20Growth: Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar on Why the Best Marketers Think Like VCs | Why the Best Companies Do Not Start with Product Marketing | New Channels; When To Do, How Much To Spend, How To Test, When To Stop

Kipp Bodnar is the Chief Marketing Officer of HubSpot, where he sets HubSpot’s global inbound marketing strategy. Prior to his role as CMO, Kipp served as VP of Marketing at HubSpot, overseeing all demand generation activity worldwide and building out the EMEA and APAC marketing teams. Kipp serves as a marketing advisor for SimplyMeasured, InsightSquared and Guidebook. Kipp is the co-author of “The B2B Social Media Book: Become a Marketing Superstar by Generating Leads with Blogging, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Email, and More.” In Today's Episode with Kipp Bodnar We Discuss: 1.) The Journey to CMO @ Hubspot: How Kipp made his way into the world of marketing and came to be CMO @ Hubspot? What does Kipp know now that he wishes all CMOs knew when they started? 2.) Choosing The Channel: How does Kipp advise founders on which channel they should focus on? What is the framework which will tell them which channel is right for them? How many different channels should they try? How focussed should they be? Should they have independent teams for each channel? How do the best founders allocate resources to new channels? How do you know when one is not working and you need to stop? When do you just need to keep going and persisting? What have been some of Kipp's biggest mistakes when entering new channels? 3.) Product Marketing, Brand Marketing and Founders Marketing: How does Kipp advise founders who say that, "social and personal brand is just not for them"? In what two ways does Kipp believe that all businesses are constrained? Does Kipp agree that the state of product marketing has never been worse? What is truly great product marketing to Kipp? How does Kipp distinguish between good and great brand marketing? How has what it takes to be great at brand marketing changed over time? 4.) The Best Marketing People: What are signs of clear 10x performers in marketing? What advice would Kipp give to someone aspiring to be a CMO? What mistakes do 95% make that they should change? How do the best CMOs manage up and manage their team? Why does Kipp compare the role of the CMO to the general manager in NFL teams? Why does Kipp believe the role of the CMO is a lonely one? What are the hardest elements? What framework for learning does Kipp use to learn all new topics? What works? What does not?

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  This is 20 Growth with me, Harry Stebbings. Now, 20 Growth is the monthly episode where we sit down with one of the leading growth experts in the world to discuss their lessons, tips and tactics on what has worked and what has not worked in scaling billion-dollar companies. Today, we have such a fantastic and natural discussion. I have to admit, I got quite animated in this one with the amazing Kipp Bodnar, Chief Marketing Officer at HubSpot, where he sets HubSpot's global inbound marketing strategy, which has been so core to their success. Prior to his role as CMO, Kipp served as VP of Marketing at HubSpot, overseeing all demand gen activity worldwide and building out the EMEA and APAC marketing teams. Kipp also serves as a marketing advisor for Simply Measured, Insight Squared and Guidebook. And if that wasn't enough, Kipp's also a magnificent author.

• 0:44Harry Stebbings?

  The B2B Social Media book is his creation. It's a must-read. And I do also want to say a huge thank you to Dharmesh at HubSpot, Kieran Flanagan and Katie Burke at HubSpot as well. Some amazing question suggestions today really did make such a difference. But before we dive into the show today, have you ever met an employee that likes company travel booking tools or even worse, expense reports? I mean, it's a nightmare. Trip Action's was born out of the realization that business travel should be easy. Trip Action's puts travelers' needs first through the best technology, connecting travel, corporate cards and expense management, and combining them into a single streamlined platform to serve travelers and companies of all sizes. Traveling employees can easily book or change travel directly on the app.

• 1:26Harry Stebbings?

  Employees are empowered to make their own bookings and manage spend within policy. They swipe a corporate card and the technology automates expense entry, approvals and compliance in real time for program managers and finance teams. This means access to real-time data to help keep employees safe, reduce spend and drive productivity. And Trip Action's is beloved by employees and CEOs and CFOs alike at Fortune 500 companies like Adobe, Unilever, Heineken, and startups like Notion, Carter, Patreon and Canva, all who've made the switch to Trip Action's. Try Trip Action's for free at tripactions.com/vc20 and get $500 after your first completed trip or after you spend and pay off your first $1,000 of business expenses.

• 2:10Harry Stebbings?

  On the Liquid corporate card, again, that is tripactions.com/VC20. And speaking of the move back to hybrid and in person there with Tripactions, did you know that 68% of workers say a hybrid workplace is their preference? So it's time to make hybrid work for everyone with Robin. Robin is the industry-leading flexible workplace platform for connecting people with rooms, desks and each other. Robin have helped companies like Peloton, Toyota and Hulu build better workplace experiences. Plus, Robin integrates with the tools you already know and love. To learn more about how Robin make flexible work a reality, visit robinpowered.com. That's robinpowered.com. And finally, to the masters of their craft in the teams now, are you a product or growth

• 2:54Harry Stebbings?

  leader at a fast scaling company who knows their weak four attention to the second decimal point, but you still can't confidently describe even your top three customer pain points from last month? You are not alone and you definitely got to check out Interpret. Interpret unifies all of your most crucial customer feedback from support tickets, community forum threads, Slack threads, Salesforce notes, Gong calls and uses it to build and continuously refresh a custom ML model for each company to granularly and precisely analyze all customer feedback. Interpret's backed by the likes of Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital India and used by some of the most respected and admired product development teams like Notion, Samsung and Airbase, who use Interpret to prioritize their roadmap, inform hypotheses for growth

• 3:38Harry Stebbings?

  experiments and measure the impact of recent product launches. Check them out at interpret.com. But that is enough of these terrible British tones, so now I'm so excited to hand over to what is a very lively discussion with the one and only Kit Bodnar, CMO at HubSpot.

• 3:58Speaker 01

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 4:01Harry Stebbings?

  Kipp, this is such a joy for me to do. I've heard so many good things from Danny at Sequoia, obviously from Kieran on your team. So, so huge thanks for joining me today.

• 4:08Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me, Harry. I'm pumped to be here, man.

• 4:10Harry Stebbings?

  It is gonna be a great show, but I want to start with a little bit on you. I love a bit of context setting. So tell me, how did you make your way into the world of startups? And then how did you come to really leave one of the most powerful marketing and growth orgs in HubSpot today?

