HubSpot's Playbook for Industry Domination with Kipp Bodnar, HubSpot

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Today's most innovative companies will have a media company embedded within them. Companies like HubSpot, Salesforce, Amex, Adobe are some of the companies that that are leveraging this strategy to drive multi billion dollar outcomes. And I'm super stoked to have Kip here CMO at HubSpot. He's gonna share their journey to building a melee arm within their company within HubSpot, leveraging education, content and advocacy. I don't even have to say this, everyone already knows this, but HubSpot's the leading platform for marketing, sales, customer success and CRM with more than 121,000 customers across 120 countries. But HubSpot's beyond software. It's a movement that helps companies market and sell more effectively. I'm an engineer and my relationship with HubSpot dates back to 2008. My first job was at a startup running product, but I was also asked to get into growth and as a young engineer wearing Multiple hats. I was forced to learn marketing and everything I learned about marketing was because of HubSpot's inbound marketing certification program, the Content SEO. I would watch it and implement it step by step. And HubSpot's been a long standing sort of pillar of my journey. And we've had Multiple leaders from HubSpot speak at our Traction events over and over. So Kip, welcome to Traction. Thanks for joining us, man.

Lloyd, thanks for having me. I also want to say hi to Dharmesh, our co founder. He emailed me. So excited you're talking with Lloyd. I watch those every week. I love his YouTube content. So hey Dharmesh, and thanks for having me. Really appreciate it.

Dharmesh is too kind. I'm just following and learning from you guys. Give us your backstory. How did you get to where you are today?

I grew up in marketing. I saw Internet changing marketing and I was like, oh, I realized this asymmetric opportunity where the Internet was new. Nobody knew any more than anybody else about online marketing because it was getting made up at the time. And so I was like, oh, the people who can learn the fastest are going to win. And so I tried to learn. I wrote a blog. I met Brian and Darmesh at HubSpot. Gosh, 12 1/2 years ago now. I joined HubSpot when we were about a $10 million run rate business. We're now over a billion dollar run rate business and it's been a blast. And so I've seen the journey of marketing and go to market and scale from that kind of series a ray raised all through post IPO and scaling up to a big scale.

You've done multiple roles at HubSpot, right? You work in every function Pretty much from the early days.

Look, I basically worked all over marketing. I started on the content side, I moved to international lead generation automation. Like I've done it all and I've been the CMO here for the last six years.

Why should a SaaS company consider having a media arm? HubSpot's done it phenomenally well. Salesforce doing it. What are the benefits to becoming a media company and why is it so powerful?

My take on this is that most SaaS companies do the following things. They get product, market fit, they start to scale their go to market and then they segment their Personas, they segment their sales team and they obsess about changing their conversion rate. That's all cool, but man, that is the quickest path to like incremental growth. If you are a SaaS company. Especially one that does not sell to the Fortune 500 and you sell a much higher transaction volume product, you have to have distribution. Most companies are really terrible at distribution. So one SaaS companies have a great business model but they under prioritize, undervalued distribution. Media companies have amazing distribution, but a terrible business model. Advertising is a really bad business model. And so if you just look at the logic, oh, it makes sense for these things to come together. How do we have really great distribution? Combine that with a 70 to 80% gross margin business, it's a no brainer. And that was the original thesis a couple of years ago when we started down this path. And we've learned a lot along the way. It's been fun.

HubSpot's core philosophy on owned content. Tell us more about that. How has it evolved over the years?

Look, the content of HubSpot has changed dramatically. We started out on the just really blog content. We had the HubSpot blog and we were writing posts every couple of days and that was the initial part of it. Then we built some webinars up and all that, that was fine. But then we really changed and evolved to be the full multimedia. And so we went from blogs to podcasts to YouTube to really building out a full media organization, which is what we've been working on for the last year and a half, two years now.

And so perhaps define that for us. So recently you acquired Hustle, right? And Hustle started as a conference and then it evolved into a newsletter, podcast, research, content. Is that part of the whole strategy? Walk us through what that media company within HubSpot looks like.

