Kipp Bodnar
speaker
121 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Kipp Bodnar’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
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 there are inefficiencies, where things are underpriced. They lean very aggressively into those things to get a really high return.
The best entrepreneurs in the world are people who just get really irritated that a problem exists and just become maniacally focused and obsessed with solving it. You could do that whether you're a solopreneur, whether you're an executive at a company, it doesn't matter. It's your job to understand what that unfair advantage is.
A few things. The number one thing is...
Hey, Hala. Thanks so much for having me. Excited to be here.
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.
I think the first entrepreneurship thing I had, I would go to Sam's Club and Walmart and find 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 there are 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 HubSpot was about 100 people when I joined, you go from just running really fast by yourself to needing to run really fast with a bunch of other people. And that's the biggest change. And you have to adopt a different mindset. And I think the mindset there is, I have limited scale, just me.
I could accomplish much bigger things if I do it with other people, but I 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 that
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.
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.
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, our 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.
I think the best relationships are results. I think results speak for themselves and results are 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.
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