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

I don't have an MBA. I didn't work at McKinsey. I'm an untraditional marketing leader. Marketing is a game of arbitrage. The best marketers in the world just figure out where there are 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 solopreneur, whether you're an executive at a company, doesn't matter.

So I know that HubSpot 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 Kip Bodnar, Chief Marketing Officer at HubSpot and one of the sharpest minds in digital marketing. In this Yap Classic, Kip 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 Kip. Kip, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast.

Hey, Hala, thanks so much for having me. Excited to be here.

I am excited for this conversation. I 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 5 years, which is absolutely incredible. So my first question to you is, what do you think set you apart from other employees at HubSpot? Spot and accelerated your career growth at the company?

Yeah, look, I think accelerating a business, career growth, it's all, it's all very similar. I think it's about how do you really focus on the small set of things that are gonna 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, you have to look at the situation and say, what are the 3 to 5 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 corporate already having entrepreneurship experience?

I think the first side hustle entrepreneurship thing I had, I would, 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? 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 there are inefficiencies, where things are underpriced, and they lean very aggressively into those things to get a really high return. And so what happens when you go and then work at a startup— at the time, I think HubSpot was about 100 people when I joined— you go from just running 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 gotta bring them along for that journey.

If I just try to push my agenda on everybody else, nobody's gonna understand. They're not gonna have the context and we're not gonna go anywhere. And so I think the biggest shift from being somebody who is working solo or on a small team to like being on a bigger team is how do you actually clearly articulate the problem you're gonna solve in a way that people are really excited to solve it with you? Because when you're like, when you're an entrepreneur, a solopreneur, you don't have to do that. You can just kind of 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 true. It's like almost every marketing activity is some sort of arbitrage.

100%. That's 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. Those are all just different ways to find arbitrage and take advantage of it.

Totally. I love that. Um, 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 relationships or What do you think it was that you were able to go from employee to CMO and in the C-suite?

I, I think there's lot, I think there's lots of moments that, 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, and what a lot of creators and, and amazing media companies do now, I did a long time ago 'cause 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 monthlies. 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, like, there are challenges with being too overtly focused, and you probably don't collaborate as well with others and everything. But I knew I needed to dramatically change the trajectory of the work we were doing. And so I, I kind of look at Everything is like a sprint and it's like, whether it be a week, a year, 2 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, our SEO, how we were scaling up. And that was a pretty pivotal transition 'cause 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 gonna learn something from you. And so even though they may be specialists, 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 it is 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 in corporate and especially, you know, getting into the C-suite. So what advice do you have for good relationships in 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 are 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 are 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 content. Great. Well, You or 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 have 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 over-exceed 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, uh, wanna grow their personal brands. And one of the most, uh, 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 at HubSpot, right? Yeah. So talk to us about that experience. How, what's your advice to people who wanna become a thought leader in their space, but they do work in corporate? How should they approach it without stepping on toes? Yeah. Or making sure that like their business, their company is aligned with what they're doing.

Yeah. I find that people's own ambition or lack thereof is their biggest limiter to growth, not their capability, not their aptitude, not, not anything else. And I find those things to largely be an excuse. I, you know, you're scared largely of what other people think versus the, what's actually true. And 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 trusted experts and advisors who have deep knowledge and deep perspective and point of view 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 tons of different ways depending on your skills, your interests to get there, but you have to get there. And the thing that nobody tells you, 'Cause I got a job at HubSpot 'cause I had run a blog. They liked my blog, and then I ran the blog. I host the Marketing Against the Grain podcast. Now, the thing that you know and that 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 is an excuse. Totally. Right? Like people, people are saying, oh, I think my company's gonna get mad. My boss is gonna get mad. But in reality, what may happen, especially if you like, you know, let them know you're gonna 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 and podcast Um, I started getting promoted more often at work. I was being asked to teach how to use LinkedIn and of course, and getting flown to conferences and, and whatever it was when I was working at Hewlett-Packard. 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.

I don't think that's true. I think entrepreneurship is about solving problems, right? Like, I think 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 normally 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 solopreneur, 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 'cause I'm in a great position to go start and solve 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, it's a little bit what we talked about earlier. Um, I'm an untraditional marketing leader, right? Like, I didn't work at McKinsey, I didn't work at— 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 like 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 have done that at HubSpot over the years? I think would help maybe bring examples of that first. In the very early days, we created a free tool called Website Grader where you could just put your website in and it would give a full diagnostic. So normally what you would hire a consultant for, or you talk to a sales rep for, it's just gonna give you a report on the webpage and email it to you, which in like 2006, '07, '08 was transformational at the time.