Yeah, I'll tell you a little bit there. We started the early content was really about how do we bring people in through Google search. And that worked really well. But as search diversified, more people invested in SEO and more people consume content, all different types throughout their daily life. We were just not hitting people and being a part of the day to day interaction. People would only come to us when they had a problem or they were actively trying to learn something and we wanted to be a part of their daily life. And we look at it as like, how do we become the number one resource on the business Internet, right? How do we provide the most value of anybody who's looking for education and inspiration on the business Internet? And so to do that we had to meet people where they were, which was podcast with video, it's email newsletters. And so what we've essentially done is build a media strategy that started with our blog built that we acquired the Hustle. With that two big things came the daily newsletter with a million and a half subscribers. We're using that to build out our entire email newsletter network. Then we also got the My First Million podcast which then became an anchor for us. Launching the HubSpot Podcast network. HubSpot Podcast network will reach nearly 6 million people next month and an amazing audio experience. We're going to be the best and biggest business podcast network in the world over time. And we're really excited about the mission that we're on there. And similar with YouTube, we realized that we were doing really great in search on Google, but we were doing really poorly in video search and discovery on YouTube. And we had transformed our investment and partnerships there to continue to grow and scale. And so I think if you're a business and you're growing, you got to find one of those places to start. But you need to start with the mind that you're eventually going to spread beyond and have a multi channel media strategy.

And I fondly remember you guys early YouTube videos where you were patterning songs with inbound marketing.

Well, look, in the early days and there are a lot of people here in the early days, we don't have a lot of time, we don't have a lot of money. Our whole thing, it's like we would get together and we would be like, look, we were just a marketing software business back then. How do we win the marketing Internet for the week? What do we do this week? That is going to be the thing that anybody who cares about marketing and is on the Internet is going to talk about. And it doesn't have to be this big high production value thing. It's normally like a point of view, a strong point of view or an unexpected thing. And so if you're serving some back office function like your payroll function or whatever, like how are you the thing that the payroll company, the payroll managers of the world are talking about that week as it relates to their work and their industry. And I think when you talk about those YouTube videos, that's all we were trying to do. We were trying to do a bunch of different things to see what would stick to basically win the marketing Internet every week.

And you guys were crushing it with lots of views and there are some of them with like half a million views.

Yeah, we had a lot of fun. It was a great time too.

Diving into the Hustle acquisition and then the newly formed podcast network. Tell us a little more about that podcast network. How does it work? You also mentioned tying in YouTube into that having a YouTube network, how does it all work? What's the benefit to you guys and to the greater community with this network model?

Yeah, so I'm a first principles based thinker. I can't operate outside of first principles. And one of my first principles is man, brands of yesterday were built on what they told the world they were. Brands of tomorrow are built on what the best creators in the market say about them. And I think that's fundamentally our point of view. And people are going to stop listening to what we have to say unless we work with the best and smartest voices in every, in all the industries we serve. And so for us, the podcast network was just that. We want to reach sales leaders, marketing leaders, operations leaders, customer success leaders, and just business leaders more generally. We're never going to be able to self produce enough content to like really build, fill all those audiences. So we went out and we partnered with the best creators and what we get is really great partnership and cross promotion with shows we own. Like My First Million. The Entrepreneur on Fire podcast will promote a My First Million podcast. And we grow subscribers there and vice versa. And so we get really good subscriber growth across the network. We get really great brand storytelling across the network because we have deep partnerships with all of these podcasts. So it's not like we're just trying to fill a 32nd or 62nd spot. It's hey, how do we work together to really integrate the story we're trying to tell around our CRM to your audience? And it's a win for our audience, it's a win for the podcast audience, the win for HubSpot, and it's been really successful so far.

What deliberate efforts are you guys doing to drive traffic to them?

Yeah, so a big part, like we have a dedicated community manager that works with all of them. So we're doing like dedicated marketing to our audience and paid around the network in totality. We're doing a whole cross promotion strategy across all of them and having the right swap. So if you come on, it's great. You're going to get promoted across these five podcasts that get 2 million downloads every month. And in exchange for that, you're going to promote to your audience of 250,000 people and you build this real network effect of helping people discovery. The hardest thing about podcasts, it goes back to the customer problem. The hardest thing I have about podcasts is discovering new podcasts. It's really hard. And the number one way I do that is by listening to a Podcast I really like and having them recommend something to me. And we just wanted to be much more deliberate about how we were doing that than the ad hoc way it's been happening on a lot of the business shows that are out there.

Coming back to the Hustle acquisition, I found that extremely interesting because you. I even saw Outreach acquire Sales Hacker and there's a bunch of this. This is a year of community.

