee and then later as a business owner, most of my workday as been spent at home or in a small office with minimal human contact during the day. Even today, there are at …