Ep. 36 - Justin In A Box with Justin Givens | Devs:After Dark

And, uh, I was like, what's a computer? He brought one home and I was like, this is awesome. I need to delete Windows so I can install the new game.

Hello and welcome to another episode. We're glad you could join us.

And for those of you who are new, Thank you for giving us a shot.

Today we're gonna have a really amazing guest. If you've ever been on our blog, if you've ever been— he doesn't know he's amazing yet. If you've ever been on our blog, if you've ever been to Inbound, if you've ever gone through any workshops, he might look familiar. That's because he's everywhere. But before we let him introduce himself, let me just get into one quick thing here, and that is the website that we always want you to go to. And that is devsafterdarkpod.com. Now, if you want to be a guest, you can go on the website and you can fill out the form and then we'll reach out to you. If you want to be a guest on the show, we would love to talk with you. As we always say, the definition of developer has changed, blown up, if you will, over a short period of time. So it's no longer one of these things where you can't talk to someone who does SEO. We have a whole miniseries that we're doing, you know, SEO in the AI world, where we're talking with people with SEO experience. So go to that website, take a look. But this is where we want you to go. And, uh, got a little Halloween theme there. I might have to change it for the holidays coming up. But nevertheless, if you got a little bit of time, we do appreciate if you go over there. You can check out some of the back episodes that we have, and there'll be links to it. Uh, those links will of course lead you to the other place that we'd like you to visit if you can and subscribe. Uh, that would be the HubSpot Developers YouTube channel. That would be @HubSpotDevelopers. Without further ado, I would like to have our guest introduce himself.

Justin, why don't you tell everyone who you are and what you do?

Thanks.

So I am Justin Givens. I have been fortunate enough to be around a computer since I was a kid, um, back to the Windows 3.11 days. Um, I run a HubSpot consultancy agency called Image in a Box that also has built and manages and supports Simple Events, uh, the fastest growing event management tool in HubSpot right now. We're over 1,000 installs, so I'm super stoked about that. But that my— if you've ever talked to me, if you've ever seen me in person, you're going to know that I love PHP. All right. And I know in this community, everyone laughs at me. But it's, it's 100% true.

Just for the PHP or is there other things that—

Both, both, both of them. Okay. So yeah, no, it's Um, I, I love problem solving. I love computers. I've always had one around my fingertips. I remember my dad, um, jumping from the copier and typewriter business and 10 other guys and him started a computer business in Chattanooga.

Shut up.

Really?

Yeah. In Tennessee. And, uh, what's a computer? He brought one home and I was like, this is awesome. I need to delete Windows so I can install the new game. And true story, that actually happened. Uh, so that was, uh, not a fun week with my dad.

Wait, me and AJ did something similar with the first Gateway that was ever bought for the house, the first like computer in the house that we started pulling it apart and like trying to mod it and stuff, like, you know, like the people online do. And it was just, yeah, it's, uh, we voided that warranty right away. Oh yeah, I can relate.

Yeah, do not remove sticker. What was that?

I don't know.

I had a metal sticker just boom, right? Right away.

What happens if I take the door off the thing with the sticker on it? I haven't technically removed the sticker. So, but yeah, no, we, we can definitely relate to that. You mentioned though, um, now you said there's a, there's a very interesting story around the creation of Image in a Box, right?

Yeah.

Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Uh, so I moved to Huntsville, Alabama, which is where I'm currently located right now. Uh, as of this podcast, I don't know where I'll be in the future. Uh, with that, Hmm. I moved down here, had another job, and I was doing a lot of WordPress. Uh, fun little fact, Justin's name's in the WordPress source code. I gave back to a lot of that program. I got a lot of code in there.

Nice.

Um, a lot of fun there. And I was just doing stuff, solving people's problems, bidding on random jobs here and there at night, not conflicting with my current job that I had. And we were walking the dog, me and my wife Michelle. And she goes, you know, you're, you're really good at what you do. Why don't we start a business? And I was like, okay, sure, you know, whatever. Uh, so I wanted to name it like Light Post Designs or something like that because I love Pixar movies and I love that little intro with light.

Yeah.

Um, so I grew up with that as a forthcoming of computers and anime and all that kind of stuff, or animation. And she was like, yeah, that's not a good name. And I was like, you're, you're right. So by her grace, by her vision, Image in a Box was born. And she's like, yeah, I really think, you know, it's Image in a Box cuz we're putting websites in, theoretically every device we look at is a box.

Ah, good.

Um, but what I will tell you is that name gets a lot of searches for custom box designs, like shipping boxes.

Okay.

So for about 6 years, I'd say we got a lead a week. Hey, can you design us a box? No, this is not what we do.

That'll have to be the side hustle, right? That's a career.

It should have been, right? Here's, here's your sign, right? It's like, go into this industry. So yeah, it was, it's been fun. We, I jumped from my current company that I was working for and we only had 3 months worth of work. At that time, how was it?

What'd you feel honestly? Like what, like nerves-wise?

I cried, um, the second week into it. Um, and I'll be honest, I was, uh, we got in the car, uh, fortunately my wife had another job at the time, so we were running it together, but she was still working at another, uh, company. We were driving to Gatlinburg to go camping with some friends. It was gonna be a nice getaway, just Camping on the river and I'm sitting there in the car. I don't know how we're gonna do this. I just spent 2 weeks networking. I went to every single networking event in Huntsville.

