In ‘20/’21 while the world was battling the COVID pandemic, HubSpot acquired The Hustle for a reported $27M — you would expect a SaaS company to be acquiring SaaS companies, but in this case, a SaaS company acquired a media business:
The Hustle had a daily newsletter (~1.5M subs) and a podcast called “My First Million”
HubSpot’s primary growth driver had traditionally been SEO (the standard playbook for a SMB focused SaaS company) — there are even detailed SEO blogs about how HubSpot has used SEO to drive massive traffic to its website.
🧠Now, anyone would tell you — channel concentration is a major risk: HubSpot knew this even then and therefore acquiring The Hustle was a starting point to diversify new user acquisition away from SEO towards organic content.
Shortly after the acquisition in Feb ‘21, HubSpot launched the HubSpot Podcast Network in May ‘21 — It has expanded from a single show to 25+ shows now
✅The timing couldn’t have been better — the Google channel dependency risk actually played out:
(1) HubSpot has faced a major SEO traffic decline (75% from March 2023 to January 2025 — per data from SEMrush). Partly driven by the change in ‘domain authority’ on non-SaaS related topics.
(2) A number of SEO experts pinned the blame on Google's AI Overviews feature (which would reduce click throughs to SEO pages since the AI generated summaries are quite good)
(3) At the same time, there is a shift from Google Search to GenAI queries - which has further impacted overall Search volume.
➡️ For HubSpot, ‘Content’ is no longer a nice to have — it is a MUST WIN battleground esp. with the changes in SEO ranking… The Hustle may just go down as one of the most strategic & sound acquisitions to date by a SaaS company!
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