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- HAMPTON'S MARKETING PLAYBOOK: HOW TO BUILD A BRAND PEOPLE CHASE
HAMPTON'S MARKETING PLAYBOOK: HOW TO BUILD A BRAND PEOPLE CHASE
How Hampton made their brand impossible to ignore – and how you can too
Niall Ratcliffe
February 09, 2025
Morning!
I bought a tennis racket this week and broke it in this morning. My tennis kick has continued, but unfortunately, my abilities have not increased… there’s always next weekend.
For now, I want to show a very simple (but effective) playbook I’ve been studying over the last year.
It’s super repeatable, quite low effort, and is responsible for $ 10M+ in revenue for this company.
Let me show you how it looks!
LISTEN TO THE AUDIO VERSION
BREAKING DOWN THE STRATEGY
Three years ago, the company I’m about to talk about didn’t even exist. No website. No brand. Nothing.
Fast forward to today, and their customers include:
Brett Adcock
HubSpot’s founder
Anthony Pompliano
And some of the wealthiest individuals on the planet.
I had a front-row seat as they went from an idea to one of the most talked-about communities for entrepreneurs and founders. I watched as they built something from nothing and the most surprising part?
They didn’t do it with some complicated, tech-heavy strategy.
Instead, they followed one of the simplest marketing playbooks I’ve ever seen.
Let’s break down Hampton’s marketing playbook:
Step 1: Build Founder-Led Attention Machines
The hardest thing to do as a founder isn’t starting a company. It’s getting that company off the ground once you’ve started it.
You have to:
Find a way to get attention
Get your ICP to take you seriously
Convince your ICP to take an interest
And to survive, you need to do all of that almost instantly.
This is where Sam Parr and Joe Speiser’s personal brands became their ultimate advantage.
Rather than starting from scratch, they had already built attention machines - personal brands that gave them an audience, credibility, and instant trust.
Sam alone has 314,000 followers, generates millions of impressions a month, and has a die-hard audience that trusts what he says.
So when it was time to launch Hampton, they simply redirected that attention that they already had.
Instead of relying on paid ads or cold outreach, they used their personal platforms to:
Explain the problem they had – The gap in existing entrepreneur communities.
Share why they founded Hampton – A real problem they wanted to solve.
Announce it publicly – Turning their audience into Hampton’s first members.
Their stories became their biggest marketing asset.
Most B2B brands have zero built-in distribution. Hampton flipped that script by ensuring its founders had attention before ever launching.
But let’s be honest… you can’t rely solely on your personal brands to build and scale your business.
This is where step 2 comes in.
Step 2: The Media Engine (AKA Attention That Scales)
When Hampton launched, Sam Parr and Joe Speiser drove massive attention to it with their personal brands.
But they also knew that if Hampton was going to succeed long-term - it couldn’t rely on them. It needed a media engine that could generate attention on autopilot completely separate from the founders.
This is a playbook top-tier brands already use.
Just take a look at HubSpot, for example, they’ve spent years acquiring media assets—including Sam Parr’s own newsletter, The Hustle, for $30 million—to build their own media network.
They have 30+ “Hubspot podcasts”
Multiple different newsletters.
Plus tonnes of creators.
So when Sam started Hampton, he applied the same logic.
Rather than relying on himself and Joe forever, he built a media asset for Hampton:
The concept? Get ultra-wealthy individuals to share how they spend their money.
The audience? High-net-worth individuals—the exact people Hampton wants.
The impact? Thousands of downloads, and hundreds of thousands of views per month.
And of course, throughout the show, they relentlessly plug Hampton - turning the pod into a 24/7 attention machine.
It’s such a simple, yet easy way to ensure long-term brand growth:
You build a media asset that attracts your ideal audience.
Make it interesting enough that people want to engage.
Use it to direct attention to your business, consistently.
Now, Hampton no longer needs Sam & Joe talking about the company - Moneywise does that for them.
Step 3: Find the Core Pain
Most brands guess what their customers struggle with. Hampton didn’t.
