Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - Kipp Bodnar: Inbound Marketing Strategies for Explosive Business Growth in 2025 | Marketing | E348

Episode Date: April 28, 2025

In today’s competitive market, many entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, business leaders, and marketers struggle to cut through the noise and scale their businesses. Kipp Bodnar’s rise from employee to Chief Marketing Officer at HubSpot in just five years demonstrates how the right mindset and focus drive success. By blending entrepreneurship, inbound marketing, and leadership, he achieved remarkable growth. In this episode, Kipp shares the most effective marketing strategies, reveals how to spot opportunities, and the key to scaling your business through content marketing, customer relationships, and AI. In this episode, Hala and Kipp will discuss:  (00:00) Introduction (01:24) Key Strategies for Career and Business Growth (10:32) The Entrepreneurial Mindset in Leadership (12:10) HubSpot’s Secret to Global Marketing Success (15:10) Inbound vs Outbound Marketing (17:23) Effective Content Marketing Strategies (22:00) Three Ways to Stand Out as a Content Creator (24:16) The Value of Email and Online Marketing (30:42) Leveraging AI in Sales and Marketing (35:52) The Power of Customer Service in Retention (39:09) How to Market a Startup with Limited Funds (40:53) Marketing Strategies for Busy Entrepreneurs Kipp Bodnar is the Chief Marketing Officer at HubSpot, a leading global marketing and sales platform. His expertise in social media, SEO, and email marketing helped him advance to CMO in just five years. With a background in entrepreneurship and marketing, Kipp also hosts the Marketing Against the Grain podcast, where he shares insights on AI, marketing trends, and growth hacks. Sponsored By: Shopify - Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period at⁠ ⁠⁠youngandprofiting.co/shopify⁠ Airbnb - Find yourself a co-host at⁠ airbnb.com/host⁠ Indeed - Get a $75 sponsored job credit at⁠ indeed.com/profiting⁠    Microsoft Teams - Stop paying for tools. Get everything you need, for free at⁠ ⁠⁠aka.ms/profiting⁠ LinkedIn Marketing Solutions - Get a $100 credit on your next campaign at⁠ ⁠⁠linkedin.com/profiting⁠ Bilt - Start paying rent through Bilt and take advantage of your Neighborhood Benefits™ by going to⁠ ⁠⁠joinbilt.com/PROFITING⁠. Mercury - Streamline your banking and finances in one place. Learn more at⁠ ⁠⁠mercury.com/profiting⁠    Resources Mentioned: Kipp’s Podcast, Marketing Against The Grain: bit.ly/MarketingAgainstTheGrain  Kipp’s Book, The B2B Social Media Book: bit.ly/B2BBook  Active Deals - youngandprofiting.com/deals   Key YAP Links Reviews - ratethispodcast.com/yap  Youtube - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting  LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha/  Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala/  Social + Podcast Services: yapmedia.com  Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com/episodes-new  Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurship Podcast, Business, Business Podcast, Self Improvement, Self-Improvement, Personal Development, Starting a Business, Strategy, Investing, Sales, Selling, Psychology, Productivity, Entrepreneurs, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Marketing, Negotiation, Money, Finance, Side Hustle, Mental Health, Career, Leadership, Mindset, Health, Growth Mindset, E-commerce, LinkedIn, Instagram, Digital Marketing, Storytelling, Advertising, Social Media Marketing, Communication, Video Marketing, Social Proof, Influencers, Influencer Marketing, Marketing Tips, Digital Trends, Marketing Podcast.

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in the show notes or at younginprofiting.com slash deals. I didn't work at McKinsey. I don't have an MBA. I'm an untraditional marketing leader. 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 solopreneur, whether you're an executive at a company, it doesn't matter. It's your job to understand what that unfair advantage is. So I know that HubSpot actually coined the word inbound marketing. So in 2025, what inbound strategies are working? A few things.

The number one thing is. Yeah, bam. What if I told you that you don't need a massive marketing budget to build a powerful brand? Today we're sitting down with Kip Bodnar, Chief Marketing Officer of HubSpot, to crack the code on digital marketing for entrepreneurs and small businesses. Whether you're just starting out or looking to level up your marketing game, this episode is packed with practical tips,

smart strategies, and real-world advice straight from one of the biggest names in digital marketing. 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 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? 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 gonna give you the high magnitude of return? I think so often people get caught up in operational details

or let everybody else push their priorities on them where you have to be like, you have to 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 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. And that 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 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 their 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 then work at a startup at the time, I think I 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 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 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 a solopreneur, you don't have to do that. You can just do what's in your head and go. 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%, it'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. So in your career, like I said, you rose up the ranks very quickly. Were there any 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 think there's lots of moments that make that happen. 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 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. 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 look at everything as like a sprint, whether it be a week, a year, 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 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. So I went from running that blog to running 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 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 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. So basically, you were a good colleague, right? And you helped other people. And that's really important with politics in corporate and especially 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 results speak for themselves and results of the ultimate meritocracy. 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 the ceiling of what they're supposed to do. 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 is good. I think 10 million is 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. I teach a LinkedIn masterclass 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 at HubSpot, right?

