[Top Agency & Israel Business Series] How To Scale a B2B Tech Startup Through Trust With Noa Eshed

Noa Eshed is Co-founder and General Manager of Bold Digital Architects, an award-winning growth marketing agency specializing in B2B tech startups. She co-hosts the Real Life Superpowers podcast, ranked among the top 10% globally, where she interviews top performers from various industries. A journalist and certified lawyer, Noa previously co-founded and distributed Israel’s only national magazine for students. She is also the author of The Smart Marketer’s Guide to Google Adwords, an Amazon number-one bestseller.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [05:33] Noa Eshed discusses how Bold Digital Architects helps B2B tech startups scale through trust
• [08:34] The journey from law school to founding a digital marketing agency
• [14:10] Why gated content isn’t as effective as it used to be
• [18:39] Noa explains how she secured HubSpot’s CEO as the first guest on her podcast
• [21:00] The bold strategy of approaching keynote speakers for interviews
• [26:29] The evolution of Bold Digital Architects’ services
• [30:11] Mentors and books that shaped Noa’s entrepreneurial journey
• [34:23] Successful case studies driving results at Bold Digital Architects
• [36:04] The power of partner webinars and how to land big-name collaborators

In this episode…

Growing a B2B tech startup is challenging, especially in a crowded market where trust plays a crucial role in driving conversions. Traditional advertising often falls short, leaving startups struggling to establish credibility and connect with their ideal customers. So, how can early-stage companies position themselves as industry leaders and build trust that fuels long-term growth?

Noa Eshed, a digital marketing expert and co-founder of a growth agency, emphasizes that trust is the most valuable currency in B2B marketing. She explains that startups should focus on content-driven strategies, positioning their founders and brand as thought leaders through educational material instead of direct sales tactics. Noa highlights the shift from outdated practices like gated content and linear funnels, advocating for consistent, value-driven engagement. She also shares insights on leveraging partnerships, securing strategic collaborations, and using bold networking techniques — like approaching keynote speakers directly — to build meaningful relationships that drive business growth.

In this episode of Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz interviews Noa Eshed, Co-founder of Bold Digital Architects, about how B2B tech startups can scale through trust. Noa explains why traditional marketing tactics often fail in B2B and shares her approach to positioning brands as category leaders. She also discusses the role of networking in business success, the evolution of inbound marketing, and how startups can use content to establish credibility and build lasting customer relationships.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Noa Eshed on LinkedIn
• Bold Digital Architects
• Real Life Superpowers
• The Smart Marketer’s Guide to Google Adwords by Noa Eshed and Uri Bishansky

Special Mention(s):

• Ronen Menipaz on LinkedIn
• Choose Yourself! by James Altucher
• The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries
• Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler
• Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work by Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal

Related episode(s):

• “[Top Agency Series] Growth Through Acquisitions – What is Your KPI and Northstar? With Jason Swenk” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “Building a Great Team and More Helpful Insights with Jason Swenk Host of The Smart Agency Master Class Podcast” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[Top Agency Series] Most Valuable Advice When Selling Your Agency With Todd Taskey of Potomac Business Capital” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[Top Israel Leader Series] Engineering the Autonomous Revolution with Rabbi Mois Navon of Mobileye” on the Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable Moments:

• “The currency of trust is the foundation of B2B tech growth. Without it, you’re just wasting money.”
• “You cannot push people through a funnel and generate intent they don’t have. It doesn’t work.”
• “When you sell something you believe in, you convey some magic that you don’t when you don’t.”
• “Instead of trying to get accepted, create the platform. Remove the gatekeepers and just move forward.”
• “Marketing isn’t static. If you put it on autopilot, it’s only a matter of time before decline.”

Action Steps:

1. Build trust through content marketing: Creating valuable, expert-driven content positions your company as an authority and attracts potential customers organically.
2. Leverage strategic partnerships: Collaborating with industry-relevant brands or influencers expands your reach and strengthens credibility. 
3. Ditch outdated lead generation tactics: Traditional gated content and forced sales funnels no longer work effectively in B2B marketing.
4. Network boldly and consistently: Relationships are a key driver of business success, so take the initiative in making connections. 
5. Continuously adapt marketing strategies: Regularly assessing campaign performance and shifting strategies ensures long-term success and prevents wasted resources.

Episode Transcript

Intro 00:00

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, doctor Jeremy Weisz.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 00:22

Doctor Jeremy Weiss here founder of inspiredinsider.com, where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders. Today is no different. I have Noa, she is the founder of Bold Digital. No, I’m going to formally introduce you in a second, but I always like to point out other episodes of the podcast people should check out. This is part of the Top Agency series and is also part of the Top Israel Business Leaders series.

