Starter Story brings an audience that aligns closely with HubSpot’s core customer base: early-stage founders and small businesses looking to grow. It also builds on its strategy of acquiring creator-led media brands, as both My First Million and Mindshare are anchored by small, founder-centric teams.
With the tie-up, HubSpot is betting that the path to software adoption increasingly begins not with a search query or an ad, but with a YouTube video.
“Small business is a core audience for us,” Hunt said. “Starter Story is one of the largest non-traditional media brands speaking to founders who are gaining momentum and need tools to accelerate that growth.”
The logic behind the strategy reflects broader shifts in how buyers discover software.
As search traffic declines and social advertising costs rise, potential customers are increasingly gathering information across fragmented environments, from Reddit and ChatGPT to YouTube and newsletters. Owning niche media brands, according to Hunt, creates a defensible channel for reaching those audiences earlier in their journey.
A creator business built on video
Starter Story’s growth in recent years has been driven largely by its pivot to YouTube, where long-form founder interviews now generate between 1.5 million and 2 million monthly views, according to Walls.
“We saw the attention shifting toward video and jumped on that wave,” Walls said.
That trajectory mirrors a broader industry trend. YouTube has become the primary incubator for a new generation of media businesses, offering both discovery and monetization at a time when traffic to traditional websites is under pressure.
Starter Story’s revenue model has also evolved alongside its audience. Prior to the acquisition, roughly 75% of its revenue came from its own products—including subscriptions, courses, and a paid community of more than 10,000 members—rather than advertising.
For HubSpot, the deal is less about advertising revenue than about building a media ecosystem that feeds its sales pipeline.
The division already reaches millions of business professionals each month, and future monetization for Starter Story will lean more heavily into demand generation and community-driven products tied to HubSpot’s broader network.
The acquisition also comes as lower barriers to entry, driven in part by AI tools, are enabling more people to launch businesses, expanding the pool of potential customers.
“We’re seeing more founders being able to build than ever before,” Walls said.
