Running a Media Company Inside HubSpot with Jonathan Hunt (VP, Media and Content)

#368 | Dave sits down with Jonathan Hunt, VP of Content and Media at HubSpot, to talk about what it means to run a media company inside a software company, and why that framing changes everything about how you build a content team. Jonathan runs a 70-person operation reaching 50 million people a month across 17 YouTube channels and a creator network of 150. They get into how HubSpot thinks about the three jobs of content (demand gen, influence, and earned media value), why gated PDFs are dead and what's replacing them, how Jonathan's team built an AI clipping engine in a six-week sprint, and how to tell the measurement story to a public company's CFO. Plus: what Jonathan looks for when hiring, how creator partnerships actually work at scale, and why "creative freedom" without strategy is just chaos.

Timestamps

• (00:00) - - - Jonathan Hunt, VP of Content and Media at HubSpot
• (03:17) - - - Running a media company inside a software company
• (07:47) - - - From the HubSpot blog to a network of 150 creators
• (11:22) - - - How to find creators (and the tool Jonathan recommends)
• (12:39) - - - The three jobs of content: demand gen, influence, and earned media value
• (17:22) - - - How to tell the measurement story to your CFO
• (20:42) - - - Why gated PDFs are dead and what converts now
• (24:00) - - - What actually works in creator partnerships
• (31:21) - - - The AI clipping engine HubSpot built in six weeks
• (45:38) - - - HubSpot's public code of ethics for AI use

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Thanks to my friends at hatch.fm for producing this episode and handling all of the Exit Five podcast production.