Yeah. Robinhood acquired a company, Stripe Acquirer has acquired indie hackers. There's some different consolidation across the space for sure. What's interesting is, right, is most B2B companies, I think, do acquisitions like that. Like at the time, Outreach BO it was really an event based business. It didn't have a ton of media properties, so it was really like an influence play. And how do you win point of view with salespeople, which was a smart play for them. But I think we think about it a little differently, which is we knew we had a big gap in the daily email newsletter space and we went out, we talked to a bunch of people candidly, and we did a bunch of diligence and we were blown away with the Hustle team and we're so excited that they're a part of the HubSpot team now. But what we really learned was there's kind of arbitrage here where you acquire something like that. It's capitalized over a period of five years. And if you're a startup and you're scaling and you think you're going to continue to raise money and your budgets are going to get bigger and bigger, you get 100% of the audience today, but you're only paying 20% of the cost to get 100% of that audience. That's a pretty powerful dynamic and it's a pretty big arbitrage opportunity if you're out there thinking about it in that way.

What is needed to build a media company? Where does a company, a SaaS company, start? You advise a lot of companies as well, right? Like somebody starting out. What are the key characteristics to become this media company?

Yes. If you want to have a media company. The trick is, like most great things in SaaS, one of the things we talk about a lot of HubSpot is you have to break the tyranny of or. You can't just pick one, you got to do both. And a lot of people make the OR decision when it comes to media. Oh, we can be really creative, but we don't have really great like operations and infrastructure to scale it. Or we have really great Operations and infrastructure. But the content, boring. So what you really need is somebody who can really own the operations of like how we scale, how we figure out the channels, how we do programmatic growth, how we do the right marketing strategies for this content, how do we cross promote. And then you need people who are actually generating great editorial that are obsessed with customers. Like, you know, I talked to Sam Parr who founded the Hustle, who's on our team and he's looked at the biggest risk of you all failing at this is uninspired. Compromise is making decisions by committee and not giving people like the autonomy media to have really strong creative perspective and do their own thing. And that's counterintuitive to a lot of SaaS businesses and how they operate. And so you have to be willing to, I would say, let people cook. If you're going to bring somebody in who's really great in this market and they understand this market and understand how to tell stories, you can't manage them to a compromise. You have to give them real Runway. And I think we've done that with Sam and his team. But it's not an easy thing I think for a lot of people to do. That's why a lot of people fail it.

They're saying media company, they're saying community led growth. Is it all just versions of content marketing? Where do I start? Like I have, maybe I've just started the company. What do I pick?

You've raised the seed round. You got to get a million dollars in the bank or something. What's, what the hell do you do? You got one person who can do some stuff for you. I always tell people, look, if you are a SaaS business, a good SaaS business has one effective distribution channel and it's normally paid. A great SaaS business normally has two distribution channels, one of which is organic. That helps them scale. And like a generational SaaS business has three or more, they have figured out how to get mass scale distribution to really build themselves up. So what you have to figure out is cool, how do I get to two, how do I get my paid marketing to work? Because I have enough cash I can start doing paid marketing and how do I figure out one organic marketing channel? And that is normally how do I get people from Google search, how do we get people from YouTube search, how do I build an email newsletter? Those I would say are like the three most popular avenues to start and it largely depends on what talent can I get to execute that because people with that core expertise are hard to find. But when you find the right person can really help you scale. And so if you think about organic search, for example, most people just create content and try to do some search optimization. You have to really wrap that in a tight process of what are the topics that I'm talking about? What is the search volume for those topics? What percent of that search volume do you think? I think I can capture? How can I increase my percent of that volume? By doing link building, content promotion, the right information architecture to actually get scale.

How do you ensure that your content stays relevant and doesn't go obsolete? Let's dive into the strategy that combines education, content and advocacy.

Look, it's really hard. Like last, I think last month, my entire blog team just spent the entire month just updating old content and just working on. Here's the thing, everybody has a bias towards new and what they're doing in the moment versus the 80, 20 of what people are actually consuming. It's once you have a hit, play the hit. So if you've got something that somebody wants, make versions of it, cross channel, figure out how to merchandise it and make it the best it possibly can. And so I think that's like a core opportunity. So when you think about how to make sense of all this across community and your content channels, is one customer obsessed. And my core tagline for marketing is great. Marketing is different, but familiar. It's different, it's unexpected, but it's familiar enough that it's not shocking, it's not jarring, there's some safety to it. And how do I tell stories that are maybe not what my customer expected, but are wrapped in a way that they're used to seeing it or through a lens that they understand so that I will surprise them and deliver really amazing value for them. And that's like fundamentally what we try to do all the time. And what you normally can do is through your product experience and your community experience, source a lot of that, those ideas because you get a lot of great feedback from your audience and from your customers around the problems they have. And how do you then take that problem and turn it into the best resource, solving it in the world. And if you can do that, wow, you can have a ton of traction with your audience and your community. Update it over time as it changes and gets out of date. Cool. Every six to 12 months you got to do some work and fix it.

