Kipp Bodnar: The Unfair Digital Marketing Advantage That Drives Faster Business Growth | Marketing | YAPClassic

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incredible deals in the show notes or at youngimprofting.com/deals. I don't have an MBA. I didn't work at McKenzie. I'm an untraditional marketing leader. A marketing is a game of arbitrage. The best marketers in the world just figure out where their inefficiencies, where things are underpriced, they lean very aggressively into those things to get a really high return. The best entrepreneurs in the world are people who just get really irritated that a problem exists and just become

maniacally focused and obsessed with solving it. You could do that whether you're a solar entrepreneur, whether you're an executive at a company doesn't matter. So I know that HubSpot's actually coined the word 'inbound' marketing. What inbound strategies are working? A few things. Yap-Fam, you don't need the biggest budget to win at marketing. You need to spot the opportunity everyone else is missing. Today we're bringing back my conversation with Kipp Baudnar,

chief marketing officer at HubSpot and one of the sharpest minds in digital marketing. And see-up classic, Kipp reveals why the biggest breakthroughs in business and marketing come from finding unfair advantages and seeking opportunities that others overlook. So if you're trying to build a brand that stands out in a crowded market, listen in. Here's my conversation with Kipp. Kipp, welcome to Young Improveding Podcast. Hey, y'all, thanks so much for having me excited be here.

I am excited for this conversation. I'd love to talk about marketing and I was so impressed with your journey. When I was researching your story, I found out that you rose to CMO at HubSpot

in just five years, which is absolutely incredible. So my first question to you is what do you think

set you apart from other employees at HubSpot and accelerated your career growth at the company? Look, I think accelerating a business career growth. It's all very similar. I think it's about how do you really focus on the small set of things that are going to give you the high magnitude of return. I think so often people get caught up in like operational details or let everybody else

“kind of push their priorities on them, where you have to be like, if you look at the situation and”

say, what are the three to five things that if I do, I will be 10 times more successful than anybody else in the situation and that's, I mean, sounds simple, but it is the thing that I think matters the most. Before you were joining HubSpot and you started there, you were actually an entrepreneur. So what were the advantages or disadvantages that you faced? Joining Corprit already having entrepreneurship experience? I think the first side hustle entrepreneurship thing I had, I would go to like Sam's club

and Walmart and find like clearance items and flip them on eBay when I was in high school. And so I was

always somebody who was obsessed with arbitrage, how do you buy low and sell high and where are the

inefficiencies of a market and one of the great things about marketing is that marketing is a game of arbitrage. The best marketers in the world just figure out where they're inefficiencies, where things are underpriced, they lean very aggressively into those things to get a really high return. And so what happens when you go and work at a startup at the time, I think HubSpot is about 100 people when I join, you go from just run and really fast by yourself to needing to run really fast

“with a bunch of other people. And that's the biggest change. And you have to adopt a different mindset.”

And I think the mindset there is I have limited scale just me. I could accomplish much bigger things if I do it with other people, but I got to bring them along for that journey. If I just try to push my agenda on everybody else, nobody's going to understand. They're not going to have the context and we're not going to go anywhere. And so I think the biggest shift from being somebody who is working solo or on a small team to be being on a bigger team is how do you actually

clearly articulate the problem you're going to solve in a way that people are really excited to solve it with you? Because when you're an entrepreneur, you don't have to do that. You can just do what's in your head and go, right? Yeah. So it's like how do you motivate teams? And I love what you said about marketing being arbitrage. I think that's so smart. And it's so curious, like almost every marketing activity is some sort of arbitrage. About 100%. Exactly what it is. Whether you're

trying to game an algorithm, whether you're trying to make a great YouTube thumbnail, whether you're trying to buy ads on an obscure platform that maybe your industry doesn't use, but they're way cheaper.

So in your career, like I said, you rose up the ranks very quickly. Were there any like pivotal moments that really shaped your trajectory or relationship? Or what do you think it was that you were

“able to go from employee to CMO and in the C-suite? I think there's lots of moments that make”

that happen. I think my very first job was I ran the HubSpot blog. So basically the equivalent

of what you do now and what a lot of creators and amazing media companies do now. I did a long time

ago because I'm old. And I think the most pivotal moment was that first year when, you know, we had a blog that had about 200,000 readers a month and by the end of the year we were at about 1.5 million monthly. And so we were able to really grow and scale that work. And I was maniacally focused on that for better and for worse. And there are challenges with being too overtly focused and you probably don't collaborate as well with others and everything. But when

new I needed to dramatically change the trajectory of the work we were doing. And so I kind of look everything as like a sprint. And it's like whether it be a week, a year or two years it's like, what do I need to really change and transform in that time? And I knew that I needed to change the

type of content we're creating, the frequency, the process, all of those things that creators now

do on a daily basis. But in 2010 was, you know, kind of new and people were trying to figure it out

“at the time. And so I think that was one and then the other is when you go from being somebody who”

is contributing as an individual to like leading a team. And so I went from running that blog to running like all of our content and how we were our blog, our social or SEO, how we were scaling up. And that was a pretty pivotal transition because it's like, can I get people to follow me, do I have a clear story, do I have a clear strategy? And the the simple thing I would tell everybody out there is the key step in that is people need to feel like they're going to learn something

from you. And so even though they may be specialist, like I would go and I would find the latest article, the latest hack that somebody had done, even if it was for somebody else on my team and I would send it to them and talk to them about it and talk about how we could use it. And they were instantly like, oh, you understand my work, you understand the craft that we're working on together here. And I trust you to help me make my craft much better than I did today. Not that it's bad today,

