Black Friday, Christmas and New Years are just around the corner. If you have an email list for your business, the holiday season is the best time of year to leverage your mailing list to generate sales. I recorded a live webinar on this subject. On the webinar, we talked talk about sequencing of messages, …
Please note that the thoughts expressed in this article are my own personal opinions and do not reflect the opinions of any group, organization or company that I am involved with. The next few months will be one of the busiest seasons for the entrepreneurial community in Sioux Falls in the last several years. A …
I had lofty goals of sending out a monthly update to keep you informed with what projects I’m working on this year, but that goal fell flat on its face like most New Year’s resolutions. There’s a lot going on at MarketBeat, in my personal life and in the Sioux Falls entrepreneurship scene, so I …
Each month, I meet with five to ten business owners that want to raise money for their startups. Since I’m the chair of a community angel investment fund, there are a lot of people that are told “go talk to Matt” when they ask around about raising capital to grow their business. I take as …
Every successful community has a central hub for the sharing of ideas the facilitation of random social interactions. Churches have Sunday worship. Service clubs like Rotary and Kiwanis have weekly meetings. Geeks have game nights at local comic shops. These regular places of meeting provide members of a community a forum to engage other people …
In 2012, a group of seven of my friends decided to purchase a rental home together. We found a nice undervalued property, fixed it up using our own labor, and rented it to one of our friends’ parents for a fair market rate. After a few years, we were able to pay off the house …
Over the last 100 years, marketers have pushed the promises they make to consumers to the limit to generate sales in an increasingly competitive world. They have used sex, action, greed and urgency to capture the increasingly fickle attention of consumers. They have made outrageous claims and guarantees about their products that simply don’t stand …
I recently recorded a webinar on how MarketBeat has leveraged web push notifications, email marketing and Facebook Messenger to grow our business from $500,000 per year in 2013 to over $4 million per year in 2018. We go over several practical tips in this hour long recording (and there’s no sales pitch at the end!). …
One of the best ways to build a business in this decade is to capture the attention of an audience and then rent that attention to advertisers that want to talk to your audience. We have done this with MarketBeat by earning the attention of 575,000 individual investors that have subscribed to our daily email …
“What’s the first step to starting a business?” Common answers to this question include coming up with a name, figuring out who your target market is, identifying the products and services you want to sell, identifying a location for your business or setting up an LLC. These tasks are all important, but I would argue …