Smarter Growth for Startups in 2025

Startups move fast—but scaling smart takes more than speed. In this episode of Avidly Talks, Emily Yates sits down with Ragini Campion to explore how the HubSpot for Startups program empowers early-stage founders with the tools, support, and AI-powered features they need to grow sustainably. From exclusive discounts to hands-on demos of new AI capabilities like the social agent, this conversation is packed with insights for any founder looking to do more with less. Let’s dive into the takeaways that could change the way your startup scales.

Listen to the Full Episode here

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Takeaways from this episode:

• The HubSpot for Startups program supports early-stage founders.
• Startups can access discounts based on their funding stage.
• HubSpot offers a range of tools tailored for startups.
• AI integration in HubSpot enhances productivity and efficiency.
• Social media management is simplified with HubSpot's social agent.
• Founders can save significant time using AI tools.
• The program includes access to a network of partners and resources.
• Master classes and community events are part of the offering.
• HubSpot's tools are designed to grow with startups.
• The platform is user-friendly, allowing quick onboarding for new users.

Chapters 

00:00 Overview of HubSpot for Startups Program
05:17 Benefits and Eligibility of the Program
09:17 Tools and Resources for Founders
15:10 AI Integration in HubSpot
19:12 Social Media Management with HubSpot AI
23:02 outro josefine avidly talks - short.mp4

How HubSpot Empowers Startups to Scale Smarter
Insights from Avidly Talks with Ragini Campion

Early-stage founders face a steep climb—tight budgets, growing teams, and the pressure to move fast. But what if your CRM could actually help you scale smarter, not just faster?

In a recent episode of Avidly Talks, Emily Yates sits down with Ragini Campion to unpack the HubSpot for Startups program—an initiative designed to support growing businesses with not just tools, but guidance, partnerships, and real ROI.

Whether you're bootstrapping or backed by VCs, this conversation offers a practical look at how HubSpot is creating real impact in the startup ecosystem.

1. What Is HubSpot for Startups?

The HubSpot for Startups program provides eligible early-stage businesses with:

• Up to 90% off HubSpot tools

• Access to a robust partner network

• Free education and onboarding

• Scalable CRM infrastructure from day one

Ragini explains how the program removes technical and financial barriers so founders can focus on what matters—building great products and winning their first customers.

2. AI-Enhanced Tools That Drive Efficiency

One of the highlights of the conversation is the growing role of AI within the HubSpot platform. Ragini and Emily walk through a demo of the AI-powered social agent, a new tool that helps founders manage and publish social content quickly, with suggested posts tailored to your audience and brand tone.

Other powerful AI features for startups include:

• Content Assistants for blog posts, emails, and landing pages

• Lead scoring automation for smarter sales prioritization

• Chatbots and workflows to keep users engaged while you sleep

3. Built-In Support for Founders

Startups often face an uphill battle with implementation and adoption. That’s why the program pairs tech access with a network of certified partners, including agencies like Avidly, to ensure startups don’t just have the tools—but know how to use them.

Founders also get access to:

• Workshops and templates for marketing, sales, and ops

• Startup community events and office hours

• Custom onboarding experiences to match your growth stage

4. Why Startups Choose HubSpot

The beauty of the program lies in its scalability. Whether you're pre-revenue or scaling to Series B, HubSpot provides a single source of truth for marketing, sales, and customer service—reducing tech sprawl and boosting operational clarity.

As Ragini notes, startups that integrate HubSpot early tend to scale faster because:

• They avoid Frankensteined tool stacks

• Their teams adopt clear processes early

• They gain instant visibility into performance

Conclusion: Start Smart, Scale Smarter

The HubSpot for Startups program isn’t just a discount—it's a launchpad. With smart tools, AI integrations, and expert guidance, it gives early-stage teams the foundation to scale sustainably and strategically.

If you're a founder looking to build momentum without burning out, this conversation offers a roadmap worth following.