Yeah, 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 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 anything else. And I find those things to largely be an excuse. You know, you're scared largely of what other people think versus what's actually true. What's actually true, if you look at the market, 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 and they liked my blog.

And then I ran the blog and I host the 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 may be doing on LinkedIn or YouTube or wherever. I totally agree with you. A lot of the times it is an excuse. 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 like 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 and podcast, I started getting promoted more often at work. I was being

asked to teach the C-suite how to use the LinkedIn and getting flown to conferences and whatever it was when I was working at Hewlett Packard. Right now, do you feel like you have 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, but I don't think that's necessarily true. I think entrepreneurship is about solving problems. 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 leader in a company, whether you're an executive at a company, it doesn't matter. I look at it as 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 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 every situation, you have an unfair advantage. It's your job to understand what that unfair advantage is. And I always tell people that 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. 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? I think it's a little bit what we talked about earlier. I'm an untraditional marketing leader, right? I didn't work at McKinsey. I don't have an MBA. I'm not out of central casting. I am from a small town in West Virginia

where 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 very early days, we created a free tool called WebsiteGrader, where you could just put your website in and it would give a full diagnostic. So normally what you would hire a consultant for for or you 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 2006, seven, eight was

transformational at the time. That's a long time ago, almost 20 years now. And we had millions and millions of people use that. Our co-founder, Darmesh, built it himself, right? Like it was not like anything fancy, 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 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, and 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. 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 is they just they do 10 different things kind of shitty, right? They're like, I'm spread 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 $10 million company if you have 10 crappy marketing channels. I've seen it time and time again, it's just how life works. Let's hold that thought and take a quick break with our sponsors.

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to sign up for BILT today. So I know that HubSpot 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 onto the scene? The world of marketing changed a bunch with the internet.

Before the internet, people remember, it was largely TV ads, billboards, direct mail, all those things, and they were all really annoying, right? Cause 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 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 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 works, but 20

years ago was fairly revolutionary. 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. 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 stodgy outbound thing that everybody hates? We tell that story and 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 had just said, Oh, like, Hey, we can help you do your direct mail a little bit better. Who cares? Well, maybe it's good enough. Do I really even need better? 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?

Cause 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 a long haul, if you think you have a big opportunity and your business is a five, 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 blogs still working?

How do you think about SEO, podcasts and all that stuff? Oh yeah, it's a great question. What works in marketing in 2025? A few things. Creators, working, partnering or being with creators and these modern media companies like you Ron Halla. Huge opportunity, huge, huge opportunity there. We work deeply with creators.

I'm a creator myself, 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 the industry you solve. Where you have unique data, unique insight, unique credibility, you can get that. You can't go and talk about everything in the world 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

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 my marketing strategies and unfair advantages and untapped opportunities, I'm thinking about SEO within platforms. Podcast search, SEO, how do I become more searchable on LinkedIn in particular, right? How do I become more searchable on YouTube? So within right? How do I become more searchable on YouTube? So when it comes to blogging, I'd love to like dig deep on this because I actually was thinking

I used to have a blog in my 20s that was really popular and then I was like blogging is over but sometimes these things come around and I was thinking you know what I feel like blogs are kind of making a comeback I like with suback becoming so popular. And I was thinking, should I start a blog on my website where I create content around entrepreneurship or should I 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?

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 Substack, 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 starting 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 chat, GPT 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 a real amount of traffic. I hosted a podcast called Marketing Against the Grain.

We did a video on DeepSeq when DeepSeq first came out and it got recommended on everybody's chat GPT queries on DeepSeq and we got 50,000 views in like 24 hours because everybody was searching for it and we had a really good credible thing. And so 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, because if somebody is getting it in like chat GPT or perplexity, they may be reading information and see your link, but they might not directly click back to it. Proportion are, but a much smaller portion than 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 I think you have to have a pretty healthy blog and 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. and 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 chat GPT? That's the future, right? And by the way, there's compounding benefits to all this, right?

Like if I get discovered in chat GPT 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 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, there's so much- 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.

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 gonna take off. It's gonna 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. If you have a survey of 2000 people in a given industry, people are gonna check it out because they wanna 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, 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 gonna get people's attention. What would you add?

You're doing this all the time, what'd I miss? I think at the core of it is how do you help people? How do you actually bring value where people feel like, oh, wow, I learned something. Oh, 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 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, is what I'm about to do going to 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 going to be really successful. Yeah, totally. And if the answer is no, it's probably going to be middle and average. Totally agree.

So how do you think about email? So email is one of those channels that have been around forever, but it's still going to be middling average. Totally agree. So how do you think about email? So email is 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 in 2025? 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. 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. And so 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 gonna 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 what's called HubSpot Academy,

which 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, or a webinar, what have you. Well, 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.

Not only do we mention their business, but we have puns. Like AI has gotten very good at that. And it feels like a human researches company and wrote them an email. And that email converts 80 to 100% better than our normal emails. And so that is 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'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, free 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 regrets 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 collect emails. So what are the best ways that people can grow their email list right now? What do you suggest?

Look, you give them the great ways to do that, which is offer something really valuable that you consider charging money for. Remember that marketing is 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 how do 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 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. 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 newsletters, their landing page. And I was like,

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 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. And I think people need to realize that a lot of this marketing strategy is a long game. Like sometimes you're marketing to somebody who might start a company in four years and might need your services four years down the line. So you guys have free trials. For me, I collect emails, I do webinars, and 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 free HubSpot service. Why are you guys giving away your tools for free initially? 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 ways you can build trust with people is to let them try before they buy, right? And like your webinars, 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, what the quality is 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 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, we all have access to infinite knowledge with AI. Knowledge is a complete 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, the free version of our product, so we do it, but you know, you have webinars, there is a version of that for any business, is I think what I would say. And I think the main lesson is don't be afraid to give away great things that people can actually use for free. 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 Max and I live by and it's distribution is undefeated. If you can get a big audience, you can always figure out how to make money on it. The inverse is not true. 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 gonna take a little bit of time. It's a different way of thinking, but distribution is the biggest reason most businesses don't grow, because they just don't have a big enough audience, a universe of people who actually care about them and the thing that they're offering in the world.

We'll be right back after a quick break from our sponsors. Hey, young and profitors. I know so many of you are in your grind season. You're working that nine to five, and then you're five to midnight building that dream. That's how I started YAP Media, so keep going and hustling. But I do want to give you some advice because if you're a side hustler, I know personally how hard it can be to find the right tools for your team without breaking the bank. All those tools can get really expensive, but you need to

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Let's talk about what drives a business's success. Sure, having a great product, a strong brand, and savvy marketing can set companies like Death Wish Coffee, Magic Spoon, or even a legacy brand like Hindsapart. But the real secret to skyrocketing sales often isn't just what they sell, it's how they sell it. Behind every thriving business is a powerful system

that makes selling effortless and buying seamless. And for millions of businesses, that behind the scenes powerhouse is Shopify. Nobody does selling better than Shopify. It's the home of the number one checkout on the planet. Shopify's not-so-secret secret is ShopPay, which boosts your conversions up to 50%. That means way fewer cards go abandoned and way more sales get done. So if you're into growing your business, your commerce platform better be ready to sell wherever

your customers are scrolling or strolling. On the web, in your store, in the feed, and everywhere in between. Businesses that sell more, sell on Shopify. Upgrade your business and get the same checkout that Magic Spoon, Heinz, and yours truly use. Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash profiting. That's all lowercase. Go to Shopify.com slash profiting to upgrade your selling today. That's Shopify.com slash profiting that's all lowercase, go to Shopify.com slash profiting to upgrade your selling today. That's Shopify.com slash profiting. So CRMs, I've got a lot of young entrepreneurs who are probably working at spreadsheets and

doing everything manually. What is a CRM and how do startups benefits from CRMs? 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 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 it be advertising, email marketing,

marketing automation, sales call prep, sales follow-up, sales automation, all of those things. 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. Your CRM is just going to 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 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 that need to go look them up. And that is why CRM is so important. 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 on place and some clear reporting. Yeah, that's what I'm most excited about, 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 your point, like AI summaries and things like that are coming out. 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, one is to prep for sales meetings. So we have a co-pilot where it just will take everything from a contact record and give you the full prep summary. That's awesome. We have an agent called

Content Remix. So like, let's say you're going to run a content campaign, you're going to do an email newsletter, let's say you're going to do a webinar, you're going to do a webinar. 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 Dimesh 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 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. 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? 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. And 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 ChatGPT'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 five, 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, those things become super valuable. So that's where I would focus if I was just like

feeling overwhelmed and not yet started. I feel like we've learned so much so far about marketing. I'd 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?

