#112: Marketing Leadership | HubSpot CMO Kipp Bodnar on The Path to CMO, Evolving HubSpot's Marketing, and Predictions for 2024

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One, two, three, four. Exit, exit, exit.

All right, Kip is here. And I just said this to you, but you have a successful podcast. You've been podcasting for a bit and I said to you, isn't it so fun having when you're not in the host chair, you just get to sit back and just be interviewed about the thing that you like talking about.

It's.

It's very fun, right?

It's like vacation, man. It's like so much easier. I'm like, well, I could do this every day. Hosting your own show is like, gets to you after a while.

All right, so Kip is a CMO at HubSpot. I think a lot of people who listen to this podcast, obviously everybody's gonna know HubSpot. A lot of people are gonna be familiar with you, but you've been CMO for 8ish years. Let's, we'll round up, we'll call it a decade. That's a heck of a run.

It's getting close.

But what people might not know is that back in the day, you were one of the original, like, up and coming marketers on the HubSpot marketing team. And I want to start our conversation today by sharing that journey because most of the people that listen to exit 5 have been in that spot or are in that spot or on their way working up to VP cmo. So I want to rewind all the way back if you don't mind giving us a little history lesson. But can you tell me, where was HubSpot when you joined and what did you initially join to do?

Yeah, I think HubSpot, if I remember right, we were about a $10 million revenue business. We're about a $2 billion revenue business today. It's about a hundred ish people. I think we had, I don't know, we had a pretty big marketing team for the size of the company. I think we had like seven or eight marketers at that time. And my first job at HubSpot was I ran the HubSpot blog.

I love that.

And the HubSpot blog was like, was one of the predominant ways we, like, we generated leads. We're trying to sell our software in the early days, and I was basically tasked, like, how do you grow this thing and make it more successful than it currently is?

What year was that roughly? I just want to give some context.

2010.

2010. So blogging was the new thing from a business standpoint, right?

Very new. Blogging was new. Everything was new. Blogging was new. Conversion rate optimization, monetizing blogs. All of those things were very new.

When you joined, was it like, hey, man, grow this blog? Or did you join the company to be like, I'm going to be a marketing executive or were you like, I love marketing. I'm going to geek out on the marketing stuff. I'm going to grow that. This is a channel that I'm going to grow and focus on?

Well, no, like, for me it was the first core thing was like, I really believe in the Internet and I really believe that the Internet is the future of marketing. And I met Brian, Dharmesh, Mike, Rick, a lot of people at the time who are at HubSpot, and I was like, oh, all these people believe the exact same thing I believe. And they have the same level of conviction I believe. And I just want to work with them. And either we're all going to be right and be really successful or we're going to be wrong and have, like, learned some stuff in the process. But, like, you got to realize this is almost 14 years ago. Like, the world was a very different place then, and it's easy to kind of forget. And so I was just like, cool. I like blogging. I like the Internet. I'm going to come on and I'll do my best job at growing this thing. And I don't know, at this point, we didn't know if HubSpot was going to be around in a couple of years. Like, there was no. There wasn't much to have visions of grandeur about.

Right, Right. It was like, we're trying to generate meetings for the sales team at this point.

Exactly. We're trying to live to fight next to next year. You know what I mean?

And then at what point did you start to take on more responsibility? Or at what point did Mike, who was the CMO at the time, or. Or Brian or Dharmesh? At what point do you remember in your career they kind of tapped on you to be like, huh, Kip's kind of like, figuring out this blog thing. I wonder if he could be our guy to do this next thing and then this next thing.

Yeah. So I think I'll frame this and kind of I'll give you the answer, but I also want to frame it for people who are in this situation. Right. And I think the best people in the situation have two things happen. They're really successful at that core job at hand. I think I had taken the HubSpot blog From, I think 200, I think February before I joined in March. I think it had done like 200,000 monthly uniques. And I think a year, 18 months later, we were at like a million monthlies. And so we had scaled it up pretty aggressively. And so, like, that was obviously going well. And the next part of that was I was also kind of a resource for other people. Other people would ask me questions about things, which is the thing that I think most marketers listening to the show probably miss. Like, most marketers are so heads down, focused on, like, killing their one thing that they're trying to do. If they're like an individual contributor that they don't realize, like, hey, I can help and lead other people without being their manager. So when an opportunity comes up, I'm like a top choice for that opportunity because it's just kind of like, embedded into the culture of what's happening. Right. And I think that is kind of what had happened where it was just like, I was talking with a bunch of folks, and then I think I doing the blog to doing, like, social and SEO and like, doing, like, a lot of the top of the funnel stuff, because it just. I don't just kind of happened, and it was just kind of an organic evolution of what I was already doing.

You were clearly passionate about that thing, but you probably also weren't like, I'm just focused on the blog. That's not my job. Mary. Don't bother me with this thing.

Correct. Exactly. I think marketers are craftspeople. I think they make things, I think they build things, I think they create things. But, like, I think to think of yourself as a very niche craftsperson is, like, the wrong way to do it. It would be like the analogy of being, like, cool, like, I only carve wooden bowls versus, like, oh, I'm a woodworker and I can make anything out of wood. Like, those are two very, very different ways to see yourself. And I think you're much better off to see yourself as the latter than the former.

Oh, that's really good. I really like that because I think we're just having this conversation with somebody yesterday. Oh, we were talking about, we have somebody that's helping us out with, like, social media for Exit 5 as an example. And I want to do all the channels. I want to do TikTok, Instagram, you know, Twitter, like YouTube.

Right.

But there's something to like, let's figure out this one. Let's nail this one thing.

That's the magic.

And then also, and you've seen this time and time again now, but it's like this belief that, like, even if the channel is different, if we have success on this one channel, we're gonna be able to take those lessons and learnings and, like, replicate that. And so in your example, it's like, we figured out this. The blog thing. Like, yeah, maybe this other channel, maybe webinars or co marketing or whatever is different, or podcasting is different, But I kind of have these similar, like, rough ingredients. Is that. Am I kind of.

Yeah, there's the same rough skills. It's like, cool. I got to research. I got to tell a story. I got to package that story for this channel that I am focused on. I've got to figure out how to convert the traffic or people listening, reading, whatever this thing may be. And those are like, yes, those are different and everything, but they're also kind of universalities of marketing that you just kind of have to do. And if you think about them A little wider. You can be like, oh, cool, I was doing this blog thing. Now I can go do this social media thing or this podcast thing, whatever it might be.

This is not why I wanted to talk to you, but because you mentioned it, you just casually said we were doing 200k monthly uniques, and then we grew to a million monthly.

Yeah, yeah.

Which is insane to think about.

Totally.

Can you give me some hits from that era?

Well, look, look, first of all, you got to remember, that era was way less competitive, right? Like, there was just way less people, like marketing. I know you believe this, and I believe this. Marketing is a game of moving early and moving fast. The earlier you move, the faster you move, the more asymmetric your returns for your time is, which means you will get a much bigger return than. And then if you're a late adopter and you just kind of get the normalized return. And so that was part of it, but I think the biggest part of it was doing the backwards math, which is what a lot of people don't do, which is, like, cool. All right. I think at the point we were publishing an article a day, and we were getting a few thousand visits a day to that article. We had a back catalog that was getting stuff. And I was like, all right, so if we want to get to a million monthly, it's like, what's the equation that gets us there? Like, how many articles do we need to publish and what type of distribution do those articles need to get? Right? And so we went from publishing once a day to, like, three or four times a day. And we got way more specific about topic selection, because topic selection relates to search, relates to the audience available to go and research and solve that thing. Right? And those things mattered a lot. We recruited a bunch of guest writers so we could actually scale our content production without just not sleeping and me writing all this stuff and random people at HubSpot writing all this stuff. Right? And so those are the secrets of what we did. But it started with, where do we need to get to to actually accomplish the goal we want to get to?

I like that, because that answer, to me is like an evergreen answer, right? It's not for people listening. That's very, like, practical advice. And so there's two things that I jotted down during that. One of them is this belief that marketing is a game of moving fast. And so you have to have a culture of experimentation and being hungry and curious and trying new things and so to go try this thing.

Right?

But the other thing is, like, You've always had this, like, at HubSpot, this mix of creative and science. It's like, we want to be fat. We want to, like, give the team freedom to, like, go try new and try new channels and figure out what works. But also, like, we're going to measure this and we're going to approach this very smartly and we're going to work backwards from the goals. And I think that that's a common mistake that I see a lot across a lot of, like startup marketing teams is. It's very easy to just like, dive in. And the marketing team is doing a lot of doing. It's like, wait, let's zoom all the way back out. And I think you have always really mastered this. Like, let's work backwards from this. Like, I want to give the team freedom to go and try this. But how is this connecting to what we're trying to do?

Yeah, it's really the combination of an aggressive, clear goal you're trying to accomplish and then how do you iterate to it? I don't know if you saw like last night, Sam Altman published his end of the year blog post on his blog and he had like 15 things that he's learned to think about for business. And he said this way better than I could. He had. He said fast iteration can make up for a lot. It's usually okay to be wrong if you iterate quickly. Plans should be measured in decade. Execution should be measured in weeks.

That's really good.

And that's marketing. That's marketing in two sentences.

Damn, there's a clip. Somebody clip that, please. That's a clip. Yeah, so, okay, that. Let's keep riffing on that then. How do you enable the team to do that inside of a company?

Yeah, I don't care if you're at a really large company or a really small company, it's largely the same. Most marketing sucks because people care too much what their CEO and their customers thinks, and they're too scared of being perceived as being bad at their job and taking risks and all those things. And so what I tend to do is be like, what's the problem we're trying to solve? Am I trying to get more demand? Am I trying to change my brand awareness? What am I trying to solve? And once I align with what I'm trying to solve, like, how much money and time do I think it's going to take to get to where I want to get to? And then I need to then basically be like, cool, I've done a good job allocating the capital and allocating the people to solve this problem. Now I need to guide them and check in with those people, but in a way that I'm close enough to the details, but in a way that I'm not micromanaging everything. Which basically means we did this recently, this year with AI because we, we wanted to go really fast on all the AI stuff on our team. And so we did basically that. We built the AI team up. We took 120 use cases from across our team, we narrowed it down the top five, we let the team go after it. And I met with them every two weeks. I'm in a twice a month, stand up with them where we check in, get rid of blockers. This legal thing's happening, whatever's happening. But that's kind of the model we run, which is like hire experts to go do this well, give them clear goals and give them the right check ins to kind of push and to like get rid of blockers.