Instead, they took a data-first approach by directly surveying their ideal audience after they became customers.
Here’s how they did it:
They onboarded their first batch of members – high-net-worth entrepreneurs and founders.
During onboarding, they ran an interview-based survey – asking them what their biggest challenges were right now.
They compiled all that data – pinpointing the most frequent and pressing problems their members faced.
The result? A goldmine of insights that are relatable to their ICP.
Instead of making assumptions, they had hard data on exactly what their audience was struggling with most.
Most brands struggle to create marketing that actually resonates because they guess what their audience cares about. Hampton simply listened.
And this led directly to Step 4, where they took that insight and used it to create something even more powerful.
Step 4: Create A No Brainer Resource
Once Hampton identified the biggest pain points their target audience had, they turned it into a high-value resource that would attract even more of the right people.
One of the most common struggles their audience faced?
They didn’t know what to do with their money.
Many of them had exited companies, made millions, and suddenly found themselves in unfamiliar territory.
They weren’t sure:
How others were investing their money.
What the smartest financial moves were.
If they were making the right decisions.
So Hampton solved that problem for them - by creating a wealth report that they called, “The 2023 Wealth Allocation Survey”
A gated report that broke down exactly what high-net-worth individuals were doing with their money.
And they didn’t just publish it and hope for the best. They turned it into a lead machine by:
Gating it – To access it, people had to enter their first name and email.
Promoting it everywhere – Sam Parr, Joe Speiser, and Hampton’s socials all pushed it hard.
Integrating it into their media engine – They plugged it relentlessly on the MoneyWise podcast.
Thousands of high-value leads flooded in.
But that isn’t even the best part.
The best part is that they actually blurred out some of the key learnings from the report and made it “Exclusive to Hampton Members”.
Such a nifty little trick to increase your FOMO for not joining Hampton.
But overall, this lead magnet is one of the simplest yet most effective marketing moves:
You find the biggest question your audience is asking.
Create the most valuable resource to answer it.
Gate it, promote it, and let the leads roll in.
The blurred parts are just an added bonus
Step 5: The Interview
At this stage, they’ve got a big fat list of 1000s of leads, they’ve teased them with the blurred graphs and they have educated them on the brand.
But it’s at this stage that most B2B brands fumble the bag. They generate leads and then immediately hit them with:
“Let’s book a discovery call.”
“Let’s have a chat with sales.”
“Let’s talk about how we can work together.”
Hampton did none of that.
Instead, they flipped the entire dynamic.
Rather than making their sales process about them convincing prospects to join, they made it about prospects convincing them that they’re a fit.
Here’s how it works:
They collect thousands of leads from their media strategy and gated reports.
They send an email saying something like, "If you’re interested in joining Hampton, we might have a spot for you."
Instead of a sales call, they invite prospects to an interview.
Not a sales pitch. Not a discovery call. An interview.
The message is clear: Not everyone gets in.
This shifts the entire power dynamic:
The prospect isn’t being sold to—they’re applying.
Hampton staff “interview” them to see if they’re a fit.
Only a limited number of spots are available, making it exclusive.
And what happens when people feel like they might not get something?
They want it even more.
Hampton masterfully positioned itself as something worth chasing—not something pushing for customers.
Step 6: Repeat
From there, all they do is repeat the process.
Every month they:
Highlight a new relatable problem.
Create a new report
Gate it
Blur key aspects
Run their sales process
And they have a nice consistent flow of leads into the company.
Marketing 101. This is a playbook we all need to copy.
🌱 THE GREENHOUSE
Things I’ve saved this week that are worth seeing:
TL;DR
Build attention machines before you need them.
Create a media engine to drive long-term growth.
Let the audience tell you what they want.
Turn insights into a lead magnet that attracts leads.
Make people feel like they have to earn their spot.
I absolutely love everything about this playbook. It’s simple, effective, and so easy to implement.
A great reminder that good marketing does not mean complicated marketing.
It’s safe to say I will be stealing this playbook - report coming soon!
Found this useful? Why not forward it to a friend?
Until next Sunday.
— Niall
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