Wow.

And I didn't get a single bit of work.

Wow.

And it wasn't the sales process. It was, uh, yeah, it was very humbling. Uh, but it was what, what I learned and what's very important is When you find your target audience, that's, you gotta find out where they are, right? Who you, who are you selling to?

Right.

I didn't care what the event was. I just signed up to go network.

Right, right.

Well, come to find out it was a franchise marketing event. Well, they don't own their websites back in the early 2000s, right? So it was, and then you come into the government world, which is where I live in Huntsville. It's a lot of DOD contractors. And they're like, no, we don't care about marketing. We're just doing cool engineering stuff. Okay, awesome. This is gonna go great, honey. Um, but I mean, God was on our side, so it was, it put us in a fast path to directory. We made some really good business connections, um, and started building. I mean, I, I wanna say early 2010s. So like 2010 is when we started, 2011 and '12, I built an eBay platform for WordPress, and it was really, really fun. Um, so, and that was for an education sector. It was really cool. But again, that's, that was the problem. They didn't want to go to eBay. They couldn't go to eBay because of the assets that they were moving, and they wanted to build a bidding system. So I was like, let's go.

So, well, is there a, um, let me ask you, was there a point, uh, when you were first getting started that, uh, really surprised you? Because I mean, aside from, and what it sounds like you're describing, and correct me if I'm wrong, but there's like, there's imposter syndrome that comes in that, like, category, right? Where there's just, you know, it doesn't leave you unless you've conquered it.

Nick, please tell me how. What's the special juice?

I would not be the one to talk to on that. No, for sure. I agree.

Yeah.

Uh, I'm sure Dennis doesn't deal with this at all.

Never.

Um, he knows everything. So also, it's true. Typically when you're starting out, you're like, look, I know what I'm talking about. I can do this. And then when you get told no so many times, you start questioning like, Maybe I don't know what I'm doing. Maybe I can't do this. Maybe, um, and in those first, I would say after those 3 months, we would get little jobs here and there in that first 3 months. And you're like, okay, we can get this snowball. We can get this going. Um, and then what you start hearing is what the clients are saying afterwards. Like, I can't believe you actually did what you said you were gonna do. I'm like, what are you talking about? That's like a no-brainer. I said I was gonna give you a website. Of course I'm gonna give you a website.

Mm-hmm.

But in the industry at that time, it was known people just to take the money and run.

Hmm.

Okay.

Yeah.

Um, so there was a lot of skepticism out there, right? So that imposter syndrome slowly went down into nothing because business was working, the network was growing, and it was really fun. Um, but what I would tell you, and a lot of people think, oh cool, I've got it successful now. Imposter syndrome is never gonna come back. Well, that's a lie. All right. So when we started Image in a Box as a WordPress, like web development shop, that's what it was. There was 4 competitors in Huntsville. That was it. I think by 2017, 2015, there was 30.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

So you wanna talk about like, oh, we're doing great. Oh my gosh. Now we're actually having to bid.

Right.

Against all these people who are leaner than what we were, were cheaper because they were leaner. Um, so it just, it crept back up. Maybe we can't do this, right? Um, and then we started looking at, even in the WordPress world, um, 'cause we found HubSpot in 2017.

Mm-hmm.

All right. So pre that, we started building internally apps, what I would call apps for WordPress. So we had started building out what I called ShopSync. So it could use WooCommerce as your single source of truth for all your e-commerce platforms. eBay, Amazon, everything would sync into it and your online store could be, your inventory could be controlled.

Mm-hmm.

Right?

That's cool.

Um, and then you could have a dashboard. Well, imposter syndrome. We built it. We had eBay and Amazon syncing and then boom, crashed. Like, no, we're taking it down. This is not what we're doing. Like imposter syndrome went through the roof and we just, I literally deleted it.

Wait, wait, wait, wait. Start over. So it, it crashed and then you—

Sorry, it cr— it didn't crash.

Sorry.

Imposter syndrome creeped up because we were like, how do we sell this? We don't know how to sell this. We don't know what we're doing. Let's just stop doing it. Let's go back to what we know. Right? Right. Same thing happened with, um, CRM Box. So I like the term box. For some reason, I don't know why. Um, and the CRM box was turning WordPress into a, it was almost a HubSpot style. You're user-centric. It could do all the cookie tracking. You could do all that. Um, and that was from my experience back in college when I built an email marketing platform for my fraternity, 'cause I was bored. We had a bad communication system, so I built an SMS and an email platform to solve a problem for the fraternity. And it was a lot of fun.

I mean, that's awesome. I mean, like, I was literally taking oceanography on a Wednesday night and you're sitting here building email marketing platforms. I think that's just like, that's awesome.

Well, it did the one-to-one, it did all the things. So it could do mail, it could do your mail merge style. Um, say, hey Nick, hey AJ, hey Dennis, all in the single email. We could see individually who opened what. And I, I mean, I really, it was, it was nerding out, exploring everything possible. with PHP and, again, PHP, uh, and MySQL at the time. But it was a lot of fun. And then I was able to pass that over to the next people in the fraternity as I graduated. And then one day, 'cause I used to format my computer every summer.

Same, same.

Really?

