It was the morning of November 2nd. Some of MarketBeat’s team members were working at our downtown office, getting ready for that week’s staff meeting. Just as our meeting was about to start, a curious email came in from Downtown Sioux Falls, Inc. (DTSF). Here’s what the email said: The time has come to start …
Announcing the Paulson Center at Dakota State University
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 Two Million Dollar Ideas that Propelled MarketBeat’s Growth and Success.
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. …
My 2020 Reading List
How MarketBeat Maintains 21% Open Rates While Sending 1 Billion Emails Per Year
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 …
How I Plan to Evaluate Charitable Giving Requests Moving Forward.
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 …
Five Growth Strategies that MarketBeat Leveraged to Increase Revenue by 75% in 2020.
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 …
Why Most People Shouldn’t Try to Build a Mobile App
My Quarterly Update: Q4 2020
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 …