HubSpot CMO Kipp Bodnar on The Path to CMO, Evolving HubSpot's Marketing, and Predictions for 2024

A CMO's first job is to realize that the CEO is the CMO. 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, exit, Exit.

All right, Kip is here. And I just said this too, but it's. 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. 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 like vacation, man. It's like, so much easier. I'm like, well, I could do this every day. Hosting your own show gets to you after a while.

All right, so Kip is the CMO at HubSpot. I think a lot of people who listen to this podcast, obviously everybody's going to know HubSpot. A lot of people are going to be familiar with you. Um, but you've been CMO for eight.

Eight years.

Let's. We'll round up, we'll call it a decade. That's. That's a heck of a run. But what, what people might not know is that back in the day, you were like one of the first. You, you were one of the original, like, up and cominging marketers on the HubSpot marketing team. And I want to, I want to start our conversation today by sharing that journey, because most of the people that listen to Exit 5 are, you know, 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. Can you tell me, where was HubSpot when, when. 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 100ish 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 with, like, how do you grow this thing and make it more successful than it. Than it currently is?

What, what year was that roughly? I just want to give. So blogging was still. Blogging was like a new. Was a 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.

What, what was your. When you joined, was it like, hey, man, grow this blog? Or did you join the company to be like, I want to be. 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. It wasn't much to have visions of grandeur about.

Right, Right. It was like, we got to. We're trying to do this thing to hit. 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, you know, 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. Right. I think. 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. And I think by the. I think like 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. I was also kind of a resource for other people. Other people would ask me questions about things, which is the. 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 just kind of like, embedded into the culture of what's happening. Right. And I think that is kind of what had happened, right. Where it was just like, I was talking with a bunch of folks, and then I think I went from 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, you know, and it was just kind of an organic evolution of what I was already doing.

When you must. You.

You.

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. Like, correct.

Exactly. Look, 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. 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, 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. You, we, we. But there's something to like, let's figure out this one. Let's nail this one thing, the magic. And then also, and, 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 going to be able to take those lessons and learnings and then like, replicate that. And so in your example, it's like we figured out this, the blog thing. Like, yeah, maybe, you know, this other channel, maybe webinars or co marketing or whatever is different, or podcasting is different. But I kind of have, I kind of have the. These similar, like, rough ingredients is that.

Yeah, there's the same rough skills. It's like, cool, I gotta research, I gotta tell a story. I gotta 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, what it, 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 200.200k monthly uniques and then we grew to a million monthly.

Yeah, yeah.

Which is. Which is insane to think about.

Totally.

Can you give me some, give me some hits from that era?

Well, look, look, first of all, you gotta remember that era was way less competitive, right? Like, there was just way less people, like, marketing. Marketing. I know you believe this, and I believe this. Marketing is a game of moving early and moving fast. Right? The more, 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 than if you're a late adopter and you just kind of get the normalized return. And so that was part of it, but like, a lot of it was just, look, 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'm publishing, I think at the point we were publishing an article a day, and we were getting few thousand visits a day to that article, and 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? 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. We recruited a bunch of guest writers so we could actually scale our content production without, you know, just not sleeping and me writing all this stuff and random people at HubSpot writing all this stuff, right? And so those are the, like, the secrets of what we did. But it started with, oh, what do we actually need to. Where do we need to get to to actually accomplish the goal we want to get to?

I like that. I like that, because that. That answer to an evergreen answer, right? It's not like that's very. 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 we're going to go try this thing, right? But the other thing is like, you've. You've always had this, like, at HubSpot, this mix of creative and science, it's like, we want to be fat. Like, we. 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 gonna. We're gonna measure this and we're gonna approach this very smartly, and we're gonna work backwards from. 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, 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 what's the biz? How is this connecting to what we're trying to do?

Yeah, it's. It's really. 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. And that. That's marketing. Yeah, that's two. 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. Let's keep riffing on that then. How do you. How do you enable the team to. 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. Right. It's largely the same. I think people get challenged. People. 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 two, I'm in a twice a month standup with them where we check in and 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, and I, 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 doing, we're doing, you know, we're just doing stuff. But you always, 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, that out. And so isn't that the, 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, that's the like mindset shift.

Yeah. Because I'm just like you, I have an extreme bias for action. 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, 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. 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's 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 go make, 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 we want to, you know, our, 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, what you talked about also, I feel like that's, that gives you, that's the conversation, that, 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, like, you don't want to let the CFO and see, you don't need to let them into the weeds of like, well, how many videos are we making exactly?

What does each cost per video and what's the cost per view and all of those things, right? Like, you don't, you don't want to get it. You don't want to get in that game with them. It's exactly, it's exactly right.

How precise do you have to be? Obviously, when, you know, once you get to a HubSpot, you know, HubSpot scale of a company, you need to be a bit more. Well, you, you have more budget, but you, you have, you know, goals matter. Wall street matters. Right? So, so it's more prec. In more of like the startup, the startup days. Like, how precise do you need to be with these versus being like, like, I report to you. You know, Kip's my boss. Like, I want to pitch him on this idea. I want us to start a podcast next year. Yeah, can I just do some like, rough math and come back to you? Like how precise are you looking to be at. At. At. At more of the earlier stage with like, what's the goal? How. What's the budget?

