HubSpot For Startups

Working across dozens of B2B Craft Ventures portfolio companies, it's 1000% clear that LinkedIn is a powerhouse for building trust, amplifying their brand and, driving meaningful pipeline and customer activity at various funnel stages. How do you get over the cold start problem? Here are 5 key insights for founders, marketers, and GTM leaders to maximize LinkedIn. ______________________ 1. LinkedIn thrives on trust: The bar for content is high—thoughtful, valuable, and authentic posts resonate more than flashy campaigns. 2. Founders make an impact: Founder-led sales and branding are some of the most effective ways to build credibility and drive engagement. 3. Video wins attention: From corporate humor (ClickUp’s style) to educational content, video is one of the most digestible and engaging formats on LinkedIn—shoutout to Chris Cunningham who has taken this to the next level. 4. Personal brands + ICP focus: Whether it’s a founder, or GTM executive, strong individual presences on LinkedIn can amplify messaging and connection with your Ideal Customer Persona (ICP) beyond what "traditional" demand gen. ➝ ➝ ➝ One of my favorite executives in the Craft Ventures portfolio leveraging LinkedIn is Kyle Coleman, CMO at Copy.ai—Kyle does an outstanding job of leveraging relevant, helpful and thoughtful ICP-driven content while sitting in a position of trust in his current and past roles (while also running marketing for one of the best GTM platforms centric around generative AI). 5. Integrated strategies work best: A mix of LinkedIn ads, InMails, video content, and personal thought leadership posts creates a holistic, high-impact presence. ➝ ➝ ➝ I've had the pleasure of working with Peter Fishman, Co-Founder & CEO at Mozart Data, in the Craft Ventures portfolio to use an integrated campaign style with personal posting layered on top of a core demand generation effort (with an actually good E-Book alongside InMails) to validate a GTM thesis while building positive ROI in pipeline and closed-won revenue. ________________________ Want to check out the full session with Ruby James from LinkedIn and Ron Dawson from HubSpot For Startups where talk about this? Watch it here: [Link in comments] Would love additional thoughts on what else is working on LinkedIn now—tagging in some of my other favorite folks:  Adrian Alfieri, Brian Sun, Caroline B., Devin Reed, Nigel Stevens, 😻 Maeva Cifuentes, Meg Scarborough

🎁 I normally share one useful resource per month in our newsletter to the Stone & Chalk community but this one is to good not to share wider! HubSpot For Startups is giving the gift of growth this festive season with "The Founder's Festive Toolbox: Tech Treats for Trailblazers". The toolbox includes software discounts, freebies, and more, to help you sleigh in 2025! We are talking up to $1.5k in TikTok/LinkedIn/Google Ad Credits, 12 month Asana & Make for free, $5k Amazon Web Services (AWS) credits and significant discounts on Apollo.io, Vanta, OpenPhone, Dropbox worth more than USD$100,000! Claim Your Festive Toolbox by 20th of December: https://lnkd.in/g_NSgngy Gwenllian Ching Linh Le Lucinda Batey

📅 Join us Dec 12th 2pm ET for Forum Ventures & HubSpot For Startups' latest workshop on founder-led sales. Great opportunity to learn how to build + scale your sales operation directly from a founder that has done it himself. As HubSpot Ventures's 2023 Million Dollar Pitch competition winner, doola CEO Arjun Mahadevan knows a thing or two about surpassing the $1M ARR mark. We'll show you exactly how to create a sales pipeline and automate it to free up your time. 👇 RSVP in the comments. Attendees will also get some 🎁 free tech stack perks from TikTok, Google Ads, Apollo.io, OpenPhone & more.

HubSpot For Startups report analyzed 500 startups that raised capital in the last 6 months. We can learn from history & data. These 3 out of their (many more) findings can help you build a solid strategy in Q1 2025: 🗣️ 52% of founders pitched between 10- 50 investors before securing funding for their startup.  𝑺𝒕𝒓𝒂𝒕𝒆𝒈𝒚 → build a wider investor list and find your Ideal Investor Targets to know who to pitch first. Prioritise your time wisely. 🎯 Most effective fundraising methods were a combination of warm introductions, cold outreach and online fundraising platforms. 𝑺𝒕𝒓𝒂𝒕𝒆𝒈𝒚 → utilise all help available. Plus, attend a Fundraising Playbooks ‘Warm Investor Outreach’ Masterclass in January… 🤖 AI startups are more likely to use Cold Outreach to connect with investors, and twice as likely to find cold outreach to be effective than non-AI-based startups. 𝑺𝒕𝒓𝒂𝒕𝒆𝒈𝒚 → AI is omnipotent and ubiquitous. Use it in your business model/ operations/ etc. If you don’t, you’re putting yourself at a disadvantage. I was super happy to participate with my insights in the report (thank you team!) And one of my favourite insights is the funding sources at Pre Seed and Seed stage: 56% Friends & Family 39% Angel Investors 36% VC or cVCs (almost same as Angels!) 29% Crowdfunding (larger than I expected) 26% Accelerators / Incubators funding (I think that’s within norm) 25% Grants ( larger than I would think!) #fundraisingplaybooks #startupfunding #capitalraising