“but that I think I can get much better with your help. That's so interesting. So basically,”

you were a good colleague, right? And you helped other people. And that's really important with politics and corporate. And especially, you know, getting into the sea suite. So what if I see you have for good relationships and corporate and being somebody who higher-ups think about when promotions are coming up? I think the best relationships are results. I think I think results speak for themselves and are very results of the ultimate meritocracy, right? And I think the

biggest thing that people get wrong is they look at what other people ask of them and say, hey, here, the goals that I think you can achieve. And they look at that as like the ceiling of what they're supposed to do. Like so if you're running a LinkedIn program for example, it's like,

oh, I think you can get a million views a month this year for our company company content. Great.

Well, you were I if we were in that situation, we would say, cool, you think a million's good. I think 10 million's good. How would I go and use the same constraints? Everything I've access to to do way better than you think. Because that change in magnitude is impossible to ignore. Because then you're like, oh, wow, we have somebody who's able to overexcede what we think are fairly aggressive expectations that we would have of them. Clearly they are able to do more and we should put them in a situation

to do more. Totally. I teach a LinkedIn masterclass and I and it's people that want to grow their personal brands. And one of the most common objections I get from these folks is that I'm really scared to start growing my personal brand while I'm working corporate. I'm scared to do my own thing. And I noticed that you launched a book while you were working. Yeah. So talk to us about that experience. What's your advice to people who want to become a thought leader in their space,

but they do work in corporate? How should they approach it without stepping on toes or making sure that like their their company is aligned with what they're doing? Yeah, I find that people's own ambition or lack thereof is their biggest limited to growth, not their capability, not their aptitude, not anything else. And I find those things to largely be an excuse. You know, you're scared, largely what other people think versus the at what's actually true. What's actually true

if you look at the market and what happens is that a company no matter whether you're starting it or you're working for it, they need experts. And they need people who their customers look to as

on their market. And, you know, how you get there? You have a great presence on LinkedIn. You start a podcast. You write a book. You have an email newsletter. There's a tons of different ways

“depending on your skills, your interest to get there. But you have to get there. And the thing that”

nobody tells you, because I got a job at HubSpot because I had run a blog. They liked my blog. And then I ran the blog. I host a marketing Instagram podcast now. The thing that you know and a lot of people don't know is that when you create, when you make something every day and every week, you learn so much faster. And you get so much better at your craft. If you have to teach a lot of other people, the thing that you want them to know and the thing you're trying to be

good at in your job. And I have always found on my team that the people who are out there

actively creating are some of the best people in their current roles in addition to what they might be doing on LinkedIn or YouTube or wherever. Yeah. I totally agree with you. A lot of the times it isn't excuse, right? Like people are saying, oh, I think my company is going to get mad. My boss is going to get mad. But in reality, what may happen, especially if you're like, you know, let them know you're going to do this. And it's not competitive to what you're doing at work.

You'll get more respected at work. I remember when I started growing my brand in podcast, I started getting promoted more often at work. I was being asked to teach you how to use the LinkedIn and getting flown to conferences. And whatever it was when I was working at HubSpot. Hey, AppGang. As the App Media has grown, I've learned that communication can get messy fast. Some clients live in Slack. Some clients would rather text all the time. Others just want to call

you. And when a deal is closing or new opportunity comes in, I don't want to import and conversations

“trapped on somebody's personal phone. I don't want to be blocked. That's why today's episode is”

brought to you by quotes, both QUO. The business phone system built so you never miss an opportunity.

QUO gives your team shared business texting and calling. So if a client reaches out, the right person can jump in, see the conversation history, and then respond quickly. Calls, text and voicemails are all in one place, keeping things super organized and making sure that nothing slips through the cracks. So if you're growing a business and still managing customer communication from your personal phone, it's probably time for an upgrade. Money's on the line. Always say hello with QUO. Try QUO

for free plus get 20% off your first six months when you go to quote.com/propheting. That's QUO.com/propheting. Young and profitors, a few weeks ago my main video editor put in his notice due to health concerns. Now because it was an emergency and I wish him well, I was in a pickle. He was gone and there was nothing I could do about it and so I was in full panic mode. The podcast still goes on. I still need

“promotional clips. I still have sponsors. I can't do this without a video editor and so I was stressed”

but I did what I always do and we found an amazing replacement who's just as good as my

previous editor if not more talented and I do what I always do. I want to indeed sponsor jobs to find my candidate. Indeed sponsor jobs makes finding qualified candidates so much easier because sponsor jobs booster job posts in the search results helping you reach candidates who match the skills, certifications, or location that you're looking for. And if you're hiring too, you can join the 3.3 million employers worldwide that use Indeed to connect with quality talent that

fits their needs. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all of your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results. When you need the right person to cut through the chaos, this is a job for indeed sponsor jobs. And listeners of this show, young and profiting will get a 75 dollar sponsor job credit to help give your job the premium status it deserves at indeed.com/podcast. Just go to indeed.com/podcast right now and support a show