What's the people?

Cause 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. Guy who was running finance was like, what's the paid marketing budget going to be? And I'm like, none. We've, 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.

What's the. How do you, how do you approach this when you don't yet have all of the, the data and you can't, 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, like, 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 fit 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 once you, when you don't have any results coming from something, you can take way more risk than you. 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, move much faster. And I think it's at that point you just set like a very simple, unreasonable goal. Like, if you're gonna 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?

Yeah.

And that means to be a top 1% podcast, that means, you know, a hundred thousand people are gonna 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, and my very first meeting. Well, I worked at HubSpot back in the day and we launched. 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, There was some. That was a career changing moment because that was like, there's so much value in setting big goals like that that then you, you're then forced to, like, work your way to, to get there. If we just say we're gonna do a podcast because we think it's good versus wow. Now I gotta think about, like, how are you? Well, 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. 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. 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. Seth Godin has every timeless quote like that.

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

I was going back, I mean obviously from, from, 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. It's. Once you read all the cess 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.

All right, I want to get back to, I want in a, 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 you know, the team is very creative, you have lots of ideas, but teams need like monthly, you know, do you have monthly campaigns or quarterly themes or can you take us into some of the, the frameworks or just ways of running marketing over, over your 14 years at.

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. 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.

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, right. Unless you're in some big Enterprise, slow sales, cycle, business, business. Then when you get kind of mid stage, it's really go kind of maybe weekly. You know, you're still doing like a weekly check in, a weekly cadence. And once you get to this like what I'd call the scale up stage, kind of the large scale business, then you're doing, 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 that it 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. What you, when you say campaigns, people think of lots of different things. So I think of campaign. When I think of campaigns, I think of brand campaigns and I think about we're going to market with a brand campaign. 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, 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, all those 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, it's 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.

Cool. But it's almost like you kind of, you need to give it, it's almost like you've given it structure now. Like, and then you kind of work, work around those things versus like, if you Have a lot of stuff with you have these intentional, like you have these intentional deadlines. 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 those like, those like stakes are really helpful in driving the team?

Yeah. So I've, I'm, I'm currently doing F with Andrew her and like that it's like this like health and performance thing and I've done a bunch of talks with Andrew and Andrew has a quote that is, deadlines are one hell of a drug, you know, and that's the, it's the best like one sentence you can get on this topic. It's like, man dead deadlines are one hell of a drug. And if you set and are working to something and you have a shared common purp to something, you're just going to do better work like that. 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'm, 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's, he's 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. 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, the deep resonance of that message that you're actually looking for.

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

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

What is the, what is being on the board of a university entail? Wild. It could be a whole other podcast But I'm just curious, like, what.

What.

How. How often do you meet? Like, what do you have to do?

We meet every. We meet. We meet six times a year, every two months.

And so you're going to West Virginia. Like, you're all.

A couple times. I go to West Virginia. And the rest of them, I do remote. Yeah. And we. We hire. We hire the president. We, you know, 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? How cool is that?

You get 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. I was in a meeting. You're going to appreciate this because it's a day of Gearhart hack that you'd love. 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 like 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 amazing. That's like. That's something 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? Like, why, like. And why wouldn't you just test it out in one county and see how it goes? And, like, you. You get to do things like that that are, 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 that, 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.

So. So I love that. So, setting debt, setting deadlines. I think especially. Especially for this. Is this. This applies to a big team or a small team? I think it's very easy to be like, yeah, we're just gonna 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 gonna do a product. We don't even know what the product launch is, but we're gonna do a product launch exactly 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 give, 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 wanted to, 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 gonna run one mile every single day for the month of December. And that got me going. Got one mile becomes easy and 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.

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

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

I'm not, I'm not a stunny guy.

You're not a stunt guy. You're thoughtful, interesting plays. So, yeah, out of all of, when you, 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, you, HubSpot's always had these kind of things, right. You got like, you got inbound. You got inbound.org. you, you, you buy the hustle.

Yeah.

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 created this.

You've.

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, 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 the front desk was talking to somebody who had sales questions and was trying to get, you know, 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, what would happen if we just put our phone number like right on the homepage? And what year was this roughly? This is like 2012 maybe.

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

Yeah, maybe late 2011, early 2012. It's probably like a 30, 40 million dollar business or something at the time. I'm like, should we just put, 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, 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? 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 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 thinking 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, it's like, what would happen if, you know, people are paying all this money for Getty Images and like 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 like shot a thousand stock photograph photographs that 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.

I got to use that example all the time. I only use like website grade. That was such a good one. And it was wild. And didn't you weren't the pictures like I remember I can think of like employees that I know.

Oh, they were. Yeah, 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 right.