Yeah.

Yeah. Oh, it's awesome.

It's such a free experience.

You know, but I, you know, and I'm kind of like on the flip side.

No GitHub existed either, right? Yeah.

Okay.

That's fair. That's fair.

You're like, whatever I'm putting on this little drive or CD. All right. You remember CDs?

God. Yeah. I remember having so many CDs of like 1 of 7, 2 of 7 of just like backup files.

Or the, what was it? The IOMegas, the Iomega zip drives, right?

Yes.

Those were, yeah.

Yes.

Those were a staple in college.

So, so, so like building websites was kind of like, you know, you, you knew PHP and Then WordPress was there, so you just built websites. You didn't decide to go more server-side stuff. I mean, like, like what you're doing, more app building initially?

Yeah. So what this was sort of the, the journey as you start bidding on projects and as your company grows and as you expand in the world, you have to see where people are asking for the next thing or you're losing the continuing services, right? So what I saw was people were like, hey, You know, your website looks great, but it's not doing anything for my business. Well, and that's when we started questioning, like, okay, well, what are you doing to drive leads? And they're like, well, nothing. I've got my website.

Okay.

So you're not blogging because we're already on WordPress. Why aren't you blogging? Oh, well, we don't think we need to. Okay. That question. Okay. Are you running billboards, ads in industry with flyers, you know, whatever you're doing? And all these people are like, well, no. People are just gonna find me. It goes back to the Field of Dreams. If you build it, they will come. Kind of, no. And the engineering mindset or even the imposter mindset is, well, I've got the perfect tool. People will just search for me.

Right.

Right. And where, where's that marketing match?

Right.

So we started saying, okay, at this time, so if y'all were using Google Ads back in 2012, It was difficult. It was hard. It was slow to launch an ad.

Oh yeah.

It took a process, right?

Mm-hmm.

Well, being technical, being nerdy, we could do it and we could make sure Google Analytics was 100% tracked on what we needed to for this client. So we moved into what I call the full agency model. So we went from websites to saying, okay, cool, let's help you drive that traffic. Let's do the blogging. Let's, let's run the ads. Let's do the email marketing. All right. So we would use Mailchimp at the time. I wanted to use my old platform, but again, I lost it because of the monthly or the, the summerly formats. Okay.

Um, this is sounding a lot like a Pixar movie that just gets deleted and then all of a sudden somebody has the backup.

Yeah, of course. But no one had the backup. SVN did not work well for me then.

Okay.

Um, so from that transition, We started losing, because we had marketing contracts at that time, we started losing contracts. So we would have clients 5, 6 years and then they were like, nope, we're done. We're not seeing any ROI. We're like, well, what are you talking about? Like, if you look at the reports, it's like we're driving growth year over year, content's growing. And they're like, yeah, but we're not getting any customers. Well, then that presented the next question of, well, what are you doing when we bring you a lead?

What do you mean?

Well, I, I'll call 'em. Well, how many times? Well, I mean, I'll email 'em.

What do you mean?

So at that same moment, we found HubSpot. So building that marketing automation, building that whole pipeline, and we started saying, we're gonna do more for that for customers who were, I currently at the mind, sorry, currently at the moment, we're a HubSpot Platinum agency. Okay, so when you think about that transition, it's like, okay, cool. Now I have another problem. I've solved all these other problems, but now you can't sell or you can't close the customer into a discovery call to actually vet them. We're losing that, right? So I can see why we're losing these contracts. So then we started doing sales coaching. We started using HubSpot Sales Hub, using sequences, using the meeting sets. Now we're actually saying, look, now look how many meetings we got booked for you. So that then turned into, okay, cool, I need to do more at HubSpot. So I think it was around 2020, 2020 or 2021, the company, I made the call, we're going all in HubSpot. So we dropped everything WordPress and said, this is all we're doing and we're teaching and coaching and building on WordPress. Um, so at that point we were running webinars. I was running training sessions on Google Analytics, um, even to my competitors. Those 30 competitors came to a training session that I had a 4-week training session on. And I was like, why did we not get any customers? Oh, because I just trained all my competition.

I mean, that's fine, man.

We broke even on it, but it was like, Well, this is great. Like looking at the room, it's like, this is my competition, you know? So, and that was, that was funny, but then you could see there was a need for this technical expert, expert in the area of like, well, we can build, we can drive leads, but we don't know how to report on it. We don't know how to build this revenue, um, engine, you could say. And that's why we went 100% HubSpot at that time. So when that transition happened, that's when we, back to your question, Dennis, started saying we need to build platforms and apps.

Mm-hmm.

That aid that there are gaps in HubSpot, right? Because as a tool for HubSpot, it's not gonna build every single solution out the gate, right? As we know, Data Hub just got launched at Inbound. Data Hub wasn't originally built back when HubSpot started. So we were running so many events for our clients. And for ourselves, um, I think it's close to 200 or something like that. I personally got tired of clicking in the CRM from one portal to the next. It's nothing against HubSpot, but it's a repetitive process.

Sure.

That can take time. So you build a flow, add in 6 emails. Okay. Create another flow for those who attend, add more emails.

Okay.

I gotta redo this again. All right.

Mm-hmm.