by saying you heard about indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com/podcast terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for indeed sponsor jobs. Yeah, fam. I genuinely feel ahead of the curve with AI for the first time because the last year that felt like I couldn't see the value from it. I would use AI and it would give me back dumb responses and I was using chat to be tea like a search engine, to draft an email here or there,

but I wasn't using it effectively. So I went to mindstones AI breakthrough weekend with my business partner Kate. I learned so many foundational skills that I use every day at yeah, media. Everything that I touch now involves AI and mindstone gave me the tools to actually make AI effective rather than just feeling like it was a bunch of hype. And in fact, I built an app in 15 minutes at this retreat and when I came back me and Kate were like we've got to put

our team through this training. And so mindstone has this AI competency program. It's a four week totally online training that's super affordable and we put the entire team 60 people through this program. The productivity and the efficiency increase I get media has been absolutely incredible.

all of our meetings and takes notes and then it basically acts as like a second brain. You can use any

tool that you want, cloud, chat to be tea, whatever. It's the actual foundational principles of how to

“use AI correctly. That's what it teaches you. And if you guys want to experience mindstone and take”

their four week AI competency program, yapp listeners get 10% off at experience.mindstone.com/yapp. That's experience.mindstone.com/yapp. Right now, do you feel like you have like an entrepreneurial itch or is being in c-suite enough for you to feel like you're building something? Just because a lot of people think in order to be an entrepreneur, you have to start your own company. Yeah, you don't think that's true. I think entrepreneurship is about solving problems.

Like I think it inherently the best entrepreneurs in the world are people who just get really irritated that a problem exists and just become maniacally focused and obsessed with solving it. And nobody do so in a way that generates a lot of wealth for them and other people. Right? And that's awesome. You could do that whether you're a solarpreneur, whether you're a startup founder, whether you are a leader in a company, whether you're an executive at a company doesn't matter.

I look at it as like am I in a situation to solve interesting problems? And the reason I don't go start a company right now is because I'm a great position to go start and solve it's really interesting problems. And I have a lot of access to capital and smart people to go and do that and make much faster progress than if I was just me trying to do something. And I look at it as any situation, every situation you have an unfair advantage. It's your job

to understand what that unfair advantage is. And I always tell people that you know, when you

work at a great company, you have the two things that matter most. You have agency and control, which is what most entrepreneurs have and they want, but you also have resources to go and do what you want with that agency and control, which a lot of entrepreneurs do not have. And so

“when you have both of those at the same time regardless of the situation you're in, you should take”

advantage of it. Totally agree. Okay. So let's move on to some marketing, best practices. Hubspot has become a household name. So what do you think has been some of the major factors in becoming a global brand? It's a little bit what we talked about earlier. I'm an untraditional marketing leader, right? I didn't work at McKenzie. I didn't work it. I don't have an MBA. You know, like I'm not, I'm not out of central casting. I am, you know, from a small town in West Virginia,

my goal was to do interesting stuff and see the world. And when you're in that kind of situation, you just think about solving problems differently. And that comes back to the idea of arbitrage. You have to understand if you're a marketer. What are the unique ways to reach my audience? And what are some of the ways that we've done that at HubSpot over the years? I think would help maybe bring examples of that. First, in very early days, we created a free tool called website

creator where you could just put your website in and it would give a full diagnostic. So normally what you'd hire consultant for or you'd talk to a sales rep for, it's just going to give you a report on the webpage and email it to you, which in like 2006, '78 was transformational at the time. That's, you know, it's a long time ago, almost 20 years now. And we had millions of millions of people use that. And like our co-founder, Darmash, built it himself, right? But it was not like

anything fancy. And it was, and but it was rooted in, he watched our other co-founder Brian doing all these sales conversations. And he was doing all this manual research. And he was like, I can, I can make an app that does that for you and then they just gave it away and that worked really, really well. Then the second thing that worked really well for us was blogging and content in the early days of content and creating. And what we figured out is that Google search was growing

rapidly and there was an arbitrage in a market and efficiency where you would search for so many things back in the day and there were terrible search results, right? Like you would go and like

“nothing on this page is good. And if we create something, we will by far be the best thing”

on that topic. And we were able to grow from thousands to hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of visits doing that. And we had that hypothesis. We created a process to scale it and we spent a lot of time and money. The other thing that people are marketing get wrong, they do ten different things kind of shitty, right? They are like, I'm, I'm, I'm real thin. I think I got to do everything. You're way better off to do one to three things better than anybody else.

And if you can do one to three things better than anybody else, you can build a billion

dollar company. If you have one or two great marketing channels that you are world-class at, you cannot build a ten million dollar company if you have ten crappy marketing channels. I have seen it time and time again that just how life works. I love that advice and I agree one hundred percent. It's so right. You've got to really know how to leverage one or two or three channels

starting out, right? So just build one at a time and go from there. So I know that Hubspots actually coined the word inbound marketing. So can you help us understand for those who are new to marketing? What's the difference between inbound and outbound marketing? And how was marketing different before HubSpot really came on? The world marketing changed a bunch with the internet. But before the internet, people remember it was largely TV ads, billboards, direct mail, all those

things. And they were all really annoying, right? Because you didn't opt in any of those things. The commercials interrupted your television when we didn't have streaming services everywhere, right? You go home and your mailbox will be full of advertisements that you didn't subscribe to or didn't want. And that was like very outbound, very interruptive. And we were basically like, well, now that the internet exists, there's a whole different way to do marketing.