• 4:22Speaker 02

  Look, I wish I had some master plan. I didn't. I'm somebody who's just a really, really curious and obsessive person. I love to learn. In the early 2000s, I saw the internet happening and I was doing marketing at a bunch of different marketing agencies. And I was like, wow, this internet is going to change how people do marketing. I didn't know what I was doing, but I realized one really important thing, that when something's new, everybody has the same baseline of knowledge. It's not like somebody's been doing it for 30 years and has some advantage. I was like, great. So all I have to do is learn faster than everybody else and I can be successful. So that's all I did is I read, I networked, I went to events, I had a blog called Social Media B2B, which was all about just how social and the web were going to impact B2B boring, traditional companies. Nobody was talking about that then,

• 5:04Speaker 02

  as they were all talking about the consumer stuff. And all of that work, wake up at 5:00 AM and grind out some blog posts and then go to work and then kind of do that every day, led me to meet Brian Dermesh at HubSpot. And they were like, hey, why don't you come help us? And I've met them and I was like, oh, they believe the same thing I believe in the world. For people listening, that's a very rare moment when you meet people who believe the very same thing you believe and the majority of humanity does not yet believe that thing. You gotta remember, this is late 2000s when online marketing was still really early. So I met Brian Dermesh and then the rest was kind of history from there.

• 5:38Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask, when do you think the tide turned and the realization for everyone else became very apparent that what you were doing was right?

• 5:44Speaker 02

  I'd say about 2013 to 2014. Basically, what happened, Harry, is that Facebook ads especially got real and Google, Facebook, all of those ad products got way mature. And then we got good enough at organic search, for example, that, oh, you could build a real business. Kieran and I were doing it at HubSpot. People were looking up and being like, oh, how do these guys have millions of people interested in this boring, quote unquote, B2B software company? And I think between that, the inbound marketing book, Thing of that movement, it took a while, but that's when it really started, I think, happening for real.

• 6:15Harry Stebbings?

  Do you know what I love about the show is that I just completely fucking freewheel Kipp. I have this schedule and then I just ignore it.

• 6:20Speaker 02

  Love it. You know me, I don't need a schedule, dude.

• 6:23Harry Stebbings?

  So the biggest problem that I have often, and I advise founders with it today, is actually that, one, you don't need to be on every channel. When people are on every channel, they do it poorly. But if you do, channels are so individual and specialist. To win on YouTube is very different to winning on LinkedIn or Twitter. You need teams per channel. Do you agree with me? And how do you think about channel selection, prioritization, resource allocation? Love to hear how you think about that.

• 6:47Speaker 02

  You're speaking my language. It's a hard problem because founders want to do everything. They also want to track everything. So first challenge here is tracking is getting harder every day. Data privacy is making tracking attribution ROI much harder every day. And I think if you're a founder out there, you're going to do some type of advertising that works well for you. Might be Google, might be Facebook, might be YouTube, but you're going to have some primary advertising channel. And you're going to need one to two primary organic channels. And it depends on your scale and your competition. If I was doing a two by two, to answer your question, I would say, do I need a few people every month? Or do I need hundreds of thousands of people every month? And do I have no competition or do I have a lot of competition? Depending on which quadrant you fall in, I think depends what channel you would actually pick.

• 7:29Speaker 02

  So if you are going, I have a lot of competition, I need a lot of people, then you're probably doing YouTube. Classic Google search is the first place everybody goes. So if you have less competition, then go to Google search. Text is easier and the conversion rates are a little higher. If you're just entering a very entrenched space where there's people who've been doing really good content inbound marketing for a while, then you need to be different and you've got to go someplace like YouTube, for example, to get real scale. And if you don't need that many people, that's where you go into different types of influence campaigns, LinkedIn, different things. If you're kind of in a niche B to B business, but you're talking about real scale, which I imagine a lot of folks listening are. It's about which Google property you're going to start with, I think for me.

• 8:09Harry Stebbings?

  I'm totally with you there and I agree. Hard thing is though with content, I think everyone fails because for me, it's a game of who can survive the longest. I've been doing this for seven, eight years. Yes, we have hundreds of thousands of listeners, but it's seven, eight years every weekend.

• 8:23Speaker 02

  The grind.

• 8:24Harry Stebbings?

  But sometimes it still doesn't work. And so my question to you is, how do you know when to give up on a new channel? Versus when to just keep persisting and the tide will turn.

• 8:34Speaker 02

  That's a great question. When I think about enduring on a new channel, I think about my moral imperatives. Like, do I have another choice? Sometimes you don't have another choice. Sometimes you're like, cool. If I can't make Google search work, then this business is just not going to work. I'm not going to be able to acquire customers at a low enough cost to make this business work. So if that's the case, then you gotta grind it out. If that's not the case, I look at it as like, are you able to make real predictable growth progress? Are you able to increase your subscribers and your distribution on that channel? Even if it's small, but are the growth rates meaningful? Can you grow that thing four, five, six percent, seven, eight, nine, 10% month over month? Even if the numbers are small, it's like, oh, I'm figuring this out.

• 9:17Speaker 02

  And can you point to clear things that you have learned that are driving that growth? If you have, then grind it out. If you don't know what the hell you're doing, and you're flat performance, and you're just kinda like throwing stuff at the wall, then it doesn't matter what you're doing, you're not going to be successful. What you have to understand is you have to think like a creator. You have to have a creator, either be one yourself or have one on your team, who understands that it's a mix of the best ideas and the best content, but packaged perfectly for that platform.

• 9:45Harry Stebbings?

  I'm so glad you said about think like a creator there, because the thing that irritates me the most, I'm really just sanding off today. Irritates me the most is founders, and I say, hey, you've got an incredible opportunity, Kipp, to build a brand in this space, in this geo, in this specific. And they go, oh, no, no, I'm, content's not my thing. I'm not into a personal brand. And I'm like, no one goes to the gym and is like, oh, I feel at home. This is so me. No, it takes time. It's a muscle. You keep working it. Do you agree? And how do you advise founders today on building that personal brand?

• 10:16Speaker 02

  Here's what you have to know. I'm a first principles driven person. I'm just logical to a fault, for better or for worse. Every company in the world is either distribution constrained or product constrained. They don't have a product that's good enough to sell to their customers, or the price that they want to sell it for. Or they do, and they can't get that product out in front of customers for a low enough cost. Normally what happens when you're early on in a business, those two things are kinda like S-curves, and the product S-curve is always the first, right? You're trying to find product-market fit. You kinda get middle of the way up that curve. And you kind of found it and that's awesome. And then you start that second S curve, which is the distribution one. And most companies fail, not because of the product curve, but because of the distribution curve. You could not want to do content, what have you. You have to solve distribution. So what I would say to them is, cool, you don't want to be a creator.

• 11:01Speaker 02

  You don't care about personal brand. Great. How are we going to get scalable distribution at a low cost? The content's one way, but if you tell me you have an awesome viral loop, cool. Then I don't give a shit if you care about content. You can make it work. If you have some repeatable template growth strategy that allows you to grow through basically search template product action, great, then you don't have to go and have this personal brand. But if you don't have an answer to that distribution strategy, then you have to care about content and personal brand, because that by default is your distribution strategy. And you are going to be distribution constrained more than you are going to be product constrained, unless you are just completely inept at building the thing you're building.