What's funny is you're right. A lot of marketers, they think about writing new content versus seeing what are your most popular pieces of content and how do you distribute it? How do you drive more traffic to it? And how do you keep it updated? Everyone falls under this trap. I got to send a new tweet every week. I got to send a new message every week.

That hamster wheel, man, It's a grind.

It's a grind. How do you manage that?

It's a false construct. It makes no sense. Right. Like, you don't have to. We self impose these rules to us. You don't have to. The thing you actually have to do is deliver value and be interesting. That is what you have to do. Everything else is optional.

Definitely. And the cadence is also important. Like, last year, we started doing the two webinars a week, and our lineups fall through February now. But like rain or shine or even pandemic, we're doing it. We're doing it, we're posting it. And we slowly saw our views on YouTube jump from like tens to hundreds to now thousands and upwards of tens of thousands. And so that cadence and consistency I found is also key. The one thing I learned really well from you guys was when you started in the early days of HubSpot, you're very focused on this audience community, like helping marketers become better marketers, become inbound marketers. And it's something I drew from you guys and I shared around our company is that fall in love with your customer and make them successful beyond your product or service. And if you build that community, you won't become a commodity. And that's where there's so many tools have come up. But HubSpot's just getting more and more elevated because you're constantly focused on making the audience successful. Now with the podcast network, with everything you guys are doing, how do you view the competition, though, that's coming in the space with Salesforce's plus network and whatnot.

Yeah. So I think there are a few things in there. First of all, like, I think we actually had a big advantage not being in the Bay Area, like, being based in Boston. It's like kind of everybody left us alone to do what we want. Where I feel like when you're in the Bay Area, you get the pressure to, like, oh, here you have to start with product marketing. You have to tell core product stories, tell your customer stories, and that's how you build a remarkable. Those things are super important, but they're not transformative. And so the first thing I always tell everybody is, do you have a better mousetrap business or do you have a transformation business? And if you have a transformational business where you're asking somebody to do something completely new that they've never done before, then you have to take the approach you just outlined, which is you have to solve for the value of the totality of the market beyond the scope of your product or service. I also think you could you future proof yourself by doing that because you never know where you're going to develop that product in the future. And so if you serve the totality of the market, you can already have that market prime for how that product develops. And so last part of your question is like, how do you think about competition? I think about it as come on in, like the water is nice, we're having fun. I think it is great for the world. Right. Because the more competition, the more it's going to focus everybody obsessed about the customer and the audience and their problems. And so if I spend a minute worrying about the competition, it's a minute I don't get to spend obsessing about how I'm going to provide value to that audience and that is that I lose the second I do that. So it's like they should do what they're going to do. My job is to stay agnostic of who's doing anything. How do I make the most valuable thing that we could possibly think of for this audience?

I'll share my personal story with HubSpot. So everything I learned in marketing was through HubSpot. But then when I bootstrapped boast, I didn't have the money. So I used to manually forward leads until our Series A a few months ago. But the first thing we did when we raised the Series A was get a marketing automation system. I didn't even think of anything else. I just gravitated towards HubSpot.

Why?

Because HubSpot enabled this engineer to become a better marketer, become a growth marketer, learn everything about SEO, content, everything else. So when you're creating that market and you're educating the market and helping that market become successful, it helps you stand out in a big way. Especially when lots of competition comes. I never even thought of once of, oh, maybe I should say does Salesforce as a marketing automation product.

Didn't even think about that.

We thought first, the first mindset was HubSpot. Let's go, let's test out HubSpot. Let's use it. And not to pump you guys stock. I'm not getting paid by HubSpot to say it.

I'm just glad that you're a customer. Thank you.

Yeah, I'm just saying this from the experience of how I and that's why I wanted to have this chat about like how I experience your content, how you built that community. And then it. I eventually became a customer like 10 years later or 15 years later. And gainsight has done something similar. There was no concept of customer success back in the day. They started this community of customer success even before they had a product and then, and they got a lot of traction that way. Now, you know, talk. You guys also have a massive community, right? How did you turn this sort of your subscriber base, your audience from like pure content consumers into a community of evangelists where you have people coming into your conferences from all over. Like, what does that take? What does that effort take?