You can do it in a bit of a way where you create content and pull people in through search engines, through social media, through email marketing, through things that people opt into and want to participate in. And that was now seems obvious because it's how the internet worked.

But 20 years ago was fairly revolutionary. And so we created a new category. And sometimes

if you're marketing or if you're an entrepreneur and you're starting a company,

“the best thing you can do is there's a great quote out there. Better is a debate different as a choice,”

right? And when you force somebody to make a choice and you do that by creating a new category. Where it's like, hey, do you want to do this new awesome inbound thing that works really great? Or do you want to do that old, sta-j-outbound thing that everybody hates? You know, and we tell that story of people are like, oh, I want to do the new cool thing that people like. I don't want to do the old bad thing that everybody hates. But if we just said, oh,

like, hey, we can help you do your direct mail a little bit better. Who cares? Like, well, maybe it's good enough to really even need better. I don't know what I don't know what you're

talking about, right? And so painting a clear choice for your target audience is so powerful.

It takes a little bit longer, right? Because people aren't familiar with it. There's a level of education that you have to do. But anybody can do it. And if you're in it for a long haul, if you think you have a big opportunity and your business is a 5, 10, 20 year thing, then it's a really important thing to take advantage of, to actually be differentiated in the market. I know that you've been talking a lot about arbitrage, unfair advantages. So in 2025,

“what inbound strategies are working? Like, our blog still working? How do you think about SEO?”

Yeah, it's a great question. All that stuff. What's marketing? What works in marketing in 2020? Five. A few things. Creators working, partnering, or being with creators, and like these modern media companies, like you run on, like huge opportunity, huge, huge opportunity there. We work deeply with creators. I'm a creator myself, like it works. YouTube, YouTube works. YouTube is an exceptional channel to drive awareness and monetization. It is much harder to disrupt through artificial intelligence,

which is kind of the thing that's changing, marketing the most. Blogging still works. It does. But it works for the very focused universe of like the industry you solve. Like where you have unique data, unique insight, unique credibility. You can, you can get that. You can't go and talk about everything in the world, but like, and get search traffic, but you can focus on your core niche and get a good baseline audience through blogging. Those things are completely working,

partnering with creators, even through like advertising means hugely, hugely valuable. The other thing that's working, a lot of people are doing events, and in person, because we've gotten so segmented, no shared experiences. I think if you're selling high, big ticket expensive things, bring people together in person is becoming something that all the marketers I talk to are spending more money on this year, not less money on. So true. And when I'm thinking about,

you know, my marketing strategies and unfair advantages and untapped opportunities, I'm thinking about SEO within platforms. So for example, like podcast search SEO, how do I become more like searchable on LinkedIn in particular, right? How do I can become more on YouTube?

“Well, that's what it is in YouTube. It works. It's because YouTube's the second biggest search engine, right?”

Young and profitors a few weeks ago, my main video editor put in his notice due to health concerns. Now, because it was an emergency and I wish him well, I was in a pickle. He was gone and there was nothing I could do about it. And so I was in full panic mode. The podcast still goes on. I still need promotional clips. I still have sponsors. I can't do this without a video editor. And so I was

stressed, but I did what I always do. And we found an amazing replacement whose just as good as my

previous editor, if not more talented. And I do what I always do. I want to indeed sponsor jobs to find my candidate. Indeed, sponsor jobs makes finding qualified candidates so much easier because sponsor jobs boost your job posts in the search results, helping you reach candidates who

you can join the 3.3 million employers worldwide that use indeed to connect with quality

“talent that fits their needs. Spend less time searching in more time, actually interviewing”

candidates who check all of your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results. When you need the right person to cut through the chaos, this is a job for indeed sponsor jobs. And listeners of this show young and profiting will get a 75 dollar sponsor job credit to help give your job the premium status it deserves at indeed.com/podcast. Just go to indeed.com/podcast right now and support a show by saying you heard about indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com/podcast terms and conditions apply.

Need a hiring hero? This is a job for indeed sponsor jobs. Yeah, bam, I genuinely feel ahead of the curve with AI for the first time because the last year they felt like I couldn't see the value from it. I would use AI and it would give me back dumb responses and I was using catchy BT like search engines, draft an email here or there,

but I wasn't using it effectively. So I went to mindstones AI breakthrough weekend with my

business partner Kate. I learned so many foundational skills that I use every day at yeah media. Everything that I touch now involves AI and mindstone gave me the tools to actually make AI effective rather than just feeling like it was a bunch of hype. And in fact, I built an app in 15 minutes at this retreat and when I came back me and Kate were like we've got to put our team through this training. And so mindstone has this AI competency program. It's a four week totally online training that's

super affordable and we put the entire team 60 people through this program. The productivity and the efficiency increase I get media has been absolutely incredible. They've got their own proprietary tool called Rebel. It connects our email or Slack. It attends all of our meetings and takes notes and then it basically acts as like a second brain. You can use any tool that you want cloud, chat to BT, whatever. It's the actual foundational principles of how to use AI correctly.