• 11:36Harry Stebbings?

  I think one thing I also find interesting is founders who try and get too cute on channels. You mentioned kind of the mix between organic and paid. And I find too many too early are like, no, I need diversification of channel. And I'm like, no, you don't. It's working on Facebook. It's working on paid. Just keep going. It's rare to have it working. How do you think about the diversification of channel? And then also how to transition between channel when you maybe see a denigration of effectiveness?

• 12:03Speaker 02

  If you are good at what you do and distributing things on the internet, every channel of any scale that I know of, you have years and years of runway. My first job at HubSpot is I wrote the HubSpot blog. I think we did like three posts a day for here or whatever. We did that to get organic search traffic. We're still doing that. We are 14 years, 15 years into that blog grind and it's still working. We're still growing that traffic. Yeah, we've expanded topics. Yes, we're optimizing the old stuff, all of that. But think about that. I've made that work for over a decade and a half. If you're thinking you're going to run out of runway in 12 months, you're just kind of an idiot. You're not thinking about the real potential of what you have. Humanity's natural proclivity is to go do a new thing because they're bored of the old thing.

• 12:46Speaker 02

  The most successful people say, wait, wait, wait. I have this thing that's working really well. How do I make it better and better every day? And how do I be a top? 1% person in the world at this thing. Like if you look, you're a really smart savvy investor, right? You've seen all kinds of companies at all kinds of stages. I think you're going to agree that the following is true. A startup that gets traction and really kicks off, they've got one predictable growth channel, often ads. A startup that really scales and like flirts with that 50, 100 million dollar run rate, they have two predictable growth channels. Normally it's ads plus one other thing. Whether YouTube, whether it be Google search, whether it be some type of free product, virality, whatever. The company that scales, goes public, really has a future to be a big scale company,

• 13:30Speaker 02

  really only has three scale distribution channels. They don't have 10, they got three. So if you're a founder and you're in that first bucket, job's just to get to one and have that one keep working for you. And then as you scale, know you're going to need to add one more. Not five more, one more. People think that we need to do way more than they actually need to.

• 13:48Harry Stebbings?

  I totally agree with you and I love that breakdown. My question, gosh, I wish we were having a martini and.

• 13:53Speaker 02

  I would love that. I mean, you're in London, which is my favorite city, not just in the world, but my favorite city to have a martini.

• 13:58Harry Stebbings?

  You should come, we could do a much more atmospheric conversation. But I want to ask you, you mentioned the kind of the expansion from one to two to three. In terms of testing that next kind of jump and transition to the second, in terms of resource allocation, do you recommend kind of splitting across five different potential channels? Or really going in hard to test one? Do you dedicate budget to YouTube to really give it a go? Or sprinkle across five and see what hits?

• 14:23Speaker 02

  I'm a fan, Harry, of a more focused approach. I think of marketing as a venture capitalist, whether you're big established venture capitalists like Sequoia, an angel investor, anywhere in between. Your job is to make really smart decisions and win on a bunch of asymmetric returns. So it's actually like, how many channels do I think I actually have the chance for an asymmetric return on? It's actually not that many. And most of the time when people spread themselves thin across five, six different things, it's because they don't realize that. Once you're very clear on the asymmetry of the return, you can say, ah, there's actually only like two things that are going to give me the return I want. And I should just go as aggressive as possible of those two things. And I have to make one of them work. If I make both.

• 15:04Speaker 02

  Both of them work, then I'm a legend. And then we have scaled this thing beyond what anybody thought's possible. If I make one of them work, we're going to survive, we're going to be great, we're going to be successful.

• 15:13Harry Stebbings?

  Chris, can you take me to a time when you thought one was working, doubled down on it, and it didn't work?

• 15:19Speaker 02

  It's a good question. So in the early days of HubSpot, we had a free tool called Website Grader. You put your website in, it returned a report. People were sharing it on social, like, really grew. Big part of how we generated leads, emails for automation, all of that kind of stuff. Still do. But man, it had a peak and then really troughed down. And I think we actually made a bigger mistake than the one you're asking, which was, we spent a bunch of time trying to redo it, do the product, redo Website Grader, to re-accelerate that growth. And we didn't realize that actually, it had a point in time, and then it has a new steady state after that initial like point in time, where websites really got mitigated through the diversification of the web, the rise of different social channels,

• 16:00Speaker 02

  people consuming across different media types. Websites are still important, but they weren't like the thing, like they were in the late 2000s, early 2010s. So I think the mistake that we made there is thinking, oh, you can salvage that and get back to that peak. We spent a while, like a couple of years, trying to do that. And I think we would have been much, much better off. For example, if I had a time machine, I would have said, no, no, no. Our job is to like, get the best steady run rate, and we should go and conquer a new channel with that same time, energy, and capital.

• 16:29Harry Stebbings?

  One thing that really, this should be cool, what pisses Harry off.

• 16:32Speaker 02

  Please, I love this, let's go.

• 16:33Harry Stebbings?

  Product marketing. I really find that-

• 16:35Speaker 02

  I hate product marketing in so many ways. I have a love-hate relationship with product marketing.

• 16:39Harry Stebbings?

  I don't think people can tell stories. And I always say to founders when I meet them, I'm an investor, I meet 25 founders a week. I say, if you had a billboard on Times Square, what would you put on it in 10 words or less? The amount of founders that can coherently say an answer, I'd say 10%, if that. 5% that are actually good. I find that appalling. I'm intrigued. How do you, do you agree with me on the state of product marketing today? And how do you think about the most effective product marketing?

• 17:03Speaker 02

  I'll give you my rant on product marketing. Harry just gave us his rant, I'm going to give you mine. Well, most founders are inherently logical humans, and they're often very product-driven humans. So you know what they do? They go hire product marketing as one of the first functions they want to hire. You're like, oh, this sounds great. You're going to help me tell a story around the product. That's never what happens. What happens is those people become operators and project story pushers around. Oh, I'm going to run to this product leader, to this business leader, and it becomes internal gymnastics versus external storytelling. They pull these product marketers so close to them that their product marketers are too close to the founder and not close enough to the customer.

• 17:42Speaker 02

  And when the product marketers do get closer to the customer, the companies often don't make the hard choice of saying, this is what my customer wants, but it's not what we're going to give them because they need something they do not yet know that they want. I need to package a different story for them. I think the best companies that have the best story don't start with product marketing. They start with the problem that their customer has. So if we take the HubSpot story, for example, we didn't start with, hey, you need software to do better marketing. We said, hey, technologies change the way people shop and buy. And because technologies come along, you look, they're fast forwarding through your commercials. They're throwing out the Yellow Pages because they got Google. They don't need your direct mail. They got ads on the internet, all of these things.