Yeah. So look, I think any business can do community really well, but I think the first step in doing community really well is understanding like what is the primary reason all these people are gathering. Like for some businesses that's networking. Oh, we're going to connect and facilitate introduction. That's awesome. That's a really great use of community. For some it's like problem solving and jobs to be done. If you're a developer, there's a ton of amazing communities or like how you do something better with this technology. And that's really awesome. For us, it's about education. Whether it's our inbound event which is coming up in October virtually, it will be, you know, back to in person, hopefully next year and everything, or our HubSpot Academy, whatever it may be. Education is at the core of what we do. People come to our event, for example, not to network but to learn. Like the breakout sessions are oversubscribed with people trying to learning and grow because education is core and fundamental to who we are as a brand, as a company, as a marketing organization. And so if you want to build a great community, you first have to say what is my object that community is going to be built around? And then two, you have to integrate that into all the work that you do. And if you go look at our YouTube content, a lot of those videos drive to engaging in our HubSpot Academy and getting learning, getting certified and then going into our actual community and helping other people learn and maybe finding opportunities for contract work, full time employment, other things through that knowledge and certification that you gain.

Kip said a great SaaS company has three channels. What is the third?

I'll give you some examples, right? Like I think you have to one, you have to get good at paid. But I think at scale, paid shouldn't be more than 25 to 30% of your mix. Right. Because you just, you hit Facebook's earnings from advertising grew 42% and ad inventory grew 5%. Not good. If you're an advertiser, it means your costs are going up dramatically. So from that, optimize your pay, but know that the majority of it's going to have to come through organic sources. Normally that means organic search. And the other options are email, newsletter, email, forwarding product, virality, word of mouth. You might say, hey, I'm going to have a great word of mouth channel because I'm going to have a product that has double the mps of my next closest competitor and everybody in my market is going to talk about it. And that is how I'm willing to drive some remarkable differentiation in my category. There's a bunch of different ways you can get there. The point I'm making is you have to start by saying, great, we need, if we're going to build a great enduring business, we need at least three scalable distribution channels. And paid can only be one of the three.

When you look at picking channels, how do you prioritize which one to spend on?

So one of the things to know about me is that I'm obsessed about unfair advantage. I want to do the opposite of what everybody else is doing because the majority commoditizes things. So in the early days, what we did is sure, we spent money on Google and Facebook like everybody does, but we tried to minimize that spend and instead we would basically say, all right, who owns big groups of marketers and how do we work with them to get access to them? So there was a couple years where all we did was we went to the six people who had 100,000 plus size marketing groups on LinkedIn and we were like, cool, how can we work out deals with you to send notifications and announcements to your group and do that like on a cost per acquisition basis or a flat fee, whatever, that will work. And we had much better unit economics for strategies like that because you're not getting commoditized in this auction system. And so the first thing I'd recommend is look at your market. Who's the gatekeeper to that audience? How do you work with them and then figure out after that what's left? What do you need to do to spend on essentially Google, Facebook and YouTube, the three channels that have real audience and real scale and that you're eventually going to have to market on and advertise on effectively when you're trying to.

Become this media company or build a media arm within your company? What are the key skills you need to have on your team? Who are the first couple of people you need to hire?

Yeah, you have to hire people who are audience obsessed and are out there to provide value to the audience versus product marketers are amazing, but they're product obsessed and they're value proposition obsessed and those are great, important things. But you're never going to build a big, large scale audience if your product or value proposition. You're just not. And so you have to have people who can be several standard deviations away from the product, tell remarkable stories that attract people. And then you have to have some operation and conversion people who say, okay, now that I have this audience, how do I connect it back to my core buying experience and monetize that at a rate that makes the unit economics of this investment work really well and really effective for what I'm trying to do.

What are some other tools you recommend to manage becoming this media company? Like content, video, social, everything else? Yeah, HubSpot's a big part of it.

HubSpot's a huge part of it for us. You know, we're doing all the email in HubSpot, we're doing all the blog work in HubSpot. Podcasts, you've got Megaphone as probably the best hosting provider out there on the podcast side of things. And then you've got some other production stuff on the audio side of things. But Megaphone for podcast is good on the YouTube side of things. It's still mostly Adobe Creative Suite. Unfortunately there's not a ton of great SaaS options to programmatically do a lot of the script, which is great for audio editing. There's not a video equivalent. There's Wibbits and a few other things. If you're just getting started, you want to do some lightweight, like really quick templated video editing. Wibbitz is pretty good, but as you scale you'll eventually do a little bit more custom editing there. But unfortunately the big thing you need is project management software. Like we use Asana. We love Asana. And you need something to run and organize your media org there.

How many people are in your media org right now?

Oh gosh, with the Hustle team, it's probably 60 60.

Although you're saying like you have this media arm now. I feel like this thought process started when HubSpot.

Yeah, we've been building it the whole time, but we've just taken it to the next like step. Function of progress for sure.

