Founder and CEO of @MarketBeatMedia.
Sioux Falls, South Dakota
Joined March 2008
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The new way to create email marketing campaigns:
1. Get a digital marketing skillset and add to Claude as a skill or connector. @ryandeiss has a great one of these in beta.
2. Connect your email service provider to Claude via MCP or a traditional API.
3. Point your Claude at reviews of your product (TrustPilot, Google Reviews, etc.) and have it collect what customers are saying about your product.
4. Use context from what your customers are saying + A.I. marketing skills to write an email series.
5. Claude will schedule the email series in your ESP automatically via your ESP's MCP/API.
Matt Paulson retweeted
Security called me at 6:12 AM today.
"Patch every PHP server immediately."
I asked what happened.
"Two critical vulnerabilities. Remote code execution. No authentication required."
Cool.
How many PHP servers do we have?
According to inventory: 12
According to reality:
Nobody knows.
We found one running WordPress.
Three running old internal tools.
One under someone's desk.
Two inside vendor appliances.
A forgotten employee directory from 2016.
And a server named:
PHP-OLD-DO-NOT-TOUCH
Naturally, that one runs payroll exports.
Then we found a PHP 5.6 box.
I asked who owned it.
The documentation said:
BRIAN.
Brian left in 2019.
We called Brian.
He said:
"Oh wow, that's still running?"
Excellent.
By 8 AM, leadership joined the incident call.
CEO:
"Can hackers actually get in?"
Security:
"Potentially yes."
CEO:
"Without a password?"
Security:
"Yes."
CEO:
"Then why do WE need passwords?"
Not the lesson.
Finance asked if we could wait until the weekend to patch because downtime affects revenue.
Security explained that the alternative was letting strangers execute code on our servers.
Finance asked for a cost comparison.
At 9:17, someone suggested temporarily taking the vulnerable websites offline.
Marketing refused.
"Our campaign is live."
So for the next hour, the company officially decided maintaining a landing page for 20% off webinar registration was more important than preventing remote server takeover.
We finally patched everything we could find.
Then our scanner discovered another PHP server.
Hostname:
TEMP-PHP-2014
Uptime:
4,512 days.
Nobody knows what it does.
Nobody owns it.
Nobody can shut it down.
But every time we block network access, the warehouse stops printing shipping labels.
Security has classified it as critical infrastructure.
It is running PHP 5.4.
The vulnerability has existed longer than half our employees.
The emergency patch took four hours.
Finding out what PHP actually runs took eleven.
The internet isn't held together with code.
It's held together with servers everyone is afraid to turn off.
Lots of publishers block ChatGPT's crawlers. Our LLM strategy is the opposite:
• Let every crawler index us
• Publish a lot and syndicate to Yahoo Finance and Nasdaq
• Run surveys and pitch local media, 20 to 50 stories each
We get more ChatGPT traffic than most competitors.
Net 30 is the most underrated part of buying ads at scale.
Once you spend six figures a month, Google and Meta switch you to invoicing. You lose card rewards, but I pay November's Facebook bill in late December. We break even by day 30 to 40, so cash never piles up waiting.
I started blogging around 2006 and felt three years late. There were already about 150 personal finance blogs, most bigger than mine.
One of my blogs eventually became MarketBeat. Whenever you start, somebody's ahead of you, and that's fine.
I’m not a fan of hiring someone and figuring out their job later.
Hiring a great accountant to fix messy finances makes sense. “Come work here and figure out how to be useful” doesn’t.
That might work with 5 people. As you scale, every hire needs a clear reason to be there.
Stuff MarketBeat Will Never Do:
- License some guy's vibe coded indicator
- Promote your subscription product for a 30% commission.
- Accept SEO guest posts.
- Pay its Reply Guy bills.
In Q1 I said yes to every podcast that would have me. It sounded inefficient, but it worked.
There was almost no prep, old relationships did the booking, and the transcripts trained my A.I. clone.
Then I stopped for the rest of 2026. I'd said the interesting stuff.
Someone's attention peaks the second they opt in, so we try to use every bit of it.
We get them on email plus a second list on another ESP, SMS when we can get the number, browser push, and a multi-page thank you path.
A plain "check your inbox" page leaves money on the table.
You should not be able to tell people you are a billionaire on a podcast without some kind of certification.
Oh, you want us to believe you are a billionaire, but there is no independent information about your private company's financials. Very interesting.
MarketBeat's numbers? I have audited financials from a large national accounting firm. I can prove them when needed.
Most podcast billionaires? Most of them are just making numbers up based on their forecasted revenues and B.S. comps.
"Oh, well MarketBeat is going to do $100 million next year and XYZ similar media company just sold for 12X revenue, so clearly it's a billion dollar company!"
This is a dumb tweet.
Normal people aren’t going to be using A.I. agents to read their email for them.
Get out of the Twittersphere.
It’s not real life.
Nobody on here is normal people.
The threat to @beehiiv isn't marc lou (guy's a jester).
The actual threat to beehiiv is that humans will stop reading their email.
AI agents don't read newsletters.
Even today, the Apple summary front-runs the need to open for a percentage of readers.
This means the ad model for newsletters is gone in 3 years.
The conversion math also becomes tougher and tougher, even with a huge list.
If everyone is using Claude/Muse/Grok as their LifeHQ (which they will), the only newsletters that get read will be personality/opinion driven (for fun).
The "own your audience" frame also dilutes when the layer between your words and the human buyer is designed to avoid consuming it.
This is not a beehiiv problem, it's an email problem in general.
Beehiiv is diversifying into other products, which is smart.
But one of the core tenets of audience building (just get their email and you're golden) is starting to weaken.
Our iPhone and Android apps had about 5,000 monthly active users, and we still shut them down.
They were a thinner version of our mobile site and ate engineering time we needed for the web product.
Most businesses don't need a dedicated app. It turned out we didn't either.
There are 23 million millionaires in the United States.
Don't feel bad about charging premium price.
People have the money to pay!
Matt Paulson retweeted
SpaceX posting nearly $15 billion in quarterly revenue.
Wow.
MarketBeat Open returns this week bringing tennis, local brews, family fun.
siouxfalls.business/marketbe…