Nice. The way that you laid that out is like exactly why I wanted to have you on and talk about this stuff. Because this is ultimately, this is getting at like hearing you talk is like, man, this is the executive of a billion dollar revenue company. And I think whether you're an intern or a marketing manager, like, you can learn something from this. Which is this is why I'm not a great marketing leader. I'm good at doing the marketing, but it's very easy to dive right into the tactics. And we're totally, we're just doing stuff. But you have this very grounded view of like, what's the goal?

Right.

You said brand awareness, whatever. What's the goal? How much money and how many people? First.

Yes, first.

Right. And then the other stuff becomes like, okay, then we can figure that out. And so isn't that like how you'd sum up the biggest step from like going to just kind of individual contributor on the team to starting to think more like a manager, director, vp? That's the like mindset shift.

Yeah. Cause I'm just like you, I have an extreme bias for action. And, and, and you and I, we know what to do. We're smart people. Like, we know what to do. But am I doing the right things to solve for the right things? Like, I know I'm doing smart things, but are they actually the right things? Is the big question that you have to ask yourself in all this. And so for me, the only way I can slow myself down is to be very first principles, like be very obsessed with the whys and the principles of, like, what are we trying to solve for? What are we trying to accomplish? What do we believe to be true in trying to solve and accomplish these things? And then that last, that what do we believe to be true is like, actually very important. It was left out of my initial answer. And it's really important because it gives you conviction. And when you have conviction, you can invest disproportionately. Right? Because if you're just like, oh, I kind of know this is the right thing to do and we're going to give it a test and we'll take a year and see if we get anything from it, which is what a lot of people do, then, like, you've just given up a year to everybody else who's now had a year head start on you and are out there kicking your ass. Right. And so you can't do that.

Well, just so easy to be like, short form video. Everyone's talking about it, everyone's doing it. We need to figure it out for our company. Let's do that in Q1 and let's make 50 short form videos where, like, if you start that at the beginning and you're like, hold on. The goal is our traffic has been struggling. We need to come up with X metric and here's how we're going to do this. We want to spend this and we want to hire these people to do it. What you talked about also, I feel like that's how you pitch that idea, not just to the marketing team, but to the CEO, to the cfo. How you have a more strategic. You don't need to let them into the weeds of like, well, how many videos are we making and exactly what.

Does each cost per video and what's the cost per view and all of those things. Right. You don't want to get in that game with them. Is exactly right.

How precise do you have to be? Obviously, once you get to a HubSpot scale of a company, you need to be a bit more. Well, you have, you have more budget, but you have. Goals matter. Wall street matters, right? So it's more precise, but in more of like the startup days, like, how precise do you need to be with these versus being like, I report to you, you know, Kip's my boss, I want to pitch him on this idea. I want us to start a podcast next year. Can I just do some like, rough math and come back to you? Like, how precise are you looking to be at more of the earlier stage with, like, what's the goal? What's the budget? What's the people? Because I think another place where this breaks down is like, all right, I get what you're saying, but, like, I.

Don'T have a lot of data yet.

And so I don't. I don't really know. I remember the very first time that I had to build the marketing budget. The guy who was running finance was like, what's the paid marketing budget going to be? And I'm like, none. We've grown entirely through inbound. What do you mean paid? And I remember the CEO kicked me in my ass. And he's like, you better get smart on this real quick because we're going to have to scale at some point.

Yes, exactly.

So how do you approach this when you don't yet have all of the data and you can't model this all out?

Yeah. So first things first. All this, like, goals, planning stuff. Why big companies fail is because that becomes the only thing they do right. They never execute. They spend all of their time doing this. And so when I say, you got to figure this out, it's like in a day to a week, it's not very long, because I actually don't think it takes that long to figure this stuff out. Where you go wrong is exactly what you're talking about, Dave. Getting. Trying to get too much data and too much fidelity. And I have a mental framework that I use. And my mental framework that I use is like, I can have predictability or I can have magnitude, which means I can give you very predictable results, or I can give you amazingly high results, but they're not going to be that predictable. And I look at every situation and I'm like, cool. Is this something we've done for a long time? We have a ton of data on, and they're looking for predictable results.

Cool.