You know, and so we had a good process, Um, and that's where Simple Events honestly came out of. Um, I've got 2 more in the works I can't talk about right now. Uh, uh, so to solve other issues that I'm seeing, um, in HubSpot that I, I'm so excited for because it goes back to that original, um, thought of help people get the leads they need to get when they need to so they can have a better chance of closing, right? Mm-hmm. And keeping that data as high quality as possible. While my, my motto is keeping it simple, hence the name Simple Events, right?

In a box. Yeah.

Not simple in a box. That's, yeah, no. So outside of HubSpot's world, I would build automations for our team. I would build backend systems that clients needed that no one ever saw. Um, I know between some schools and HubSpot, In WordPress, I built a full automatic sync between events that were in the school platform like Canva all the way into HubSpot, but also into WordPress as well. Um, WordPress fixed their legal issue. I had an awesome WordPress plugin for HubSpot that made everything native in WordPress so you didn't have to switch between the 2 tools to drop in bookmark links, call to actions, forms, you name it. Um, yeah, it was really cool. Um, but then WordPress and HubSpot both started saying you can't use WordPress in the plugin name and you can't use other legal names.

Hmm.

Yeah. So I was like, okay, I don't have a good name for this. Let's move on. Imposter syndrome, Nick, came back up again.

Gotcha. No, that's, no, that's amazing. That is, I mean, it's one of those things too where there has to be a, a sense of kind of like you're, when you solve that problem, right? Like whether it's something big or something small, like There has to be that gratifying feeling where you're like, it's clicking. And it's not only just clicking, but it's clicking for multiple people simultaneously. 'Cause it's one thing for like something, like you said, to get over the imposter syndrome, to create something like, let's just say like Simple Events, just specifically for you to create it, for it to work like that, there's a gratification there. But for then for it to like solve problems like in the snap of a finger across multiple people, that's gotta be something that is, Yeah. Like, can you speak to like how rewarding that was when you realized, well, this, I think this is a problem and I feel it is because I've talked to other people, but now I'm seeing that problem being solved in real time.

So let's go when the idea came to me. So 2022, we were at Inbound. I found out about a Discord community that was really great, really thriving before the Dev Slack. I didn't even know about Dev Slack back then. And there was like 6 questions about the marketing event object. And I was like, well, I love events. I like creating it, like doing this flow and all this stuff. So I was like, okay, let's build an app on that. Right? So, and I do attribute, like, God gave me this idea. It wasn't Justin had this epiphany. But what I will tell you, this goes back to the imposter syndrome. I got super excited to build it. I built it for 3 months. And then I stopped.

Why?

I walked away from it.

Why?

I want to know.

You've got my attention.

Imposter syndrome.

Yeah. Okay.

I literally started from September of 2022, got a beta or an alpha, more of an alpha by January, and I walked away until March.

Walk me through that last week where you, uh, you said, no, I'm just, I'm just dropping this. Because I mean, 3 months of work, I'm sure Many, many, many, many hours.

Yeah, this was before AI, guys.

Okay.

And girls, like, yeah.

It's true. Well, I mean, one doesn't just say, eh, you know what? No.

Yeah.

And I feel like a lot of people might be in your position that you were in where they're building something and they're on that cusp of like, do I continue or not? So like, I, I definitely want to hear more about this.

Well, I, I feel like we, we as humans start saying, okay, I'm about to expose myself. I'm about to push this into the public realm. What is someone— and this is where the imposter syndrome and this fear, and I lived in this fear for a long time. What does the community think of this app? What is the community going to view it as? Right? Because the last thing you want to do is like you launch something and it's like, well, that's dumb.

Right?

Yeah.

I knew it wasn't dumb.

Right.

But those are the bad thoughts that every developer goes into. Why does every developer say, hey, I'm almost done?

Yeah.

And what do they, what do they do?

What do we just tell them?

I owe you an app that I've been, I've been meaning to give to you for 6 months. And guess what? I'm almost done, buddy.

I'm almost done. But it goes into this, like, your, your mind is fighting you. You, you are smart. And if you're not telling yourself that every day, I can do this because I have been doing this. And that's what a lot of people lose sight of. And now you, you will have those other people who can just power through it, get it out there, launch it. Great. That's awesome. Right? I dealt with this probably 8 times in my life of Image in a Box, building these platforms and then trashing them. Okay. One little birdie, one little hiccup would then say, oh, nope, not good. Right? So as I got to that January moment, it felt like, hey, it works. It's good. But is someone going to pick it apart?

Hmm.

So I moved into, so I built, because we did it, we did WordPress managed hosting. And I didn't like all the platforms out there like WP Engine, nothing wrong with these platforms. I didn't like how I could scale and I couldn't control what I need to control from a client standpoint, right? So I built a WordPress managed solution from the ground up, all this. So January, I was like, you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna move that to Google Cloud. I'm gonna move it off this other client. I'm gonna move it over into the GCP world.

Mm-hmm.

And actually make it more scalable. I wasn't even selling WordPress.

Okay.

But that's the thought that came in. And I would say around mid-February, my wife goes, hey, where's the app? Where's, where, where's Simple Events? And I was like, oh, I'm doing this so I can, you know, get this off my plate. And she goes, stop.

Mm.