Want to see the AI-powered social agent in action?
🎥 Watch the full episode for a live demo and behind-the-scenes look at how startups are transforming their marketing with HubSpot.

Transcript:

Emily Yates (04:00.067)
Yeah, so we've got a bit of a different set up today because we're on a different platform. We should have been on LinkedIn. Really sorry for that issue. I'm joined today by someone from HubSpot, Ragini, and she is going to be talking to us about the HubSpot for Startups program. So do want to give us a little bit of an introduction to yourself?

Ragini Campion (04:21.408)
Amazing. Yes. First of all, thank you so much for having me. And I'm excited to also be on my first LinkedIn, well, Riverside Live, I guess, at this point. But yeah, I'm Ragini Kampi and I work on the HubSpot for Startups team. We sit as a team within marketing at HubSpot and our goal really is to help early stage founders. So those building entrepreneurs, those sort of like budding entrepreneurs building early stage businesses.

anything from pre-seed, seed to series A. And our goal really is to help them access the best of HubSpot through the program. So that means favorable discounting, means providing access to HubSpot's resources, partner networks, et cetera, as well as a curated set of master classes. So I'll take you through, I know you had some questions about how people can apply for the program, who's eligible, et cetera.

So we can get into that. otherwise, yeah, my goal really my day to day is to work with partners and ultimately support their founders and startups.

Emily Yates (05:17.207)
Amazing. So can you tell us a little bit more about the program itself and how people can sort of make the most of it?

Ragini Campion (05:29.19)
I would love to. So just want to confirm that you are able to see my slide. Perfect. Amazing. Thank you, Emily. So yeah, this is just, you know, I'm not really running through a presentation here, but just to give everyone a flavor for what the program is, I thought I'd put something together. But essentially the program has been live for a number of years. We were actually one of the first first SaaS companies to launch a startup program.

Emily Yates (05:34.71)
I am, yes.

Ragini Campion (05:54.638)
well before AWS activate as well. And since then we've had about 35,000 founders who have applied to the HubSpot for Startups program globally and are continuing to grow with us. The program itself offers three core benefits, I would say. The first one is access to HubSpot's network. So what that means is we open up our tech partners and their perks. So for example, we have...

over $100,000 USD of tech stack offers that we give to us founders in the program from companies like Asana, Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and most recently three months free of perplexity AI enterprise licenses that founders can leverage. So that's one of the ways we open up the access that HubSpot has to startup founders. The other thing that we offer is the ability for startups to start small with HubSpot.

But when they're ready to scale and when they begin to need those more advanced features with workflows, automation, more of a platform solution, we have a discount that kicks in at that stage. So when you apply to the HubSpot for Startups program, you get set up with all of our free tools. So that's the free CRM, the free marketing sales service and content tools. And then when you're ready to hit scale, we have a discount of up to 75 % off that kicks in.

on our pro and enterprise tier licenses. And how we decide who gets what discount really boils down to funding. So essentially the magic number to remember is 2 million USD. So if startups have raised more than 2 million USD, we offer them a 50 % discount on professional and enterprise tier licenses in year one, dropping to 25 % in year two. But if you are a slightly earlier stage startup and the higher volume of our startups tend to be in this category,

And if you raise less than 2 million USD, you get 75 % off in year one, 50 % off in year two, and then 25 % off in year three as well. And the way you apply for that program is by either going to hubspot.com slash startups and finding a partner that we work with that you have an affiliation with. So whether that's, know, Emily, sometimes we have startups that come to us from VCs or accelerators, incubators. We also have partnerships with coworking spaces.

