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🚀 This Week's Growth Hack 🚀 

🚨 New: CAN’T MISS Marketing Signal

Marketing is all about campaigns, affiliate partnerships, paid ads, product launches, lead gen forms, dashboards, and quarterly targets… Right?!

Wrong!

The smartest companies in the world no longer think of marketing as a department that promotes the product. They think of it as a distribution engine that owns attention.

And no company is signaling this shift louder right now than HubSpot.

HubSpot acquired Starter Story last week. From everything I understand, this wasn’t about acquiring a cash-flowing media company (Starter Story does around $1m/yr from premium content).

It was about their Newsletter & YouTube eyeballs.

This is also the second major media acquisition for HubSpot. A few years ago they acquired The Hustle, which also included the business podcast My First Million. At the time, HubSpot had already been advertising heavily in The Hustle’s newsletter. The math worked. Their CAC to LTV ratio from advertising to that audience was strong.

So they made a logical move: instead of renting the audience, they bought the platform.

This is not a random media experiment. This is capital allocation from one of the largest software companies in the world. HubSpot has endless places it could deploy cash. Product development. International expansion. AI tooling. Enterprise sales…

Instead, it’s buying newsletters, podcasts, and YouTube channels.

Why?

Because attention is a scarce asset.

You Cannot Grow If People Don’t Know You Exist

At the most fundamental level, businesses grow in two ways: word of mouth or paid distribution. Either customers tell other customers about you, or you pay to get in front of your target customers via an audience someone else owns.

Most companies live and die by rented reach. They sponsor newsletters (like this one). They run paid social ads. They buy search traffic. They place podcast ads. Every month they pay the toll again.

HubSpot looked at this system and realized something important: if our customers are already consuming business content on YouTube, reading entrepreneur newsletters, and listening to startup podcasts, why are we perpetually renting access (eyeballs)?

Why not own the highway?

The Real Growth Hack: Attention Arbitrage

Here’s the part most people miss. This isn’t about HubSpot becoming a content brand for fun. It’s about attention arbitrage.

If you know that your ideal customer spends time in a specific media ecosystem, you have three options:

1. Pay to Access the Attention

This is the most common route. You sponsor the newsletter. You buy the podcast ads. You run YouTube pre-roll. You place paid media against your target audience.

This works. I charge brands to get in front of my audience every single week. It is a clean exchange of money for distribution. Hundreds of brands have found us to be a profitable acquisition channel (and if you wanna join them, start here)

But you are renting. The second you stop paying, the access disappears. It’s like paying for a booth at a trade show every month for the rest of your life.

2. Buy the Attention

This is what HubSpot is doing.

Instead of paying for ad slots forever, they acquire the media asset. If the unit economics are already strong as an advertiser, the math can become even more attractive as the owner.

When you own the newsletter, the podcast, or the YouTube channel, every ad impression is yours. Every lead magnet slot is yours. Every pixel, every retargeting audience, every email subscriber becomes part of your long-term ecosystem.

Most founders never even consider this path. They think acquisitions are only for competitors. But buying distribution can be more profitable than buying revenue.

If a niche newsletter in your space reliably reaches your exact buyer persona and you already know ads convert there, why not explore acquiring it? The multiple might be lower than you think, and the long-term CAC advantage might be massive.

3. Build the Attention From Scratch

This is the slowest route, but by far the most defensible & highest ROI.

Start the YouTube channel. Launch the newsletter. Build the podcast. Show up consistently on LinkedIn. Over time, your marketing department transforms into a media arm. This is EXACTLY what I did after I sold my last agency 4 years ago. I started creating content online as Marketing Max, knowing that any product or service or company I want to launch in the future will get its first batch of customers for free because I will have the attention.

It worked out so well for me that brands started approaching us to help them build these media machines for them because once they reach escape velocity, something magical happens. Customer acquisition costs drop. Authority compounds. Partnerships increase. Deal flow accelerates.

Now we actively grow, create content, and monetize newsletters for 40+ active B2B brands! Owning attention is like owning beachfront real estate in a city that keeps growing. It appreciates while you sleep. And the best part? We do it all for you, here!

Please, Don’t Ignore This

HubSpot is one of the biggest software companies in the world and the second-largest CRM platform. Their executive team has access to more data than almost anyone reading this newsletter. If they are doubling down on owning distribution through media acquisitions, that is not a coincidence.

It is a signal you need to be paying attention to.

The future of marketing is not just better ads or better funnels. It is better ownership of attention.

So here’s your Growth Hack for the week:

Stop thinking purely like a marketer optimizing campaigns. Start thinking like a media owner controlling distribution.

Ask yourself:

• Where does my ideal customer already consume content?

• Am I renting that attention?

• Could I buy it?

• Should I build it?

Two of those three paths create leverage that compounds over time. And if you’re serious about playing the game of business, you need to be investing in one of those two out of the three attention arbitrage opportunities.

Because in 2026 and beyond, the companies that win won’t just have better products.

They’ll have better distribution.

See you next week,
MarketingMax

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That’s it for this week!​

Thanks for being a part of my journey :)

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