Go back and launch. And I was like, I can't, it's not ready. It doesn't have all the features. And I don't know if I can do all the features. Okay. Fast forward 2 weeks from that conversation. I'm at coffee with my best friend. He's also an engineer, really smart data scientist guy. I got a PhD in it. And he goes, Justin, take the engineer out of it. And I was like, what do you mean? He goes, launch it. I was like, I can't. It's not— he goes, no, go home, package up what you have and launch it.

Yes. I love this. I love this.

So yeah. No, go ahead.

I, I just wanna say, I just wanna double down on all this 'cause I think this is something a lot of developers are missing is we, yeah, we, we isolate ourselves so much. And what you were just saying right there is, uh, it's a huge thing that many people missing is community, honestly. Like having people around you. To support you and just get yourself out of your own head to say, just do it. Love of God, do it. You know, I mean, that is so huge. Sorry.

So yeah, never launched an app on AWS before. I spent 3 days and I launched Simple Events, turned around, recorded a video for LinkedIn. This was the only marketing I did. It was listed in HubSpot. But it wasn't a, um, certified listing. It wasn't anything crazy. It had like 3 installs from the clients I had that were running events at the time.

Right.

I did a social media post on LinkedIn, just said, hey, I'm looking for like 10 beta users. This is what I'm solving. This is what I'm, I've built. And this is my path that I'm going on. I think I had 50 users.

Nice. Well done.

Every single one of them came back to me and said, I want more.

That's awesome.

Like, this is the, you're, you're doing exactly what I wished every other event platform would do. And I was like, so, okay, cool. So that gave me, hold on, this is where it's great. For the next 3 months, I built feature after feature after feature. So we launched it with just a simple form system that did event management. So you could check people in, you could cancel, you could do all that fun stuff. From there, I think I launched emails, workflows, um, limited capacity with HubSpot Forms, um, and a very simple guest registration process. Okay. 3 months hit almost on the dot. I stopped building. Couldn't do it again. Got this imposter syndrome again.

Really?

Yeah.

It's not working. It's not going the way I want it. It's, it's—

So, Was it, can I ask you, was it, did it feel exactly like the first instance of it or was there, was there a difference to it? Because it's like, listening to you say that, I almost kind of feel like, well, you've already met, like not mastered success, but you, you definitely had that touch of success where before it was like, I don't know if it's even achievable. Achieving it even at a slight sliver of it, or regardless of how you want to measure it.

Right.

You did it, and so you've touched the golden ring at least temporarily. It's a little bit of a different fear than saying I don't know if the golden ring's even there.

Well, I don't know if it still exists. Have I exhausted?

Okay, okay.

The growth of this app.

Well, could you match that up with your metrics? I'm sure you're tracking things at that point. How you know the app is performing, right?

Yeah.

So I mean, it was it was your head.

I mean, this is all.

Well, so is it's, it's to the point to where you might get one email, let's say out of my 50 users saying, hey, it didn't work. So then this would creep in, right?

Yeah.

It's the same thing when you launch a website for the first time and it's somebody goes, hey, this doesn't work.

Right.

Yeah.

And you're like, crap.

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

But you have to learn as the developers, that's constructive feedback. Let's dive in so I can actually help this process go even better. Okay. So I say that, wife caught me back on and said, what are you doing? Why aren't you doing this? She's my, my guiding star. And she was like, no, you've done this. You have just like what y'all said. We hit goals, right? You, yeah, you got 50 users quicker than you realized. So I was like, okay, got back into it. And that was really the first 12 months. It was a fight to say, because here's the other thing about what the world will do to a developer. You'll have this idea and then you'll go to a social media network, you'll drive down the street, you'll see a TV commercial and it will derail you.

Yeah.

Yep.

It will either A, give you another idea. B, say your idea is not as good as this new shiny idea, right?

Yep.

Or C, it will just bring your spirits down.

Right. Right.

So I dealt with a lot of imposter syndrome in my life, a lot of fear of what others thought. Okay. I would say in 2024, I finally got free of that. Okay. That's a whole separate conversation. I am happy to share that. It is with my faith with Christ, but that journey, oh my gosh, I can't stop having ideas about simple events.

So how do you, how do you, I, I know you, you have thousands and thou— actually, I have 2 things about this. One, um, how do you say no to ideas? How do you, how do you limit your iterations? Because, you know, you want to put out a solid feature before you move on to the next one. How do you rein yourself in?

So I read, you'll end up doing everything for everyone and literally never sleeping ever again.

Right.

Correct.

Um, so I was fortunate enough back in 2024, I can't think of his name, but I read a, um, it was, it was an ebook, like 6 pages, and it was called Open Loop. When you have an idea or a task in your head that you need to do, And you leave it in your head, it keeps an open loop. So us developers know that the loop just keeps going, right? We don't ever want a continuous loop in code. So if you think about it, Christmas is coming up. We have all probably thought about this of getting gifts or Thanksgiving's coming up. We've got to figure out travel or get the turkey cooking, right? We've got stuff happening, right?

Right.

The problem is those open loops. add capacity into your brain of what you can and can't handle.

Right.

And what you can clearly think about. Right. So Dennis, to answer that question, as an idea comes to me, no matter when, where, or how, I go straight to my task management system and I have a simple events development board and just vomit out whatever it is. All right. So I've got code and prod, like features that I'm working on right now. But every idea that keeps coming goes in there.