So from the agency side, I, Jason Swank on Jason Swank. Talk about how he built his agency to eight figures and sold it. And then he was buying up agencies. Then he has an agency group, the group that he wished he had, Noa when he started his agency helping agency owners grow. So that was a really good one.

Actually. There’s two episodes on that. Another good one was Todd Taskey. Todd Taskey helps pair agencies to private equity. So he helps sell agencies and he has a Second Bite Podcast second bite because he found sometimes when the founders sold the private equity and private equity sold again they would make more on the second bite than they did on the first.

So that was a really interesting in the business valuation space, M&A space agency space. That was a great one. On the Israel Business Leader series. I had Mois Navon of Mobileye. If you’re in Israel, you know Mobileye.

If you’re not, you probably know Mobileye. They were actually acquired by Intel for $15.3 billion, I think, when I talked to him. No, I made the mistake of saying $15.2 and he’s like, Jeremy, it’s $15.3. I’m like, okay, that decimal does make a difference. I guess what was interesting about his story was actually just the journey was ups and downs, and there was a lot of times where they had to go and sacrifice along the way.

He had to go back to his family at one point and say, hey, we can’t do extracurriculars. There’s no more eating out. There’s no more niceties because we’re in the lean phase of this thing. So that and many more on inspiredinsider.com. This episode is brought to you by Rise25.

At Rise25, we help businesses give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. How do we do that? We do that by helping you run your podcast, or an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast. We do the strategy, the accountability and the full execution.

And Noa, you know this. We’re kind of like the magic elves that run in the background and make it look easy for the host so they can create amazing content, create amazing relationships, most importantly, run their business. You know, for me, the number one thing in my life is relationships. I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships, and I have found no better way over the past decade to profile the people and companies I most admire on this planet and share with the world what they’re working on. So if you’ve thought about podcasting, Go ahead, go ahead.

Noa Eshed 02:58

I got to hand it to you that you’re a master at networking, because I think it’s thanks to you that we’ve been in touch for years, and it’s just every once in a while, it always seems so genuine. You reach out, you just send this short email with how you how are you? What are you up to these days? How do you feel? And it’s always like it’s so efficient and heartwarming. So thank you for that. And I learned from it.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 03:22

Thank you. Yeah. And not only does it seem genuine, but it is genuine. But no, I like to, you know, keep in touch with people just to see how they’re doing, see how I can help. And obviously, you know, I’m going to talk about knowing they have a podcast.

So I always like to recommend I love when my friends have podcasts because I get to recommend guests to them. And it’s a give to the guest to feature them. It’s a give to the show to connect with more great people. So if you’ve thought about podcasting, we’re gonna talk about Noa’s.

You should. If you have questions, go to rise25.com or email [email protected] and Noa is a really amazing at relationships. You are a master to I learn from you. You are very quick to respond. You know sometimes I may not hear from people for months and you’re like amazing with your communication.

So I am excited to introduce Noa Eshed, founder of Bold Digital. They help you scale your B2B tech startup through trust, and we’ll get into what that means. She was actually recognized as a thought leader by The Daily Telegraph. Her book, The Smart Marketers Guide to Google AdWords was an Amazon number one best seller, and her podcast, Real Life Superpowers, is ranked in the top 10% globally and is featured on Ctech, Israel’s largest business newspaper. And she actually previously co-founded and distributed Israel’s only national magazine for students. And of all things, she thought she was going to be a lawyer someday and practice law. So that’s interesting as well. Noa, thanks for joining me.

Noa Eshed 04:57

Thank you. I’m glad to be here.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 04:59

Let’s do this.

Noa Eshed 05:00

But I am a lawyer, like I did the whole journey and then left.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 05:06

Yes. Corrected. I stand corrected. John, my business partner calls himself a recovering lawyer, so I’m like. He used to be a lawyer. He’s like, I’m still a lawyer, Jeremy. I just don’t practice. I’m like, yeah, I don’t.

Noa Eshed 05:17

Take it to me, I suffered enough.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 05:19

Yeah, exactly. Let’s start off with bold digital and what you do. And there is a video piece. So if someone’s listening to the audio they will be able to. I’m going to pull up both digital and we’ll take a look. So talk about Bold Digital and what you do.

Noa Eshed 05:33

Of course. So basically what we do is we have helped B2B tech startups to grow. And we do it based on the assumption that if you try to grow a B2B tech startup through advertising, through trying to pitch and sell, rather than through educating and adding value and positioning the startup and the founders as domain experts. Then you’re probably going to be wasting a lot of money. So we doubled down on the currency of trust, and we do that through content marketing.

So basically we help the founders and also the brand create content that helps position them as domain experts. And we help the startup become a category leader at least to be positioned as such. And I don’t mean at least in the sense that it’s not. But we help the startup actually convey what they know so that people will trust them. And that’s really important because in B2B tech, the sales cycles are very long and they require a lot of trust and multiple decision makers.

And then if you don’t have that trust and you know, if you’re if you believe that you can just advertise, you know, do a banner, do a display ad, you know, just go to, to Google and do some sort of, you know, target some keywords and try to get people to click and then convert very early on in the process. I mean, I hope for you that it is early on. You’re going to be realizing that you’re wasting a lot of money and that people do not convert into customers that way. And the way to convert people into customers is exactly through what you said relationships and relationships. The foundation of those is trust. So that’s what we try to help do.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 07:07

I do, you know, noticed I did notice scale your B2B tech startup through trust and talk a little bit about the currency of trust.

Noa Eshed 07:18

So a startup is at least in the beginning, not known. And when you couple that with the fact that the sale cycles are going to be complex and that they’re probably going to be costly, you know, in order to start a relationship with a startup and a B2B tech startup, you’re going to probably have to pay them a lot of money to use what they sell you. So people are not going to hurry. You know, the target audience does not hurry to buy from a company that they don’t know. So the idea here is to see how they now take this anonymous company and get acquainted with it in a way that isn’t interruptive, in a way that they learn from it and get a positive impression that they are experts, that they know what they’re talking about, and it’s worthwhile to evaluate and consider them as the go to solution solution to what they’re looking for.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 08:15

I do want to dig in to kind of the evolution of bold a little bit. Let’s start with the niche for a second. B2B tech. When you first started, what was some of the companies that you worked with and how did it evolve to B2B tech for you?

Noa Eshed 08:34

Well, that’s a really good question. And you’re nailing it because we definitely didn’t start that way. We started pretty broad. I’ll go back a bit. So as we discussed, I studied law.

And then and then I decided I don’t want to do that. And then I started doing two things after. After I decided I’m leaving the law behind. A was to found the national student magazine and at the same time I was also dabbling with marketing and what I was doing. It was just at the era where Facebook started with company pages.

So before that, there wasn’t even a way to really establish a presence on Facebook as a brand. And I was lucky to be one of the first, at least in Israel, who was doing that. So I was working with a chain of magazines, not mine. Mine was a magazine for students, and I was working with a few fashion brands all B to all B to C, and I was helping them establish a presence. And I learned a lot through that.

I was also working on my magazine, which was a huge failure, but it was also it was a business failure, but it was also a great experience to understand business. And b to understand content. So I was growing an understanding of the power of content through those experiences. And then we also added the layer of PPC to the equation. And, and we started understanding what’s effective there and what and what isn’t.

And the next stage was when we discovered HubSpot and everything that they had to offer with respect to educating the market. And they were educating agencies. They were targeting people like us. So I learned a lot about marketing and how to do it right from HubSpot. And that was a fantastic use case for me to understand how this can be done in an effective way, because we were also trying, you know, to advertise and promote companies through ads and through what we knew as PPC and media in general.

And, things started clicking, and we started getting that understanding and honing what the best and most effective ways to promote and grow a company. So it was with trial and error, which I believe is always true for marketing. I just believe that there are best practices that you learn along the way, but it’s also so agile because everything is so dynamic in this landscape, and there’s new technologies, but there are fundamentals. And with time, there was this understanding that evolved, that B2B tech is where we can add the most value and that the currency would be trust and would be doing that through content — quality content.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 11:19

So no, it’s an interesting journey. And by the way, we will talk about you do have an interesting HubSpot story, which we’ll talk about, but you went from lawyer, B2C magazine and then B2B, B2B tech. Do you remember the first kind of B2B, or one of the first B2B tech companies? That was a major milestone for you that maybe put ideas like we could really help. We should really zone in on this type of client.

Noa Eshed 11:50

Yeah, I won’t name the company, but it was a startup that we really experienced. How? Through doing the research of what they’re doing and then doing the research of the target audience and, and then seeing how we put content out there and that that was the era actually, that gated content was the way to go. So we were doing campaigns with gated content, purely educational content about the industry, and people were downloading it. And then we created funnels out of it, and we saw how people are progressing through the funnels, like really in a linear way, which, by the way, I wouldn’t recommend now, but what worked then won’t work now.