Any advice on the process to acquire media companies in the space because you guys have been building something, but you also acquired Hustle and you mentioned a number of companies have Stripe and everyone have acquired media companies. Any advice there? How do you go about.

Yeah, so, so the first thing you have to consider is like how is that company making money?

Yeah.

And if it's a true media company and they're making money off advertising, then they're gonna one, they're gonna have some growth limitations. But there's growth limitations, advertising, they're gonna, they're gonna trade at basically 2 to 3x that revenue. And so if you're thinking about acquiring them, that's basically the price you're gonna pay. Where the deals get trickier is if somebody's got an awesome media property and they're monetizing it through subscription content, through partnerships, through Carry on a venture fund. There's a bunch of different ways that people are monetizing their media products. And if they're monetizing just by advertising, those deals are much more straightforward. You buy them and you swap out the ads for your ads and you think about how you build that organic scale. Long term it gets a little bit more nuanced if they've got a bunch of mixed business models there.

And what are, what are the common business modules outside of ads? Because there could be like conferences, premium content premium.

Education is the next biggest one.

Premium content premium.

So they have some type of subscription premium content offering that is that they're creating that's gated behind some type of monthly or annual subscription.

When you're creating all this multi channel content essentially, how do you ensure that it's also generating sales while building brand? Right. Like for someone like HubSpot, it's great, you guys are multibillion dollar company, but like a younger SaaS company, you have to think in terms of the month, the quarter. So how do you balance that and how do you ensure it's also generating sales?

I still think about the month and the quarter. Man, that never goes away. How many know if that goes away, it'd be nice. I'd rest a little easier if that was the case. But, but in all seriousness, you're talking about like how do you, how do you think about the, the value and like part of it is right. Some of these investments, there's different time horizons to how they come back to you. But in general how we think about it is here's this media property, how are we going to monetize it? Are we going to monetize it on brand or direct response? And brand means we're going to drive awareness and consideration for HubSpot. If it's direct response, we're going to drive a lead or a direct sign up for HubSpot. So the first decision you make, how are you monetizing one of those two ways? Great. Once you've made that decision, then what is your operating model for that decision? So I have a thesis that is if you own the media, then you can deliver a way more remarkable brand story than if you're fitting in somebody else's box that you're buying on some third party media from some third party media company. So how do you tell custom integrated stories and then how do you do ad recall testing and quarterly surveys to understand how that works? And if you're a smaller startup, you're probably looking for more of the direct response side of things than you are the brand side of things initially. Right? So direct response, you have to say, cool. How do we get people from YouTube to our core calls to actions on our website and what's the type of content that we convert? How do we grow that channel, how do we run the CTAs and how do we measure that? And then you, week over week you run your test and you figure out how in parallel to keep growing that audience and getting that conversion rate higher and higher until you get the unit economics looking really favorable. But it's honestly a lot of testing on what is your conversion flow for each channel.

And there's also this thought of how do I not bastardize the community? How do people not think that they join this inbound community? They're getting value from me. Are they going to see me as just constantly hawking my product versus content. How do you guys balance that? Because if you have this massive audience community and media network that you build, if people constantly see you as selling into there, they might get turned off. You guys have done a good balance. But is that 80, 20? Like how do you balance that?

No, it's the go to market experience and it's the customer experience. Right. I think where a lot of companies fail is cool. There's this great educational video on YouTube and like the call to action flow is just to go buy our product. And that's just a jarring bad high sales experience. Right. If you look at us like a lot of our YouTube content, you learn something on YouTube. And the core call to action is to go to our academy and to go learn more. When you go and sign up for our academy, you automatically get permissioned a free version of HubSpot?

Yeah.

Free CRM, free email, everything. And in our academy there are courses that tell you how to do great email marketing, how to do great selling, and they show you how to do it within the HubSpot CRM, which you can do for free. That is amazing value and an amazing like kind of chain of experience. And so once you are then using the product and getting real value, then you upgrade and you pay us and a percentage of those people pay us. And that's a really healthy flow for us.

You don't want a jarring message. You provide a piece of valuable content, whether it's a webinar or YouTube video or whatever. If you just do immediate direct response, buy my product right from that, that's very jarring. So get them. You need an intermediate step to drive more value. You built this media company, you got great content. How do you keep growing your audience? For example on YouTube, are you promoting it in your newsletters? What are you doing to drive? What are some best practices to drive the audience?