• 18:24Speaker 02

  What are you doing? Don't you need to do marketing in a fundamentally better way? Yeah, actually I do. What do I do? Oh, it's called inbound marketing. It's amazing. You're going to create content. You're going to deliver that content through free, organic channels. You're going to grow over time. You're going to own those assets versus renting them from somebody else. It's going to be amazing. And then by that time, people are like, oh, well, cool. How do I do that? Oh, well, we have some software for you. It's called HubSpot. You should check it out. We can help you do all those things way better. Provide amazing automation for you. But that product story is that part of the act. If people are coming to you and saying, I need this particular product. I need this category. Then you're in a market share game with all of your competitors. If you are defining that category, defining the human changes within that category,

• 19:09Speaker 02

  then you're growing that category and you're then not against your competitors. You are against your ability to grow that category and drive awareness for it.

• 19:16Harry Stebbings?

  I have a couple of things I have to unpack there. I totally agree with you on defining the category. Does that not also make it almost harder because you're then entering a customer education process? Education and that's more expensive.

• 19:28Speaker 02

  It's not necessarily more expensive, but it takes longer. You know, there's two types of business. You're creating categories, you're a transformative business, or you're a better mousetrap business. And most better mousetrap businesses are 10x better, 10x cheaper, 10x faster, whatever. And transformation is like, we're going to ask you to do something completely new. We're going to ask you to leave the old way of thinking behind and think this new way. And it takes longer because you start earlier on that adoption bell curve. You start with those early adopters and then go up. When you're a better mousetrap, you start in the middle of the bell curve. You're like, oh, I know about this category. It's awesome. Let me tell you how my thing is better. The problem is when you start at the beginning of the bell curve, you can be really different. When you start in the middle, you're kind of just like everybody else. If you're running a better mousetrap business, you have to be obsessed with differentiation and emotion.

• 20:12Speaker 02

  I think that's where brand marketing is way more important than product marketing. Yes, you can describe the value proposition of your product. But what is the reason that somebody should believe in your brand, have emotion about this thing? That they already know that there's already a bunch of good things out in the world to do and solve. Like, why should they take the time to switch or consider your new thing?

• 20:32Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask, brand marketing wise, to be very clear, how do you define brand marketing one? And then what do you think you've done so well? That means thousands of people want to come to your conferences. People don't want to go to conferences. Thousands want to go to yours. What have you done well, brand marketing wise, to inspire that feeling within customers?

• 20:51Speaker 02

  When I think about brand, Harry, I think it is the emotional benefit of not just your product, your service, but your company. Why do you exist in the world? And what do you make people feel? From the very beginning at HubSpot, our goal was, we want people to feel like we are there to help them, teach them, guide them through this transformation. That just became the principle. So in the early days, I talked to startups all the time and they're like, "Look, I don't have a bunch of money for this expensive brand marketing." I'm like, "Cool, yeah, we didn't either. Tell you what we did. We had a good story that resonated with people. We wrote a book, we spoke at conferences, we wrote a blog. All that stuff was actually pretty cheap." Hard part, the expensive part was getting the story and agreeing that that story was the right story to tell and having it really tight and everything.

• 21:34Speaker 02

  So that whole message is kind of cascaded through and that becomes a movement, that becomes an emotion. And so people want to come to our event. Most conferences are marketed as like, oh, it's gonna be great networking. You're gonna get to learn from your peers. Most big conferences, like that's what it is. People come to our event, like we're having our event inbound in September this year and we'll have, I don't even know how many people, thousands of people there. Because they know that all we want is to help and educate them. That's it. They know that if they sit down in a room, that they are going to get a completely valuable and different perspective on whatever topic they're sitting down in. And I've read all the MPS reports, Harry. I have read all the surveys. The top rated thing, the top reason people come is the quality of content, the quality of education.

• 22:16Speaker 02

  Same reason people listen to your show all the time, because that's what they want, because that is the scarce thing in this world today. Everybody's trying to just cold sell and cold email people to all hell. It's very rare to get that value today.

• 22:27Harry Stebbings?

  What do you think is the biggest mistake that founders and startups you see make when it comes to brand marketing?

• 22:33Speaker 02

  Not giving a shit about it, right?

• 22:36Harry Stebbings?

  And you think that's just because it's not inherent within founders or it's not taught? I almost sympathize with them. It's like product marketing, brand marketing for a technical founder who then also doesn't know sales as well. It's fucking hard.

• 22:47Speaker 02

  It's super hard. What you are getting at is what the majority of startups fail. All of these things are very different disciplines and it is a rare human being who can figure out how to prioritize and get them all right.

• 22:58Harry Stebbings?

  Does your brand marketing change significantly over time? And do you worry about inconsistencies that like when you think about, you know, HubSpot's evolving product layering on CRMs, et cetera? Does the brand marketing change over time? And how do you think about not losing your core when expanding the brand marketing to additional?

• 23:15Speaker 02

  Let me give the founders out there listening, I think, a framework that will help them kind of codify this a little bit. You want to think about your marketing stories in a timeline. So the brand marketing work that you do is the longest part of your timeline. That's going to be 12 to 18 months ahead of the reality of your business and your product. It's the emotional benefit. It's pointing everybody to where you're going. In the product marketing that you're doing, that's kind of like 90 days, four months ahead of where you are right now. You're previewing, you're giving some roadmap, but like it's largely in the here and now. Your demand generation is exactly in the here and now. It is what is happening right now. It's what you have to offer people and it's what customers want in the market today.

• 23:55Speaker 02

  And if you think about stacking those three things along that timeline, it gets a lot clearer. Cause you basically start at the demand generation stuff and say, oh, what's my story here today? Am I, do I got it working and is it, if people buying it, great. Extend a little bit to product marketing, they say, great. Now I can accelerate that demand generation, that product marketing. If I tell a remarkable brand story that shows people that my company and this business is going in a real long-term direction that is better and different than the other alternatives in this market.

• 24:24Harry Stebbings?

  I totally get you there. It all to me comes back to like resonance and resonance with your customer. The challenge and the question I have for you is HubSpot is bought by a huge variety of customers, incredibly horizontal product. How do you think about resonance when it's anyone from a gardening company to a dentist to a mom and pop cookie store? When it's such a horizontal product, how do you think about that brand marketing story resonating across the horizontal customer base?

