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
So if you're running a LinkedIn program, for example, it's like, oh, I think you can get a million views a month this year for our company content. Great. Well, You or I, if we were in that situation, we would say, cool, you think a million's good. I think 10 million's good. How would I go and use the same constraints, everything I have access to, to do way better than you think?
Because that change in magnitude is impossible to ignore. Because then you're like, oh, wow, we have somebody who's able to overexceed 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.
Yeah, yeah.
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're scared largely of what other people think.
versus what's actually true and 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 because I got a job at HubSpot because I had run a blog and they liked my blog.
And then I ran the blog and I host the Marketing Against the Grain 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 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 a 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. 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.
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 Website Grader, where you could just put your website in and it would give the full diagnostic. So normally what you would hire a consultant for, or you talk to a sales rep for, It's just gonna give you a report on the webpage and email it to you, which in 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 Dharmesh 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 in the early days of content and creating. And what we figured out is that Google search was growing rapidly and there was an arbitrage in a market inefficiency where you would search for so many things
back in the day and there were terrible search results, right? Like you would go and like nothing on this page is good. And if we create something, we will by far be the best thing on that topic. And we were able to grow from thousands to hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of visits doing that. 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 gotta 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.
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