• by Ray Schultz , February 8, 2021

CRM software platform HubSpot will acquire The Hustle, an email newsletter publisher with 1.5 million readers, in an effort to expand its own content capability, the company has announced.

Financial terms were not disclosed. 

The Hustle’s daily newsletter is known for its impertinent coverage of business.

HubSpot hopes to serve scaling companies by delivering “educational, business and tech trend content in their preferred formats,” states Kieran Flanagan, senior vice president, marketing at HubSpot.  

For many customers, “their first introduction to HubSpot is through our educational blog, Academy, and YouTube content, not our software,” Flanagan adds.

HubtSpot serves 7 million people each month with its blogs and hundreds of thousands with its videos on YouTube. In addition, it provides 100,000 professionals per month with lessons through its Academy program. 

The Hustle was started in 2016 as Hustle.com, an event for nontechnical entrepreneurs in the San Francisco area.  

It soon offered a daily weekday newsletter, with a special issue on Sunday, all aimed at ”the makers, builders and doers of society,” a Hustle executive said in 2018. 

The Hustle monetized the newsletter by running ads penned by its own team, the executive added.  

"I started The Hustle with the mission to help give business builders the information they needed to put their dent into the world and change how media companies operate,” states founder Sam Parr. 

In 2019, The Hustle started Trends, a premium subscription product. And it offers a podcast titled "My First Million." 

In a newsletter piece in 2018, Parr scored big news companies that “treated their readers like idiots, had obvious agendas and were poorly run businesses.” 

In contrast, “Our motto from day one has been to treat you like our smart friend -- not just a click that makes us ad revenue,” Parr added.