• 24:52Speaker 02

  All those people have the same problems. All of those people have the same problems. The best, best stories are when you can find the universal truths across your customer base that people are afraid to say out loud, but they believe and tell them to them. That's what we did with inbound marketing. It's like people knew that they were sending out 10,000 direct mail cards at work and then going home and throwing everything in the mailbox away. They knew that, but they didn't want to admit that to themselves. They needed somebody to tell them and not just tell them in a shameful way, but tell them in a, hey, it's okay. There's a better way. That is the universal truth here that I think every business has to get to is we have this big diverse group of customers. Yeah, we do, but they're all trying to grow. They're all trying to solve a crisis of disconnection with their own customers.

• 25:37Speaker 02

  They feel like they're a mile away from their own customers, whether that be attracting them in, keeping and retaining them. I don't care if you're an architect, a manufacturing company, a software company. I can talk to you in that way. And give you real practical ways to do that on top of that emotional benefit of doing that, then that doesn't matter. You can have a big, clear, horizontal business with that.

• 25:55Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask, when we look at the things that we've mentioned, brand marketing, product marketing, taking unconventional bets on new channels, one thing that strikes me is the challenge for say a CMO in communicating why we need that budget to the board, to the CEO. How do you advise CMOs on managing up in order to get their upward hierarchy to see what they see and what they need?

• 26:17Speaker 02

  Look, it's a tough thing. I would say there's also a converse to what you just talked to, Harry. It's like you manage up to take that budget and then your CEO and your board are often trying to push down and spread you in a bunch of directions. They're trying to cause you to be less focused. So there's this double edged problem that like both are bad for the marketing leader. What you have to do, I want to help people out there solve both of those. On the CEO, the board pushing at it and try to like extend your priorities, what you have to do is be very proactive versus reactive. You have to play offense instead of defense. And you have to say, hey, I'm looking at the state of our business. Here are the three to four key strategies and things we must nail for the next six to 12 months. And you take it and you shop it around, you go to the board meeting, you get everybody bought in. And then anytime somebody asks you to do that,

• 27:00Speaker 02

  you say something new. You're like, oh, well, that's not part of the things we agreed on. We'll add that in and we'll revisit it in six months when we talk about it again. And yes, they're going to push and yes, you might have to do some of it, but man, it will deflect a lot and will make your life a lot easier. But then you brought up a point of like, how do you manage up? How do you get the, the resources to be successful? Well, first you anchor it all in what are the business goals? What is the constraint for growth of that business? Because a board and a CEO is always thinking about like, what is the thing that we fixed would drive growth and success for this business? And you as a marketer have to tell them, this is how marketing can solve that problem. So that might be deal creation. That might be your competitive win rates. That could be a whole host of different business metrics. Could be customer retention, whatever that may be. And then you package a strategy

• 27:43Speaker 02

  that solves just like that. You say, hey, I can help us create more deals. This is what it's going to take. It's going to take content marketing strategy. It's going to take a prospecting strategy. This is what it's going to take. This is the amount of humans and money it's going to cost to do it. Do you want to solve this problem with me or not? It's very clear. Either they're going to give you the money to solve that problem, or they don't care about that problem the way you thought. So if you're not solving it, they shouldn't be upset or think you're not doing your job for not solving it because you brought to their attention.

• 28:08Harry Stebbings?

  And be happy with the silence. I find that everyone says like, do you want to do it or not? Let it sit. Don't say anything else. Just leave it at that.

• 28:14Speaker 02

  There's nothing better in the world than a binary.

• 28:16Harry Stebbings?

  Totally.

• 28:17Speaker 02

  Yes or no?

• 28:17Harry Stebbings?

  A hundred percent. Element that's interesting and slightly nuanced, though, is the element of accountability and attribution. And it's should marketing be held accountable to a number tied directly to revenue? Leads alone ain't worth much, actually, if they don't convert.

• 28:34Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 28:35Harry Stebbings?

  So how do you think about creating frameworks of accountability and attribution around the initiatives that marketing does to prove the effectiveness?

• 28:44Speaker 02

  Look, you're talking about a problem of attribution, which has always been a problem as long as marketing exists, will always be a problem as long as marketing exists. And it kind of ebbs and flows. And like, honestly, it's going to get kind of worse in the short term because data from Google and Facebook and other channels is getting worse, not better. For example, email data getting worse, not better. What you have to do is measuring something is more of an internal alignment exercise than it is an analytic exercise. You have to understand on the puts and takes between marketing, sales, CFO, CEO. What do we agree on? So for example, Harry, there's overlap across marketing and sales and across marketing channels. So how are you going to account for overlap in your attribution is like a big thing that you have to figure out. And there's endless ways that you could rationalize to do it right.

• 29:25Speaker 02

  So it matters less what you decide and matters more that the business agrees that, oh, this way we're doing it is good and fair to everyone and is an accurate representation of what we think is going to grow and scale this company. So when I think about it, I think every marketer in the future should be directly accountable to revenue, both inbound and outbound, whatever that may be. And SaaS especially, it's pretty straightforward. You have a close rate, you have an average sale price of the product you sell. If you sell a hundred dollar product and you have a 10% close rate on, call it a qualified lead, then great. Every qualified lead's worth 10 bucks because you need 10 of them to get to the hundred. Yes, it's an oversimplification, but you can get to what is a simple enough example that can show contribution. In a way that's not perfect, but it's going to really work and drive alignment and

• 30:10Speaker 02

  growth for the business because that's ultimately what matters, not marketing getting credit, but it's like, are we doing these activities and are we getting the growth that we want on the other side?

• 30:18Harry Stebbings?

  With the rise of product-led growth and the increasing importance of content marketing and consumers appetite to engage with content marketing as a way to be educated on a product, to me, we're going to see like the complete delineation between sales and marketing where there's not really like a line between the two. How do you think about that, given now consumers being so far along the sales funnel before they touch often a sales rep?

• 30:43Speaker 02

  Saying sales and marketing are going to become more different than they are similar and that consumers are going to notice the starkness of that handoff more?

• 30:50Harry Stebbings?

  In a way that actually marketing is eating up so much more of the sales funnel with its education of customers where traditionally sales reps would have done. And actually, the blurred lines are moving completely away and marketing is just kind of eating sales.

• 31:05Speaker 02

  Well, look, marketing is eating sales, but I would actually say that stories, differentiation, personalization are eating like go-to-markets. If you're a great marketer and you've got content that resonates and you're using that to pull people in, drive automation, like really help them understand what you're all about, for example, well, don't you think a sales rep's going to send a personalized video in their email about that same thing? The best companies are going to figure out how to just have that content experience transition really seamlessly from one-to-many to one-to-one. That's all we're talking about. All we're talking about is one-to-many to one-to-one. That to me is the difference between marketing and sales is when you do something one-to-many, it's marketing. You do something one-to-one, it's sales. I fundamentally believe that's what's going to happen is the best teams are going to be

• 31:48Speaker 02

  aligned on that story and that customer journey from that like very high-level brand awareness or first search result to the deck that a sales rep showed, the demo the sales rep showed, and I want that line to be blurrier. The more stark the contrast is between marketing and sales, the less effective it's going to be in the future because the customer is going to be like, oh, wait, I was sold on this thing with all this, this marketing messages, but now I'm getting this very different vibe and experience and message over here. Is this really what I thought I was getting?

• 32:16Harry Stebbings?

  I always think that actually lessons are learnt in the mistakes that we make.

• 32:19Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 32:20Harry Stebbings?

  When we listen to you, it kind of sounds like you haven't made any, Kipp.

• 32:23Speaker 02

  I've made a shit ton.

• 32:24Harry Stebbings?

  I'm sure. So like when you review the mistakes you've made as a CMO with HubSpot, what was the most significant to you? And what would you say was the big lesson that you took away from it?

• 32:34Speaker 02

  I will tell you what the most significant is. It's one of the things I talk with founders or companies I invest in constantly. Mistakes, always people related. People are much harder than strategy. Strategy is often much clearer. The people side of it, do you have the right people with the right skills for the right stage of your company? Is actually the hard thing. The biggest mistakes I have made, not hiring the right person, or not knowing that I needed a person with a new level of skill set at that stage and scale of the company, or holding on to somebody who was really good for that last stage of growth, but isn't good for this next stage of growth too long and being too close to that.

• 33:10Harry Stebbings?

  I heard that was a weakness of yours.

• 33:12Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 33:12Harry Stebbings?

  But it's hard. What are the signals that someone is now in a stage where they are no longer comfortable or meant to be?

• 33:19Speaker 02

  Let me tell you why I think that's hard. Are you a sports fan, Harry? I think you are, right?

• 33:23Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah.

• 33:23Speaker 02

  So for example, in the NFL and the NBA in the US, there are some teams that have a person who is both the coach and the general manager. And there are some teams that have a person whose job is to be general manager, the other person's job is to be the coach. It's very hard to be both. And that's what you're asking a CMO to do, to be the coach and the general manager. And when you're the coach, you're so close to the people and you're in the trenches with the people that you have trust, you have loyalty, you have all those things. When you're a general manager, you're saying, huh, I'm trying to win. Do I have what I need to win? And that is a very, very hard thing. That's a very hard thing for a CMO. It's a very hard thing for a founder. So I have found that there are times where you have to purposely put on the general manager fictitious hat.

• 34:04Speaker 02

  You gotta say, okay, I have to take this week and think about it like I am just a general manager, change my schedule and just be very, very objective. You really have to put in processes in place where you're like, okay, I'm taking back and I'm taking a different look and evaluation at this team to make sure I have what is necessary to win.

• 34:22Harry Stebbings?

  I totally agree with you, but it's hard to do.

• 34:25Speaker 02

  Frickin' so hard. It's one of the things that Harry takes practice and repetition. You just can't like hear me or you or anybody else in this world talk about it and be like, oh, cool. I got it.

• 34:34Harry Stebbings?

  So how do you actually do it? How do you form that detachment where you switch hats, put on the GM hat, bluntly, remove a bit of the humanity and go, this is not what we need.

• 34:42Speaker 02

  You have to look at everything from the principle and problem layer. You actually have to take the people in totality out and you have to say, I am trying to grow. What are my constraints for growth? Based on those constraints for growth, what is it that I need to do? And what is, does success in doing those things look like? Literally write it out like this is what I need to do. This is the type of skills and activities that will happen to be successful. Once you have all that finished, then you can go and like overlay it on top of the people and be like, oh, well, what we need to do is actually this person has the skills to do what we need to do. So that's fantastic and we can go and march on to do it. Or actually this person doesn't, but I think I could coach them because it's just a small gap. Or, oh, actually there's a big gap and what I need to do is bring in somebody with a different set of skills to help us get to that next stage of the problem.

• 35:26Harry Stebbings?

  I use the show also as an advice. It's, it's cheaper than a therapist or a mentor.

• 35:30Speaker 02

  Of course, way, way cheaper.

• 35:31Harry Stebbings?

  Tell me, stretch candidates, I am looking now, my media business has grown far faster than I thought.

• 35:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, of course.

• 35:38Harry Stebbings?

  But I need a CEO to really run the day to day processes. I have the feeling that I want someone young, hungry, who's not done it before, but is a complete fucking hustler. But then I'm also worried that actually I need a seasoned CEO who's run big media companies before. How do you think about the stretch VP versus the seasoned exec from a big firm?

• 35:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I will broaden this up to just founders overall. And I get this question all the time. Do I, am I good with like a junior director of marketing for a while? Do I need a VP like what, do I need a CMO? What is it that I need? And what you have to say is balance teams win. Teams with a balance of perspective and skills win at the end of the day. If you're a CEO, for example, on the startup side, who's passionate about marketing, been doing a lot of the company's marketing in the early days, you know what's up. You can probably get by with a stretch candidate because you know a lot of it. If you are a super product driven CEO and you are crushing on the product, you don't know shit about marketing, then stretching is not going to be a good thing. So just on the media company side, Harry, if you are. Awesome at operations and you are process driven. You know how to scale stuff, then you can go and stretch somebody.

• 36:42Speaker 02

  If you are not those things and you want to bring in somebody to be those things, then you need to have somebody with those skills more established.

• 36:49Harry Stebbings?

  I didn't mean to dickish you. I am awesome at them, but I have 20 other things that I need to go do and I can't be in them at all anymore. So it doesn't matter if I'm awesome or shit. I just can't do them anymore.

• 36:58Speaker 02

  Well, no, it does. It does. I completely disagree with you because if you are awesome at them, you know how to help people. You know how to get people unstuck. You know how to push them and point them in the right direction. If you're not good at it, then you just don't have the clearest fucking idea what to do. You don't know where to point somebody and so they're just going to run around in a circle.

• 37:16Harry Stebbings?

  I totally agree with you. How do you know when to let someone go?

• 37:19Speaker 02

  You know when to let someone go, when you're clear on what you're trying to achieve, set expectations with them about what it takes to get there. And they have not been able to do it for a period of time that you guys agree on. Normally you would say, you can normally see progress pretty quick in a month or two. You can say, oh, this person's on the progressive path. They're going to get there. You can say, this person is actually just not, this is actually just a fundamentally wrong job for them. They actually care about this other thing that I don't need right now. And they should go to another organization and go do that and be great at it.

• 37:48Harry Stebbings?

  We spoke about the changing hats there and the challenge in moving to GM. And I spoke to Kieran on your team before this and he said, I always wonder, is the role of CMO lonely? And I thought the same when he said it. Do you find the role of CMO lonely? And what's the most challenging aspect for you?

• 38:04Speaker 02

  It's super lonely. Think about it. Have a pretty broad sense and go, we get to the second part of your question, right? Which is the challenging part. I don't know that there's another business discipline that requires as much context switching and broad knowledge than marketing. So for example, what I mean by that is like, you need to understand like the depths of distribution on Google and Facebook. You gotta understand email score deliverability and GDPR and data privacy regulations. But you don't need to understand what great design looks like and what a perfect event experience looks like. And oh, by the way, how to model and attribute all of that so that you can do what you need to do for your sales team. Oh, and what's the story we're going to package for product, for the product team? And how are we going to take that product to market?

• 38:46Speaker 02

  Start stacking all the very different things that are actually fundamentally very different skills. It's a very broad job and that's what makes it lonely because at any month you're kind of focused on one part of it. So the vast majority of your team is like off doing other things that you're not thinking about and doing. Because you're trying to fix the one of those many parts that is broken in that moment.

• 39:07Harry Stebbings?

  How do you think about creating such great cross functional relationships with sales, with product, with engineering? To really allow yourself to be kind of plastic across the different functional areas?

• 39:18Speaker 02

  The thing everybody listens to this show needs to understand is that humans are incentive based creatures. Incentives and alignment around goals and incentives fix everything. If you have a problem collaborating, it is because you have competing goals or you have competing incentives against those goals. So job one is to be very clear on those goals and make sure the goals are aligned between whether it be marketing and product, marketing and sales. We talked about attribution. Once you have your SLA, your attribution, all of that set up, it's actually very clear. The incentives are aligned and then you just come up with a check in and like communication process around that. Most people fail because they don't set that foundation and instead they just go and kind of do a bunch of stuff and kind of over index on the relationship building side, which is really important, but the relationship part can be secondary.

• 40:03Speaker 02

  If you've got the right foundation and infrastructure around goals and accountability.

• 40:07Harry Stebbings?

  It was funny, when we tweeted last night about your coming on the show, I got a load of DMs from aspiring marketers who want to be CMOs. And there was about 10 of them who said, hey, what would you advise aspiring marketers who want to become CMOs? In order to get that promotion and get that step up into the role of CMO?

• 40:26Speaker 02

  This works for CMO, but I think it works broader than CMO. If you want to be great at something, whether you want to be a CMO, whether you be CEO, found a successful company, you have to make a series of counterintuitive trade offs that you wouldn't think you'd otherwise make. Most people that I know who who want to be a CMO but don't get there, don't make trade offs. What I mean by that is like, cool, you know what, Kipp, I really want to be a CMO. Well, what's the next job you're going to take? Well, you know, I've been doing marketing automation. It's going really well for me. So I'm going to go take a director of marketing automation. They're going to pay me. Twenty percent more, it's gonna be awesome. I'm like, great, but what if you just go learn a completely different part of marketing? Go make twenty percent less in the short term, but wow, you you get a real breadth of experience. And now you're actually ready to be a CMO. Most people don't make those changes.

• 41:11Speaker 02

  If you want to be a CMO, you have to figure out how to get a breadth of knowledge. And you have to figure out how to scale your leadership and get things done through others. Most really talented marketers are amazing individual contributors. They have a hard time delegating and scaling through others. And the magic of being a marketing leader is figuring out how to scale through other people.

• 41:29Harry Stebbings?

  Is that not hard to get that promotion to CMO, though? If you move between different roles, constantly kind of flatlined, do you not need to show a spike of excellence? And you won't show the spike of excellence unless you concentrate in some way.

• 41:43Speaker 02

  The question I think we're asking is, oh, cool. If I have one spike of excellence, is that enough to get me to be a CMO? In an average organization, maybe. What I'm advocating for is multiple spikes of excellence, which is like, hey, I've got a spike of excellence in marketing automation. And then I went and did eighteen months in product marketing and killed it. This is the progress and success we had. And then I did eighteen months in acquisition demand generation marketing. We grew demand a hundred percent year over year. Now, let me talk to you about how I also built the teams that I made to accomplish those things. And how I think about hiring people. That's the ideal candidate. It's a hard thing to do in practice, but that is the person that a founder really wants.

• 42:20Harry Stebbings?

  I could talk to you all day, which is rather a challenge, given the twenty minute guidance that I did set on the show.

• 42:26Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 42:26Harry Stebbings?

  Terrible. Product marketing, I lied. Very simple, but I do want to dive into a quick fire round. So I say a short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts. And I'm going to start with one. If you were to teach Kieran one skill that would ten X his career, what would it be?

• 42:42Speaker 02

  The emotional side of marketing, brand building. Kieran is a logical person, right? If you are listening to this, what you want to say is, what are the things that I am best at in the world? And how can I get good at the opposite side? Because that's how you get ten X. Kieran is methodical. He is logical. He is analytical. If you can combine that with really emotional skills, then you are like a diamond in the world. There are very few people who can combine those things together.

• 43:07Harry Stebbings?

  No, that's terrible advice. You want to be so good at the one thing. It's like I'm an emotion-driven investor. So the only thing that matters to me is human psychology, understanding incentive structures, frameworks, human ambition.

• 43:23Speaker 02

  I'm gonna disagree with you, Harry, because the question was 10x better. It's very hard to get 10x better at the thing you are best at. If you asked me how to make the most money, I would said exactly what you said. But if you asked me how to get 10x better at something, Kieran can't get 10x better at something he's been doing for the last 20 years.

• 43:39Harry Stebbings?

  Will you not only just then be mediocre at something that you were shit at?

• 43:43Speaker 02

  No, I'll tell you a little bit about me and my approach to this, Harry. I'm a serial obsessive. I love learning things. I believe that anybody can get to like 80, 90% proficiency in something in three to six months of learning something, maybe not necessarily doing something, but learning perspective, applying that knowledge. And I've done it across all kinds of things, whether it be marketing, whether it be personal hobbies, whatever that may be. How you do that is you have to approach learning very differently. Most people go and they buy the most popular books and they follow, listen to the most popular podcasts and all of that. And that's a bullshit way to do it. How you actually go and do this is you find, who are the people that the majority of the world think are smart at this topic? I've got that outlined. Who are the people that those people learn from? And I go straight to them.

• 44:28Speaker 02

  And there's normally like these background, less popular, less personality people that have all the fucking knowledge in the whole world. And you go straight to them and you are unadvised. And you say, hey, I will pay you for an hour of your time. I will pay you for a day of your time. I don't care. I am trying to be the best in the world at this thing. Can you help me? And you flatter them, you pander them, you do whatever it takes. You go and you learn as much as humanly possible. And you go through this deep immersion process where you get all this information and then you start pattern matching that information against the thing you're trying to learn about. Like I learned about art the last year. I learned all about contemporary art. I talked to gallerists all over the world. It was incredible. And I probably have looked at 10,000 paintings in the last year because I wanted to understand the lessons that they taught me and how to apply them.

