2022 Speakers
Financial publishing and media are both in a state of disruption and disrupting other financial industries.
This is one of the most exciting times to be in the industry.
This year we’re excited to bring you publishers, marketers, and CEOs from all sides of this disruption.
We’re keeping the FMS community on the cutting edge of the transformation of finpub & fintech.
-John Newtson & Jami Stout
Porter Stansberry
Porter Stansberry, Founder and Chairman of Meadowdale Holdings, has been rewriting the rules of financial publishing for over 25 years.
Porter started what would grow into the world’s foremost financial publishing company back in 1999. It began with a single direct mail promotion called “Railroad Across America” that he pecked out on a borrowed laptop, and culminated in 2021 when ‘MarketWise’ went public at a $3 billion valuation.
Porter’s astounding achievements in the financial newsletter industry are made possible by a simple – renegade – guiding principle. According to Porter, “You can’t trick customers into paying for financial advice. You have to have something proprietary, valuable, and easy to use. And you have to offer it for sale in an ethical way, by putting the customer first in every aspect of your business.”
The mission of Porter’s latest publishing venture, ‘Porter & Co.’ is to become the world’s leading independent provider of financial research — and to set new industry standards for customer service, technological integration, and proprietary analytics.
Porter is going to show the 8 tactics & strategies he used to capture the highest customer lifetime value (LTV) of just about any scaled-up publisher in the business.
His company built a customer value is about 3-times higher than just about any else I’ve seen who has scaled, High LTVs on over 400,000 customers is kind of the holy grail of direct response.
Marin Svorinic
Marin Svorinic and his partner Marin Katusa run Katusa Research. Katusa pioneered the private placement newsletter back in 2005.
Today, getting your company’s capital raise featured in their newsletter is the holy grail of digital cap raise.
Their subscriber base has invested as much as $100 million into a single company.
And over just the past year and half or so they’re subscribers have invested over $500 million into various deals.
You’d think with those kinds of numbers Katusa Research has a massive customer list. You’d be wrong.
Marin and Marin are doing this with a paid subscription base of around 5,000 customers.
Marin Svorinic is coming to explain what they’re doing and how they’re doing it.
Michael Hearne
Decentral Publishing
Format breakthroughs are the cause of some of the most dramatic revenue drivers we’ve ever seen in the industry.
When the first VSL came out we were seeing 9X conversion rates for the first year.
Hotlist launches added billions in revenue to the industry.
No wonder marketers chase format breakthroughs.
Mike & Nate at Decentral Publishing are proponents of a new format – the Docuseries funnel.
They’re Uncensored Crypto launch also had the benefit of NOT NEEDING earnings claims in any way.
Nate Hopkins
Decentral Publishing
Their docuseries model is one of the most exciting things we’ve seen in the last several years in finpub.
It was a lead generation breakthrough, too. They were getting 3 leads for every 1 lead they paid for – THREE!
Why? Because so many viewers were sending the funnel to their friends.
Expect to see this model and format explode in finpub over the next several years.
Like so many format changes before this one is transforming production values on promotion.
It’s also revealing an alternate model to traditional financial publishing.
Ian Rosen
CEO, Financial Answers by Tifin
Ian has been on one of the biggest acquisition sprees the financial publishing has ever seen.
He’s been buying publishers and media companies at a staggering pace.
The goal? Transform their business models through leveraging their data.
His group, Financial Answers is part of Tifin, recently valued at $842 million.
Ian has deep experience in financial media.
Following 15 years helping financial services firms build tools to better integrate financial data, Ian transitioned to consumer media, becoming GM of MarketWatch, Inc., one of the largest multi-channel financial media brands globally.
After MarketWatch, Ian co-founded Even Financial, now the premier platform to provide customizable financial product offers.
Following two years as CEO of Even, Ian left to become CEO of Stocktwits, Inc., the largest social network for investing and trading with more than three million members.
