Ep. 35 - Agency Owner to App Builder with Nicole Pereira | Devs:After Dark

Funny story, my husband found one of my websites in, in 2004. Um, I was studying abroad in Brazil. He was in Brazil in Rio. He commented on my guestbook. I thought it was uncanny that I was in the same country, same place. We met up. We've been married for 21 years. My SEO was so good that it found me a husband.

Wow.

Welcome to Developers After Dark. This is the show that puts the style in style sheets using pseudo-class Mohawk. So we have an amazing, amazing show for you. I know, Dennis, I know you like that. We have an amazing show for you today. We're going to be talking about development, the entrepreneurial spirit, where those intersect, and much, much more with our guests. But before we get started, I would like you to, if you can and if you have time, I'd like you to try to go to our— let's see here. There's a couple of places that I want you to go. Let me see what order I want you to go in. We appreciate everything that you guys do for us, but first off, hubspot.com/startups. Now, this is going to be something I'm gonna pull up the actual website for you as well. This is where you're gonna be able to grow better, scale smarter, and save on HubSpot. Now listen, everybody at one point in their life is the backup quarterback. But at one point, you have to get off the bench and you have to get ready to play the game. This is gonna be the place you're gonna wanna go and you're gonna wanna check out all the resources. It's gonna help you do that. So if you can, and if you have time, please go check that out. That's at hubspot.com/startups. Now, one of the, if not the most important website you're ever gonna wanna go to is devsafterdarkpod.com. Twice for Dennis.

Mm-hmm.

devsafterdarkpod.com. That's where you're going to be able to go to find out a little bit more about us, some of our previous episodes, and any information that we have that's current about the show and what we plan to do and who we plan to talk to in the future. Now, that's not the only place you can find us, and that's not the only place you can find really great HubSpot content. You can also go to the YouTube channel. That's @HubSpotDevelopers on YouTube. That's where you're going to find all of our episodes. You're going to find so much more. We've got newsletter rollups. We've got tips and tricks. There are plenty of developers, DevRel, dev advocates, people outside of HubSpot as well, where community members as well have done videos. Really great series. I believe John Fuller did a really great one about PHP to Hubbell, which I watch myself. Personally love that. But there's all of that and so much more. You can pretty much get lost for a very long time in there. Now the very, very, very last thing I want to throw out there is if you haven't already, uh, developers.hubspot.com is a really, really great website that was built not too recently by a really, really great group of people. One of them happens to be— well, at least on my screen, sitting to my left. But AJ, you've got to tell everybody just a little bit about how fantastic this is.

I mean, it is a really good site. We put a lot of work into it. Um, we definitely went back through feedback from previous things. It took a lot of developer just Any feedback that they had submitted. We basically parsed through that and we really wanted to make a site that was fully functional and more like use case driven and rich for developers to be able to accomplish the tasks that they come to accomplish.

Everything is all new at HubSpot. We've got plenty of stuff you can check out, whether it's website, the developer docs, the platform itself. You're going to be busy for a very, very long time. So go and check that out for us one more time. That's developers.hubspot.com. So With all that out of the way and without further ado, let's get to our guest. Nicole, can you introduce yourself and tell everyone who you are and what you do?

Gosh, I don't know what I do. I know who I am though. That's the first step, right, in life. I'm Nicole Pereira and, you know, it's interesting. I've been in the HubSpot world revolving around it since about 2013 as a customer, as a partner, on advisory councils of different kinds, ran the largest HUG in the world called the Super HUG when it was still in person. Actually worked with Dan Tayer to create the playbook for all HUGs after that because they never had a Super HUG. We actually ran the largest, was that about 800 to 1,000 people attended a HubSpot-specific event that wasn't actually ran by HubSpot. We were the first and the largest at that time.

Wow.

Awesome. Amazing. I love that. Now, let me start off by asking you this, right? Because you have many hats, right? It would be safe to say that you have worn many hats across your journey. When it comes to, from developer to entrepreneur, because that's one of the things that have always struck me as interesting, because there has to be, at least from what I would think, there has to be some defining moment, right? Or a driver that pushes you from taking that first jump into creating something like your own business or your HubSpot partnership? Or was there a defining moment there for you that said, okay, I know what I'm doing now, but this next step I have to go?

I'm a weird case where I was actually surrounded by quirky entrepreneurial endeavors really, really young. So I actually started as an entrepreneur when I was 19 in college and a Mary Kay Cosmetics rep. Approached me, and I started my journey down the MLM Mary Kay Cosmetics path.

Please tell me you have the car.

Please tell me you had a car at the time. Had a car. You know, it's a it's a it's an interesting story because this was back in I was nineteen in what twenty twenty one or twenty twenty one twenty two thousand and one. Oh my god! I can't even do the numbers in my head. And so. I rose the ranks. I was a great recruiter. I used MySpace actually to find a lot of people to work for me. And I actually became a director in that company and had my directorship stripped in 2007 because I was promoting too much online. Think about that.

Whoa.

I was— they had rules at the time where they felt that promoting online was an unfair advantage and that that particular MLM group wanted it to be Home parties, face-to-face, right? And here I was, 2006, 2007, pushing the boundaries of like, the internet's there to expand our ability to connect with people. And—

Can you imagine if someone were to even say something like that today?

What are you talking about? Yeah.

Right.

Wow.

So I, I had to switch gears. Um, but yeah, I, I sold MLM. I mean, Probably the hardest type of business to do, right? Is to do your own direct sales in an MLM environment, home parties with, you know, women mostly trying to sell makeup. Wow. And I learned how to do taxes and I had to form, you know, a business and I had to have inventory with depreciation. Like here I was 19 learning the ins and outs of business, whether we call it entrepreneurship or not, I don't know. But the technicalities of what it meant to have a business, I learned that pretty early on.

I mean, I would say that's entrepreneurship for sure. I mean, it's not like you walked into this with a mentor, right? Like, I assume you probably have people who are helping guide.

They have some formulas, they have some systems, but the business side, no, it was just, let's show you how to sell lipstick, you know, like, let's show you how to conduct a home party, you know. But beyond that, yeah, I had to figure a lot of that out. Um, and we didn't have ChatGPT, but we had Yahoo and I was a good Yahooer and I was a good Googler. And I ask Jeeves a lot. I was gonna say, no issues.

So what got you into, from there though, what got you, what made the next step into the development world, into the like creating like HubSpot company, like focused companies, like what led you into that kind of avenue, if you will?

So let's go back. There's 2 parallel stories happening here. I was actually building websites in high school and on, AngelFire and Lycos with guestbooks and webrings and repeating backgrounds. And funny story, my husband found one of my websites in 2004. I was studying abroad in Brazil. He was in Brazil, in Rio. He commented on my guestbook. I thought it was uncanny that I was in the same country, same place. We met up. We've been married for 21 years. My SEO was so good that it found me a husband.

That's awesome.

That is fantastic.

That is awesome. That is the best SEO story ever.

Strongest.

Yeah.

They key searched something like Brazilian American, my website showed up, right? So, so I was making these webpages or websites really simple. I mean, really, it's just HTML, CSS, if you'd call that being a developer back then. And I was selling them to people like somebody's dad who had a car repair shop, like How do I get on the interwebs? So I was doing that in high school. So I guess I was coding back then. I got the internet when I was 11 and I just never got off it from that point on. Like I shared, things like MySpace was usually social media to market and grow businesses before then. After I was kicked out of the Mary Kay pink world for forbidden online marketing tactics, I went off to start a mommy blog. I had an OS Commerce PHP store and I was on a web platform, web blog platform called B2 Evolution, which at the time was a huge competitor to WordPress. When WordPress didn't quite have its standing yet, it was 2 blog platforms. So taught myself how to hack my way through editing PHP. I was always a code modifier, not really a code creator, if that makes sense.

Mm-hmm.

Uh, since the early days. And so, uh, even when I was making those websites in high school, I was like grabbing somebody's template, right? And then changing it. Uh, I always had some starting material. Um, and then I, I landed, uh, my first corporate job at the newspaper here, the San Diego Union-Tribune, which I don't even know if it exists anymore, as an online ad campaign specialist because of what I was self- taught through my mommy blog, through my store. My store had like 200 other moms reselling scrapbooking handcrafts that I made. My store had scrapbooking supplies and I was ranking page 1 for a lot of scrapbooking terms on my blog, like girls' baby shower invitations or things like that. So SEO since the '90s was my jam, probably my most versatile skillset. I guess you would say. And, but back then you were called a webmaster.

Yeah.

SEO was a word, people are a thing. You knew all the things of the web, not just the SEO. And, and that's how your SEO was so good because you knew the full structure of a website. You knew how to manipulate it. You knew how it works. You knew the ins, you knew the outs, you knew all, all the stuff. Uh, at some point I think those fields separated and then it got harder to, to do well on your website when people don't know The full scope of that. So, I got this first job and it was interesting because I was what, 26 years old? And I jump into this job and they're doing this multimillion-dollar ad campaign platform for their real estate department.

Yeah.

That they would put for real estate, but no one knew what they were doing. They sit every week with the developers and they wouldn't realize that questions they would ask were increasing the cost. and scope, adding timeline that they were one week they were asking for something and then the next week they were changing it because they just didn't know what they were asking for. And the developers are just, whatever you want, right?

Yeah.

Sending the invoices. And I show up and I'm like, this feels wrong. Like, where's the end goal? What is the deadline? Can I see the contracts? The guy who was managing the project was like, contracts?

What do you mean?

So I bring it all in and I look at it and I go, okay, this is what we're gonna do. We don't have any more budget. Like, we can't keep going, um, like this way. What have we done so far? What haven't we done so far? You know, recycling code snippets that they pulled out 4 weeks ago, because yes, we do need it. They just didn't understand what they were saying, and managed to get this project launched in, like, 4 or 5 months, and they had been working on it for years. So, here I am, you know, 26, multimillion-dollar project, just got it launched. They're like, how did she do it? Yes, that was my first foray into project management and solutions architecting. Uh, I didn't know it, but I just knew this needed to get done because it was pausing everyone around me. Like no one was capable of doing work because they were trying to transition out of the old platform to the new one. And because of that, I was then thirsty looking for more projects. I found out that the virtual tour system was also hemorrhaging money. It was broken. It wasn't working. It was antiquated. It was old. We were on the cusp of things changing with the web. And so I was able to get a budget for, you know, off hours to use a developer in Django. And we rebuilt the whole thing. I wireframed it, we mapped it out, and gosh, within a couple months it was making hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue per month again. You know, all the realtors were coming back going, yes, okay, add this virtual tour asset to my to my quarry. Then 9 months after I was there, after I had 2 really successful projects, there was a massive layoff. This was 2009. If you remember that era with basically the whole world imploded, they had been bought out by PE. I got a severance package. I was actually happy. I was like, I don't like corporate. These people are ridiculous. They don't get anything done. I had 2 big projects. I had a little baby at home. I was a nursing mom. I was pumping all the time. I experienced everything possible in the corporate world where I said, this is actually not for me. So I was happy to take a severance package and get back home with my babies and work on my blog again for a period of time. But after that, I just kept picking up jobs where I was like, okay, I was the web girl, marketing, digital marketing, but I was also the IT girl because the projects that I did over at the Union Tribune, they were all classified as IT. So anything like that, anything technical was considered IT. So I had to have these dual roles if I wanted to play in the realms I wanted to live in. And so I kept picking up jobs where I'm like, oh yeah, I can do your IT. I was doing the VoIP systems and dropping cables in their walls and setting up their VPNs and their, you know, their firewalls. And, but then I was also, you know, print drivers. Oh, that was crazy.

Yeah.

But then I was also like social media marketing, getting their website live, right? Like it was, It was, you know, who am I? I felt pulled into— I wasn't IT to the point where I was like diehard fixing computers and soldering motherboards, but I also wasn't digital marketing to the point where I ever wanted to write copy or do design. I wasn't a creative marketer. I was a technical marketer, but there was no field for that. And it wasn't until my last and best job, honestly, where I worked for somebody else, where I discovered this blog called Chief Martech. .com, Scott Brinker, right? And all of a sudden I found my people. I was like, I have an identity and there's other ones that exist. Because honestly, in California, like, none of this really existed. We were really behind, like, on the times, even though we have Silicon Valley and we have all the— we were really— inbound marketing wasn't even a term out here, right? Um, this sort of like cohesive way to do marketing that revolved around your website didn't exist while I had been doing things like that because that's what made your website shine. Like, I didn't have those people out here.

Mm-hmm.

So that started off that career path and I, that's my first job where I found HubSpot. I needed to find a tool that like did social media and did websites and did email. I was like, I'm not gonna have 12 tools. I was forbidden to use WordPress 'cause they were a Microsoft shop. So they're like, You can use anything that's not open source.

Pretty much.

And so in 2013, I got HubSpot and learned the COS and launched a website on the platform. I was their Salesforce administrator back when Salesforce and HubSpot's integration was not very nice. And so I feel like, you know, I'm one of those OGs who's sort of seen a lot happen in HubSpot since then and shortly after. And I'm sure that'll be your next question.

The fact that you said COS shows just how OG you are because I don't think anybody's referenced it as the COS in a long time besides like maybe us here who have been like through it, you know, but no.

That was before me even.

I don't—

that was, yeah, that even, that was even before I started there. Let me ask you, that first interaction with HubSpot as a kind of a solution for you, was there anything that really stood out and surprised you about Being able to use something like that to solve, you know, like having that kind of tool?

You know, I remember it was between HubSpot and Contigo and it was the HubSpot rep who was like, I will give you a deal. I was like sold, right? But I think for HubSpot, even though we joke and poke fun at it, it actually had the best integration to Salesforce at the time. I remember Salesforce was an early investor and so that was like one of the first Native, you know, connectors that happened. I think for me, I just needed that all-in-one tool. And there was another agency that my boss knew, or another dude. He was in like the fantasy sports betting realm, and he was running a million-dollar business all by himself. And he said, "I do it on HubSpot." So I think that was like the final validation. Like okay. I was a solo market— I was like the solo everything, you know, every, every role was me and I needed to be able to do everything as efficiently as possible in one tool. 'Cause I couldn't do it if I had to have multiple tools, you know?

Yeah.

No, that's fantastic. Yeah. No, I mean, if anyone told me that about you can start a million-dollar business all by yourself just by using one piece of, you know, like one tool, I mean, that, that speaks volumes. Let me ask you a question.

May I ask a question like a little bit further back? Uh, when you were 26 and you went to work for the paper and you were 26 and you see it's going wrong, how did you have the confidence to actually say, yo, this is wrong and we need to do it this way? Because I don't know if, I mean, that's a, that's a big step right there, isn't it?

Especially starting out. Yeah. If you're, nobody wants to be the new person, right? Yeah.

I've never had an issue with that. And there's actually, um, I'm going to just jump forward, Nick. There's a question you had on your list earlier, you know, later on, like, what is one thing a mentor, like, said to you that was impactful? It was actually in that last and best job that I had, which was a software agency that also had a SaaS product, where my CEO said, you know, it doesn't matter if you're the smartest person in the room, if no one wants to listen to you. I always knew I was smart. I always had a little bit of an inability to read people early on. So, I would just flat out tell you, this is wrong. Like, I never had a problem. I was one of those people where everybody wanted me on their projects. They knew they were going to get brilliance, but no one actually wanted to talk to me because I lacked the skill needed to convince people, educate people, motivate people, um, have them want to listen to me.

I have the same thing except without the brilliance. People just don't want to talk to me. So it's, I can understand a little bit where you're coming from.

We honestly don't know why he's here today. We just, No, it's—

and it was tough. And I think I see that a lot, you know, later on as I became an employer, where brilliant people who just lack the comms skill, you know, you see people who rise and succeed, and 90% of them are these people who are just so beautiful with words, so personable, so eloquent. And they're not necessarily all that technically adept, right? But if you can If you can bridge the two, wow, can you do amazing things? Yes. So, uh, I, I feel like I've been a lifelong student of communication and people and try to figure out how, how to connect with other people so that we could all get motivated to do things together because it's lonely to try to do things alone. You know what I mean? Like, right. It's good to have people with you to do it. It's, you know, this is not a manipulation tactic. This is a, it's healthy. It's the human condition to want to be with people, you know?

Yep.

Oh, absolutely.

Well, not all of us can build sites that, you know, attract our significant others in different kind of gaps, you know?

We're not all there.

Okay.

It's amazing.

I claim to be.

It's amazing. It is absolutely amazing. And you've also too, like, it's not just because from that point, I imagine then, because you have mentioned being, you know, an employer, multiple, right? HubSpot agencies, like top HubSpot agencies, you've been instrumental in creating, that has to take some of those things that you're mentioning and you have to either sharpen on it or become better at it because you can't get to that next level in the ladder without, I'm okay as a person. Yeah, some people don't like talking to me, but those two things never equate with someone who create, you know, a top agency. So was there, was there, was there, was there any type of like problems you ran into like moving on to that next step with some of those skills or?

Um, I think early days it was good that I was ignorant. If I, if I wasn't ignorant, I probably wouldn't have done certain things, right? Uh, business stuff is scary, taxes and employment rules. I mean, I think Before COVID I had my first employee in a different state and I had to learn how to be a multi-state employer. I think our government makes it so hard to run any kind of a business, but the human side has always been the most difficult part. I mean, people are the best and the worst part of a service-based business. You know, everyone's on PTO, everyone has their own problem, everyone has their own issues, everybody has their own personalities. You feel like As the one running the show and the most invested in it, you constantly have to be a chameleon to adjust to everybody else's goals and priorities. And you have to honestly, at least diminish yours in the face of theirs, because we're not in an environment where everyone really wants to cheer for the business owner, right? We live in a world where we cheer for the employee, we cheer for the the guy at the bottom who's, you know, the big guys are earning off their backs. And unfortunately, as an employer, even if I have one employee, I've now become the big guy who's earning off the backs of somebody else. So, I have to just make sure that our goals are aligned, right? That they feel that there isn't an imbalance in benefit to this relationship. Otherwise, the human part is lost. So, it's a constant struggle to try to keep that.

That's such a good perspective to have too. Like, that's so— it's so unheard of in, in like some of the larger things that you hear in the news and things like that where like they don't care about employees. Like hearing people say like, no, like those are like the, you know, of course the loudest ones are always going to be in the news, things like that. But you're like, what you're saying is like, that's not a common thing that people can expect to run into all the time. You know, there are the outliers where like, no, they do care about the employees and like Dude, that's really refreshing to hear. And I'm sure a lot of people who listen will be refreshed to hear that as well.

Yeah. And also, can I say, like, you also have those guardrails though, right? But there are guardrails to that. Like, the goals can't— it's not like you are the owner still and you have to drive the direction of the business. So you can only be so flexible, I'm assuming, right?

You gotta align it, right? You have to align it all the time. And it's on you because to your point, You know, I wasn't going so deep into this conversation, but you're right. I have to adjust it. That adjustment sometimes means our goals are no longer aligned. I'm not leaving, but you do.

Right.

You know, like, you need to leave because, wait, yeah, I'm the unmovable, you're the movable. And we have to find a good path. And I know that I've had to do firings and layoffs. But at the same time, I've marched that person over and introduced them to other 5 other CEOs who I know could hire them. Right? Because they may not meet my goals now, but they will absolutely meet Goals of another team. I have staff, you know, past staff, just like in all the HubSpot agencies. I feel like the Queen Victoria mother of agency workers. They're just, I have like 7 past employees that work at HubSpot. So I feel like I'm just, they're everywhere. They've just disseminated out to join other lands, right? And bring us all in unifying us all together. So.

Yeah.

I mean, misalignment doesn't necessarily mean a a bad thing is, I mean, like, if you're misaligned and you're working together for years, that's just a toxic relationship and no one wants it. No one wins. Right. So, yeah.

Now, let me ask you this.

I worked hard. I endeavored to be a person that could let my employees tell me when they were ready to move on and they wouldn't have a consequence. Right. I remember I had one employee who said she was ready to move on, but it took 10 months. So I had to help her for 10 months prepare for a transition for her to go and Be an entrepreneur and do her own thing.

That's amazing.

At some point I said, I think you're ready. Like, we've been working on this.

Like, you should take the leap.

Yeah.

The fact that you took the time to do that though is even— it's immense because a lot of places, like, especially the bigger you get as an organization, it's kind of like, oh, well, you'd like to do something else? Well, here's the door. Let me show you how to open it. Like, yeah, you know, so it's, uh, no, no, it's a very refreshing take on that. And, and granted, Like hindsight's 20/20, right? Like, so there's a lot of things where, you know, people may listen to a story or they may even think to themselves like about things that happened previously with like, oh, I should have seen that happen or I should have done this or that. But was there any type of like non-obvious things like with that? Let's take that first agency launch, right? That first creation of that. Were there any type of like, I wanna call 'em like, it's like non-obvious advice, right? that you had to learn that kind of maybe wasn't so? Because like, you know, there's things you can look back on very easily and say like, oh, well, yeah, obviously I should have done that. Like one of an example you gave was like, you know, like taxes out of state. Were there any other things like that, that like as an entrepreneur that like, especially for people starting out, that they're just not, it's not as obvious when they're trying to, like you said, the person that it took them 10 months to go, were there things like, you were mentioning to them that are like, hey, you may not realize this when you first start, but you might wanna look, you know, take these things into consideration?

Gosh, I think everything else, there's a business book, there's a business advisor, right? There's a checklist. I think honestly building my personal brand was what has separated me. It has allowed me to have a forum to launch new things because people follow me and the things I do versus The business I created, and so investing in that earlier, I think, would have been great. I was doing a lot of connecting online and you know marketing to people in the name of the brands I was associated to, but it took too long for me to realize I needed to do it actually like for me. Now there was because I was doing that, there was a little flow that came to me right by way of that. They're like, oh, the girl who markets Mary Kay. But I think if I was a little bit more aggressive earlier on, I think I could be better, further, faster. And I think a lot of people don't want to do that. I think it's scary to be in a place where you reveal yourself and people can criticize you. It's not the route for everyone, but I would say it's going to be the cheaper, most effective route to launch new businesses. It's going to cost you an infinite amount of money to hire somebody else to do it. for you if you don't do it for yourself. Lots and lots of business lessons along the way, but they were all things that I probably should have paid attention to. The one thing I just didn't smack me in the face back then. And honestly, it's all over the place. You hear people talk about personal brand and still people ignore it. And I think that's the one thing. I always paid my staff to market themselves alongside the umbrella of the company, right? Like, well, don't just talk about the product we offer. Talk about how you are building The product we offer, right? Talk about your experience working here. Talk about what you are learning and build your expertise. We ride our flags together, but one day when you're sailing your own ship, right, you're gonna have a whole crew following you over there.

So.

That's a bit, that's a, I like that analogy cuz I, I, I think like one, I'm guilty of it myself. Like I don't really, not until recently, right? Like until this endeavor, to be brutally honest, didn't really do that, right? It was always like, oh, I'm, Well, I can say it now because they don't exist anymore, but like, I work for DreamTown. Like, that is what I— it's not me, it's I am the, you know, SEO person for DreamTown. Or like, and HubSpot kind of changed that kind of self-view as well, where it was like, oh yeah, I'm not just, you know, someone on ecosystem quality or DevRel, I'm a HubSpotter. I'm actually Nick, the HubSpotter, not just a number or a, you know what I mean? So that's I think that's— I'm glad you mentioned that because I think that's something people miss. And I think too, and I'd love to get your take on this, it's like you lose— not that you lose that, but you don't do that necessarily at the start because you're young and when you join a place. And I know you said just a little while ago that for you, some of those things weren't necessarily an issue because you were able to speak to like, hey, this doesn't seem right, where a lot of people would be kind of Afraid because they don't want to. You don't want to be the new ship in the harbor and start making waves, right? Like so, was on top of because I know you said that like the being able to point out that like hey there's something wrong here we need to fix this. Like was it hard to like build that personal brand once you started to realize that that was something that you should be doing? Because like I said, a lot of people sometimes they just don't do it.

I started off with like things that were like repetitive that I could do that didn't require me to be brilliant to figure something new out. I attended conferences and I went to webinars and I took notes and I became the gal who gave you the Cliff Notes of the education that was going on out there in the realm. I'm a pretty entertaining writer, so people liked to read it. I found that I did have a, you know, even though I, I was annoying and could show up and tell somebody that you're doing this wrong, I could then simplify and make it really easy for you to understand. And all of a sudden, You knew how to do it right. You just sort of didn't like the harshness of my criticism, right? But when it came to passing the criticism and now going into teacher mode, I was a great teacher and educator and I could— I was patient and I really loved to see people learn the things I was interested in. So I started off my brand just doing something very simple like that. My brand was just, she's the one passing knowledge. And I was like, okay, I could do that. Like I could be known as someone to pass knowledge. Because that's not me being fake, that, oh, she's the girl who always says the nicest things to me. Like, I could be the girl who passes knowledge. That was my brand. And then over time, I learned how to be a better speaker. And now I, you know, I get compliments. And I— this is very meaningful compliment when I'm on a podcast or I'm on a video or I have a clip of me speaking and people say, wow, you're so interesting to listen to. You're so engaging. You know, I don't know if it's your tone of voice or your, you know, life story or how you explain things, but I love listening to what you're saying. This is like the biggest mountain I had to surmount was to get to that point where someone actually out of their own choice wants to listen to me, not because they have to, because they want to. And, you know, I probably will never stop investing in that part because I think it's It's a flaw in me that will always exist if I don't work on it. I'll kind of like default. Then I hear myself saying something a little harsh to, to my spouse or something. Like I'm not being as thoughtful in conveying my message. Um, so it's, you know, it's like an addiction, right? An addiction to just blunt, um, communication. I've worked hard to be effective. Now I'm not softening it. I'm just being more effective in how I communicate.

Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah.

I, I don't, me as an individual, like I love the direct feedback because I'm one of those people where like if I build something, tear it apart. That's the only way I'm going to learn. You know, and I know that there's others out there that like build things and kind of get disheartened by it. But I think that there's the emotional attachment to a project that you work on and the things that you enjoy. And so when people do like come down on it, you do feel hurt. And I mean, I even went through this myself. And this was something that I just very recently was able to detach from previous work that I had done to where like somebody changes it or they change the way in which I had originally made it and intended. And it's like, yep, not my thing anymore. So I gotta accept that. Like, that's— so like, that does take a lot of work to do though. And then to your point, it is a mountain. It's a climb the entire time until you finally get to that point where you're comfortable enough to say, hey, I'm handing this off. Like, if you need questions, I can help, but like, this is yours now.

You know, go with it.

Now, AJ, you mentioned building apps and building, you know, just building in general. A question we had for you, Nicole, was how do you keep that fire alive? Because just for some kind of context, you didn't stop. Like, because I know a lot of people that have like created, maybe they created businesses or they've created things and they've kind of moved up that ladder, if you will, if people like to use that analogy, but they'll give it up. Like, I've talked to people where they're like, oh, I don't do website stuff anymore because I own this, so I run this now. But you've kept consistently like either vibe coding or just creating sites. And how do you keep that passion going?