I love that. And I, and the one reason I really wanted to bring it up is because with the dawn of AI coding, you know how many features are offered to you every time you, you know, submit something? Why don't we do X, Y, Z, you know, like, and you get so sidetracked from actually building your actual project that you're just super busy.

So what I look at Is yes, you can ask your audience, you can see what they're doing, but you can also have a really good sense of like, hey, this would save more time or this would actually speed up somebody's life, right? I like to keep things simple. So that's why Simple Events now creates over 13 assets with a click. So if you remember the WordPress days where it said you can install WordPress in 5 minutes, I took that same philosophy for Simple Events. You could actually have your entire event marketing In HubSpot in 5 minutes or less.

Love it. Okay.

Fantastic.

So no other event platform can say they can do that in 5 minutes, right? The, the goal is always, you're always gonna generate ideas when you're in the high stage of it.

Yeah.

You're thinking about it when you're, when you're, when you're, when you're vibing in it, right? The vibe coding, right? I don't, I don't like vibe coding.

But I mean, I could get the vibe's still a thing, right?

Yeah, it, it is. It's a, it's a, it's, it's a, a state of mind that you're like, this is going great. This is awesome. Oh, look at that. I just saw like some, you'll be walking through the house, driving down the road and something will trigger. Right. What happens to a lot of us is I didn't write that down. I forgot that idea. And then you start beating yourself up.

Story of my life.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So like my, Reading this like six-page ebook was like a task management system that can be shared no matter what device you're on, and you can easily comment. You can easily put anything in. You can even do the quick Google search to find the research of like yeah, this is here's a perfect example. I wanted to integrate CSAT or the surveys API for HubSpot. That was the idea that came to me because I had some random clients that say, "Hey, could you integrate a CSAT after?" Attending an event. I was like, that's a fantastic idea. Let me go see. Put the task in, creating a follow-up email with CSAT survey link, all this. Go to the developer API docs, nothing. Okay. This API doesn't exist. Put a note in there, no API. See if you can find a product owner, see what you can find through the community of people talking about this.

Mm-hmm.

That's it.

Don't go do it. Don't get sucked down the rabbit hole. You put it in because what will happen is like Friday at 4 o'clock in the afternoon when you're like vegged out because you've been programming all week, like Nick said, 24 hours a day, right? You're like, hey, what could I do? I need a mindless task that you can do your research. You can then go see, are other platforms doing this? Is this a good value add? Yes or no? Right. And it goes back to not every idea will make it into the app. And I think that's a litmus test that you have to be okay with.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's just like in business, in almost 15 years of Image in a Box, you have to say, I'm not gonna win every contract or, or every job. Right.

Mm-hmm.

And you have to say, cool, what can I learn from that?

Mm-hmm.

Right? Yeah. And if you're not taking your life of saying, hey, I messed that conversation up with my spouse, what could I do better? Well, maybe I could go lower instead of trying to win every argument, right?

Mm-hmm.

Or in, in the business realm, maybe every idea I bring to my team isn't gonna stick. Don't stop giving those business ideas, right?

Right.

So I, I just say that as it's always a key to not take it personal, because that's when the imposter syndrome, that's when the fear kicks in. That's when you start getting dragged through the mud and you're like, I can't do anything. Right? And if you're missing that community, please come join us. Okay? The dev Slack is amazing. Okay? Um, but no, it's— that can then spiral into other things. So Something that I don't even know if y'all know, I'm awful at numbers. I am dyslexic. I can't read time to my kids sometimes. And my kids laugh at me because they're like, Daddy, it's not 8:45. It's 4:53. Like just completely wrong. Right. I built an office in my shed with tools and measurements and rulers and 9/16 that I've never dealt with before. But that is only because of the, the spiral of doing simple events and sticking with it and building and seeing, Nick, like you said, that, that spiral of that golden ring, right? To actually obtain like, oh my gosh, I can do, what else can I do in my life?

Hmm.

Now here's the, the personal attack. I broke my ACL twice. During this journey. And I have played soccer my whole life for over 35 years, and I've never had a torn ligament or a broken bone. So I was, I lost my soccer identity. Yeah.

I don't know.

That's kind of a big deal.

That's kind of a, yeah.

Yeah.

So, but with that, I have gained who I truly am. I'm not a soccer player that runs a business. I'm actually Justin who's grounded now. And I'm here to help anybody and everybody, right? Because I think it was 2023 Inbound, we did that little speed talk on the floor in the community, and I was like, all you developers standing around here, build your app and launch it, right? Stop, stop trying to add every feature and get it out there.

Yeah, I felt bad because I saw you guys doing that, and I was, I was working one of the booths, so I, I couldn't When I was, because I believe that was because what that would have been the you were on stage.

I think that year.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So I was like, ah yeah. But I know I saw all you guys standing around then. I was like, oh that looks cool. What are they all doing? I want to stand over there. And I was like, ah. But yeah, no that's I I I appreciate that too because that I like I like the the view you have on all of that. Especially like especially when you're talking about like the way the community helped you. move through it, because it's almost like, especially when, when it comes to the things you do, Justin, it's almost easier to talk about the things you haven't participated in in the community because there's, there's probably a smaller amount versus having to talk about everything you do do, you know, with respect to HubSpot in the community. But, um, if I could just touch on a couple of them, because I think they're really, really cool and they're really important too, because some of the subject matter, like especially the blog post that you just had, uh, not too recently on the Developers Blog, Uh, about the platform and about how like it enables, right?

