How HubSpot Built Its Creator Program After Inbound Marketing

HubSpot’s creator program has partnered with more than 300 business creators since 2021, works with around 150 at a time, and has grown into a media network of four acquired brands. It grew up alongside inbound marketing, the category HubSpot invented, and in September 2026 its own marketing leaders announced they were burying inbound after the blog lost 5 million visits in 30 days.

HubSpot reported $3.13B in revenue for 2025, and creators have gone further into its business than at any other company we’ve mapped. We mapped the founders, employees, media hosts and paid creators posting for HubSpot, and here’s how it fits together.

How Did HubSpot’s Content Engine Start?

With a blog. Before HubSpot had a product, Dharmesh Shah was writing a couple of posts a week on a blog called OnStartups, and Brian Halligan watched it pull more interest than his venture-backed startups did.

Halligan named what he saw: inbound versus outbound. In Dharmesh’s words, the pitch was to take the budget you’d spend blasting a message at people and “create value for your prospective customers” instead. Dharmesh is still posting two decades later, now to about 1.2M followers.

Why Did HubSpot Start Buying Media Companies?

By 2021 a blog wasn’t enough. That February HubSpot bought The Hustle, with its 1.5M-subscriber newsletter and the My First Million podcast hosted by Sam Parr and Shaan Puri, for $20.3M according to its SEC filing. Three months later it launched the HubSpot Podcast Network with six shows.

The team became part of the media company too. Kipp Bodnar and Kieran Flanagan run marketing and also host a show, Marketing Against the Grain. CEO Yamini Rangan publishes data from HubSpot’s 306,446 customers, Kyle Jepson posts product tips most days, and Daphne Costa Lopes writes about customer success.

The two biggest audiences on the team didn’t come through a job ad. Adam Biddlecombe and Matt Village arrived with Mindstream, the AI newsletter HubSpot bought in October 2024.

How Does HubSpot’s Creator Program Work?

HubSpot’s creator site calls it “HubSpot’s in-house influencer marketing agency”, and you can spot the current roster by the disclosure tag every partner carries, HubSpotMediaPartner.

On LinkedIn that includes Eric Partaker, Ben Meer, Jade Bonacolta, Lara Acosta and Jean Kang. On YouTube it’s Ali Abdaal, Nischa Shah, Ishan Sharma, Jeff Su and Marina Mogilko, and Tim Ruscica, Tina Huang, Matt Wolfe and Robert Benjamin each got a series of their own.

None of it is one-off. Jade has posted for HubSpot 12 times in the last year, and the roster posts together around the same launches, which is what turns a list of sponsored posts into a channel.

How Did a Creator Partnership Turn Into an Acquisition?

Brandon Huang on the creator partnerships team cold-emailed Kevin Hutson in November 2023 with no introduction, and in his words “he replied five days later”.

That one email became 52 sponsored videos across Futurepedia and Skill Leap AI and more than 14 million views for HubSpot. In April 2026 HubSpot bought Futurepedia outright for about $27.5M. Starter Story, bought two months earlier, also started as a creator partner, so two of HubSpot’s four media acquisitions began as creator partnerships.

Jonathan Hunt, who runs HubSpot Media, calls the network of media brands and creator partnerships “the largest source of organic content lead generation for the business.” That’s why Bodnar and Flanagan could bury inbound in public: they’d already built what comes after it.

What Can You Copy From HubSpot Without HubSpot’s Budget?

Almost nobody has made creators the core of their growth the way HubSpot has, and most companies won’t be buying a YouTube network. Three parts of it work at any size:

1. Run creators as a roster that keeps posting. HubSpot’s partners post repeatedly and together, so the audience sees the product again and again from different people they trust.
2. Put your own people on camera. HubSpot’s marketing leaders host a show and its CEO publishes data, so the brand has faces before any creator is paid.
3. Treat your best creator partners as long-term relationships. Futurepedia went from a cold email to 52 videos to an acquisition, because HubSpot kept investing in what worked.

That roster model is what we run for B2B SaaS and AI companies, on LinkedIn first and on YouTube and newsletters where the buyers are. Our Productive case study shows a launch turning into an always-on program, and our case studies cover the rest.

For a company that gets 600+ partners posting while paying only a handful, read our Clay teardown.