Welcome to Breaking the Blueprint — a blog series that dives into the unique business challenges and opportunities of underrepresented business owners and entrepreneurs. Learn how they’ve grown or scaled their businesses, explored entrepreneurial ventures within their companies, or created side hustles, and how their stories can inspire and inform your own success. Switching careers can be daunting for anyone, but the challenges can feel particularly overwhelming for people of color.  The tech industry, while brimming with opportunities, presents unique hurdles that must be navigated with determination and strategic planning. The path is riddled with obstacles, from battling imposter syndrome […]

Welcome to Creator Columns, where we bring expert HubSpot Creator voices to the Blogs that inspire and help you grow better. A habit that has woven itself through many facets of my life, like parenthood, my health, and entrepreneurship, is a consistent check-in I like to do with how I’m growing. I often call it a ‘life inventory’ where I scoop up everything I’m working on, learning, and feeling, and ask myself about what’s going well and what needs to shift. Inevitably, I spend a little bit of my check-in time wandering back down memory lane to the beginning stages […]

Kris Hughes is a content strategy and storytelling wizard. He: ✍️ Wrote (and sold) blogs before it was cool 👻 Spent years ghostwriting daily social content for clients, from agencies to CEOs 🖥️ Runs his own digital strategy consulting firm (on track to hit 30% YoY revenue growth) Here are Kris’ six tips for nailing your content strategy — to generate solid, authentic leads. 1. If You Don’t Tell Your Brand’s Story, Someone Else Will As a founder with a million priorities, content like blogs and social media posts can seem like low-priority items. But if you don’t tell your […]

Welcome to Breaking the Blueprint — a blog series that dives into the unique business challenges and opportunities of underrepresented business owners and entrepreneurs. Learn how they’ve grown or scaled their businesses, explored entrepreneurial ventures within their companies, or created side hustles, and how their stories can inspire and inform your own success. For many Native entrepreneurs, it’s not active discrimination that proves the biggest issue in getting a business off the ground. In fact, per a recent Breaking the Blueprint HubSpot Blog survey, many Natives don’t feel like their heritage figures one way or the other into their entrepreneurship […]

Welcome to Trends, a weekly newsletter with the zestiest business trends and actionable insights for entrepreneurs. The best part of my job is being surrounded by content-obsessed folks. They’re pros at creating great content, but also at sniffing it out. So when two of them, without coordination, point me to Substack, I pay attention.  Source: Google Trends, six-month rolling average Apparently, the self-publishing platform is enjoying a fresh boost in popularity — many entrepreneurs are seeing it as a better alternative to social media. “Substack is the new Instagram,” Free People’s director of brand marketing, Libby Strachan, told Glossy. What’s Old […]

Graza. Fishwife. Brightland. If you’ve never heard of them, just walk into a local specialty store — you’re guaranteed to spot some of these brands, with packaging so aesthetically pleasing they make you feel like walking inside an Instagram feed. Gander helped build the Graza brand from scratch, an olive oil that comes in a squeeze bottle. Source: GoPuff Marked by bright colors, bold fonts, and creative illustrations, this style of packaging is now moving beyond specialty stores and into big retail aisles. “If you walk into almost every major retail chain grocery store in the US, there would be […]

It’s that time of the year… We asked a few badass colleagues and expert Trendsters what they think will be huge in 2024. Here’s what they said: 1. Niche Sports  Sara Friedman, Senior Writer of The Hustle Pickleball has grown into a national craze, with courts and other related businesses popping up everywhere. In 2024, more niche sports will follow. Source: Google Trends, six-month rolling average Games like badminton, racquetball, croquet, and spikeball will see increased popularity through activity bars, facilities, and clubs. These sports will be used to fill vacant shopping malls and offices that are too difficult to flip […]