I can make this 10 to 20% better. And, like, I can give you five bullet points of what we'll do to make that thing 10 to 20% better. It's the, oh, we haven't done this before. We need to do this very differently. That's where actually all the opportunity is. Because when you don't have any results coming from something, you can take way more risk than when you have results coming from something, because people are going to be more conservative because they don't want to mess up the stuff that you're already getting to grow your business. And so you want to be really unreasonable and move much faster. And I think it's at that point you just set, like, a very simple, unreasonable goal. If you're going to launch a podcast, it's like, great. Well, it needs to be a top 1% podcast in 12 months. Like, how would we do that to be a top 1% podcast? That means 100,000 people are going to need to listen to it every month. How are we going to do that? Because at the startup stage, your problem is an opportunity cost. There's a lot of stuff you can do, so you need to pick the best subset of things of all your options to do. And so you got to think critically a little bit to just make sure that the solution actually fits the problem.

It's funny you mentioned that, because I worked at HubSpot back in the day and we launched a podcast. And I remember I knew how to do a podcast, but I didn't know how to think like a marketer. I didn't know how to set goals. And my very first meeting with my boss was like, all right, great. What's the goal for the podcast? And I was like, oh, we're good. It's going to come out twice a week. Yep, it's going to be good. And he's like, no, we need a top five business podcasts on itunes by the end of the year. I was like, well, that's a huge goal. And he's like, yeah, welcome to HubSpot.

Yep.

But that was a career changing moment because that was like, there's so much value in setting big goals like that that then you're then forced to, like, work your way to get there. If we just say we're going to do a podcast because we think it's good versus, wow, shit. Now I gotta think about, like, how are. How do we do that?

You know how sometimes when you read books, there are like points or sentences that just get kind of burned into your brain.

Yeah.

Seth Godin. I think in Tribes, if I'm remembering correctly, it's one of the early Seth Godin books, he has a paragraph, that's all. That's basically the point is, like, it's just as much work to do something great as is to do something good. There's actually no difference in the amount of time effort you put into that. It is really just like your aspirations is the only difference. And once that gets burned into your head, then you're just like, cool, I am wasting my time if I am not going to be unreasonable in my expectations, because then I am just failing to meet my own potential. Right. And I think that's what a good leader can do, is help people understand that their Potential is actually way higher than they currently think themselves.

That's awesome.

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Seth Godin has every timeless quote like that.

That guy is one of. His writing is so good. Like he is just amazing.

I was going back, I mean obviously from you all creating like inbound marketing. Right. Like he wrote, he wrote the book permission marketing in 1999. And it's like if you go and read that today, it would be like, oh my God, this is like we should be doing this now.

Oh, that's the thing is once you read all of this books, you realize that like people just can't help themselves. It's like he's like, actually gives you like the answers and like we all just can't help ourselves. We can't get out of our own way to do all of them.

In a little bit we're going to get back to some of the career stuff. But while we're, we're kind of talking about like marketing and at HubSpot, do you have a overall philosophy for like, I guess what I would call like routines and rhythms where the team is very creative, you have lots of ideas, but teams need like, do you have monthly campaigns or quarterly themes or can you take us into some of the frameworks or just ways of running marketing over, over your 14 years at, you know.

Yeah. I would say those rhythms change dramatically based on the scale of company you're at. Right. Like when you are in an early stage company, you really have a daily rhythm.

Yeah.

You're like, cool, all right, we missed our demand number today. We gotta go get it tomorrow. Or like we're screwed for this month.

Right. Our two sales reps had no meetings today. Something's gotta change tomorrow.

Yes, we have a big, big problem. Right. And so when you're early, it's normally a daily cadence with like a monthly look back. Unless you're in some big enterprise slow sales cycle business, then when you get kind of mid stage, it's really go kind of maybe weekly. You're still doing like a weekly check in, a weekly cadence. And once you get to this, what I'd call the scale up stage, kind of the large scale business, you're looking at everything monthly, you're tracking everything daily. But you don't have to do the standups and everything daily. You just need to like check in and maybe make some tweaks on a daily to monthly basis. But you're diversified enough then becomes kind of a monthly rhythm. I have always thought anything other than like a monthly, anything longer than a Monthly rhythm just doesn't have enough urgency to be successful.

And do you call them like campaigns? Are they themes?

So we call them a whole host of different things at scale. When you say campaigns, people think of lots of different things. When I think of campaigns, I think of brand campaigns and I think about we are going to market with a brand campaign. And when you go to market with a brand campaign, you're doing two, three campaigns a year max. And so for us it's, we're really doing like two campaigns a year. And so that's what that looks like. And then right below brand campaigns, you're normally talking about product launches and how you take your products to market. And we've done that all. Like we've done the monthly campaign, the quarterly campaign, no campaigns, all those things. And what we have found as you scale and you have more product to ship, if you just talk about all the products that you're launching kind of without any focus, the market doesn't know what's important. Right. You need to tell your customers and your prospects what's important. So we've moved to kind of a twice a year product release schedule where it's kind of what Airbnb is doing. If you listen to Chet Ski's podcast with Lenny, which I highly recommend, everybody should go check that out, kind of a spring and a fall and put magnitude around our big releases. And then there's still products getting released and communicated every week and every month and lots of product marketing happening. But we have some specific like releases and campaigns kind of twice a year.

But it's almost like you've given it structure now, like, and then you work around those things versus like if you have a lot of stuff with. You almost have these intentional deadlines. Like you have inbound every fall and you're always going to do some big announcement then. And I've always found that it's very helpful to have that for the team, whether it's as big as Inbound or like, hey, we have, we're doing our first ever user conference in June and we want to have 60 people there and that's when we're going to do our big announcement. Don't you feel like those like, those like stakes are really helpful in driving the team?

I'm currently doing fail with Andrew her and like that it's like this health and performance thing and done a bunch of talks with Andrew and Andrew has a quote that is, deadlines are one hell of a drug.

It's true.

Yeah, it's the best like one sentence you can get on this topic.

Yeah.

It's like, man, deadlines are one hell of a drug. And if you set and are working to something and you have a shared common purpose to something, you're just going to do better work. There's that part of it. The other part of it is when you have more focus, you have more repetition. Like, I'm very fortunate that I get to work with Brad Smith, who's the former CEO of Intuit, who now is president of Marshall University. I'm on the Marshall University board with him. And he's like, just an amazing, amazing leader. He's on the Amazon board. He is incredible. And one of the things he always says is like, just as my dad said, repetition does not ruin a prayer. Right. Which is like, you have to repeat. And that's his, like, very folksy West Virginia way of saying, like, you better keep repeating yourself till everybody knows exactly what you're saying.

Yeah.

And when you have too many campaigns and none of them have time to breathe, there's no repetition.

Yeah.

Right. And so you don't get the deep resonance of that message that you're actually looking for.

Well, I did. That's really cool. You're on the. Did you go to Marshall?

I did. I grew up in West Virginia. And just like Brad and a few of us and excited to work with him on that.

What is being on the board of a university entail?

Wild.

It could be a whole other podcast. But I'm just curious, like, how often do you meet? Like, what do you have to do?

We meet six times a year, every two months.

So are you going to West Virginia? Like, you're all meeting a couple times.

I go to West Virginia and the rest of them, I do remote and we hire the president, we sign up on contracts, we do all those things. But largely we are there to, like, advise and help. And so, like, most universities are seeing a decline in admissions, and Marshall's up 5% in admissions. And, like, that's one of the reasons I'm involved, is to help us. How do we market and take that university to market and grow admissions and grow students and enrollment and everything there. And so you get to work.

Wow, how cool is that? That's such a different creative problem for your brain. Right. You're like, whoa, I get to apply everything that I've learned now to, like, an institution like a school?

Well, I was in a meeting. You're going to appreciate this because it's a Day of Gerhardt hack that you'd love to. And I Was in a meeting with all these folks and I was like. I was like, can somebody just tell me our acceptance rate? They're like, oh, it's 93%. I was like, great. Well, why wouldn't we just. Instead of having students pay money to apply, why wouldn't we just send any student with above a 3.0 an acceptance letter in the mail?

That's some, like, old school direct marketing. Like, congratulations, you've been accepted to Marshall. That's gangster. I love that.

Right? But it's like, why wouldn't you do that? Why wouldn't you just test it out in one county and see how it goes? And, like, you get to do things like that that are cool, like, really.

Fun, and everybody's taking pictures and posting them online and.

Yeah, exactly. And it's like, cool. Where's this person going to go? Are they going to go to the school that accepts them or this school where, like, is making them jump through, like eight hoops?

Yeah, it's pretty cool. That's really cool, man. All right, well, separate.

Yeah. Another pod for another time.

Separate podcast. Separate podcast. So I love that. So setting deadlines, I think especially, especially for this applies to a big team or a small team. I think it's very easy to be like, yeah, we're just going to do that thing where, like when I was working at Drift as an example in the early days of that company, one thing that we did is we said, we're going to do a product launch. We don't even know what the product launch is, but we're going to do a product launch every single month, the first Tuesday of every month. Why did we pick the first Tuesday? Because we learned that it was like about a 30 day sales cycle. We wanted to get that bump in interest and momentum at the beginning of the month. And so I. I love setting artificial deadlines or just giving yourself challenges. Like last year, I felt like I was in good shape, well rounded, but I hadn't run. I wanted to get into running. I just said, I'm going to run one mile every single day for the month of December. And that got me going. Got one mile becomes easy, then becomes two miles. I love stuff like that. And I think these are those little disciplines you can apply to the marketing team. Like that stuff matters. Having a publishing schedule, having, like, no matter what, we're sending our newsletter out every Wednesday.

It matters. It creates discipline and it creates, like an organizational model for your team. It works.

You've done a lot of crazy. Not like Benioff like, stunt level crazy, you know, putting people in jail.

I'm not a stunny guy.

No, you're not a stunt guy. You're thoughtful, interesting plays. So if you look back, what's one or two of the craziest plays that you've run? I guess things would be in this bucket. Like, I'm not articulating this well, but, like, HubSpot's always had these kind of things, right? You got inbound.org, you buy the hustle. What's something in that bucket that you look back and you're like, that's the one that I'm really proud of. And that was, like, a crazy idea that has had a huge impact on our company. Or now you've turned your. What used to be an SEO machine into, like, this media company.

