On Aug. 5, HubSpot’s Q2 earnings were released, and the markets had a lot to say about them.
Hypha CEO, Jed Morey, penned a brief essay over on LinkedIn contextualizing the results and the market reaction paired with Hypha’s viewpoint on why we believe HubSpot is uniquely qualified to succeed.
I’m sharing an excerpt below, but I encourage you to head over to LinkedIn and read the full piece!
Once again, HubSpot beat analyst expectations and once again the stock was hammered. Not because of the phenomenal growth numbers but because future projections simply aren’t enough for Wall Street.
Pay no mind, I say. Wall Street rewards the hare and never the tortoise.
On Wednesday, HubSpot posted Q2 revenue of $912 million and adjusted earnings per share of $3.26, handily beating expectations of $898 million and $3.02, respectively. More importantly, in my humble estimation, “HubSpot grew free cash flow 44% year-over-year to $168 million, and it projects free cash flow of $750 million in fiscal 2026, a 26% year-over-year gain.”
What HubSpot has done better than almost every other SaaS company is to embed AI into its systems and processes to facilitate the acceleration of growth for its user base.
We can personally attest to this as a partner. The early returns on the agentic tools baked inside the platform are nothing short of astounding. More importantly, they’re measurable.
-Sage Levene, VP of Marketing, Hypha HubSpot Development
Open Mic
Every Service Teaches You Something
By Jon Chim, VP of Design & Development
One of our clients recently completed a redesign that featured an incredibly tight deadline. Under normal circumstances, not only do we have more time, but projects are typically owned by a single lead designer/developer.
Because of the tight turnaround, multiple designers were called in to work on the same project simultaneously. We ended up with various stylesheets, templates, and duplicate modules.
What’s that saying? Too many cooks in the kitchen.
For instance, having multiple developers working simultaneously creates risks like style overrides, where newer, conflicting rules replace existing ones based on hierarchy. Additionally, bringing in team members who are unfamiliar with the project can lead to inefficiencies, such as the accidental recreation of modules that already exist.
At the end of the day, the redesign was successful—as so often is the case, our team was able to rise to the occasion, an achievement we’re incredibly proud of. The bigger takeaway, however, wasn’t the launch itself but everything we learned along the way.
We came away with ideas for improving how we collaborate, communicate, and structure projects when multiple people are working in the backend. Sure, those instances are rare, but it’s always good to be prepared.
As designers and developers, we’re constantly refining the websites we build—so it makes sense that we should be just as intentional about refining the way we collaborate.
Every project is an opportunity to improve our processes, not just the end product.
The goal isn’t a perfect service, it’s making the next one even better.
🎶 All around me are [ai-generated] faces.🎶 In case it needed to be said, don’t do this y’all.
“For one thing, her headshot — showing a light-eyed, soft-smiling brunette — was clearly AI-generated. Though not visible in the tiny email window, when I opened her profile picture in a new tab, I could see that the image had failed to cut out a watermark disclosing that it was downloaded from the site ‘this-person-does-not-exist.com,’ which traffics in AI-generated faces.”
I’ve been vocally pro-Reddit for businesses in this newsletter, but I always add the caveat that you need to be helpful and genuine, not spammy. Case in point: users can see through the spam techniques.
“Complaints about potential LLM-related spam and promotional content pop up in a diverse array of subreddits: A user on r/CleaningTips questioned whether the subreddit needs a ban on product names; another user warned the popular r/BuyItForLife community that it was being ‘brigaded by ad bots to skew Google and AI search results.’ In its rules against self-promotion, r/FoodNYC specifically calls out brands targeting and commenting on old posts. A moderator of r/salestechniques posted a ‘name and shame’ thread filled with brands they said were astroturfing the subreddit. Reddit itself has acknowledged the new kinds of spam. In early July, the company announced it was beefing up its spam detection tools with AI and LLMs to better catch ‘the highly subtle, coordinated patterns of fake behavior and artificial hype.’ The company said it is catching 25,000 spammy posts and comments and blocking 23 million spam views a day as a result.”
Hypha Highlights
AI has made content creation remarkably easy, but that ease often masks a critical truth: the best copy still demands strategic thinking, scrutiny, and time, none of which AI removes from the equation. Rather than arguing against generative AI, this piece makes the case for using tools like Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini well, which means grounding them in a comprehensive AI content strategy built on core SEO principles and optimized for AI search. What follows is a rundown of the most common mistakes teams make when deploying AI for content, and how to avoid them.