That’s a fact. But it was a holistic understanding that this works if you do it right. And we saw how tweaking things and having a feedback loop enabled us to do it right.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 12:45

And for people who don’t know gated, it means like they have to opt in, right? Like you have to put an email or a phone number.

Noa Eshed 12:52

Yeah. It’s you have to provide your. Yeah. It’s a way of opting in but it’s but it’s not like you’re opting in in order to get the specific piece of content that is gated in a landing page.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 13:09

Typically what you were saying, not all of that works today. What part of that does work or what are best practices now with that?

Noa Eshed 13:20

It used to be the case, or at.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 13:21

Least because the reason I ask, I’m gonna let you finish that thought. But I am looking at your website and I love the you do have an opt-in on there if people and I’m going to subscribe to it because I think it’s pretty cool and we’ll talk about it. But you can see on both digital, if you go — they practice, you know, they practice what they preach here, right? So you can get the ultimate 2025 B2B tech conferences spreadsheet. Right.

And if you go to that page, you will give your email first name, last name for some valuable information that they’ve curated for you. And if I’m a B2B tech company, I would. That’s something I would want to know. So talk about gated versus non in today’s world.

Noa Eshed 14:10

So I actually am not a fan of gating content any longer. But I think there are exceptions. Yeah. Because what I was trying to say earlier that doesn’t work any longer as much as probably did earlier in previous days is that the funnel isn’t linear. So we cannot assume that there’s this person who is a lead.

And now they will download a piece of content, and now you can nurture them through stages and get them to buy, because the understanding is that it doesn’t work that way, and you cannot push people through a funnel and get them to generate intent that they don’t have. So the premise is that instead of looking at it as a linear funnel, we should understand that we need to be there to show up consistently with quality content, adding value, and then we will be considered as a solution when they’re ready to buy. So the intent and the readiness to buy and the need won’t happen at a click of our button. And I think many companies ditch along the way because they assume that it’s either people will click now and buy or won’t. And it’s just not the case.

It’s more complex and it requires more investment, but it pays off. So with respect to the content that I created on my website, basically my team and I worked for long hours on creating a spreadsheet that details all the events in many different industries in 2025. And we did it purely to add value. And the thought was to create it so that we do grow our database. So we’re able to send emails to them.

But it’s not salesy emails at all. Like we send them newsletters and more educational content with an assumption again, that when they’re ready, if they need the solution, they will reach out. And if they won’t, then they can also forward this to somebody else who may.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 16:09

I’m curious, Noa, on that. I’m sure you know, whenever something that’s on a website, I know people sat around the table, they thought long and hard before going in that direction. I’m curious what else was on the table that you considered building for that download? Right. You ultimately came to B2B tech conferences are valuable. What else were you considering?

Noa Eshed 16:32

To be honest, there wasn’t anything else. It was more a situation where I was seeing a need for this, and I realized we can answer it. So it wasn’t even strategized as, let’s see how we can generate leads. It’s just not even the mindset. The mindset is always, let’s be on the lookout for things where we can add value.

And through that, we know that things will fall into place because they simply do. So it wasn’t a discussion about let’s brainstorm what other tactics. It wasn’t a tactical discussion.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 17:04

So you just found people were asking you this question, or you saw it being asked in a lot of different places online.

Noa Eshed 17:11

And I also saw it sometimes lacking with clients. So I saw that they don’t necessarily have a mega database of events.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 17:20

Obviously, if people want to get the ultimate 2025 B2B or whatever year it is B2B tech conferences, they have to go and download it. What are a few of your favorites that people should check out?

Noa Eshed 17:32

What for the events?

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 17:34

Yeah, yeah. A few of your favorite tech conferences.

Noa Eshed 17:37

So it depends on what industry. But for advertising and marketing it’s definitely digital. But beyond it, the value of this spreadsheet as we intended it to be is not just to know that there is an event, but actually map out all the opportunities that go along with it, because sometimes that’s the missed opportunity. So sometimes companies may be aware of an event, but they may not be aware of the sponsorship opportunities in that event or the keynote opportunities that they can submit. And the idea was to help them wrap this up in a way where they can make sure that they’re leveraging their spending so much money on events, and sometimes they get drowned in the day to day, so they don’t do the full research, and then things drop where they can really be leveraged.

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