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, are 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 focus on it, we've seen customers get to like 50, 60% deflection, which is huge, save 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 all show about, it's never been easy for a customer to switch. So your core economics are going to be retaining that customer. I'm sure you see that 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 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 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. 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 going to use the thing I bought for? And do I know how I'm going to think that that's valuable? If the answer to those things are yes, that customer's 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. 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 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. Your business has this problem that isn't relevant to our other customers that we need to help you solve. And once you 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 a new customer survey to try to see how our agency clients are feeling, how our network clients are feeling. It was really, really helpful. Do you have any suggestions of the type of questions you should ask your customers to get their feedback? 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 one 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, 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 best during a systemic, you always want new problems. So it's like, Oh, our customer supports back. Great.

Let's 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, right? And so 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 that I think are gonna be really fun. Okay, so you are a brand new entrepreneur. You 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 company? All right. If I'm time rich and money poor, what would I do? 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, I'm going 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 the early days of LinkedIn groups, right? What you could do in the early days of LinkedIn groups is sponsor messages that the group owner could send to the entire group.

We would go and we would spend money to do that. Nobody else was doing that. We got hugely efficient lead generation by doing that. It's just like, oh, a million marketers in this group. Nobody is really going after them. How do we get them? 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 podcasts. 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. So what is your way of 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, you're 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 wanna start a new company, what would you do to market your company? Money richer, time poor.

Time poor, yeah, exactly. Okay, if I have some resources to do this, it's not gonna be that dissimilar. I think the channels work, how I'm going to accomplish those channels. I'd probably still be a creator, but I would hire an agency to help me do all the post-production, to do the research,

do all that, and I would use AI to 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 the cost is 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. Yes, like go hire you guys. Entrepreneurs just show up, We do everything for you. 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.

I know we only have a couple of minutes left, so I gotta wrap up, even though I really want to keep asking you more questions. So the last questions that I have, I asked all of my guests and this doesn't have to do with, you don't have to even talk about marketing. You can talk about whatever you want. So what is one actionable thing our young and profitors can do today to become more profitable tomorrow?

Start using AI. Pick a foundational model, chat GPT, Claude, Google Gemini, and use it every day. Once or twice a day, every day, build the habit. It's very important 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 feel like you're stupid. Just go and ask all the questions. And if you're curious about something, 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? You can check out hubspa.com, product, everything there.

I host marketing against the grain over on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts, you can check out marketingSpot.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. Perfect. And I'm really excited that I get to go on your show soon. Yeah, you're coming on marketing against the grain soon. I can't wait. I'm pumped.

We get to talk again. And maybe I'll play that on this podcast so you guys can get more of Kip. I love that. I'm excited to have you on. We'll catch up again real soon. Awesome. Thank you, Kip.

Thanks, Ella. Well, that about does it for this episode. And I thought Kip Bodnar touched on so many of the key themes that I've been preaching for a while now. For example, I love his approach to entrepreneurship. You don't actually have to start your own company to be an entrepreneur. You just need to think like an entrepreneur,

even when you work at a large company. Like Kip said, entrepreneurship is about solving problems and finding ways to do so that others miss. And one of the best ways to do that is to find out where you have an unfair advantage over somebody else. That is where your opportunity lies and that's where true value can be created. Marketing is likewise about locating opportunities. What are the market inefficiencies? Where can you take advantage of arbitrage? What is undervalued? Where can you

buy at a low price and sell at a high price? So where are all the opportunities in 2025? Kip pointed to several good ones. First, events. Bringing people together for shared experiences and to demonstrate your own value. Next, YouTube. Still an incredible channel to drive awareness. We also talked about blogging, including your own website, which can be an effective way to reach people, especially as more advanced AI search tools drive users to relevant content.

And also lastly, don't sleep on email marketing. It can be really useful especially if you use AI tools to target and personalize your messaging. Finally, whatever method, I really want you to think about what you can teach others. What do you have to offer that is thoughtful, that is interesting, that is unique, that is going to grab somebody's collar and make them pay attention? That, after all, is what the best marketing does. Thank you for your attention and I know that there's so many places you can direct it and

I'm so grateful that you're spending time with me and Young and Profiting Podcast. And if you listened, learned, and profited from this conversation, please bring it to somebody else's attention. Share this episode with somebody who you know could benefit from it. And also, why not drop us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Castbox, wherever you listen to the show. Nothing thanks us more than a good review from you. And if you prefer to watch our podcast as videos, you can find us on YouTube. You can also find me on Instagram at Yap with Hala or LinkedIn by searching my name.

It's Hala Taha. And of course, I got to shout out my talented YAP production team. You guys are amazing. Thank you for all your hard work. This is your host, Hala Taha, aka The Podcast Princess, signing off.