All this and more in this weekâs edition of The Hypha Wire, from Hypha HubSpot Development.
Welcome back to The Hypha Wire! November is creeping around the corner, huh?
At Hypha, weâre in the middle of 2026 goal-setting sessions. Weâve always set yearly goals, but last year we codified the process for the team.
Our CEO sent out a document with the brief: establish department-level goals as well as personal goals. I donât think I can overstate how important it is to have these conversations at your organization.
As evidenced by updates in this newsletter, things are changing fast these days. If youâre not actively discussing developments and setting goals around how to keep pace, you will fall behind. And I donât say that to create anxiety! Even during a big news week, I feel like Iâve fallen behind already.
But back to goal setting. This process may fill some with dread, but I look forward to it. Having an established framework to work from clears up any uncertainty. Itâs much easier to work toward a goal once it has a name.
It doesnât have to be set-it-and-forget-it, either. With planned goal check-ins, you can assess if the goal is still working for you or if it needs to be altered. Maybe you assessed that what you planned isnât realistic, or on the contrary, maybe a development allowed the goal to be achieved much sooner, and you need to expand.
When in doubt, make the goal SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound). This should absolutely set you up for success.
Whether thereâs a formal process or you need to go it alone with some personal goals, the exercise is worth it.
In a yearâs time, rather than saying âwhat did I do in 2026?â you can point to direct achievements, and thatâs invaluable.
-Sage Levene, VP of Marketing, Hypha HubSpot Development
Open Mic
Start With Why: What Drives Us Matters More Than What We Do
By Cleeton Gumbs, Project Manager, Hypha HubSpot Development
Simon Sinekâs 2009 book âStart with Whyâ introduced a simple but powerful idea: people donât buy what you doâthey buy why you do it.
At the heart of his message is the Golden Circle encompassing three ringsâWhy, How, and What. Most organizations work from the outside in. They can explain what they do: âWe make software.â âWe build websites.â âWe sell products.â A smaller group can describe how they do it differently.
But the most inspiring, world-changing companies start at the core: they lead with Why.
Take Apple. Most companies would say: âWe make great computers. Theyâre beautifully designed and easy to use.â Thatâs a what statement.
Apple starts with why:
âEverything we do, we believe in challenging the status quo. We believe in thinking differently.â
Thatâs what people connect with. The computers, the phones, the earbudsâthose are just the how and the what.
Thatâs something we try to hold onto at Hypha.
Yes, we design websites. Yes, we build systems and sharpen messaging. But underneath all that, our core belief is this:
Stories move people. And people move change.
We are journalists, designers, creatives, and marketers who just happen to build web experiences. What we make is rooted in what we believeâthat honesty, heart, and craft can still break through the noise.
Our why gives meaning to the work. It keeps us alignedâand keeps us growingâfor good.
And maybe thatâs the challenge in all of this: not just to know what you do, or how you do it, but to get real clear on why it matters.
Because when you know your why, everything else gets sharper. And when you donât, even good work can feel a little lost.
As Iâm sure youâre aware (and were affected by), AWS experienced an extended downtime period last Monday. While it would probably be healthy to move on and return to business as usual, the outage left me with a nagging feeling thatâs disturbing me about the worldâs dependence on this service.
âA sprawling Amazon Web Services cloud outage that began early Monday morning illustrated the fragile interdependencies of the internet as major communication, financial, health care, education, and government platforms around the world suffered disruptions.
âMultiple network engineers and infrastructure specialists emphasized to WIRED that errors are understandable and inevitable for so-called âhyperscalersâ like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, given their complexity and sheer size. But they noted, too, that this reality shouldnât simply absolve cloud providers when they have prolonged downtime.â
With little clarity provided by the platform, many marketers are planning to scale back their TikTok spend next year.
âFor now, what marketers know is murky at best. TikTokâs U.S. operations, which are still wholly owned by ByteDance, will continue to handle revenue-generating businesses like advertising and e-commerce, according to reports. Meanwhile, a new U.S. based joint venture, majority owned by American investors, will control the appâs user data and oversee retraining of the algorithm licensed from ByteDance.
âAnd thatâs where the questions begin â who will lead the app in the U.S., how will it be governed and will the shift will affect performance. So far, TikTokâs reps havenât offered much clarity on any of the logistics around its future U.S. existence, but instead continue to remain calm, cool, and push marketers to spend more next year.â
Hypha Highlights
HubSpotâs recent Marketing Hub updates transformed the platform into a true marketing operating system. Marketing Studio gives teams a shared visual workspace for campaign planning, while Breeze AI agents handle personalization and content generation based on unified CRM data. The real win is multi-touch attribution that tracks the full buyer journey from anonymous visit to closed deal, giving marketing teams the revenue data they need for boardroom conversationsânot just vanity metrics.
Hereâs a cool new release thatâs in public beta: Breeze Assistant mobile App for Android and iOS.
âWork doesnât stop when you leave your desk - youâre between meetings, traveling, or out with clients but still need customer context, deal updates, or quick summaries. Breeze Assistant gives you that business intelligence anywhere, so you can prep for calls in the car, respond to urgent questions while traveling, and capture insights right after meetings when theyâre fresh in your mind. Itâs not just mobile AI - itâs mobile AI that knows your business data and remembers your preferences.â
OpenAI just launched Atlas, an AI-powered web browser that directly challenges Google Chrome. The browser lets users open a ChatGPT sidebar to summarize content, compare products, or even complete full tasks like researching a recipe and automatically ordering ingredients through Instacart.
And, just two days after OpenAI launched Atlas, Microsoft rolled out nearly identical features for Edgeâs Copilot Mode. Both products are very similarâoffering AI assistants that can summarize content, compare information across tabs, and complete tasks like booking hotels or filling out forms. While Microsoftâs Copilot Mode technically launched in July with basic features, the timing of this announcement highlights just how heated the AI browser race has become.
It was a big week for Anthropic. The company launched Claude Code on the web, letting developers assign coding tasks directly from their browser that run in parallel across multiple GitHub repositories. They also introduced Agent Skillsâcustomizable folders with instructions and resources that Claude can load when needed to handle specialized tasks like working with Excel or following brand guidelines. Meanwhile, Bloomberg reports that Anthropic is in early talks with Google for a multibillion-dollar cloud computing deal to access Googleâs custom AI chips, which sent Googleâs stock up over 3.5% and Amazonâs down 2%.
Wikipedia is seeing an 8% drop in direct human visits compared to last year, largely because search engines and AI chatbots are now answering questions directly using Wikipedia content instead of sending people to the site itself. While Wikipediaâs volunteer-created content remains crucial to powering AI and search results across the internet, fewer direct visitors could mean fewer contributors and donors to sustain the platform long-term.
Over 850 public figuresâincluding Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Virginâs Richard Branson, and leading AI researchersâhave signed a statement calling for a ban on developing âsuperintelligenceâ until it can be proven safe. The group warns that AI surpassing human intelligence could lead to risks from economic disruption to potential extinction, with only 5% of Americans supporting fast, unregulated development of these systems.
Reddit is suing AI search engine Perplexity and three data-scraping companies for allegedly stealing Reddit content to power its answer engine. Despite Reddit sending a cease-and-desist letter in May 2024, Perplexityâs use of Reddit citations actually increased, and Reddit claims the company accessed content that was only available through Google search results.
AI-generated articles now outnumber human-written ones on the web, according to a new study from Graphite that analyzed 65,000 articles from CommonCrawl. The shift happened in November 2024, though AI content growth has plateaued since May at around 50% of all published articles. Interestingly, despite their prevalence, a separate study shows these AI-generated articles largely donât appear in Google search results or ChatGPT responses, suggesting search engines may be filtering them out.
âHubSpot Cofounder and CTO, Dharmesh Shah, joins Cameron Adams to explore how AI agents are reshaping work, leadership, and creativity. From culture-as-a-product to tech-powered parenting, Dharmesh shares insights into why heâs still betting on humans, even in the age of powerful AI tools. From building culture as a product to tech-powered parenting, Dharmesh shares insights into why heâs still betting on humans, even in the age of powerful AI tools.â
How can we help you?
Case Study: Email Marketing in HubSpot
An automotive supply chain company had thousands of contacts in their HubSpot CRM who hadnât heard from them in over a year. Their marketing team knew they needed to re-engage, but the stakes were highâsend to an unvalidated list and you risk damaged deliverability, spam complaints, and a wasted shot at reconnecting. Adding to the challenge, their content specialist could write strong copy but lacked the technical fluency to build campaigns, interpret analytics, or manage their HubSpot Marketing Hub independently.
Hypha structured a two-month engagement around safe reactivation and capability building. We validated the entire database through ZeroBounce to protect sender reputation, then designed a three-email reintroduction campaign that rebuilt familiarity without overwhelming dormant subscribers. Throughout the process, we trained their team to build workflows, review deliverability metrics, and run campaigns confidently on their own. The results proved the approach worked: ~1% bounce and unsubscribe rates, a clean foundation for ongoing email marketing, and a team that now owns their HubSpot system.
Marketing database gone quiet or team struggling to use HubSpot effectively? Contact Hypha to build the clean foundation and internal confidence you need for sustainable email marketing.