While there, Ian extended the platform by launching Trade App, the first FINRA approved broker-dealer with social features. Ian graduated with highest honors from The University of Michigan, and currently serves on the External Advisory Board of the UM School of Information.
Jarrod Glandt
President, Cardone Enterprises
Rebecca Kacaba
CEO & CO-Founder, DealMaker.tech
Rebecca co-founded DealMaker.tech, a revolutionairy cloud-based platform for high-performance digital capital raise.
So far, over $1 billion of capital raise has run through her platform.
Dealmaker not only intersects with traditional financial publishers regularly, they are also part of a new breed of finpub.
They’ve recently launched what looks like a financial publisher – staffed by finpub veterans – as part of their broader media strategy.
David Pena
Co-Founder, Lifewater Media
Lifewater Media has been crushing it as a marketing agency for public and private issuers raising capital online.
As the first-generation son of an immigrant family, David Pena learned his strong work ethic at a young age. His work experience started with long hours of hard labor, which then shifted to the hospitality industry. David found his calling in sales as he quickly rose through the ranks becoming a top salesman and regional manager. For over 12 years, David has focused on online marketing. As a result of strong relationships and implementing the knowledge of advertising on a plethora of verticals, he planted the seeds for Life Water Media. Fun fact: sports mohawk, avid weightlifter.
Lawrence Cohen
Lawrence Cohen is Of Counsel in the Phoenix and New York offices of Gordon & Rees.
Mr. Cohen has a diverse national business law practice spanning areas such as general business law, securities and capital markets regulatory matters, franchising, and healthcare transactions. His expertise is especially strong in broker-dealer and investment adviser regulation and compliance.
Early in his career, Mr. Cohen was Secretary and Chief Compliance Officer of The Guardian Life Insurance Company’s retail mutual funds and annuities/separate accounts and its affiliated broker-dealer distributor and investment manager, and then associate counsel and assistant secretary of Lehman Brother’s institutional funds group. He has served as outside counsel to public and private funds, and formed and registered numerous broker-dealers and investment advisers, including the Blackstone Group, advising them and other preeminent investment banks and private fund managers on regulatory and compliance matters.
With respect to tech start-ups, Mr. Cohen has counseled entrepreneurs and development-stage companies, and served as a judge at the New Jersey Technology Council competitions and as a mentor to companies participating in the Cleantech Open, the world’s largest clean-tech accelerator. He is serving a mentor for the 2022 Cleantech Open’s annual business competition and accelerator program, as well as a Metro Ambassador for the Greater Phoenix marke
John Newtson
CEO Pendry Cannon
John has been on the cutting edge of the transformations in financial publishing.
He started predicting M&A was coming to the industry back in 2016 at FMS.
Predicted publishers going public before the MarketWise Spac; the merging of finpub & media models with fintech and traditional financial services, and that most capraise platforms would NEED publishers and media agencies in order to thrive long before anyone else.
He created the Cannon Network, a platform for financial services firms & issuers to intersect with publishers in 2018. The Cannon Network is the first & only platform for public & private company management teams to present their company or capital raise to the digital financial publishing and influencer industry in an open and transparent way.
His presentations on industry trends are sought after by major publishers and media companies in the industry and by financial services firms looking to connect with the industry.
Aaron Dehoog
Publisher, Banyan Hill
Aaron Dehoog is consistently one of the most successful publishers in the industry.
He first scaled Newsmax’s investment newsletter group from around 10,000 subscribers to over 400,000 paid customers.
Then took over an Agora division that was losing money before he turned it around and scaled it to over $100 million in subscription revenue.
He is a strong advocate for his customers and one of the best business builders in the industry.
He’s going to share his top 5 do’s & don’ts when you’re trying to scale your business up.
Morgan Busby
CEO, Financial Media Corp.
Morgan has probably done more deals – and more types of deals than anyone else in the industry -partnerships. acquisitions, exits. You name it, he’s probably done it.