“With this release, super admins and any users with ‘Modify Billing’ permission can now set a maximum marketing contact limit on their portal’s Marketing Contacts page within Account & Billing. Once reached manual imports and automated features will no longer set contacts as marketing. Previously, there was no way to cap marketing contacts, leaving portals vulnerable to unexpected tier auto-upgrades.”
Currently in development, scheduled for release. Expected August 14, 2026.
AI in Action
News, updates and tools from the AI industry.
Anthropic found three cases where Claude models, wrongly told they had no internet access, breached real companies’ systems during cybersecurity tests they believed were simulations. It traced the issue to a misconfiguration rather than rogue models, and is tightening controls around its evaluation environments in response.
New EU powers under the AI Act now let the European Commission evaluate AI models before release, restrict market access, and fine providers up to 15 million euros or 3% of annual turnover, raising the stakes for U.S. labs like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google.
OpenAI drew swift online backlash after hosting roughly 30 content creators at “OpenAI Summer Camp,” a luxury Hudson Valley resort weekend featuring farm-to-table dinners, branded merch, and a beekeeping session tied to its ChatGPT Work launch. Critics accused the company of “greenwashing” given AI’s energy and water demands.
After considering aggressive measures like sanctions and cloud-business bans against Chinese “open source” AI makers, the Trump administration backed off following Silicon Valley pushback led by Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, and instead invited U.S. tech companies to discuss a framework for reviewing new models’ cybersecurity before release. The debate has split the industry, with OpenAI and Anthropic favoring tighter restrictions on Chinese rivals while Nvidia, Google, Meta, and Microsoft defend open-source models as good for innovation and security.
Jeff Dean, Google’s 30th employee and one of its most influential AI executives, is leaving alongside top researchers to launch Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation that aims to use AI to automate and accelerate scientific research. The startup, which Dean will lead as CEO, has backing from Alphabet, Radical Ventures, Khosla Ventures, and others, and is also pursuing recursive self-improvement to help AI build more powerful AI.
OpenAI is rolling out product carousels in ChatGPT ads, letting multiple products appear side by side in a single placement, with OpenAI’s own systems deciding when to show a carousel versus a single-product ad by pulling from retailers’ product feeds. The move marks a step toward a Google Shopping–style experience and supports OpenAI’s steep ad revenue targets, reportedly $2.5 billion in 2026 rising to over $100 billion by 2030.
A developer found that TIME serves AI crawlers like ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and OpenAI’s search bot a stripped-down markdown version of its site—one-twenty-third the size of the human page—with sponsored content baked in from advertisers like Ally Bank, invisible to human readers and tracked as per-request ad impressions by ad-tech vendor Mobian. Since TIME says bot traffic already outnumbers human traffic most days, the setup offers an early glimpse of what the web may become when AI models, not people, are the primary audience.
“The application software industry is facing a mega-restructuring with the arrival of agents in enterprise workflows. On this episode of Tech Disruptors, HubSpot’s Chief Product and Technology Officer Duncan Lennox speaks on the AI impact on marketing, sales and service applications. He joins Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Niraj Patel to discuss how HubSpot is leveraging AI technology for its small and medium business software portfolio. Duncan dives into its proprietary data stack, the changing landscape ahead for CRM, AI’s impact on software buying, managing LLM inference costs, HubSpot’s brand new agent builder solution and much more.”
How can we help you?
Case Study: Marketing IFM on HubSpot
Two integrated facilities management companies had the same problem: buyers didn’t know what to search for. IFM sits in an awkward middle ground—consultative, variable, and hard to define.
One company served major retailers but avoided the “work order management” label buyers used. The other wanted to grow beyond Legionella compliance but hadn’t defined a broader story. In both cases, positioning wasn’t clear, and inbound stalled.
For the first, we ran a targeted ABM campaign with personalized landing pages, outreach, and a cost calculator. It led to meetings with national accounts.
For the second, we built authority through SEO and a weekly Legionella outbreak tracker. It pulled in search traffic and introduced buyers to compliance services.
The result: outreach drove meetings, and content built a path to repositioning. Same pattern in both; marketing works once positioning is clear.
Marketing a consultative service where buyers don’t know what to search for? Contact Hypha to get the positioning right before you build the campaigns.