Right.

With the new platform and everything. And just, can you speak a little bit to that? And then the other thing too is the bootcamp.

Yeah.

You're hosting a bootcamp as well.

Oh yeah.

There's just so much stuff that you're doing and it's like, that's why sometimes when you say like, especially now, like imposter syndrome, I'm just like, I look at some of the stuff you do and I'm like, there's no way this guy's got imposter syndrome. This is impossible.

Maybe.

So the blog post that I wrote was talking all about the new release that happened at Inbound 2025. So those who are listening in 2026 and 2027, okay? It was the new versioning of the developer platform and they came out with a new feature for apps called the App Home. All right? Sitting in these talks at this stage, we had Cursor, we had Claw Code, we had some other automated AI coders, so I'm talking to you in the future who might have even cooler, okay, coders. As they were talking about this, at this point I was like, this is gonna bring my entire app into HubSpot where they can run everything. So I built a prototype in 45 minutes with AI, okay? And The new developer docs that were launched as well and was able to spin up an entire app homepage that gave a HubSpot portal all the marketing analytics they dreamed of. All right. The reason why I wanted to share that is because, A, the team at HubSpot put a lot of effort into the new platform versioning, which I believe is going to help developers know exactly what features we can and can't use and what's coming down the road instead of Hey, this feature got rolled out. We heard about it, or I didn't hear about it. This new versioning is going to give them the windows of sprints that we can all then anticipate. We're so excited for 26.1, right? Because you've talked about what's coming out. Everybody's working towards that.

Yay!

But this article specifically highlights how the at-home can be a new marketing, a new dashboard for your apps. And why and how you could go and implement it quickly. Um, because before that, I would say, cuz me and Carter, Carter McKay, teach the CRM Customization Bootcamp. That is App Development 101. It's card development, but it's also app development now. Um, because we, I couldn't tell you between the two of us how many apps we've built privately and publicly. With that, we're now able to see and clearly teach these audiences, this is what we're doing and this is why we're doing it in this version and this is what's coming out. And before it was like, well, just pick 2024, 2023. I don't, just pick one and move on and we can keep going, right? There's a clear definition of what these assets and these versionings mean, and they've put so much effort into the CLI tool now. That we can actually spin up things a lot faster. So before, what I will tell you is before this launch, it was Postman and it was a lot of checks and balances and testing things rigorously. Now that the whole config is in a command line prompt or in a folder directory, I can see my workflow actions. I can test them. I don't have to do this like, wait, which one's right? Hold on. Did I push that? Because I actually have And this is what I recommend in the bootcamp. You have a local version and you have a production version of your app. So then you can test these workflow changes or you can test these cards without breaking stuff, right? Because that's the last thing you want to do is actually push code or edit code live on the server, which I would never recommend anyone doing. You only do that on Friday at 4 o'clock, right? Yeah, no, you only commit Breaking changes Friday, 4 o'clock. And then, um, we actually, um, back in the WordPress days, we had an internal policy: never commit code or never release code on Friday.

Please hear me.

And it saved us so much stress.

For those of you who haven't checked out that article, I want you to go to developers.hubspot.com/blog where you can read that and a lot of other amazing articles. There's one from AJ in there buried somewhere. I think there's one from me, like from years ago buried in there somewhere. So like I said, there's a lot in there. So check that out as well, please, when you have some time. I wanted to ask you, because I, before we run out of time, a lot of what you've been talking about, Justin, like there's this common thread of community, right? Where community is key. Because I believe you even said once, because I was, you know, I like to stalk people on LinkedIn. That's kind of like part of my job, or at least it's a cover to be a stalker on LinkedIn. Come on, let's be honest. I host a podcast. I'm not a stalker. But it's even more important when you travel, right? Like when you're going to these conferences, like, so let's take inbound for example, right? There's this sense of community that just, it seems to solve problems. It helps with, I mean, I wouldn't say get rid of imposter syndrome, but imposter syndrome doesn't seem to be a thing when you have the strong community aspect around you. How has that, like, especially when you go to these conferences, right? Because You have a lot going on.

You really do.

Like, not just being somebody that's created a company, but then you have Simple Events and you had, like you said, you had this kind of like push too where, yeah, it's nice to go to inbound and it's nice to see everybody and meet everyone, but you have like not an agenda, but you have something that you're trying to accomplish, right? Multiple things probably. So how does that sense of community then kind of help you throughout that like mini journey that you're going on?

Well, so who's your sounding board, right? In the community, right? When you're, when you're sitting at home, when you're sitting in the office and you're like, I've got this great idea, but I don't really know if that's a good idea or if I should even go this path, right? Having that community, having that openness to be like, look, AJ, I came up with this idea for Simple Events. I like, does it sound crazy? Oh, it sounds terrible.

You should not be doing this. Just enough.

It sounds terrible, but send me all the source code and, uh, I'll get rid of it for you.

I'll get rid of it.

I'll throw it away.