And for sure he’s done deals in ways you never considered.
He has built a community of deal makers that has allowed him to build one of the largest, most robust ecosystems of financial media companies and financial publishers in the industry today.
Anyone who knows Morgan has probably heard him say, “We’re in the relationship business.”
For Morgan, relationships matter.
It’s more than just being nice, though.
This year Morgan is going to pull back the curtain on some of the most important aspects of his approach to business development and deal making.
Eric Johnson
Chief Marketing Officer, LeadMark & Traders Agency
Eric is one of the biggest lead generators in the industry.
He’s been buying media and driving traffic for major publishers and niche trader educators for years.
He’s leading this year’s panel on traffic & acquisition.
The panel will be digging into everything from the top performing traffic sources to conversion strategies to what keywords are getting clicks at scale and more.
Traffic is one of the most fluid areas of the industry and one of the biggest priorities for publishers.
So we’ve assembled a rockstar team of media buyers to help bring you up to speed.
Wes Anderson
Head of Acquisition, Angel Publishing
Wes is a cutting edge marketer and media buyer.
By fostering strategic affiliate relationships alongside managing media buying on most major ad networks, Wes has increased front end acquisition by over 100% YoY while drastically improving breakeven time. Wes credits their custom built reporting software OptiPub for allowing him access to every relevant data point to make the best revenue generating decisions in real time.
Jason Stodsgill
Head of Traffic, Cardone Training
Jason has been hailed by a herd of media buying gurus as a genius.
Every time I turn around I see another marketing or media guru talking about how he’s a Google Display Network media monster or some other over the top praise.
It’s all deserved, too.
Jason is one of the top technical media buyers in the industry.
He drives profitable traffic at scale.
Charles Flagle
Founder, Traffic grid
Charles was head of the media buying team at Money Map Press back when they broke over $200 million in subscription revenue.
He managed media on several of the biggest acquisition campaigns in their history.
Then he left and launched Traffic Grid where major pubs and other media buyers flock to him to get him to help with their campaigns.
Bret Holmes
Bret Holmes is industry famous for two things: strong opinions and a mastery of publishing math.
He, more than almost anyone else we’ve seen, is a proponent of the math is the business.
He can break a publishing business down into fundamental KPIs and tell you what the revenue would be blind.
Entrepreneurs and marketers who see his breakdowns get pretty elated because it shows exactly what needs to happen to go from one stage to the next.
How much mail should you send? What do you need to spend on acquisition? What do all the numbers need to be to go from $1m to $5m to $100m?
That’s the kind of technical marketing Bret shares and is a big part of why so many of his clients end up with one “record setting sales day” after another – over and over again.
Damon Wright
Partner, Gordon & Rees
The FTC remains very active in financial publishing.
It recently proposed a new rule change regarding earnings claims that could have sweeping impacts on the industry.
Damon Wright has been helping us keep the industry up to date on new cases, discussing nuances of the FTC’s positions, and helping publishers navigate this evolving regulatory environment.
He is joining us again to update the FMS community on legal developments and make sure everyone understands how to stay compliant.
A healthy understanding of the FTCs concerns and of the issues around compliance allows you to grow with confindence.
Did you know you can trigger an email the SECOND a customer is actually reading and opening email?
Yes, there is a way to target people on your list WHEN they are opening emails.
That’s just one tech breakthrough you’ll discover at FMS this year.
FMS is famous for how much actual business gets done each year.
Part of that is our devotion to helping each and every attendee meet everyone they need to meet.
The most common praise we hear are variations of “I can do real business with 99% of the people in the room.”
And “I do more business development in two days here than I do all year normally.”
Speed Networking is a special session we do at the end of Day One.
It guarantees you meet every single attendee so you know who to follow up with.
Speed networking is sponsored by:
We start networking the night before FMS.
Join us at our Welcome night reception for networking and cocktails.
Hosted by:
