Learn Your Way Through (with Kipp Bodnar, CMO of Hubspot, and Tim Leatherman)

Daily Creative with Todd Henry

This episode explores how leaders navigate disruption by prioritizing rapid learning over perfect preparation. Kipp Bodnar details HubSpot's pivot after losing 140 million organic

Key takeaways

• Kipp Bodnar reveals HubSpot lost 140 million organic visits in one year, forcing a shift from linear funnels to an hourglass model where AI enables massive conversion rate increases through personalized messaging.
• The episode reframes AI not as an industrial replacement but as a Renaissance-era instrument that scales human taste and creative direction rather than eliminating it.

Main topics

• Learning through disruption
• AI integration in marketing and creative work

Notable quotes

"The people who fail using AI are tool first, brain second."

Conclusion

The episode delivers a clear takeaway: whether facing algorithmic market

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:01) Hey everyone, this is Todd Henry. Every leader I talk with right now is asking some version of the same question. What happens to my people as AI absorbs more of the work? That question is why I built a new keynote and workshop called The Infinite Lever. It's about human capacities that get more valuable in an AI world, not less, and how to develop them on purpose before the window closes. So if you're planning an event this year, just visit toddhenry.com speaking to learn more. Speaker 3 (0:29) In 1975, an engineer started an eight-year journey to put a pair of pliers inside a pocket knife. And today, one of the most influential marketers in the world is running the exact same playbook in a matter of days. The tools keep changing, but the people who win are always the ones who learn their way through. Speaker 3 (0:48) In the late summer of 1901, two brothers from Dayton, Ohio, just up the road from where I am right now, boarded a train home from the outer banks of North Carolina, and they were defeated. Wilbur and Orville Wright had spent weeks on the dunes at Kitty Hawk testing a glider on the best aerodynamic data in the world. The glider barely lifted. On that ride home, Wilbur told his brother that man would not fly for 50 years. But they didn't quit. They went back to their bicycle shop and they asked a better question. What if the data everyone trusts is wrong? So they built a wind tunnel out of a wooden box about six feet long, a fan, and measuring balances cobbled together from bicycle spokes and a hacksaw blade. Over a couple months that fall, they tested roughly 200 miniature wing shapes. They discovered the published numbers were off, and they rebuilt their understanding of flight from the ground up. Two years later, on December 17, 1903, Orville flew. The Wrights didn't win because they had the most resources. Their best-known rival, Samuel Langley, had a $50,000 grant from the War Department. They won because they learned faster. They learned what they needed to know, when they needed to know it, and they refused to let a hurdle become an exit ramp. That's what today's episode is all about. You're going to hear from two people who faced the moment when the old way stopped working. Kip Bodner is the author of a new book called Loop. and he's also the chief marketing officer at software giant HubSpot. Tim Leatherman is the creator of the tool that bears his name, the Leatherman Multi-Tool. Their worlds cannot be more different, but their answer is exactly the same. This is Daily Creative. Since 2005, we served up weekly tips to help you be brave, focused, and brilliant every day. My name is Todd Henry. Welcome to the show. Speaker 2 (2:39) I sit at this very interesting vantage point of everything that's going on in marketing and the creative world right now. And it turns out that the most relevant story is about corn. And, you know, Everett Rogers goes on to write one of the most seminal works in business history all around disruption theory. But the genesis of that disruption theory comes from being on a farm in Iowa and his father. looking at his neighbor's corn and his neighbor's corn is growing and it's thriving in this drought, terrible summer. And their corn is not. It's withered. It's barely growing. And, you know, that's their livelihood. And his father is sitting around because he didn't adopt this new hybrid seed corn technology that was out there, makes corn more drought resistant, more pest resistant. And so it's really just like you get more corn for the seed that you plant. Instead, he was doing it the old way. And he looked around and he's kind of in the like, oh, let's wait and see mindset. And by the end of the summer, it was like, well, I've seen and I didn't get the result that I was hoping for. And now it's time to do something different. And I think that's where most marketers sit today. I Speaker 4 (3:56) think that you're exactly right. And the strange thing for me is that often it's people who are, these are people who have trafficked in the world of innovation. creativity. They've been helping their clients, their customers, take things to market for years and figure out how do we innovatively tell these stories. And yet when it comes to their own business, sometimes it's kind of like the cobbler's son has no shoes, right? They haven't really thought about how is this going to impact my business? Not just how we're going to be helping others, our clients or our customers or our own organization, but how is this going to affect us? And you start chapter three of the book with a pretty startling confession. You talk about how HubSpot lost 80 % of its organic blog traffic, which is something, I mean, anybody would know, like that's been a core part of your marketing strategy for years. Huge part of Speaker 2 (4:43) our Speaker 4 (4:43) journey. Yeah. So explain to us what happened when that happened Speaker 2 (4:47) and what the net result was on the other side. Look, one of the unfair advantages of life is when you have something happen to you that's so extreme that you have to take action. There are probably a lot of people listening who haven't had that happen to them yet. We had that happen. You know, you just talked about it. For a period of 12 months, we lost 140 million visits. which is a lot of people who no longer are discovering you, reading about you, maybe signing up for your content, your products, those types of things. And to us, that was the clearest signal ever that the world had changed. And we sat back and we said, it's not possible to keep doing what we're doing. You know, like there's no way out of that. If we just keep following the old playbook, we might get... you know, 5 % of those visits back. We're not going to get 75 % of those visits back. So we fundamentally looked around and said, there has to be a new way of approaching marketing and getting to our customers and having them adopt our products that hasn't been disrupted by this AI thing that has provided the world with democratized access to information and intelligence in a way it's never been able to previously access. And so that's, you know, this was the genesis of the whole Loop book and the Loop framework was fundamentally born out of necessity. We were our first customer. I Speaker 4 (6:17) want to talk about what you learned and really the strategy you articulate in Loop, which is that sort of the traditional marketing funnel, as we've thought of it, is no longer really a funnel. It's kind of changed. It's morphed a little bit. Can you describe? What you learned that led you to that realization and how you are adapting your organization to meet these new and changing times? Speaker 2 (6:42) Yeah, so there's a couple things here. First is like, how has the funnel changed? For the last 20 years, we lived in a pretty linear funnel where the biggest leverage, I don't care if you're a B2B company or B2C company, the biggest leverage was, can I get more visits to my website? And I get more visits to my website. My conversion rate of those visits into like leads and customers is kind of consistent. I can make them a little bit better, but I can't transform. And so getting those visits is where all the opportunity lies. And that's just no longer true. It's much harder to get visits and visits are far less correlated with customers and revenue. And so we look at it as we went from this very linear funnel to an hourglass looking funnel because. What's changed is getting awareness and getting people just to know who you are through AI search engines, through creators and influencers, through the just kind of explosion of advertising channels. You know, we have way more high scale advertising channels today than we did five years ago. And so that has really opened up the top of the funnel. It's been it's much harder to get those people to your website. You know, people read the answers in those AI search engines. They don't necessarily need to come back to your website. They see your video or your ad on TikTok or an influencer talk about you. They don't necessarily need to come back to your website. Or if they do, it's just to take like the last 10 % of that journey to become a customer, right? You don't get all the research and understanding and behavior that you used to over the last 10 to 15 years. What has changed though, is those people who do come. AI enables you to personalize an experience for them at scale that is remarkable. And we were able to increase conversion rate on our website, across our email marketing, across our ads, not like 5%, 10%, but 80%, 100%, 200%. And that is one of the biggest shifts that is happening in the marketing world today. Walk Speaker 4 (8:45) us through how that is happening in a practical way when people come to you. Because I experienced the same thing, by the way. I mean, it used to be... For example, in the podcast world, since we're on the podcast right now, you know, if I had 100,000 people, say, following the show or listening to the show, like pretty reliably, like 80,000 people were going to listen to any given episode or whatever, right? That's