“That's what it teaches you. And if you guys want to experience mindstone and take their four week”

AI competency program, app listeners get 10% off at experience.mindstone.com/yap that's experienced.mindstone.com/yap. Hey yap gang. As yap media has grown, I've learned that communication can get messy fast. Some clients live in Slack. Some clients would rather text all the time. Others just want to call you. And when a deal is closing or new opportunity comes in, I don't want important conversations trapped on somebody's personal phone. I don't want to be blocked.

That's why today's episode is brought to you by QUO, spelled Q-U-O. The business phone system

built so you never miss an opportunity. QUO gives your team shared business texting and calling.

So if a client reaches out, the right person can jump in, see the conversation history, and then respond quickly. Calls, text and voicemails are all in one place, keeping things super organized and making sure that nothing slips through the cracks. So if you're growing a business and still managing customer communication from your personal phone, it's probably time for an upgrade. Money's on the line. Always say hello with QUO. Try QUO for free,

plus get 20% off your first six months when you go to QUO.com/propheting. That's Q-U-O.com/propheting. QUO.com/propheting. Wouldn't come up with a blogging. I'd love to like dig deep on this, because I actually was thinking like, you know what? I feel like blogging used to be how I used to have a blog in my 20s. That was really popular. And then I was like blogging's over, but sometimes these things come around, right? And I was thinking, you know what? I feel like

blogs are kind of making comeback, or I'm like, with sub-stack becoming so popular. And I was

“thinking, should I start a blog on my website where I create content around entrepreneurship?”

Or should I like leverage something like sub-stack and leverage that platform for a blog? Like, what would be your advice to start from scratch or leverage a platform? Well, I have a rule that I don't make anything without being clear on how I'm going to get it distributed. And what the distribution advantages are, I think sub-stack, if you're an entrepreneur, has a little bit of built-in audience, but it's not worth it. Because the bigger built-in

audience is information discovery. And I say that kind of broader than search. And so if I were started today and it was just me, you and I were starting a company, we were going to go out and do something. I would start a blog on my website for a couple of reasons. One, a ton of people still use Google search. And you still can get a lot of traffic from Google search. The second thing is people are using AI for discovery, you know, chatGPT search, Google Deep Research,

Grock, all these things. And complexity. And what we have seen is that text-based content and video-based content that's cited in those results still gets a real amount of traffic. Like I host the podcast called Marketing and the Green. We did a video on DeepSeek, when DeepSeek first came out. And it was like the got recommended on everybody's chatGPT queries on DeepSeek. And we got 50,000 views in like 24 hours because everybody was searching for it.

text and video is getting better. What's changing is that it's a little less attributable, right? Because if somebody's getting it in like chatGPT or complexity, they may be reading information and see your link. But they might not directly click back to it. You know, some a proportioner, but a much smaller portion than like historically in Google. But you're still getting the awareness, the distribution, the brand recognition for being like a credible resource in those

“things. And that's why you have to have a pretty healthy blog and kind of YouTube strategy”

to surface in all these new models. Yeah. And we were just talking about SEO in platforms and that's such a great example. Like how do I get better search on chatGPT? That's the huge advantage. And by the way, there's compounding benefits to all this, right? Like I get discovered and chatGPT. And I get really good engagement on my video. Then YouTube's going to be like, oh, this is clearly a good video. So I'm going to prioritize it more in YouTube search.

And then you get more in the YouTube algorithm and the YouTube search engine. And then you have a video that completely takes off because of it. That's awesome. What would you say is the secret to making content that stands out today, considering that there's so much more content. So competitive, right? So competitive. And it's so easy now with AI to create videos to create blogs. You don't really need to be a writer like you used to anymore. So what's your best advice?

Here's my advice on content creation day. First, people have never wanted more actionable content

ever. It's not, they don't just want to learn something. They want something that's going to lead them to immediately take action. And so anytime you're creating content that's going to allow people to immediately take action that they can take, especially like in free tools or free platforms, that's going to take off. It's going to go great. I see that all the time. I imagine you see that all the time. That is clearly a trend that is happening. The second thing people want

is unique data and perspective. So like, if you have a survey of 2,000 people in a given industry, people are going to check it out because they want to know benchmark. They want to see how they're doing. They're competitive. They want to compare themselves. All that stuff happens. Right? And so you are going to see that be a real standout thing. And so that's where proprietary research,

customer data, things like that are a huge leverage. And then the third is like, can you be really

contrary and then have a good argument? Can you go against the status quo and change people's thinking with a real deep and thoughtful reason argument about something? And if you can do that, you're also going to get people's attention. What would you add? You're doing this all the time.

“What I miss? Well, I feel like you hit a lot of them, but I think at the core of it is like,”

how do you help people? Like, how do you actually bring value where people feel like, oh, wow, I learned something. Oh, this is this is something unique and meaningful. This is not just regurgitating what's out there or just click bait for me to just get on this page. And then I actually there's actually no good information or no good tools like you were mentioning. So you want to just figure out how to actually teach people something that they can't really find anywhere else. That's

what I feel like is really working. The prompt I've always given myself is like, is what about

you're going to be 10 times more valuable for people? Or would somebody pay a thousand dollars, two thousand dollars to have access to this? And if the answer to one of those two questions is, yes, it's going to be really successful. And if the answer is, no, it's probably going to be mentally an average. Totally agree. So how do you think about email? So email is one of the channels that have been around forever, but it's still really effective. What do your thoughts

“about it? How do you think we should best leverage it? Okay, email is super important.”