Ragini Campion (08:12.524)
So if you're a startup and you're most likely plugged into an ecosystem of some sort, there's likely a partner there who can offer you the HubSpot for startups benefits. And you just apply, you choose their partner, their name on the dropdown option when it shows up when you apply on the website. You can also follow the QR code directly to get a special offer for today, which is the 30 % off and then find a partner who can offer you a 75 or 50 % off once you've applied to the program. So that's the core of how we kind of help.

startups get started early and then grow with the program. And then, you know, as part of the program, we also attend events like this, but we also support community events that our VCs run, our accelerators run, and we have an annual calendar of master classes. So we invite go-to-market experts, both from within HubSpot, but from our network as well, to help founders really upscale on those best practices. And especially now with AI, you know, that's kind of...

the bread and butter of what we're doing this year with upscaling founders. So yeah, we have anything from like, I'd say eight to 10 events happening every month. And this is Europe alone, you know, so there's quite a lot happening for founders, yeah, throughout the year. So that's very high level what the HubSpot for Startups program is.

Emily Yates (09:24.577)
I wasn't aware of just how much HubSpot did to support founders in those very early stages. as I've been researching for this, I've found it really insightful.

Ragini Campion (09:36.782)
Yeah, I'd say I always tell people and we say this internally as well, HubSpot was once a startup as well and we've never forgotten it. So yeah, we continue to add to this offering as we go as well. But it's a really cool team within HubSpot to be part of.

Emily Yates (09:49.508)
Yeah, and I guess it feeds into that, that you never stop sort of learning as well, it feeds into that whole mentality of how HubSpot is as well. It's how I imagine everyone that works at HubSpot to be. So yeah, so that's, I mean, that's really, really good. What are some of the tools and stuff that founders find really useful when they're getting started with HubSpot?

Ragini Campion (10:15.32)
That's a really good question. find that, I mean, of course it varies, I think, depending on what stage of funding there are, what their needs are, how big their teams are. But we tend to find the most popular tools that startups begin with, HubSpot when they come to the program, is a combination of marketing and sales. know, given that's primarily where they're going to be concentrating their time apart from finding like product market fit as a business, they're going to be focused much more on trying to get their first hundred leads or trying to convert their first 10 customers.

And so that's where we see the most popular product. And what's super interesting is also as startups sort of begin and grow with us, we found actually many of them stay on HubSpot as well. you we have about, I think the last time we looked at this 40 % of German unicorns, I believe there were 30 at the time of the report, 12 of them are customers that came to us through the HubSpot for Startups program.

starting and growing and I think three out of one out of every three in UKI unicorns, they're HubSpot for startups customers as well. So the ability to start with one or two hubs or tools that you need and then sort of grow is really what HubSpot offers as you expand your team. The other exercise I did, which is like a really low key, I mean, it's not coming from any reports or anything, but I just, cause I managed the Nordics as a market and I took a look at our top five customers that came through the HubSpot for startups program.

getting that 75 % discount. And when I took a look at those top five customers, what they had most in common, because I know today we're kind of focused on social and how you can leverage social, what they had in common that they did, so these are the most successful ones, were sort of three things. One was all of them have a combination of ads and organic social. So all of them are using both sort of scheduling posts and that sort of...

those features as well as on average about two to three ad networks connected and the volume of ads really varies. I saw one of the customers had anything from like 24 ads being created per month versus the highest one is like 1,500. So again, a huge variance there. But the other interesting thing amongst these five customers is also we're seeing a huge increase compared to last year in the use of campaigns. So really speaking to what we're seeing with marketing in general, with people

Ragini Campion (12:34.67)
going to this like only channel strategy, multi-channel approach and being able to think from a lens of campaigns, which often is an early stage entrepreneur that might not necessarily be the way that you think about marketing. But we're seeing that that's changing.

Emily Yates (12:49.589)
I guess there's lots of, I mean, we've touched on the fact that we're going to talk about the social side of it here, but I guess the new agents and things like that play a part in that, and I believe we might have a bit of a demo as well to run through.

Ragini Campion (13:06.634)
I will do my best to try and speed through that as best as I can, but just to give everyone sort of like a high level overview, you know, if you're on your hub spot or you've been on HubSpot already before, but you are starting to leverage the tools, really how HubSpot's AI is available to you is across four categories. So we've got Breeze Copilot, we have Breeze Agents, and then of course we're embedding AI across all of our hubs, whether it's the free tier or paid tier, really making sure that the CRM is working hard for you.