Yeah. So, yeah, there's a bunch of them. I'll tell you some of them. I remember one day I was, like, walking through the HubSpot office, and I walked by the reception, and, like, the person working in the front desk was talking to somebody who had sales questions and was trying to get sent to a sales rep. And I was like, hey, guys, is our phone number on our website? And everybody was like, nah, it's kind of buried over here in, like, the Contact Us section. I was like, wonder what would happen if we just put our phone number, like, right on the homepage?

And what year was this, roughly?

This was like, 2012, maybe.

So, like, two years before going, well, you're doing, you know, 50 to $100 million in revenue.

This is not, like, yeah, maybe late 2011, early 2012. Like, we're probably. It's probably like a 30, $40 million business or something. At that time, I'm like, should we just put a phone number on our website? And then we obviously did website chat early and all that kind of stuff too. But, like, it was madness what was happening. And you had this digital business bias, right, that, oh, everything happens online. Nobody wants to call us. And it's like, no, no, lots of people want to call us. And can we just make it a lot easier for people to call us? So that's like an example of, like, doing obvious things to reduce friction. Always, always work. Then I was walking home one day, and one of the things I always, like, obsess about is how much value you can give your prospects or customers. Right? Like, how do you just make the value equation just completely imbalanced? And we were in the process of, like, thinking about a lot about our offers and the things we were offering people for lead generation and this was maybe 2013 or something. And I was like, what would happen if people are paying all this money for Getty Images and Shutterstock and stuff? It's really expensive. A lot of our prospects probably can't afford that. The images there kind of suck. Like what if we just shot a thousand stock footage photographs? I just like gave them to everybody to use for free. That ended up being like wildly successful. Like wildly, like hundreds of millions of dollars over a decade successful.

Oh, I forgot about that one. I got to use that example all the time. I only use like website. That was such a good one. And it was wild, wasn't it? Like, weren't the pictures like I remember I can think of like employees that I know that were like in the pictures.

Yeah, for the first set the down and dirty version first. There were a lot of employees. One who still works with me, Pam Vaughn.

That's what I was thinking of. I can picture the bricks.

She was like on a hundred websites a week. People would just keep sending her links of like websites and stuff she was on. But it showed you the amount of demand that was in the market for this. It just was a simple way to deliver a lot of value. And then the last was probably definitely like buying the hustle and going from a company who had some really popular blogs but needed to then build a podcast network and a YouTube network and a series of awesome daily newsletters and really kind of represent business media in a holistic way. And like you got to get your CEO, your board, like it's a non trivial thing to do. Like you're taking a real bet and doing something like that. But that started probably like two years earlier. I was on the phone with Kieran. Kieran Flanagan, CMO is happier now. He was working with me at the time and I was like, we should just buy more content assets. The like financial arbitrage of that is huge because we get to like take the expense hits over five years and I. And I'll bet that we are going to have a way bigger budget in five, like next year, the year after and the year after than we do this year. And so we only take 20% of the expense.

Why is that? I have no idea how company financials work. Why does it over five years?

Yeah, so you're capitalizing it as an asset versus an expense. So like let's say you go and buy a website for $100,000 and today that a hundred thousand dollars because it's an asset, you're Depreciating that expense over the lifetime of that asset, which is normally for tech things like this, five to seven years. And so you're like, great, well, I can spend $20,000 of this year's budget to get this $100,000 thing. I'll pay another $20,000 next year. But I believe that I can make this thing, I spent $100,000 worth, worth way more to me next year. So it's going to be easy to spend that $20,000 the year after that. And it basically gets cheaper over its lifetime because of that. If you think you're going to grow and you think you have a plan to package it. And like we had done that with a bunch of websites and other things. So like, we had done some test runs before we did the full hustle deal.

I think the media company Evolution is the, is the one that's super interesting. How do you. And obviously you don't need to give away. You're good at this, so you won't. But you don't need to give away secret sauce on this. But I think just hearing you talk about it would help other people, maybe at a much smaller scale, think about how to measure their investments.

Right.

And how do you tie these things back to how does this ultimately help HubSpot sell more? Because if it doesn't, you're not going to get to do this. So. And like, yeah, I listen to my first million as an example. Yes, HubSpot runs ads on that podcast that, that's one way to do it. But when you acquire assets like this or you build something, hey, we want to build a completely brand agnostic publication. Or I just did a podcast yesterday with Ian Faison who runs this Caspian Studios, and they did this, they produced this podcast for Jim Pass called Murder in hr and it was like a narrative podcast that went to number one in fiction for podcasting. And gympass has generated a ton of interest and pipeline from that. I'm curious to hear how do you talk about that to the executive team? How do you measure that today? How do you know if this stuff starts to work over time?