I honestly don't think I'm an entrepreneur. I think I'm an inventor and a builder. I think entrepreneurship sort of just funds it if you think about it in a way. So I left my first agency, which was at its peak, you know, very, very successful. Multiple millions in revenue, big staff of trained HubSpot people. That that was the business that a lot of people went off to work at HubSpot eventually because I felt that inbound marketing was changing and I and I felt that it was it was not where I wanted to be anymore and that I was sort of seeing this movement towards RevOps before it was RevOps at the time. I was like somebody needs to admin these HubSpot portals that all these other Creative agencies don't know how to admin. They can send @email and they can make @page, but like, are they going to orchestrate the system to work well? And so I started the second agency from scratch and built a website and started doing my SEO thing like I do. We were ranking for the question, what is RevOps, for years before people really even knew what it was because they were like, what is this term that people are looking up? And I kept trying to, you know, action people at HubSpot and agencies to like, RevOps is the next thing for HubSpot agencies. I'm telling you, like inbound will sunset and it will become something more connected to what it means to run a business and not just to market the business. We're gonna be like deeply rooted in that. So I was smart. I caught another wave. COVID hit. Everybody was like, oh crap, you know, we need to do more with less. And then when that sort of became really mainstream, there wasn't much to invent anymore. Everybody now already has solidified definitions of RevOps. Felt it was time to move on again, right? So I merged that business out and, you know, was looking at what's the next big thing for me. I think my entrepreneurism is the invention, is the building, is the creation portion of it, not The bureaucracy and stabilization. And, you know, like, I think I'm a good wartime leader, right? Everything's chaos and I can bring it all together and I'm not afraid. I think my fearlessness to speak up was also fearlessness to just try something and like, oh, screwed up. Like, I don't have much ego when it comes to like, oh, that was really bad. Let's fix it. Let's do better. It also, I think, makes me a great person to work with because while I can be direct about, okay, you screwed up, let's fix it. That's a totally different attitude than you screwed up, let's put you on a PIP, you know, like, like, let's actually clean up our own mess. There's a great story. This was actually a job way back in probably 2010, 2011, WordPress website, getting it launched and working on it for months with an outside developer, adjusting a theme, writing copy, getting it all ready for a— it was a legal association I worked for. Night before, I somehow deleted, while, while we were cleaning up the hosting, somehow this folder was in the wrong place. Somebody put it in the wrong, and so I deleted it. Website gone. But here's the thing, the files for the website when it comes to WordPress are separate from the database. So I had the database. So I had like, I had the content, I had the configuration, I had the, like the structure, the underpinning of what it was supposed to be.

Mm-hmm.

So I literally spent like 14 hours all night, didn't leave the office. I'm there all night long. No one knows what's happening. I'm sitting there trying to get as much as I can back live through email copies, code snippets, like literally doing what took us months and a developer to do. And I got it to like 90%. Developer comes online. I'm like, please tell me you have the rest. He gets in there, he does the rest, and we launch on time the next morning. And it was like, that has been my journey all along is massive screwups, but the fortitude to go, I have to fix it, right? I don't walk away from the messes. I will literally fix it. And the amount I learn in those stressful moments, it's like years, right? Are packed on just that, that one night that I stayed up all night to fix this. I felt like at that point I was like a WordPress goddess. Like I felt I learned more about WordPress. in that night than, than I had in a long time. And I, you know, in that career I ended up launching over 500 WordPress websites. So I've actually launched more WordPress websites than HubSpot websites in my, I mean, a lot's changed, but I think, I think that was a pivotal point that made me feel like I really could do a lot with this platform at the time.

Yeah, it's like a godlike feeling, right? It's like, it's like you can either kill it or you can make it successful. All, all with one little—

I can do anything on WordPress at that point. I was like, oh, you want to do that? No problem.

Drop table.

Yeah. Let's see, 500 sites. If I think about updates and plugins, that's at least a million.

Like, oh yeah. And hopefully you don't have to move to the next PHP version because then that's going to throw everything else off. And then it's like, oh my God, it's—

That's why I moved to HubSpot, right? Because I needed it closed. You know, for all the benefits that open source gave me, for businesses who really wanted their business to not be hacked or fall apart, you need a closed environment where that is monitored. And that's where sort of HubSpot became the gold standard for me after that.

Yeah, I wanna say that was a big thing with a lot of clients, even when I freelanced, was they knew of WordPress because of the hype and the advertising of it all. And they were like, this is gonna be great. And it's like, yeah, but you need to maintain it to make it Consistent. And that's where I don't think they understood the maintenance portion of it. And then they would just come back and be like, oh, well, this isn't working. It's like, no, it's working. You're just not maintaining it.

So that's why it's not working.

Yep. Yep.

Why don't we— we could, since we're almost— we're coming up on time anyway, so we can transition into kind of like just kind of wrapping everything up. And then so basically, like, are there any places that people can find you if they want to learn more about you or Is there anything that you'd like to promote?

Gosh, I'm not the best promoter other than the promoter of knowledge.

Are you looking for prospects for SEO? I'm just saying.

No, you know, these days I mostly do it for my own ventures, right? Like the things I'm invested in. Honestly, I'm in this new realm, so, you know, I'm going to skip over to A little bit of a conversation I do want to have where we talked about that entrepreneurial thing. And I feel like I've discovered that my entrepreneurship is more of like an investor, right? Having ownership or partial ownership of things, being a mentor, that teacher, that guide, but not the boss in a sense, right? Being there to impart knowledge, but not have to mandate compliance. I think all that compliance and HR stuff. killed it for me.

Mm-hmm.