And that's why now we're calling it a smart CRM. And then the fourth category is enriching the data that's already in your CRM or that you want to bring into your CRM with Breeze Intelligence. So finding access to our database of information on companies and improving the data you have on your companies and contacts within your CRM. So that's kind of the broad brush on what we have available. I'm going to try and show you one particular agent that I think could be really useful for companies.

that are early stage, small teams don't necessarily have the money for a social media, know, contractor or to hire something like social media agent could be really helpful. And that's one of the agents I'll show you today. But of course, you know, we'll also be sharing links to some of the other agents we have live HubSpot has four available prospecting agent to help you do sales outreach. You can choose whether you want that to be completely autonomous or semi-autonomous.

We've got content agent to help you literally build out landing pages for your campaigns, blogs, podcasts, a whole wide bunch of creation for your digital assets. And then of course we have a social agent and customer agent, which is one of our most successful ones. I HubSpot is using it internally as well. Don't quote me on this. I shouldn't be saying this in a live session, but I believe it's something like we found 50 % resolution, a successful resolution through using customer agents.

some really powerful early stats there.

Emily Yates (15:00.419)
Yeah, and guess that really helps for founders who are trying to do things fast and efficient and get things moving so that they can scale that business at the speed that they want to.

Ragini Campion (15:13.356)
Yeah, that's the key, I guess, is the speed, right? Like everyone knows that AI obviously is going to help you be more productive. But I think if you look at the time saved, that's like a really underrated point, is like how much time that actually saves. We had a French startup, AgiCap, I believe, and we had a case study on them and they saved something like 750 hours weekly and they've only just started to use Breeze. So really powerful, even if you just think about just time.

and how much you can save and how quickly you can shift things out. with that, yeah, given the fact that we have a couple more minutes left, I'm gonna try to jump into the tool to actually give everybody a flavor for what's happening. I wanna make sure you can actually see the right screen now. Emily, can you confirm? You guys can see that. So we're in live within HubSpot now, which is where I live most of my day. And I suspect where Emily, you live too.

Emily Yates (15:57.124)
I can see the right screen, yeah?

Emily Yates (16:06.007)
I'm in there quite a lot, yeah.

Ragini Campion (16:07.406)
So we're currently sitting within, HubSpot is primarily left pane driven. So you can see we're sitting here within marketing. Because I had the live today, I bookmarked this. And if there are frequent tools you tend to come to most often, you can of course bookmark them yourself as well. But we come into a social agent, which is one of our live AI agents available from Professional Plus only. So I do want to caveat that it's not available in the free CRM currently or in the start-up here. You do need to be a professional customer to be able to access social agent right now.

and you can request this within your portal. So once you come in here, the first step is to kind of get a feeling for what the agent actually does. And you tell the agent a little bit more kind of about your business, right? In this case, we've got Zen Plant Care, but let's say you have a business that offers you something else. You know, maybe you're a smart notebook provider that focuses on, you know, yeah, AI generated.

These are handwriting.

to be coworking spaces, whatever it is your business is you tell the AI a little bit more about it, who you're selling to, coworking spaces, et cetera. And then it sort of works in the background to offer you a set of social posts that meet that particular business, not just because it's basically pulling from your business description here, but also your domain, as well as what you've told the CRM your brand identity is. So.

things like your brand colors, your brand tone, is it witty, is it humorous, and it pulls from that. In this case, this is a demo portal that's kind of already built and I don't want to change this for everyone else, but you'll see here this is a preview of some of the examples that comes up. In this case, it's showing a Facebook post, you know, talking about how to keep your plants happy, etc., and then you can sort of update that as you go. But what I want to show you that's really cool is you can actually review each of these posts before they go live.