Yeah, so like, I don't know. I'm a fairly simple minded human in that. Like, I can't make things too complex because I'm trying to do a lot. I can't keep that much in my head. So for me, it's like I'm doing something that's either going to increase our awareness, it's going to increase our consideration, or it's going to be a direct Response like lead to a sales reps free product signup kind of thing. Right, that's what I'm doing. And so I asked myself, what is this thing that I'm doing? What's the primary goal of it and how will I measure it related to one or more of those three things? And normally for this stuff, what I try to do, like if you, if you look at a lot of the media stuff, what I try to do is I try to get the direct response stuff to be kind of as close to break even as possible or greater than break even. So that the intangible awareness stuff is like basically all of the add on roi, all of that kind of stuff. But for a media property, you're looking at what's the direct response side of it. And then what would have cost me to go and buy that same attention from another podcast or podcast network. And so like how much quote unquote free brand media am I getting? And for us, like we get a lot of free brand media from our own properties. And so one of the ways we're able to grow our awareness and consideration much faster despite not spending a massive, massive amount on brand.

That's really good. So that's, I'm just going to repeat this because I wrote it down. It's really simple for people. So basically when you're going to do something this you think of is this awareness, consideration or direct response. And what's cool about what you mentioned is with something like the Hustle, my first million, you can actually do all of them?

Yes, a lot of things you can do all of it.

So you might sell enough HubSpot, CRM or whatever the latest ad is through the podcast ads that great, we just broke even here. Now it's all gonna be upside in brand awareness that we're gonna get.

Well, yeah, and it's like there's also a bunch of intangibles that your finance people are never gonna understand that if you're a good marketer you're gonna be able to take advantage of like for example, oh, I can do tracking links in every my first million show YouTube description link so I can see which guests actually converts the best. So then I could go do a creator partnership with that guest and get a way lower cost per signup because I know the math and economics are already going to be in my favor that you just couldn't have done without having that like baseline infrastructure. And so like once you're, if you have faith in your own creativity, you can keep stacking the value Plays on any kind of given asset.

Well, like, the webs of this thing can get really deep too, which is like, wow, the most. These were the most popular episodes this year. Hey, we're thinking about which we're already thinking about programming for inbound next year and what topics and what stages and who should speak this really good stuff. What's something that looking back on and in your evolution, from Kip running the HubSpot blog to CMO Kip, what's something that you had to work on?

Oh, about a hundred bazillion things. Okay, I'll try to give the short list. The first is there's a great Lemkin quote, Jason Lipkin, who runs saster, that a CMO's first job is to realize that the CEO is the CMO. And once you.

I felt that one in my soul.

Dan Gerhardt's losing it everybody. He's like, I feel seen. Yes, yes.

I never was running marketing.

No, no. So you have to learn that. And that is a very, very important lesson to learn. You then have to learn all the stuff that you're not a primary expert at. So anybody who becomes a cmo, they come up through certain part of marketing, whether brand marketing, product marketing, direct response marketing. But then you're responsible for managing all of that stuff. And so you have to spend a lot of time reading, learning, working with teams, building a lot of expertise in that stuff. Because somebody's got to think if you're going to hire a credible leader to run any of those things, they got to think they're going to learn something from you, which means you have to learn and be the right leader for them. And that, like, that's actually, I think, the hardest part. That's where a lot of people kind of fall and stumble down.

How did you scratch. What's an example of an area that maybe wasn't your. Wasn't your background?

Brand marketing? I don't have any brand marketing expertise growing, and our content marketing was our brand marketing at HubSpot. Right. And so it was a little bit different. And so you're like, how do you build that expertise? Wow. Painful. Takes a lot of time. The biggest hack I've ever found on this is like, I got it through the interview process, but you don't have to be an interview process to get this. It's like, if you can go and talk to 10 or 20 people who are, like, really good at this thing, you can learn it a lot in, like 15 to 20 hours. Like, you would be shocked at how much you can learn. And so I've hired a couple VPs of brand. And in that process, I have talked to everybody, brand leaders at the best brands in this world. I have broken down every campaign and now I'm like, oh, I feel like I know, like, I'm a top 1% in terms of knowledgeable about the topic. I don't think I'm top 1% in executing, but I am top 1% of, like, my knowledge and understanding of it.

Interesting. There's a lot of common threads there to being the one who was. Who just was going to figure stuff out and to think about the stuff that we talked about earlier, goals, budget, people. It's like that same brain is still in there. You're now just like, well, how do I think about pr? Okay, let me talk to a bunch of PR people and then, like, figure out what our take is. But you also.

No, I'm just obsessed with, like, you have to be obsessed with learning. And my framework that I share with everybody is kind of like the field trip framework. And you can do virtual or you could do in person, where it's like, I want to get 10 to 15 people who are the experts on this topic, and I want to talk to them all, like, in the span of a week. I want the density of those conversations too. Like, I've flown to New York or LA and just met with people and walk away, like, a few days later. I'm like, oh, I feel like the world is different now. Like, I feel like my understanding of the world is fundamentally different and most people are too insular to do that. And the second you get outside of yourself and your own work, you learn so much more.

That's the best version of this now. But there's even, like, a lightweight version of this. Like, if. If you're not at HubSpot or you don't have the network and experience that Kip has, like, V1 of this is like, listen to podcasts, listen to YouTube. You can go down this hole and be like, I gotta figure out brand. I'm gonna go and do it. Like, on the scrappy level.