• 45:12Speaker 02

  And so now I can tell you all the things you need to know about contemporary art. I can tell you the core artists, but I can tell you why. And the why is what's important. Once you understand the why, then you've actually, you're not just like mediocre, you're actually approaching being one of the better people in the world at it.

• 45:27Harry Stebbings?

  I love that strategy. Or you could host a podcast and interview VCs. Ah, there we go.

• 45:32Speaker 02

  A podcast is a great hack to do that.

• 45:35Harry Stebbings?

  Phenomenal. Tell me, what marketing tactics have not changed over the last five years?

• 45:40Speaker 02

  I'm gonna give everybody a cheat sheet. The more open a tactic, meaning less, less regulated by one company. So like email hasn't changed a lot because S M T P is inherently an open protocol. Apple has put some tracking changes in, but like email is evolved, but it's still email. And it hasn't actually changed that much. I know some of the email people will disagree, but I'm sorry, folks, it hasn't changed that much. Whereas if there's one company, organic search, for example, organic search has changed a ton. Because Google has changed the search engine results page a ton, more ads, different types of search results. And that really, normally when there's one company that has financial incentives to evolve a platform, that changes a lot. When it's an open protocol, it changes a lot less.

• 46:19Harry Stebbings?

  What tactics have died a death, do you think?

• 46:21Speaker 02

  I think in marketing, everything is circular. I don't think anything dies. I think it goes dormant for a long time and then comes back around. Look, I think even some traditional advertising channels like Out of Home and those things, like I'm an investor in a company called One Screen. It's creating a, a platform for Out of Home, an attribution for Out of Home. And like, that's gonna be awesome. And I thought Out of Home had died a death a long, long time ago. So I've learned my lesson that things don't die. They go dormant for a while and then they come back around.

• 46:46Harry Stebbings?

  If there was one reason inbound has been so successful, what would you place that success to be on?

• 46:51Speaker 02

  A simple, valuable, clear story.

• 46:53Harry Stebbings?

  Which is educate first.

• 46:55Speaker 02

  The inbound marketing story was 10 very simple slides. The way you were doing marketing doesn't work anymore because technology changed. And because technology changed, people are ignoring you. You need to do something new. That was the story. I could give you the three hour version, or I can give you the three minute version of that story, or the three second version of that story. And that is what makes something powerful and successful.

• 47:14Harry Stebbings?

  Where would you say you need most need to improve as a CMO today, Kipp?

• 47:17Speaker 02

  Oh gosh, every way. Problems of scale, international markets are really hard. Leading a large scale team of people and helping them succeed in a hybrid work environment when nobody knows what the hell is going on. Some people want to be in an office, some people want to be remote. There's a lot of things to get, to get better at over the next few years.

• 47:36Harry Stebbings?

  This is a grenade. Do you want to be a CEO, Kipp?

• 47:38Speaker 02

  Someday, yeah.

• 47:39Harry Stebbings?

  I can feel that. You're very brave. I've interviewed many CMOs and you're like way, way up here.

• 47:45Speaker 02

  Very kind. Thank you.

• 47:45Harry Stebbings?

  Final one. What one company marketing strategy have you been most impressed by over the last couple of years?

• 47:52Speaker 02

  Cash out.

• 47:52Harry Stebbings?

  Why?

• 47:53Speaker 02

  I love anybody who's great at marketing a commodity and money is the ultimate commodity. They've done such a great job of reaching a younger demographic in a platform centric way, whether it be through TikTok, whether it be through in-person activations. They've taken a product that had no business of being successful candidly and making it very successful through remarkable marketing.

• 48:14Harry Stebbings?

  Kipp, this has been such a joy. You can tell that I've completely freewheeled, but you were fantastic.

• 48:19Speaker 02

  Love it.

• 48:19Harry Stebbings?

  And thank you so much.

• 48:20Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me, Harry. I appreciate it.

• 48:24Harry Stebbings?

  I mean, I could literally speak to Kipp all day. That was such a fantastic and natural discussion. Two very, very passionate people discussing their favorite topic together. If you'd like to see more from us, you can, of course, on twenty vc.com. But before we leave you today, have you ever met an employee that likes company travel booking tools? Or even worse, expense reports? I mean, it's a nightmare. Tripactions was born out of the realization that business travel should be easy. Tripactions puts travelers' needs first through the best technology, connecting travel, corporate cards and expense management, and combining them into a single streamlined platform to serve travelers and companies of all sizes. Traveling employees can easily book or change travel directly on the app. Employees are empowered to make their own bookings and manage spend within policy.

• 49:08Harry Stebbings?

  They swipe a corporate card and the technology automates expense entry, approvals and compliance in real time. For program managers and finance teams, this means access to real time data to help keep employees safe, reduce spend and drive productivity. And Tripactions is beloved by employees and CEOs and CFOs alike at Fortune 500 companies like Adobe, Unilever, Heineken, and startups like Notion, Carter, Patreon and Canva, all who've made the switch to Tripactions. Try Tripactions for free at tripactions.com/vc20 and get $500 after your first completed trip or after you spend and pay off your first $1,000 of business expenses on the Liquid Corporate Card. Again, that is tripactions.com.

• 49:51Harry Stebbings?

  Forward slash VC20. And speaking of the move back to hybrid and in person there with trip actions, did you know that 68% of workers say a hybrid workplace is their preference? So it's time to make hybrid work for everyone with Robin. Robin is the industry-leading flexible workplace platform for connecting people with rooms, desks, and each other. Robin have helped companies like Peloton, Toyota, and Hulu build better workplace experiences. Plus, Robin integrates with the tools you already know and love. To learn more about how Robin make flexible work a reality, visit robinpowered.com. That's robinpowered.com. And finally, to the masters of their craft in the teams now, are you a product or growth

• 50:32Harry Stebbings?

  leader at a fast scaling company who knows their weak four attention to the second decimal point, but you still can't confidently describe even your top three customer pain points from last month? You are not alone, and you definitely got to check out Interpret. Interpret unifies all of your most crucial customer feedback, from support tickets, community forum threads, Slack threads, Salesforce notes, Gong calls, and uses it to build and continuously refresh a custom ML model for each company to granularly and precisely analyze all customer feedback. Interpret's backed by the likes of Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital India, and used by some of the most respected and admired product development teams like Notion, Samsung, and Airbase, who use Interpret to prioritize their roadmap, inform hypotheses

• 51:16Harry Stebbings?

  for growth experiments, and measure the impact of recent product launches. Check them out at interpret.com. As always, I so appreciate all your support, and I can't wait to bring you a fantastic episode with Tarek Kalsi on Friday, discussing how startups can create defensibility against incumbents.