Ragini Campion (18:05.89)
And what I find really handy is once you've created something for one channel, let's say LinkedIn, all of a sudden, then you have to build it out for Instagram. You have to then build it out for X and everything has a different algorithm, but this agent does that for you. It makes sure it's within character limits. It's got the right hashtags. It's got links in the right way, as well as, you know, focuses on, let's say a more image heavy post when it comes to Instagram. So you can really get a feel for across all the channels, what it's going to do.

And I know with AI people are like, that's a bit odd. Like, why did it choose to do that? It actually tells you. find this to be such a useful feature. I mean, I know you can do this on ChatGPT as well where you just ask it, like, explain your reasoning. But we have this pre-build where it says, like, here's the reason why our AI is recommending this post for you. And then you can provide feedback on that as well. So you can.

Emily Yates (18:55.725)
Is that part in other areas of HubSpot too, that rationale?

Ragini Campion (19:00.054)
Ooh, I don't know. I know that you can use Breeze Copilot and you could potentially ask it for rationale so we can test that out.

Emily Yates (19:06.593)
not seen that before, that's really useful. Yeah, I like that.

Ragini Campion (19:09.588)
Handy, right? And so yeah, you can kind of go through this, review the posts and sort of set it up and you can connect your whatever accounts you have and then it sort of functions like a social media expert suggesting different posts. And it's got lots of different categories here as well. So you can kind of choose like.

These are the ones available. I'm sure we'll be adding to this as time goes, but these are the types of posts you can do. You know, the AI agent will provide posts on marketing events, sort of like brand content, also like what sort of products and services you offer and sort of top performing content within those keywords and spaces as well. And then I want to show you the reply feature, but I don't know if I can do this on this portal. So I've got another one ready to go. But what's really powerful that we're seeing actually across our top customers and how they're using social media is also how they use it for social listening.

So not just sort of being a fly on the wall to see what people are saying about your brand, but actively participating in that conversation. So I'm in a slightly different portal now, which is our internal one here. And you can see I'm now within the reply tab. And within that, I've got mentioned. So I'm currently connected to LinkedIn. And I can see that my colleague, actually Anna, has posted something about HubSpot for Startup. She's tagged us, so I can see this here.

And when I click on it, it opens up this screen on the right here where I can actually respond directly to Anna. I can like it from the HubSpot for Startups account. And then if I, you know, I'm uninspired during the day when I'm responding or I need some help, I can just hit AI and say, you know, respond to Anna or quick reply. And it will suggest things that I could say to Anna in response. So really making it easy, not just to see what's happening about your brand and who's posting about it.

but also to actually be a part of that conversation and steer that brand along. And then of course, this is what all Marketing Hub users have, but worth pointing out that in social, you can also analyze all of your different social channels, your posts in one place, which is one of the top use cases for connecting it to something like this. So you're not having to go to like five or six different platforms to see what's going on with your updates.

Emily Yates (21:17.509)
Amazing I don't think I've seen a demo of the social agent before and I particularly liked how it drew in from the brand that you've got built in the settings of your HubSpot as well. So I really like that and I like I'm assuming it's continually learning about you as you go through and yeah.

Ragini Campion (21:38.292)
It is, yeah. mean, I think this is the thing sometimes people, you know, this is live, like even the, if you are a free user of HubSpot, HubSpot's Breeze Co-Pilot is available and ready for you. And the more you interact with it, of course, the better it gets at learning more about your brand identity, what works for you, what sort of email outreach you prefer, et cetera. But I mean, I just want to share one thing super quickly, which is, let me see if I can go back to sharing my screen, which is, there we

Go under, yeah. So once you come into your HubSpot portal, this is literally my last tip for the day is if you haven't done this yet, just go into settings, go into AI, and then make sure if you want to use these features in your tools, just give it access first. Otherwise, you won't really be able to do anything with it. And once you've come in here, you'll actually be able to do something really powerful, which is not just leave the AI to figure out information about your business, but tell it like you're saying, Emily, about your brand.