But here's why email is super important from like a principal base. It's one of the few channels you actually control. There's not now algorithm, right? Like somebody gives you permission to email them and you get to send them a message. And you actually own that email address. Somebody can't come along and change the Google algorithm, the YouTube algorithm, the LinkedIn algorithm. I know people are all up in arms about LinkedIn algorithm changes recently. That's the real value

of email marketing is that you have way more ownership and control of email marketing than most other channels out there. And so once you kind of have that foundation, you're like, okay, email marketing still matters. What am I going to do? And the number one thing you're going to do is to have as highly personalized emails possible, and that's writing emails with a AI. So one of things we did at HubSpot is we have, let's call HubSpot Academy, which is teaches you how to do

marketing, how to use our software, all of those things. And there's a bunch of different courses on HubSpot Academy. And we basically, when people come into HubSpot and maybe consume a article or a free guide or a webinar, what have you, will then send a follow-up email that is custom, one of them, written from them by AI, and that we recommend based on everything we know about them, the content they've consumed, what the best course for them to take is. And like we mentioned

there, not only do we mention their business, but like we have puns, like AI's gotten very good at that. And it feels like a human research is company and wrote them an email. And that email converts 80 to 100% better than our normal email. And so that is like number one, anything you

with your company and your website, you're going to get much, much better results. The other thing I would add when it comes to email is you were talking about giving away free tools, your content. Instead of having people pay for it, make their email the way that they pay for that content, right? You want to just collect as many emails as possible. One of the biggest forgots that I have is that I only started collecting emails like three years ago. I wish I

started seven years ago and really made it a point to collecting them. So what are the best ways

“that people can grow their email list right now? What do you suggest?”

Yeah, I mean, look, you gave them the, you gave them the great ways to do that, which is like offer something really valuable that you consider charging money for. Remember the marketing is just it's kind of a lesson in economics. It's what you want to sell versus what you want to give away to sell a bigger thing down the road and like how do you add you offset? How you think about that? And so for me, the things that are really good, if you have any free tools, great, if you have any

templates, like you do the work of building out a big Excel sheet with formulas and everything that people could just drop their own data in, they will give you an email address for that. I promise you, like one of the things that worked really well at HubSpot back in the day and you can do

similar versions of this now is we would find our customers always needed stock photography and

imagery for their email newsletter's Delaney page. And I was like, what if we just hire a freelance photographer by the rights out for like $10,000 to $500 different pictures and we just give those

“away for free instead of them having to pay, get images or all these people. And I think over the”

years we've had like five million downloads. I can't even tell you how popular that has been, but it's looking at your market thinking about something that they do that they spend money on and say, hey, can I give that to them for free? And if you can, you will get whatever information you want and exchange for them saving that money. Yeah. And I think people need to realize that a lot of this marketing strategy is a long game. Like sometimes you're you're marketing to somebody who might

start a company in four years, right? And might need your services four years down the line. So you guys have like free trials. For me, I collect emails. I do webinars and you know, sometimes that leads to a course that's pretty expensive. And people might attend three, four webinars before they actually purchase the course, but I'm investing in them building that trust. And so talk to me about how you guys think about your like free hub spot service. Yeah. Why are you guys giving away

your tools for free initially? Yeah. So about 10 years ago, we were like, hey, you know what,

the world is changing and trust is becoming the most important thing. And one of the things

ways you can build trust with people is to let them try before they buy, right? And like your webinar is a great example of that. It's like, hey, if I'm on a 30, 60-minute webinar with you, I probably have a pretty good idea about what your course is going to look like. How about what the quality is going to be, what it's going to feel like, the experience. And so I'm much more likely to have trust to go buy that course. So if we, if you use our free version of HubSpot CRM,

you're much more likely to buy a paid version because you're like, hey, you know what, I'm up and running on this. I've closed a couple deals with it. I understand the features that

“if I pay for them that I would get. And you know what, I kind of need them because I think I would”

make even more money if I paid for those features. And it's a whole different game. Right now, like we all have access to infinite knowledge with AI. Knowledge is a completely commodity. So in that world, trust becomes everything. People can know who you are, but they can still not trust you at all. And giving that value away is how you build trust. And so for us, like, the free version of our product. So we do it, but you know, you have webinars. There's a version of that for any business.

It's, I think, what I'm saying. Yeah. And I think the main lesson is, like, don't be afraid to give away great things that people can actually use for free, right? Don't be afraid for people to have to have enough for a couple months or whatever to do what they need to do because it's going to build that trust. I have a, I have a maximum I live by and it's distribution is undefeated.

And like, if you can get a big audience, you can always figure out how to make money on it.

The inverse is not true. Like, you can have an expensive product and sell it to a few people, or you can have a big audience and sell it to a lot, lot more people, but it's going to take a little bit of time. It's a different way of thinking. But distribution is the most, is the biggest reason most businesses don't grow because they just don't have a big enough audience, universal people who actually care about them and the thing that they're offering in the world.