Yes. And pandering always works. I would do this when Nobody knew who HubSpot was, but I would just send emails or LinkedIn messages to people and be like, I think you were one of the best people in the world at this. I thought this work you did was incredible. I was blown away. Could I have 30 minutes of your time to talk to you about it? And you would be shocked how many people say yes, not all of them. But a lot. When that's your opener, when you're just like, I think you're amazing and I want to learn from you people, it works. People get flattered.

Yeah. And because you're doing it because it's not fake, you can kind of tell. And I'm sure people reach out to you all the time. And you're like, yeah, I gave some kid like 30 minutes.

Oh, yeah, for sure. Look, the second people know that you're not trying to sell them something, they're more interested in taking a little bit of time with you.

All right, let's spend five minutes as we wrap up you. I'm sure you all are going to talk about this on your fantastic podcast, Marketing against the Grain. But what are you excited about heading into 2024? Obviously, you've talked a bunch about AI. If you could give us listeners here some trends, some 2024. We're recording this at the end of the year. What's exciting to you or interesting to you about marketing next year?

I think there's a lot. The first is the continued change and evolution of email and email's role. You've got the Google and Yahoo bulk cinder stuff that's happening in February. We just published a show on the RSS and YouTube on those changes, and it's blowing up like, people are very into it. And for people who don't know, any bulk sender whose spam rate gets above 0.3% is going to get blocked from Gmail and Yahoo inboxes. So it's a big deal.

Wait, and was this an episode of Marketing against the Grain that you did?

Yeah, we just published it yesterday, actually. Just published our Marketing against the Grain yesterday.

I didn't expect you to lead with email there. That's cool.

Okay, well, because email is very important to everybody's business still.

I still say this all the time. And now I'm building a media company and so I feel like email is always the print money button. If you want a response, you send an email about it. AI, short form, video, whatever. Nope, give me email. If I can build an email list, I'm going to be good.

Email and search, baby. If you can make email and search work. Which is why I'm going to start with both of those. So that's my email on search. Look, Google totally bait and switched us with some other Gemini demo videos, but their concept of AI search creating a unique user experience per search, I think is extremely exciting and is going to change how people research and learn and find information and most marketers I know are like, they're concerned, right? It's like, oh, we're going to lose search traffic because the. The 10 blue links are going to go away. And all that's true. And, like, I believe that that's true. But I know when major change like that happens, there's some opportunities to take advantage of that will more than make up for what you lose. And I'm excited to, like, I'm excited for the day next year where, like, I'm just talking with people and I'm like, oh, we have figured it out. We're gonna go and do this thing and we're gonna grind out on this play and it's gonna work and we're gonna grow search traffic way faster than we thought. Right? And so I think that's cool.

It's cool to hear you be excited talking about these things because it all goes back to where we started this podcast, which is when you join HubSpot, you're like, I'm gonna figure out the blog. You said marketing is a game of moving fast. Huge advantage by being early on something. And so it's very easy to look. To look at changes to Google with AI and search and whatever, and be like, oh, my God, there's going to be no links where what Kip is saying is like, no, no. What's the opportunity there? You're very optimistic in how you think about those strategies.

Look, if I could ask anything of everybody listening to this for 2024 is have a mindset of abundance instead of a mindset of scarcity, Play offense instead of defense, and play at a fast pace of play, not a slow pace of play. If you do those three things, your life will be changed forever. Like, you will transform your life no matter what you're doing. That is what it's about. And so the search thing's a good example. Like, I have an abundance mindset that it is going to open up new ways for people to learn, and there's going to be new opportunities for marketers in that, and it's my responsibility to take advantage of that. I'm not a victim. I'm not any of these things. Like, it's my opportunity to go and do that thing.

Awesome, Kip, this was fantastic. You delivered. I wrote a title and wrote some notes in advance, and this was better than I anticipated. So thank you. Thank you, man.

Oh, wow. I exceeded Dave's pre show title. I like that you got a lot of notes going. For people listening. You've got a full notebook page Going here.

This is really interesting for me. So.

All right.

I'm going to go listen to that podcast later. Go check out Marketing against the Grain. Go follow Kip on LinkedIn and wherever else.

LinkedIn, Twitter. I'm all over the place. Easy to find.

Yeah.

Thanks for having me, Dave.

Thanks for coming on. This is the last podcast I'm recording this year, and I'm glad that I got this.

It's also the last podcast I'm recording this year, so.

Nice. I love that.

We're gonna go take a little break and let's go, Hank.

Let's get offline now. Yeah.

And then I feel like we'll do it. Let's do a round two, like, playing golf. Like, I want to get good enough to get on Dave's golf podcast sometime.

Let's do that. Yeah. We had a golf. We need to recommit to our golf date, our Vermont golf date.

We're gonna play like a May golf round. It'll be fun.

Yeah. We gotta check the weather. I want proper weather with you when we do it.

Yeah, yeah. We're not gonna be out there in the rain and. No. All right, man.

All right, Kip. Good to see you, man. Thank you for doing this. See you later.

Exit.

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