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

20:39Like you would go and like, nothing on this page is good. And if we create something, we will by far be the best thing on that topic. And we were able to grow from thousands to hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of visits doing that. And we had that hypothesis. We created a process to scale it, and we spent a lot of time and money. The other thing that people in marketing get wrong, they do 10 different things kind of shitty, right? They're like, I'm 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.

21:16If 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, that just how life works.

21:28Hala Taha:I love that advice. And I agree 100%. It's so right. You've got to really know how to leverage one or two or three channels really well before you go so broad. And then especially when you have no resources and you're just starting out, right? So just build one at a time and go from there. 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 on? The world of marketing changed a bunch with the internet.

22:01Before the internet, people remember, it was largely TV ads, billboards, direct mail, all those things. And they were all really annoying, right? Because you didn't opt into any of those things. The commercials interrupted your television when we didn't have streaming services everywhere, right? You'd go home and your mailbox would be full of advertisements that you didn't subscribe to or didn't want. And that was like very outboundy, very interruptive. And we were basically like, well, now that the internet exists, there's a whole different way to do marketing. You can do it in an inbound way where you create content and pull people in through search engines, through social media, through email marketing, through things that people opt into and want to participate in.

22:39And that was now seems obvious because it's how the internet works. But 20 years ago was fairly revolutionary. And so we created a new category. And sometimes if you're in marketing, or if you're an entrepreneur, and you're starting a company, the best thing you can do is there's a great quote out there, better is a debate, different is a choice, right? And you have to when you force somebody to make a choice, and you do that by creating a new category where it's like, hey, do you 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?

23:12You know, and 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? Like, well, maybe it's good enough. Do I really even need better? I don't know. I don't know what you're talking about. Right. And so painting a clear choice for your target audience is so powerful. It takes a little bit longer, right? Because people aren't familiar with it. There's a level of education you have to do, but anybody can do it.

23:43And 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.

23:55Hala Taha:I know that you've been talking a lot about arbitrage, unfair advantages. So in 2025, what inbound strategies are working? Like are blogs still working? How do you think about SEO? Oh, yeah. It's a great question. And all that stuff. What's marketing? What works in marketing in 2025? A few things. Creators. Working, partnering, or being with creators and, like, these modern media companies like you run, Holla. Like, huge opportunity. Huge, huge opportunity there. We work deeply with creators. I'm a creator myself. Like, it works. YouTube. YouTube works. YouTube is an exceptional channel to drive awareness and monetization.

24:34it is much harder to disrupt through artificial intelligence which is kind of the thing that's changing marketing the most blogging still works it does but it works for the very focused universe of like the industry you solve like where you have unique data unique insight unique credibility you can you can get that you can't go and talk about everything in the world but like and get search traffic but you can focus on your core niche and get a good baseline audience through blogging. Those things are completely working. Partnering with creators, even through like advertising means hugely, hugely valuable.

25:10The 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.

25:30Hala Taha:So true. And when I'm thinking about, you know, my marketing strategies and unfair advantages and untapped opportunities, I'm thinking about SEO within platforms. So for example, like podcast search SEO, how do I become more like searchable on LinkedIn in particular, right? How do I become more searchable on YouTube? Well, that's one of the reasons YouTube works is because YouTube's the second biggest search engine, right?

25:58Hala Taha:Young and profiters. It's been over six years since I bet on myself and became a full-time entrepreneur. And if one of my friends came to me today and said, Hala, I'm starting a business. What do I actually need to get started? I would not advise them to start with a logo or a fancy website. You need to focus on the paperwork, the business address, the things that actually make you legit and professional. And for all of that, I'd recommend Northwest Registered Agent. They've been helping entrepreneurs for nearly 30 years with more than 1 ,500 corporate guides to understand local business laws.

26:27Hala Taha:I recently launched a new LLC on a project that I was kind of procrastinating making it official. And I knew I was going to use Northwest Registered Agent. So I went in, it took 10 minutes. I just put the information about the business. And I literally had somebody follow up with me. And they're like, hey, I need you to go in and fill out more information so we can complete your LLC formation. And that's just amazing that they've got real people that are actually helping you with your business. Northwest helps you build a complete business identity. From day one, you get a business address, website, phone number, operating agreement, a registered agent, free guides, and more all in one place.

27:02Hala Taha:The sooner your business has a real foundation, the sooner you can focus on actually growing it. So don't pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for what you can get for free from Northwest. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com slash yapfree and start using their amazing free resources and templates to build something amazing. Get more with Northwest Registered Agent at northwestregisteredagent.com slash yapfree.

27:27Hey, Yap Gang.

27:28Hala Taha:As Yap Media has grown, I've learned that communication can get messy fast. Some clients live in Slack. Some clients would rather text all the time. Others just want to call you. And when a deal is closing or a new opportunity comes in, I don't want important conversations trapped on somebody's personal phone. I don't want to be blocked. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled Q-U-O, the business phone system built so you never miss an opportunity. Quo gives your team shared business texting and calling. So if a client reaches out, the right person can jump in, see the conversation history, and then respond quickly.

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28:31Hala Taha:Hey, young Improfitters. When I think back to the early days of Yap Media, I was way too scrappy. I'm talking about working out of coffee shops, bouncing between public Wi-Fi networks, and hotspotting from my phone just to get through on a client call without the connection dropping. But looking back, it was actually adding a lot of unnecessary stress because you realize pretty quickly your business is only as strong as your connection. It's how you run meetings, serve clients, and keep everything moving. And that's exactly why I wish I had AT &T Business back then. They're built for small business owners who need their internet to work without second guessing it.

29:05Hala Taha:And once you've had that kind of reliability, you get real peace of mind. You can show up fully, close deals, serve your clients, and focus on growing your business without any of the stress. You need a provider that is as serious about your success as you are, like AT &T Business. Built to work. Get AT &T Business at business.att.com. That's business.att.com. When it comes to blogging, I'd love to like dig deep on this because I actually was thinking like, you know what? I feel like blogging used to be how I used to have a blog in my 20s that was really popular. And then I was like, blogging is over.

29:40Hala Taha:But sometimes these things like come around, right? And I was thinking, you know what? I feel like blogs are kind of making a comeback or I like with Substack becoming so popular. and I was thinking, should I start a blog on my website where like I create content around entrepreneurship or should I like leverage something like Substack and leverage that platform for a blog? Like what would be your advice to start from scratch or leverage a platform? Well, I have a rule that I don't make anything without being clear on how I'm gonna get it distributed and what the distribution advantages are. I think Substack, if you're an entrepreneur, has a little bit of built-in audience, but it's not worth it because the bigger built-in audience is information discovery.

30:24And I say that kind of broader than search. And so if I were starting today, and it was just me, you and I were starting a company, we were gonna go out and do something, I would start a blog on my website for a couple 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, you know, 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.

31:00Like I host a podcast called Marketing Against the Grain. We did a video on DeepSeek when DeepSeek first came out. And it was like, got recommended on everybody's chat GPT queries on DeepSeek. And we got 50 ,000 views in like 24 hours because everybody was searching for it. And we had like a really good credible thing. And so 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.

31:33You know, some proportion are, but a much smaller portion than like historically in Google, but you're still getting the awareness, the distribution, the brand recognition for being like a credible resource in those things. And that's why you have to have a pretty healthy blog and kind of YouTube strategy to surface in all these new models.

31:52Hala Taha:Yeah. And we were just talking about SEO in platforms. And that's such a great example. Like, how do I get better search on ChatGPT? That's the future. And by the way, there's compounding benefits to all this, right? Like, if I get discovered in ChatGPT and I get really good engagement on my video, then YouTube's going to be like, oh, this is clearly a good video. So I'm going to 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. And that's awesome. What would you say is the secret to making content that stands out today, considering that there's so much more content?

32:23Hala Taha: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. It's not, 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 can allow people to immediately take action, that they can take, especially like in free tools or free platforms, that's going to take off.

32:54It's going to 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. So if you have a survey of 2 ,000 people in a given industry, people are going to check it out because they want to know benchmark. They want to see how they're doing. They're competitive. They want to compare themselves. All that stuff happens, right? And so you are going to see that be a real standout thing. And so that's where proprietary research, customer data, things like that are a huge leverage. And then the third is like, can you be really contrarian and have a good argument?

33:32Can you go against the status quo and change people's thinking with a real deep and thoughtful, reasoned argument about something. And if you can do that, you're also going to get people's attention. What would you add? You're doing this all the time. What'd I miss?

33:45Hala Taha:Well, I feel like you hit a lot of them, but I think at the core of it is like, how do you help people? Like, how do you actually bring value where people feel like, oh, wow, I learned something. Oh, this is something unique and meaningful. This is not just regurgitating what's out there or just clickbait for me to just get on this page. And then 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 like, is what I'm about to do going to be 10 times more valuable for people?

34:19Or 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. And if the answer is no, it's probably going to be middling and average.

34:31Hala Taha: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? Okay. Email is super important. And here's why email is super important from like a principle base. It's one of the few channels you actually control. There's not an algorithm, right? Like somebody gives you permission to email them and you get to send them a message and you actually own that email address. Somebody can't come along and change the Google algorithm, the YouTube algorithm, the LinkedIn algorithm.

35:01I know people are all up in arms about LinkedIn algorithm changes recently. Um, that's the real value of email marketing is that you have way more ownership and control of email marketing than most other channels out there. And so once you kind of have that foundation, you're like, okay, email marketing still matters. What am I going to do? And the number one thing you're going to do is to have as highly personalized emails as possible. And that's writing your emails with AI. So one of the things we did at HubSpot is we have, we have what's called HubSpot Academy. which teaches you how to do marketing, how to use our software, all of those things.

35:39And there's a bunch of different courses on HubSpot Academy. And we basically, when people come into HubSpot and maybe consume an article or a free guide or a webinar, what have you, we'll then send a follow-up email that is custom, one-on-one, written from them by AI, and that we recommend based on everything we know about them, the content they've consumed, what the best course for them to take is. And like we mentioned their, not only do we mention their business, but like we have puns, like AI has gotten very good at that. And it feels like a human researches company and wrote them an email.

36:12And that email converts 80 to 100 % better than our normal email. And so that is like, number one, anything you can do to better personalize your email and make it relevant to their problem and their experience with your company and your website, you're going to get much, much better results.

36:29Hala Taha: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? Yeah, I mean, look, you gave them the great ways to do that, which is like offer something really valuable that you consider charging money for.

37:07Remember that marketing is just kind of a lesson in economics. It's what do you want to sell versus what do you want to give away to sell a bigger thing down the road? And like how do you offset? How do 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.

37:48and I was like, well, what if we just hire a freelance photographer, buy the rights out for like$10 ,000 to 500 different pictures and we just give those away for free instead of them having to pay Getty Images or all these people. And I think over the years, we've had like 5 million downloads. I can't 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.

38:21Hala Taha:Yeah. 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, right? And might need your services four years down the line. So you guys have like 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 like free HubSpot service. Like why are you guys giving away your tools for free initially?

38:57Yeah, so about 10 years ago, we were like, hey, you know what? The world is changing and trust is becoming the most important thing. And one of the ways you can build trust with people is to let them try before they buy, right? And like your webinar is a great example of that. It's like, hey, if I'm on a 30, 60 minute webinar with you, I probably have a pretty good idea about what your course is going to look like, what the quality is going to be, what it's going to 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?

39:32I'm up and running on this. I've closed a couple of deals with it. I understand the features that if I pay for them that I would get. And you know what? I kind of need them because I think I would make even more money if I paid for those features. and it's a whole different game. Right now, like we all have access to infinite knowledge with AI. Knowledge is a complete commodity. So in that world, trust becomes everything. People can know who you are, but they can still not trust you at all. And giving that value away is how you build trust. And so for us, like the free version of our product, so we do it, but you have webinars.

40:05There is a version of that for any business, is I think what I would say.

40:09Hala Taha:And I think the main lesson is like, don't be afraid to give away great things that people can actually use for free, right? Don't be afraid for people to have to have enough for a couple months or whatever to do what they need to do because it's going to build that trust. I have a maxim I live by and it's distribution is undefeated. And like, if you can get a big audience, you can always figure out how to make money on it. The inverse is not true. Like you 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 going to take a little bit of time.

40:43It's a different way of thinking, but distribution is the most, is the biggest reason most businesses don't grow because they just don't have a big enough audience, universe of people who actually care about them and the thing that they're offering in the world.

40:55Hala Taha:Did you know that we just signed with HubSpot? Yeah. That's amazing. Welcome. Yeah. Thanks for coming. Yes, of course. Yeah. We're like doing this whole big HubSpot implementation and it's like a huge company focus. Yeah. So I'm really excited about that. So CRMs, I've got a lot of like young entrepreneurs who are probably working at spreadsheets and doing everything manually. What is a CRM and what would benefit? How do startups benefits from CRMs? Okay. So if you think about CRM, there's lots of views of what CRMs are, but what they really are is a single source of truth for your customers and your prospects.

41:32So 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 because your CRM is just going to generate the email follow-up to your meeting for you.

42:19And it's like, oh, great. I know I need to follow up for 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 and need to go look them up, right? And that is why CRM is so important. It also is when you have all your data in one place, you can do real reporting and actually understand what's working and what's not working. And as somebody who has helped grow a business from tens of millions of dollars to billions of dollars, it's done through basic iteration over a long period of time, finding problems, solving them, and building and iterating.

42:55And you can't do that without your data in one place and some clear reporting.

42:58Hala Taha:Yeah, that's what I'm most excited about is like 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. And 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 conduct record and give you the full prep summary. That's awesome. We have an agent called Content Remix.

43:32So like let's say you're going to run a content campaign. You're going to do an email newsletter. So you're going to do a webinar. You're going to do a webinar. It's like it will spin up the landing page, the email, the ad assets, everything for you and does all the manual work in the background. And then we also have a product that our co-founder at our MeshTar called Agent.ai, which is a marketplace of agents where you can go and anybody can build or use different agents. It's kind of like a modern kind of automation marketplace where if you have a problem, you can either use Agent.ai to build it or somebody's already built it and you can just use their agent.

44:04A really good example is there's a company research agent that will give you 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 two minutes, perfectly formatted for free. And that is just a game changer when it comes to agents.

44:25Hala Taha:If you are in marketing and in sales and you're feeling overwhelmed with AI and leveraging AI, how would you approach it? Okay, this is a fantastic question. I use AI all the time. I'm AI obsessed. I would pick one AI tool and get really good at it. And for marketers, that's probably Claude. For sellers, that's probably ChatGPT. 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.

45:16And it might research a problem for 5, 10, 20 minutes with all these different agents in the background going and doing that. And you having the full map to an industry, the accounts within the industry, how your product maps, core competitors in that industry, like those things become super valuable. So that's where I would focus if I was just like feeling overwhelmed and not yet started.

45:39Hala Taha:Yeah, I love that advice. I feel like we've learned so much so far about marketing. I'd love to move into customer service 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? Yeah, so 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 or answered by our agent. And so that's 30 % less support people, support time, founder time, depending on the size and scale of company that you have to spend.

46:19And if you kind of focus on it, we've seen customers get to like 50%, 60 % deflection, which is huge, saves so much time and so much money. And the biggest reason why that's important is because in today's internet, where everything is highly competitive, as we've talked all show about, it's never been easier for a customer to switch. So 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.

46:56And 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 because I haven't been focused on it at all. I don't have any of the infrastructure to actually focus on it.

47:11Hala Taha:Yep. And the best customers refer other people who are great customers too. So you're missing out on all the referrals. If you don't, yeah. How can we better align marketing and sales so that we have the best customer service? Customer service is largely about setting expectations, right? Which is, do I know what I bought? Do I know what I'm going to use the thing I bought for? And do I know how I'm going to think that that's valuable, right? Like that's, if the answer to those things are yes, that customer is 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.

47:47A 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 that like your business has this problem that isn't relevant to our other customers that we need to help you solve. And once you kind of fix those problems, the customer is going to be very happy. It's normally in one of those stages where things go off the rails.

48:19Hala Taha:We just rolled out like a new customer survey to try to see like how our agency clients are feeling, how our network clients are feeling. It was really, really helpful. Do you have any suggestions of like the type of questions you should ask your customers to get their feedback? Oh, this is great. This is great. So I think 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.

48:55The 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 festering and systemic. Like you always want new problems. So it's like, oh, our customer support's back. Great, let's go fix our customer support. And then you won't hear anything about customer support. You'll hear about a new thing like product speed or, oh, our client portal is tricky.

49:36You hear all these things, right? And so that, I think the net promoter score question is the best because it gives you where the big root cause are. When you ask specific questions, you often get the symptoms without the root cause.

49:48Hala Taha:I want to close out our interview with some scenarios that I think are going to be really fun. Okay, so you are a brand new entrepreneur. Yep. You might have like a little bit of money, but 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? Yes, yeah. 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 because I'm time rich.

50:24I got the time to make every day and I got to make something every day. And 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 like the early days of LinkedIn groups.

50:51Hala Taha:Yep. 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. And we would go and we would spend money to do that. And nobody else was doing that. And we got hugely efficient lead generation by doing that. And it's just like, oh, a million marketers in this group. Nobody is really going after them. How do we get them? I love that. 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.

51:24Hala Taha: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 like 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 want to start a new company. How would you, you know, what would you do to market your company? Money rich, money richer, time poor.

51:55Time poor.

51:56Hala Taha:Yeah, exactly. I got, if I have some resources to do this, it's not going to be that dissimilar. I think the channels work, how I'm going to accomplish those channels. Like I would probably, I'd probably still be a creator, but I would hire an agency to help me do all the post-production, to help me do the research, do all that. And I would use AI to kind of 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.

52:38You 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.

52:58Hala Taha: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 got to wrap up, even though I really want to keep asking you more questions. We can talk all day, I know. But I will be respectful of your time. So the last questions that I have, I ask all of my guests. Please. And this doesn't have to do with, you don't have to even talk about marketing.

53:29Hala Taha:You can talk about whatever you want. Okay. So what is one actionable thing our young and profiters 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 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 be stupid. Never feel like you're stupid. but like just go and ask all the questions.

54:09And if you're curious about something, like just call somebody up. You'll be shocked. People will give you time. People will give you information if you care enough to know it. And then once you have that knowledge, your life is just way better in every single way.

54:22Hala Taha:And where can everybody learn more about you and everything that you do? Okay, you can check out hubspot.com, product, everything there. I host Marketing Against the Grain over on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts, you can check out Marketing Against the Grain. Awesome, thank you, Kip.