Did you know that we just signed with HubSpot? Yeah, me. That's amazing. Welcome. Yeah, so thanks for coming. Yes, of course. Yeah, we're like doing this whole big HubSpot implementation and it's like a huge company focus. Yeah. So, um, really excited about that. So CRM. Yeah. I've got a lot of like young entrepreneurs who are probably working at spreadsheets and doing everything manually. What is a CRM? And what would benefit, how, how do startups benefits from CRM? Okay. So if you

truth for your customers and your prospects. So instead of your support team having us working out of a project management system, sales reps working out of spreadsheets, all of those things, everybody, your marketers, your sellers, your customer service folks, all working, updating one

record, all the context in one place and then being able to do really powerful things, whether

the advertising, email marketing, marketing automation, sales call prep, sales follow-up, sales automation,

“all of those things. Like that's what you're talking about doing. And you're going to see CRM be way”

more important over the next couple of years because what's going to happen with CRM over the next even year is that all the unstructured data, your meeting recordings, the emails you exchange, all of those things, all that context are going to make it way better. Because you're just, you're seeing, I'm just going to generate the email follow-up to your meeting for you. And it's like, oh, great. I know I need to fall up from this meeting, but I've got to go run to this other meeting

right now. Well, it's great. I can do it in 30 seconds versus having to do it 15 minutes tonight when I have forgotten half the things and need to go look up up, right? And that is why CRM is so important. Also, when you have all your data one place, you can do real reporting and actually understand what's working and what's not working. And as somebody who has helped grow a business from tens of millions of dollars to billions of dollars, it's done through basic iteration over a

long period of time. Finding problems, solving them and building and iterating, and you can't do

“that without your data one place in some clear reporting. Yeah, that's what I'm most excited about”

is being able to track everything, having everything in one place. If I'm like, what's happening with the sales deal, I can click in, see all the conversations to point like AI summaries and things like that are coming out. And have you guys been thinking about AI agents at all?

Tons, tons of AI agents. So first of all, the most used AI features at HubSpot 1 is to prep

for sales meetings. So we have a co-pilot where we'll take everything from Conduct Record and give you the full prep summary. That's awesome. We have an agent called Content Remix. So let's say you're going to run a content campaign. You're going to do an email newsletter. It's going to do a webinar. You're going to do a webinar. It's like it will spin up the landing page, the email, the ad assets, everything for you, and does all the manual work in the background. And then we also have a product

that our co-founder and a messenger are called Agent.AI, which is a marketplace of agents where you can go and anybody can build or use different agents. It's kind of like a modern kind of automation marketplace where if you have a problem, you can either use Agent.ai to build it or somebody's already built it and you can just use their agent. Like a really good example is there's a company research agent that will give you like a McKinsey analyst level, kind of deep detail briefing.

Who's the CEO funding history? Core products, competitors, the whole thing, and it'll do it in like

two minutes, right? Perfectly formatted for free. And that is just a game changer when it comes to agents.

If you are in marketing and in sales and you're feeling overwhelmed with AI and leveraging AI, how would you approach it? Okay. This is a fantastic question. I use AI all the time. I'm AI obsessed. I would pick one AI tool and get really good at it. And for markers that's probably Claude for sellers that's probably chat GPT, but you're going to use those tools. The reason I say Claude has the best taste. It's really good at writing. You can upload to projects in Claude and

have really great specific, highly repeatable writing output that's core to marketing. For sellers, I think one of the best AI features that exists on the planet is chat GPT's deep research feature where you can have it go and just build a incredibly complex research report. And it might research a problem for 5 to 20 minutes with all these different agents in the background going and doing that. And you having the full map to an industry, the accounts within the

industry, how your product maps, core competitors in that industry, like those things become super valuable. So that's where I would focus if I was just like, build an overwhelmed and not yet started. Yeah, I love that advice. I feel like we've learned so much so far about marketing. I love to move into customer service because it's not only important to bring in customers, we've got to retain them. So how does HubSpot help people in a CRM? How does that actually help

with your retention, with your customer service? Yeah, so a few things. So one of the other agents we have is called our customer agent. And it basically helps resolve customer support. Like the average HubSpot customer solves 30% of their support questions are answered by AI or answered by our agent. And so that's 30% less support. People support time, failed time, depending on the size

“and scale of company that you have to spend. And if you kind of focus on it, we've seen customers”

get to like 50, 60% deflection, which is huge. Say it's so much time, it's so much money. And the

competitive, as if we've talked, we've talked all show about it's never easy for a customer to switch.

So your core economics are going to be retaining that customer. I'm sure you see that your best customers are people who take multiple courses, people who do multiple purchases with you. And if you don't have good customer service, good onboarding, good customer support,

“man, they're, they're going to be out really quick. And I think it's one of the things most”

entrepreneurs overlook early on. They get so obsessed with sales and bringing those customers in. They're like, oh gosh, why I'm like 80% of my customers leave this year. That's because I haven't been focused on it at all. I don't have any of the infrastructure to actually focus on it. Yep. And the best customers refer other people who have their customers too. So you're messing out on other girls if you don't, yeah, how can we better align marketing and sales

so that we have the best customer service? Customer service is largely about sending expectations. Which is, do I know what I bought? Do I know what I'm going to use the thing I bought for? And do I know how I'm going to think that that's valuable? That's, if the answer to those things are yes, that that customer is normally pretty happy. If it's no, they're going to be pretty unhappy. And so marketing's job is to set up the value proposition early on.