We know what your brand kit is, make sure you update that. Give it information about your company and tell it about your ideal customer as well. Like you can actually have multiple different ICPs and you can tell it all the information you know so that the AI is not just like randomly producing content, but producing content that's connected to you, your business, your startup and the kind of customer that you're ultimately trying to close.

Emily Yates (23:00.773)
I guess by spending a little bit of time setting those up, it then adds so much more potential to what you're putting out there and ultimately once you've done that you only have to do it once unless your brand completely changes. So I guess that's a really useful thing for start ups too, where they can just move in quickly because that's what start ups want to do isn't it?

Ragini Campion (23:25.45)
Exactly. And like with founders, you just, haven't got the time. You've got your fundraising constantly. That's a full-time job. You're running this business. You just don't have the time to also have to create this content, have the pressure of it. So social media agent can take something like that away and do it for you. And then of course, you know, as you scale and you don't have to start with the bigger subscriptions with HubSpot, you can start small. And then as you get more comfortable using the tool.

you grow, but yeah, it's such an easy platform. Like founders often come and tell me, I don't even have to upskill my team. They just hit the ground running when they come on board, which is ideal if you have a business.

Emily Yates (24:00.869)
I've often said as well about HubSpot that once you know one part of HubSpot, you can almost go into any area of HubSpot and you can almost hit the ground running with it straight away. Because everything has the same look and feel about it and as you get into just getting that logic in place and it's so straightforward and simple to use.

Ragini Campion (24:10.574)
That's such a good way to put it. Yeah.

Ragini Campion (24:26.188)
Yeah, I love the way you said that I'm gonna be using that actually in my conversations. That's so true because if you've created a sequence, can create a workflow. If you've created a workflow, can build a landing page. Yeah, so true.

Emily Yates (24:33.817)
Yeah.

Emily Yates (24:37.357)
Create a landing page, can create a website page. So, obviously we are slightly over the half past because we had some technical issues at the start. If there's anyone watching that has any questions, you can pop it into the chat here. We can always come back to you afterwards as well. mean, I'm sure you don't mind people connecting with you on LinkedIn.

Ragini Campion (24:39.636)
Yep.

Ragini Campion (25:02.516)
not at all. Reach out if you are a startup, have any questions about how you can access the program. We've also shared a few links in the chat if you want to take a look there. We have our free CRM as well as a 30 % offer for you today through Avidly. So that's instant approval. And then if you want to unlock the higher tier of discounting, you need to find a partner that you're affiliated with, that we work with.

And then yeah, a bit more on lots of the customer agents that I talked about. Check out the demos so that you can see what's possible with these agents and what's super cool is also, you know, what Darmesh launched, which is that agent.ai. It's just, it's just a marketplace and you can literally build your own AI agent. Like we've had people build like LinkedIn scraping profile agents and generate your website, just meta descriptions sort of agents. So no matter how small or big the task is.

Yeah, have a play, even if you're not technical. I'm not technical and I've tried to build an AI agent myself.

Emily Yates (25:59.673)
I just say, look out for that little diamond in HubSpot and you're there. That can help you. Amazing. So obviously a lot of the comments in here are the links that we've shared. There's no questions come through. But what we'll do is we'll also share the links that we've shared today into the original LinkedIn Live. And when we share the recording of this so that people who wanted to join originally can watch that.

Ragini Campion (26:04.126)
Exactly.

Emily Yates (26:29.241)
they can access all of these things too. So yeah, final thing from me, thank you so much for joining me. I love technology when it goes wrong. No, joking, I don't really.

Ragini Campion (26:31.566)
Sounds good.

Ragini Campion (26:36.856)
Thank you.

Ragini Campion (26:41.3)
It's all part and parcel of the world we live in. So don't worry about it at all. But it was so nice. It was so nice to have a conversation as well. Emily, thank you so much for having me and thank you to the Avidly team. I'd be happy to come back any time.

Emily Yates (26:50.662)
amazing amazing I'm gonna stop the recording now