That's, you know, that's a long time ago, almost 20 years now. And we had millions and millions of people use that. And like our co-founder Dharmesh built it himself, right? Like it was not like anything fancy and it was, and what 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, ah, 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 inefficiency 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 in marketing get wrong, they do 10 different things kind of shitty, right? They're like, I'm, I'm spread real thin. I think I gotta do everything. You're way better off to do 1 to 3 things better than anybody else. Yep. And if you can do 1 to 3 things better than anybody else, you can build a billion dollar company. If you have 1 or 2 great marketing channels that you are world class at, you cannot build a $10 million company if you have 10 crappy marketing channels.

Channels.

I have seen it time and time again. It's just how life works.

I love that advice and I, I agree 100%. It's so right. You've gotta really know how to leverage 1 or 2 or 3 channels really well before you go so broad. And then especially when you have no resources and you're just starting out, right? So just build one at a time, uh, and go from there. So I know that HubSpot actually coined the word inbound marketing. Yep. 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 of marketing changed a bunch with the internet. Before the internet, if 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 to any of those things. The commercials interrupted your television when we didn't have streaming services everywhere, right? You'd go home and your mailbox would be full of advertisements that you didn't subscribe to or didn't want. And that was like very outboundy, 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 an inbound 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 wanna participate in. And that was, now seems obvious 'cause it's how the internet works, but 20 years ago was fairly revolutionary. And so we created a new category. And sometimes if you're in 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 is a choice," right?

And you have to, when you force somebody to make a choice, and you do that by creating a new category where it's like, "Hey, do you wanna do this new awesome inbound thing that works really great? Or do you wanna do that old stodgy outbound thing that everybody hates?" You know, and we tell that story and people are like, "Oh, I wanna do the new cool thing that people like. I don't wanna do the old bad thing that everybody hates." But if we had 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. Do I really even need better? I don't know. 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 you have to do, but anybody can do it. And if you're in it for the 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, are blogs still working? How do you think about SEO?

Oh yeah, it's a great question.

And all that stuff.

What's, what's marketing? What works in marketing in 2025? A few things. Creators, working, partnering, or being with creators and like these modern media companies like you run, Hala, like huge opportunity, huge, huge opportunity there. We work deeply with creators. I'm a creator myself. Like it's, 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, bringing 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.

Yes.

So for example, like podcast search SEO, how do I become more find— like searchable on LinkedIn in particular, right? How do I become more searchable on YouTube?

Well, that's one of the reasons YouTube works is cuz YouTube's the second biggest search engine, right?

When it comes to blogging, uh, 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 twenties that was really popular and then I was like, blogging's over.

Yeah.

But sometimes these things like come around, right? And I was thinking, you know what, I feel like blogs are kind of making a comeback or I, I like with Substack becoming so popular and I was thinking, should I start a blog on my website, um, where like I create content around entrepreneurship or should I like leverage something like Substack and leverage that platform for a blog? Like what would be your advice to start from scratch or leverage a platform?

Um, well, I have a rule that I don't make anything without being clear on how I'm gonna get it distributed and what the distribution advantages are. I think Substack, if you're an entrepreneur, has a little bit of built-in audience, but it's not worth it 'cause the bigger built-in audience is information discovery. And I say that kind of broader than search. And so if I were starting today and it was just me, you and I were starting a company, we were gonna go out and do something, I would start a blog. On my website for a couple 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, Grok, all these things, and Perplexity. And what we have seen is that text-based content and video-based content that's cited in those results still gets gets a real amount of traffic. Like, uh, I host a podcast called Marketing Against the Grain. We did a video on Deepseek when Deepseek first came out, and it was like, 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 and we had like a really good credible thing.

And so the, it's almost like the distribution for text and video is getting better. What's changing is that it's a little less attributable, right? If somebody's getting it in like ChatGPT or Perplexity, they may be reading information and see your link, but they might not directly click back to it. You know, some proportion are, 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 future.

Well, and by the way, there's compounding benefits to all this, right? Like if I get discovered in ChatGPT and I get really good engagement on my video, then YouTube's gonna be like, oh, this is clearly a good video, so I'm gonna prioritize it more in YouTube search. And then you get more in the YouTube algorithm and the YouTube search engine, and that you have a video that completely takes off because of it. And 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. Um, you don't really need to be a writer like you used to anymore. So what's your best advice?

Hey, here's my advice on Content Creation Day. First, people have never wanted more actionable content ever. It's not— they don't always wanna learn something. They want something that's gonna lead them to immediately take action. And so anytime you're creating content that's gonna 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. Uh, that is clearly, clearly a trend that is, 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 contrarian and have a good argument? Can you go against the status quo and change people's thinking with a real deep and thoughtful, reasoned argument about something?

And if you can do that, you're also going to get people's attention. What would you add? Like, you, you're doing this all the time. What'd 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 clickbait 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 wanna 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 is what I'm about to do gonna be 10 times more valuable for people? Or would somebody pay $1,000, $2,000 to have access to this? And if the answer to one of those two questions is yes, it's gonna be really successful. And if the answer's no, it's probably gonna be middling and average.

Totally agree. Um, so how do you think about email? So email's one of those channels that have been around forever, but it's still really effective. What are your thoughts about it? How do you think we should best leverage it? Okay.

Email is super important, and here's why email is super important from like a principle base. It's one of the few channels you actually control. There's not an 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. You, 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. Um, the, 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 as possible, and that's writing your emails with AI. So one of the things we did at HubSpot is we have, we have what's called 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, a free guide or, or a webinar, what have you, we'll then send a follow-up email that is custom, one-on-one 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 their bu— 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 researched this company and wrote them an email and that email converts 80 to 100% better than our normal emails. And so that is like number one, anything you can do to better personalize your email and make it relevant to their problem and their experience with your company and your website, you are gonna get much, much better results.

Mm-hmm. The other thing I would add when it comes to email is you were talking about giving away free tools, free content. And instead of having people pay for it, make their email the way that they pay for that content, right? Of course. You want to just collect as many emails as possible. One of the biggest regrets that I have is that I only started collecting emails like 3 years ago. Yeah. I wish I started 7 years ago and really made it a point to collect emails. So what are the best ways that people can grow their email list right now? Uh, what do you suggest?

Yeah, I mean, look, you, you gave them The, you give them the great ways to do that, which is like offer something really valuable that you consider charging money for. Remember that marketing is just, it's kind of a lesson in economics. It's what do you wanna sell versus what do you wanna give away to sell a bigger thing down the road? And like, how do you, how do you offset how you think about that? And so for me, the, 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, uh, 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 like stock photography and imagery, uh, for their email newsletters, their landing page. And I was like, well, what if we just hire a freelance photographer, buy 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 Getty Images or all these people.

And I think over the years we've had like 5 million downloads. I can't, I can't even like, 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 in 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.

Yes.

Like sometimes you're, you're marketing to somebody who might start a company in 4 years, right? Yeah. And might need your services 4 years down the line. So you guys have like free trials. Uh, 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 3, 4 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 HubSpot service?

Yeah.

Like 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 thing, 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 gonna look like. Like how, what the quality's gonna be, what it's gonna feel like, the experience. And so I'm much more likely to have trust and 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 complete commodity. So in that world, trust becomes everything. People, you can, 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, it's how we do it. But you know, you have webinars, every, there's a, there is a version of that for any business, is I think what I would say. 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, to do what they need to do because it's gonna build that trust.

I, I have, I have a, I have a maxim I live by and it's distribution is undefeated. And like you, 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 could 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 gonna 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 cuz they just don't have a big enough audience universe of 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? Yap Media.

That's amazing. Welcome.

Yeah.

So thanks for coming on.

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, and what would benefit? Yeah. How, how do startups benefit from CRM?

Okay. So if you think about CRM, there's lots of views of what CRMs are, but what they really are is a single source of truth for your customers and your prospects. So instead of your support team having a, a, a working out of a, a project management system, sales reps working outta 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 it be advertising, email marketing, marketing automation, sales call prep, sales follow-up, sales automation, all of those things. Like, that's what you're, that's what you're talking about doing. And you're going to see CRM be way more important over the next couple 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 gonna make it way better. Cuz you're just, it's your CRM's just gonna generate the email follow-up to your meeting for you. And it's like, oh great, I know I need to follow up from this meeting, but I've gotta 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 'em up. Right. And that is why CRM is so important. It also, is when you have all your data in 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 in one place and some clear reporting.

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

Tons, tons of AI agents. So, um, so first of all, the most used, the most used AI features at HubSpot, one is to prep for sales meetings. So we have a Copilot where it just will take everything from a contact record and give you the full prep summary. That's awesome. Uh, we have an agent called Content Remix. So like, let's say you're gonna run a content campaign, you're gonna do an email newsletter, So you're 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 Ramesh started 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 detailed briefing.

Who's the CEO, funding history, core products, competitors, the whole thing. And it'll do it in like 2 minutes, right? Perfectly formatted for free. And like, that is just a game changer when it comes to agents.

If you are in marketing and in sales and you're feeling like overwhelmed with, yes, AI and leveraging AI, how would you approach it?

Okay. This is, this is a fantastic question. I use AI all the time. I'm AI obsessed. Um, I would pick one AI tool and get really good at it. And for marketers, that's probably Claude. Um, for sellers, that's probably ChatGPT. Um, but, and you're gonna use those tools. The reason I say Claude has the best taste, it's really good at writing. Uh, it ha— you can upload, uh, 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 ChatGPT's deep research feature, where you can have it go and just build an incredibly complex research report. And it might research a pro— a problem for 5, 10, 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 the core competitors in that industry, like those things become super valuable. So that's, that's where I would focus if I was just like feeling overwhelmed and not yet started.

Yeah, I love that advice. I feel like we've learned so much so far about marketing. I'd love to move into customer service. Oh yeah, because it's not only important to bring in customers, we've got to retain them. So how does HubSpot help people and a CRM, how does that actually help with your retention, with your customer service?

Yeah, so a few things. So we— 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, founder 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. Saves so much time and so much money. And the biggest reason why that's important is because in today's internet where everything is highly competitive, as we've talked, we've talked all show about, it's never been easier for a customer to switch. So your core economics are gonna 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 gonna 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 did like 80% of my customers leave this year? That's 'cause 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 are great customers too. So you're missing out on all the referrals if you don't do that. Yeah. How can we better align marketing and sales so that we have the best customer service?

Customer service is largely about setting expectations, right? Which is, do I know what I bought? Do I know what I'm gonna use the thing I bought for? And do I know how I'm gonna think that that's valuable, right? Like that's, that's if, if, if the answer to those things are yes, that customer's normally pretty happy. Uh, if it's no, they're gonna be pretty unhappy. And so marketing's job is to set up the value proposition. Early on. A 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 gonna 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, cuz 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's gonna be very happy. It's normally in one of those stages where things go off the rails.

We just rolled out like a new customer survey to try to see like how our agency clients 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. Um, so I think the, the most, the most helpful thing that we have done and learned over the years is we always run a monthly net promoter score survey with our customers. And so net promoter score is a question we all see. How likely are you to rank the company from 1 to 10? 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 as 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 festering and systemic. Like you always want new problems. So it's like, oh, our customer support's bad. 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.

You'll hear all these things, right? Right. And so that, I think the 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 wanna close out our interview with some scenarios.

Let's do it.

That I think are gonna be really fun. Okay. So you are a brand new entrepreneur. Yep. You, um, might be, have like a little bit of money, but you mostly, you have time. So you have time to invest. What would you do for your marketing strategy launching a new product?

All right. If I'm, if I'm time rich and money poor, what would I do?

Yes.

Um, yeah. The first thing I am doing is I am figuring out what type of creator I need to be, right? Am I gonna be YouTube, LinkedIn? What's my product? What's my market? And I gotta start creating and I gotta create on the daily cuz I'm time rich. I got the time to make every day and I gotta make something every day. And that, and I gotta, I'm gonna use AI tools to help me keep up the pace of production and they're free to very low cost. So I can, I can take advantage of that. And then the second thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna 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 lead generation by doing that. And it's just like, oh, a million marketers are in this group. Nobody's really going after them. How do we get them?

I love that. It, I think the whole theme of this episode is unfair advantage.

Yeah.

I remember when I started my podcast, I started on LinkedIn. I wanted to target young professionals and nobody was talking about podcasts. Yeah. Nobody was putting up anything about podcasts. And then I became the number one podcaster on LinkedIn, but it was already a channel where people were hanging out. They just weren't doing what I was doing. Doing. So what is your way of like cutting through the noise and getting in front of a lot of people in a creative way?

I love that.

Okay. Now what if you exited a company, you're slightly older, you've got more experience.

Mm-hmm.

You've got some money.

Yeah.

Um, but you've got a family, you've got a lot going on, but you do wanna 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. Yeah, exactly. Um, I got, if I have some resources, to do this, um, it's not gonna 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. I would, and I would use AI to kind of prep and, 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, yeah, I would probably use YouTube, YouTube ads, to be honest with you. YouTube ad targeting is great and the cost is so much lower than Google and Facebook, um, and, and Instagram that I, I would probably do that.

Yeah. There's plenty of agencies like my agency, for example.

Yes. Like go hire you guys.

Entrepreneurs just show up. We do everything for you. Just show, if you want a 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. Um, I know we only have a couple minutes left, so I gotta wrap up even though I really wanna keep going.

We can talk all day. I know.

But, uh, but I, I will be respectful. Respectful of your time. Oh, thank you. So the, the last questions that I have, I ask all of my guests.

Please.

And this doesn't have to do with, you don't have to even talk about marketing. You can talk about whatever you want. Okay. So what is one actionable thing our young improfiters can do today to become more profitable tomorrow?

Uh, start using AI. Pick a foundational model, ChatGPT, Claude, 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. Um, and what is your secret to profiting in life? And this can go beyond financial.

Uh, I just bought a piece of art that says, if you don't know, find out. Um, be endlessly curious, be endlessly curious and ask questions. Never be stupid. Uh, 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, uh, 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 could check out HubSpot.com product, everything there. I host Marketing Against the Grain over on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts, you can check out Marketing Against the Grain.

Awesome. Thank you, Kev.