Yeah, I think those change depending on the channel you're talking about. For YouTube, what you see in realizing something like YouTube is that you need like a franchise model where you have channels dedicated to different Personas and different topics. And so what you're trying to do is basically build a network of YouTube channels. And so we're working on building out different channels for marketers, for sellers, for operations professionals, et cetera. But we run a very similar playbook in terms of like, this is how we do conversion rate optimization for each of those channels. This is how we do channel subscription within the videos. This is how we do any paid promotion of those videos. This is how we feature those videos in the Hustle or our other email promotion. And a lot of it's just cross media. It's like we have all this great blog content. How do we go back and embed the relevant YouTube videos as part of that blog experience and help people just go from this great tech solution to their problem to an also amazing video solution to that problem.

Is the content marketing core team part of that media company? Is there tension? How do they work together?

No, they all, it's all one team together. We're bringing it up, bring it all together. We look at it as we have a media strategy. And that media strategy is comprised of email, blogs, YouTube, podcasts, like the core channels and formats of media. And that the more those people can work together and cross promote across channels, the bigger the aggregate audience is going to grow and the more effective the strategy is going to be. You can't have them siloed because then you're just defeating the point of having a big integrated strategy.

As you look into the future, where do you see this is going? More and more people are jumping on the bandwagon, but HubSpot's been doing it for decades. Where do you see this whole media company strategy going? Like, are more and more companies going to adopt it? I think if you're not deliberate, it's not part of your DNA, it's going to start and stop right for you.

Yeah. I think if you're going to get really out there, you're going to see this strategy hit a collision course with the third version of the web, which I think is largely going to be a decentralized version of the web. And you're going to have a digital wallet that carries your certifications and all of those things with you. And Dharmesh and I talk a lot about it will get to the point where, like, you can offer to be paid in some type of token for access to your information, to take a sales call to all of those things. And so I think content and telling great stories has been a part of marketing forever. Right. And it's going to be a part of marketing forever. It is how those stories are delivered and how value is, like, constructed around them. That's going to change. And I think we're going to be on this path for a while until the core decentralized version of the Web 3.0 really meets the broad consumer market, which I think is still three to seven years away.

You see value in pushing a single piece of content to multiple channels, like a video podcast, YouTube, IGTV, et cetera. And I think you guys have done a great job of that. Like slicing it for different mediums.

Yeah, for sure. Here's the thing that you want to do is you want to figure out a process that works for you, that helps you identify a hit early. All this idea positioned this way really works with my audience. And once you know that, then, yes, you want it to be on YouTube, you want it to be on audio, you want it to be on ig, everything. Right. All across social. But if you spend all of your time, like editing and manipulating that content for all those platforms in dud, then you wasted a bunch of production time and administrative time on something that's not going to get you a ton of leverage. So the thing that matters is, like, how do you identify the real successful stuff right up front? And then once it passes your bar, then get the distribution across all of your four channels.

What are some hacks you've picked up of identifying that hit or trying to look into the crystal ball and say, this is going to be a hit?

Yeah, we think about it pretty democratized. Like, we look at any channel we have, whether it be a podcast, episode, episode, a YouTube video, whatever. And, like, how far and how quickly does it deviate from the average? If you're trailing average, your average YouTube views are 5,000 views per video, for example. And you got a YouTube video that's 10,000 views in the first day, you got a hit. Right? That's an obvious hit, but maybe you have something that's 2,500 views in the first day. Wow. That's actually probably a hit too, because you're. You reached half your half your average in 24 hours. And so it's about understanding how stories perform relative to each other. And you want the outliers of that performance and you want to keep elevating the average. And you have a really successful media organization if the delta between the average and the best is really spread really wide.

As a leader of such a big marketing team, what KPIs are top of mind for you, and how do you ensure everyone is aligned to do the right thing when you're not in the room?

First of all, like, one of my guiding principles is I believe that the most important decision made is by a frontline marketer who has a couple hours in the afternoon to work on a project in between meetings. And they have that couple hours, they've got to make a couple hundred decisions. And the magic is, how do they make the vast majority of those decisions really well? And if they make the vast majority of those decisions really well, and they do that every day, and that's compounded across the whole team, then, wow, you get really great results. The only way for that to happen is massive transparency is transparency of information, transparency of strategy, transparency of goals, and really direct feedback with people around what's going well and what's not. This comes into the thing I'm actually most passionate about, which is like, hiring great talent, great marketers, and helping those leaders develop teams really effectively, because that's actually how you get to scale. The thing that I will tell you is you're never short on ideas. You're short on leadership bandwidth to accomplish the ideas. Like, there's never. You're never like, oh, man, my brain is empty today. Oh, I can do these, like, 30 things. That would be amazing. But do I have three people who could each go take 10 of those things and do them really well. That's always, almost always the core constraint.