Sales job is to not oversell, to not make promises that the product can't keep and to understand that customer's business enough to understand that this is how you're actually going to use this thing once you buy it. And then customer success and customer supporter, their job

is to help you get onboarded and get any blockers. Because there's always unique things that like

your business has this problem that isn't relevant to our other customers that we need to help you solve. And once you kind of fix those problems, the customer is going to be very happy. It's normally in one of those stages where things go off the risk. We just rolled out like a new customer survey to try to see like how our designs are feeling, how our network clients are feeling.

“It was really, really helpful. Do you have any suggestions of like the type of questions you should”

ask your customers to get their feedback? Oh, this is great. This is great. So I think the most, the most helpful thing that we have done and learned over the years things is we always run a monthly net promoter score survey with our customers. So net promoter scores is a question we all see how likely are you to rank the company from one to ten. And please tell us why. And the score kind of important. The tell us why is very important. And the reason for that is

you get a real sentiment is to what people value or like or dislike about your product. And now with AI, you can, if you run a survey like that, you can take all of those text responses and just get the core themes very quickly. And what your job is with any customer surveying. And why I

think NPS is so good is to not have problems be bestering and systemic. Like you always want new

problems. So it's like, oh, our customer supports back. Great. Let's go fix our customer support. And then you won't hear anything about customer support. You'll hear about a new thing like product speed or, oh, our client portal is tricky. Something that you hear all these things. And so that,

“I think that net promoter score question is the best because it gives you where the big root”

cause are. When you ask specific questions, you often get the symptoms without the root cause. I want to close that our interview with some scenarios, but I think we're going to be really fun. Okay. So you are a brand new entrepreneur. Yeah. You might be, I have like a little bit of money, but you most that you have time. So you have time to invest. What would you do for your marketing strategy launching? All right. If I'm time rich in money, poor, what would I do? Yes. Yeah.

The first thing I am doing is I am figuring out what type of creator I need to be. Right? Am I going to be YouTube, LinkedIn? What's my product? What's my market? And I got to start creating and I got to create on the daily cause I'm time rich. I got the time to make every day and I got to make something every day. And I got to use AI tools to help me keep up the pace of production and they're free to very low cost. So I can take advantage of that. And then the second

thing I'm going to do is I'm going to find one area where my target audience spends a lot of time that I might be able to reach them in a very interesting way. Like an example of this is like the early days of LinkedIn groups. Yep. Right? What you could do in the early days of LinkedIn groups is sponsor messages to that the group owner could send to the entire group and we would go and we would spend money to do that. And nobody else was doing that. And we got hugely efficient

legioneration by doing that. And it's just like, oh, a million marketers in this group. Nobody is really going after them. How do we get them? I love that. I think the whole theme of this episode is unfair advantage. I remember when I started my podcast, I started on LinkedIn. I wanted to target young professionals. And nobody was talking about podcast. Nobody was putting up anything about podcast. And then I became the number one podcaster on LinkedIn. But it was already a channel

cutting through the noise and getting in front of a lot of people in a creative way? Okay. Now,

what if you exited a company or slightly older? You've got more experience. You've got some money. But you've got a family. You've got a lot going on. But you do want to start a new company. How would you, you know, what would you do to market your company? Money rich money richer time poor. Time poor. Okay. I got, if I have some resources to do this, it's not going to be that

“dissimilar. I think the channels work. How I'm going to accomplish those channels? Like, I would”

probably, I'd probably still be a creator. But I would hire an agency to help me do all the post-production,

to help me do the research, do all that. And I would use AI to kind of prep. But I would need somebody if I was time poor to tell me, oh, these topics suck. They're not working. These are the new topics we should do. They kind of give you the cheat sheet of editorial and iteration for sure. And then if you have some money, you can use programmatic ad platforms. You can use Google, you can use meta that will give you enough baseline revenue to kind of start reinvesting.

And so I would probably use YouTube ads to be honest with you. YouTube ad targeting is great. And it costs us so much lower than Google and Facebook. And Instagram that I would probably do that. Yeah, there's plenty of agencies like my agency for example. Yeah, it's like, oh, how are you guys?

“Entrepreneurs just show up. We do everything for you. Just if you want to podcast, you show up to”

record or we literally just write everything on your behalf. So if you've got money, you can invest, like you said, in an agency, I know we only have a couple of minutes left. So I got a wrap up, but even though I really could talk all day. I know. But I will be respectful of your time. So the the last questions that I have I asked all of my guests. And this doesn't have to do with you don't even talk about marketing. You can talk about whatever you want. So what is one actionable

thing are young and profiter can do today to become more profitable tomorrow. Start using AI, pick a foundational model, chat chipty, cloud, Google Gemini and use it every day. Once once or twice a day, every day, build the habit. It's very important for the future. And what is your secret to profiting in life? And this can go beyond financial. I just bought a piece of art that says if you

don't know find out, be endlessly curious, be endlessly curious and ask questions never be stupid,

never feel like you're stupid, like just go and ask all the questions. And if you're curious about something, like just call somebody up, you'll be shocked. People will give you time. People will give

“you information if you care enough to know it. And then once you have that knowledge, your life is”

just way better in every single way. And where can everybody learn more about you and everything that you do? Okay, you can check out hubs.com, product, everything there. I host marketing against the grain over on YouTube and wherever you're podcast, you can check out Mark Hingens the grain. - Awesome, thank you, Cap.