So I said the human side is the best and the worst part. The best part is the teaching. The worst part is the disciplining. And so, uh, investing myself to play that role that I know I'm best suited to be, because I think once I reached 20, 25 people in a company, I tapped out emotionally. Like I could not handle the people side of the business so much anymore. It was a lot. Um, and I over-indexed on relationships. So it was just crushing to me, you know, to have to deal with that. So this transition for me is to be an investor. So owning things, advising those things. And so that leads into the vibe coding phase that I'm in, where I'm trying to build an app, and I'm trying to find a business model that can let me play that role. Less people are needed. When you build an app. And I can spend more time tinkering and inventing than appeasing cranky customers and needy team members. And so I'm on that, I'm still on that journey to find out, am I really still an entrepreneur? And which model is it? Because I landed magically into the service model because I was a service provider. That happens for a lot of people. But I don't think that model is for me when it comes to being a leader. Like, I don't think I want to be a service leader. It just doesn't— it's not giving me the life that I want to live, right? Everyone else around me is fulfilled but me. So, that's where I'm at right now. And AI has helped me do that, where I was always this almost a coder, not really, total solutions architect, scoping software, troubleshooting code with developers, articulating you know, how this world needs to work. I've even presented on your, you know, events teaching developers how to develop, right? But I never did it myself until, you know, DeepSeek and Gemini and ChatGPT came around and I could articulate what I want to do and it would show me the code and then the code would work and then it would help me troubleshoot the code and then it would help me lint the code. And I was like, this is what I needed. I just needed a sidekick this whole time that that could be my pen, you know, in the coding world. And I did similar things in the design world, right? I can train and advise designers and teach them the foundations, but I'm not a designer. So, I was always just a good person who understood the fundamentals and could teach others. And so, I built a prototype and now we're working on an app. It's just a side project right now, but I'm hoping it could be something meaningful. And it's helping me dive deep— deeply back into the dev world, working with the devs, working, learning APIs, seeing a side of HubSpot. Like, I love turning HubSpot over and seeing an area that no one is giving it attention and solving for that person, solving for that team.

Yeah.

And so that's where I'm at. So if anybody wants to talk to me about vibe coding, you can find me on LinkedIn. I try to make myself very free to talk to people. I don't think I'm the type of vibe coder where I'm like, ooh, I launched a business all by myself. No, I transitioned to having developers, but my prototype gave them the map, right?

Right.

Like, they could take that, and now I've validated every process. I validated how the APIs worked. I've documented it. Now they can just now go make an actual application. They're not testing or tinkering or figuring it out. I did it for them. And that's what I love.

I love that part.

That's fantastic.

Well, thank you so much for coming on. We really do appreciate it. I mean, there's, you know, there's certain people that you talk to that have such an, like, a unique not just Outlook, but they have their journey, like, because telling the developer story, right? That's our tagline, right? And there's— and developer obviously now, especially like in the moment, has a completely new definition as opposed to like 5 years ago, or when you're— if you're making a website on AngelFire, like, there's— there's a— the, the developer definition has changed. But yet there are so many people that have such a unique experience and have such a, uh, you know, a unique story. And yours is one of those. And that's why we wanted to talk to you today.

Yes.

So we really do appreciate you Being able to give us that sort of insight because like I said, you, it's not just development, it's not just vibe coding, it's not just whether you wanna call it entrepreneurial or whether you wanna call it building or like creating like agencies and just companies. And from like, like you said, from makeup all the way to like top HubSpot agencies, there's still those type of commonalities, right? As far as like what you're learning. You know, the lessons learned, the mentorship that both you get and you give, right? Because that teaching is sort of a mentorship as well. So, but like having you on and being able to talk is the kind of things where not everybody gets that because not everybody knows people with such unique aspects to basically their career. So we just wanna thank you because that's huge. And then to be able to tell it and to be as open and honest as you are about it is You don't find that in a lot of people, and we really do appreciate that.

Priceless. Priceless. Yeah.

Thank you for having me. I think I represent a group of people who, who don't have like guidance, right? Like they, they, on the surface we look, we're just jumping around with, you know, aimlessly, but there is some thread. And once you can find the thread, that becomes your story, right? Like mine, mine is just, I'm a builder, I'm an inventor, I'm a creator. Um, it just manifests itself in many different ways.

Mm-hmm.

But this story's always been there. And once I could figure out what that story was, then people looked at me differently. No longer was I the gal who didn't wanna wake up early in the morning and, you know, who works all night and who, you know, doesn't wanna be in an office. Like, I was the person who needed lots of time to create things and just gimme the space. And all of a sudden, next week you're gonna have a product. That's my story. And I think a lot of people, Once they find their little thread, the little story, I think all of a sudden they feel empowered, right? Then they could be on a podcast talking about it and it's no longer weird. It's something that's interesting.

Yeah, we definitely appreciate you taking the time to tell your story here because this is what we live for here is doing this. So we really do appreciate it. And I wanna be really conscious of time here for you. Again, thank you for coming on and I'll kind of just leave everything with this. Dennis, a quick question for you. Do you know why the developer was unhappy at their job?

Why?

Because they wanted arrays. Arrays.

That's right.

That's right.

Bye.

I can't take credit for all the jokes, but they are pretty good. They are pretty good.