How do you prioritize the best idea? So you're working on the most impactful stuff.

Yeah. So if you talk about prioritizing ideas, I think about it in like two by two. I like to use the most. There is essentially total addressable audience. Like marketers don't talk enough about the total addressable audience of the thing they're doing. Like I could talk about marketing automation and 10% of the market cares about it. I could talk about SEO and like 80% of the market cares about it. And that doesn't mean I should always talk about SEO, but that's a weighting in how I think about it. Yeah, I need to think, I need to think about the total available audience. I need to think about that relative to the delta of value I can create versus what exists already. If there's a big audience and nobody's really done anything around this idea or topic, then wow, that's a no brainer to go and do because I can create 10x20x100x the value than what currently exists in the world today. And like that construct and framework for me helps you really prioritize ideas really well.

And I love that. Total addressable audience. Nobody thinks about it. They think about it in terms of, oh, this initiative, this is how long it's going to take to accomplish and then let's push it out. But everything starts from an audience. You're starting from the goal.

One of our rules is nobody makes anything until how many people can get to and how it's going to get to them. It's not about making the thing. It's not about you can always make good things. It's about will somebody actually ever see it?

Got 375 phenomenal marketers. HubSpot's everywhere. How do you find great marketers? And especially if you're a young startup or a smaller company.

Yeah, if you're a younger company and you're looking for first you have to be like, all right, what skills are really important to the problems that I'm trying to solve? And then where are those skills most prevalent? So for example, like if you're looking for a great paid marketer, it's really easy to go, well, I'll go look at the SaaS industry and hire somebody else from HubSpot or Salesforce or some other big SaaS company and they're going to have them come do paid marketing for me. That's often the wrong choice. You have to say what market has to be the best at paid marketing. I'd argue like something like E commerce, like where the margins are really small, competition is really high, you have to be amazing at paid marketing and so cool. How do I go talk to some of the E commerce companies and take one of their best paid people and bring them onto my team is a far better option. So part of it's identifying where those skills have to be the strongest and going and finding people in that pool. The second part is you got to have your story. You have to sell people from the minute you talk to them. And what is the story? Why is doing marketing in this case for you better than doing it anywhere else in the world for them? I believe that people take seven to 10 jobs in their life and that's the case. Every job they take is a life changing moment. So if you're going to take a job with me and I'm going to change your life, I better sure as hell give you a good reason on why that life change is going to be remarkable for you and why it's going to help your career, why it's going to help your growth. And I think too many early stage companies focus on like really digging in and assessing people, but you have to do that in parallel with actually selling them and having a real clear story and point of view of why they got to come do it with you.

If you were to start a company today, who would be the first two or three people you'd hire on the marketing team?

Let's say I'm going to do a SaaS business where I'm trying to target the SMB mid market. Then I'm going to hire somebody who's great at distribution and organic distribution. I'm going to hire somebody who's good at paid and I'm going to hire somebody to do product marketing.

As you look back at this long super successful career of yours, looking back, what do you wish you did less of and what do you wish you did more of?

Wish I did less administration and less time on things that were really low magnitude and didn't matter. Right. Focusing your time on what really matters is everything and managing your time is everything. Administration kills it and like needless meetings with people. I want you to know that you're in a good spot with me. I want you to have good feedback but we don't have to do that constantly. Like I want to make sure that we're working together on an intellectually stimulating problem and like having a really good debate of ideas and the more you can do that kind of kind of time, the more you win long term.

Apart from all the fantastic content and the media that HubSpot puts out, what are some favorite sort of first principles books you'd recommend to folks? One or two maybe.

I really love Shoe Dog and Phil Knight's telling of the early marketing of Nike and the storytelling and how they thought about the storytelling was really great. And I look at Nike as an iconic brand and get to their journey was really awesome. I like the new Jim Collins book B 2.0. I think that's really good. And I really like there's a book called the Coddling of the American Mind which is like challenging how we like manage and treat and educate each other. And that's a really helpful book that challenges a lot of the storytelling and influence that that I think about every day. Miller Story Brand is a great book. If you've never read that one, Story Brand is great. There's I'll tell you one of the one of the things to do is go look for like vintage copywriting books.

Yeah.

From like the 70s and 80s, like direct mail copywriting books. There are some amazing ones out there that will tell you more, give you more practical advice about writing and storytelling than you can read from most modern books.

Fantastic. This has been a great session. Thanks for joining us. I need some traction. You need some traction.

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