She was on like, she was like on a. She was like on 100 websites like a week. Like people would just keep sending her links of like websites and stuff she was on. But it showed you like the amount of demand that was in the market for this. And so like that just, it just was a simple way to deliver a lot of value. And then the last one is 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, in a holistic way. And like you got to get, 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. And so that was. But that started probably like two years earlier. I was on the phone with Kieran Kieran Flanagan, CMO is zapier now. He was working with me at the time and I was like, we should just buy more content assets. The financial arbitrage of that is huge because we get to take the expense hits over five years and I'll bet that we are going to have a way bigger budget next year, the year after and the year after than we do this year. And so we 20% of the expense.

Have no idea how company financials work. Why, why does it over five years.

Yeah, so you're capitalizing it as an asset versus an expense. So like the, if you go and acquire like let's say you go and buy a website for $100,000 and today that $100,000 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 hundred thousand dollar 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 love that, I love the, I think the media company evolution 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 other their investments. Right. And how do you, how do you tie these things back to how does this ultimately help HubSpot sell more? Because if it doesn't, you know, you don't, you're not going to get to do this. So how. And like, yeah, you know, I listen to my first million as an example. Yes, HubSpot runs, you know, 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 Gym Pass 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, it's going to be a direct response, like lead to a sales reps free product signup kind of thing. Right. And like 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 get the, I try to get the direct response stuff to be kind of as close to break even as possible or greater than Breakeven. So that the intangible awareness stuff is like, you know, basically all of the add on roi, all of that kind of stuff. But you know, for a media property, you're looking at what's the, what's the, what's the direct response side of it. And then what would it, what would it have cost me to go and buy that same attention from another podcast or podcast network? And so like how much quote, unquote Free, you know, brand media am I getting. And for us, like, we get a lot of free brand media from our owned properties. And so it's one of the ways we're able to grow our awareness and consideration much faster, despite not spending, you know, a massive, massive amount on brand media.

That's really good. So this is. 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 going to drive. 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. So you might, you might sell enough HubSpot CRM or, or whatever the latest ad is through the podcast ads that. Great, we just broke even here. Now it's all going to be upside and brand. Brand awareness.

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, like, oh, I could do tracking links in every Hustle in every My first million show YouTube description link so I can see which guests actually converts the best. So that 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, you can keep stacking the value plays on any kind of given asset.

And 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.

Yeah.

What's something that you had to work on.

About? About 100,000,000,000 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.

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 gotta think if you're gonna hire a credible leader to run any of those things, they gotta think you're gonna, they're gonna learn something from you, which means you have to learn and, 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.

And how did you, how did you scratch. What's an example of an area that you maybe wasn't your. Wasn't your background? You obviously.

Brand marketing. I don't have any brand marketing expertise growing. And we. 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 is 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 of 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, to being the one who was, you know, who just was going to figure stuff out and to think about those 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. Sorry, go ahead.

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, like, met with people. And, like, I walk away, like, a few days later, I'm like, oh, I just. 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 and then how. So, like, there's. That's. That's the best version of this now, but there's even, like, a lightweight version of this. Like, if you're not, you know, if you're not at HubSpot or you don't have the network and experience that. That Kip has, like, V. One 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. Like, 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. 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.

And because you're doing it because it's. It's not fake, you're genuinely, like, 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. Yeah. 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.

Yeah. 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, if you could give us listeners here. Some, some trends, some 2024. You know, we're, we're recording this at the end of the year. What, what can we, 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 emails role. You've got the Google and Yahoo bulk sender stuff that's happening in February. We just published a Show on the RSS and YouTube on those changes and it's blowing up. 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.

Whoa.

So it's this, was this episode of.

Of Marketing against the Grain.

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, 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. Yeah, you send an email about it. AI all a 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 started, 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 of their 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. Like, 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.

It's cool to hear you be excited talking about these things because it all. 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. I'm gonna figure out the blog. I'm gonna figure out. You mentioned Mark, you said marketing is a game of moving fast and you can create a 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? Right? You're very optimistic in how you think about those strategies.

Look, if my, my, my. If I could ask anything of everybody listening to this for 2024 is have a. 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. Like, that is what it's about. And so the search thing is 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. 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. This is you. You delivered. I wrote a title and wrote some notes in. In advance, and this was better than I anticipated. So thank you.

I see the Dave's pre. Pre show title. I like that.

Come on, I've been in here.

This is, you know, you got. You got a lot of notes going for people listening. You've got. You got a full notebook page. This is.

This is really interesting for me. So. All right, go in. I'm gonna go listen that podcast later. Go check out Marketing against the Grain. Go follow Kip on LinkedIn and LinkedIn Twitter.

I'm all over the place. Easy to find.

Yeah. And thanks for coming on. I. I thanks for having me. Last podcast I'm recording this year, and.

I'm glad it's also the last podcast I'm recording this year.

Nice. I love that.

We're gonna go take a little break.

Let's go ahead and just get offline.

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. No, we.

We.

Yeah, we had a golf. Yeah, we. We need to. We need to recommit to our golf date. Yeah, we're gonna.

We're gonna play like a May golf round.

It' we got to check the weather. Let's. We're. I want. I want proper weather with you.

Yeah. We're not going to be out there in the rain and. No. No.

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

Talk to you later. Exit. Exactly.