But I would feel comfortable talking to you 3, if not anybody in the community, and be like, look, like, this is what hit me. This is what I'm trying to solve. What do you think? But if I'm isolated, if I'm in this little nugget, it's going to be, well, maybe I could, maybe I couldn't, maybe I could, or I'm going to go at it the wrong way and waste a lot of time, which then is only going to impel And like further suppress or further amplify the imposter syndrome or that fear of actually achieving success. Right. So, and then also your mindset too is like, are you going in to be like, I want to be the best, I'm going to make millions of dollars, or are you going in to actually help the community? Are you going into further the people around you that you're going to affect with that?

Right.

And so I say that is the community is so key because you might think, okay, well, Justin, who's Justin talking to? I would say I probably talk to Carter almost every week, if not multiple times in a week of like random ideas or like, hey, does this sound stupid?

Really? We're really sorry that you have to, have to do that.

That's—

we love Carter. I'm just kidding.

But, but on the flip side though, somebody in the community, Anton, Carter, whoever it may be, might come back to me and say, hey, like, what do you think of this? And I'm going to say, I know exactly what you're dealing with. I know it's exactly what you need to do next because I've been through all that. Right. And that was me and Carter flew together to San Francisco this year. Um, and I've even had talks with Anton and, um, Nicholas Decker, like other things about just like random ideas that pop up and like, well, how can I do that? Well, this is how you do it. You go back to this task open loop syndrome. Of saying, get it out. What's the first task that you can do on that?

Right.

Right.

And before you write any code, go do a little market research. See what apps are out there. See what they solve. See how they solve it, right? On the flip side, if you're building themes, if you're building anything for the HubSpot ecosystem, just do a couple, an hour amount of search. Let ChatGPT do the search for you. What's out there to solve this, right? Then say, okay, cool. Research says I should build this. First step, let's get an app created in HubSpot. Second step, get the scoping. Now let's start building and playing. Don't try to make it the perfect scenario, but you're not gonna do that when you're in isolation and you're not talking to the community. Even just jumping into the community.form, or sorry, the, um, community.hubspot, the, the community forums, or even Dev Slack and just doing a quick Google search.

Right.

Or search on those sites, but then you can see Hey, there's actually people asking for this same thing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yep.

You know, and that community, what I would say is, cuz we've had a lot of people, I think we had 250 registered at the last CRM bootcamp.

Nice.

We, we average around 200 registrants. If you're like, hey, I want to get into HubSpot development, or I've been in HubSpot development, I know, I just wanna know what I don't know. This bootcamp's for you. That, like, that's how awesome we try to make this bootcamp cover is like, look, even if you're a seasoned vet, 10 years plus in HubSpot, or you're 3 months in, but you know coding and you know programming, get in here and let's build something.

Mm-hmm.

Because we're, we're just gonna build you up so you can actually launch it.

Yeah.

Right?

Yeah.

My goal is to leave you in a happier state. I don't wanna bring you down by any means. I'm sorry, AJ, Nick, and Dennis, I brought you down with imposter syndrome, but hopefully all the other viewers said, yeah, dude, this guy's got— um, and I always stop drinking coffee at noon, so this is way past noon for me.

I like how you mentioned— I like how you mentioned that though, because I think, um, oh, beside the coffee thing, but the— I think like you watch movies and TV and everything else, I think you see Like the developer's always the one with the headset on that's like sitting in the corner pounding away at keys. And it's like, oh, don't bother him. He's the one that's— it's just like, it's such the opposite of that where it's like, it is like any other thing where community or the impactfulness of community has such a net benefit, but you just don't— it's not the stereotypical, it's the introvert, right? It's the developer. It's the introvert.

Like, this only is me. No one else is like this.

Right, right.

Exactly. And that's, that's the thought you, you get sucked into. But when you watch any of these episodes, you're like, oh wait, I'm, I can relate to, yeah, Melinda, right?

Yeah.

I, I can relate to other people in this community. Um, and I'm not saying the HubSpot community's the one-all-be-all, right?

I think we are, we are, we are officially for this podcast are saying that just to be in case, in case, in case legal's listening, that is exactly what we're saying. Just—

all right, hold on.

Uh, back.

Um, this is the one community—

I love that you brought your own soundboard.

The community is what keeps you on top of the water instead of sinking below the water, right? That's a great— Just like this podcast. It's like, hey, should I— I don't know if I really should be on it, right? Like, who am I, right? You can have those thoughts, right? Or Should I really? Like, and this is probably where 90% of the people live. I don't want to ask that question in the Slack community because I'm scared what someone will say.

Yeah. I don't even want to be asking them to my coworkers because I'm like, they're going to think I'm an idiot. This is exactly what's going to happen.

Yeah. No, it's starting out the dev Slack where it was, it was very intimidating to ask questions, especially because you knew HubSpot engineers were also in there. So you're like, I'm going to ask this question and one of the HubSpotters is going to come to me and be like, Stop talking. That's what I was always waiting for. And, you know, luckily for me, it was the opposite naturally.

Like, you know, it always is the opposite, right?

It really is. It was so shocking to me. Like, I'm going to call out Matt Coley here at HubSpot, like, was instrumental to helping me literally, like, do a lot of the things I needed to do. And then so was like David Adams, who's on our team. Like, I remember the old, old developer forums and he used to help me on those all the time. And then when I came here, I was like, After talking for a little bit, I was like, "Wait a minute! Are you the same dad I'm talking about?" Like because I never put two and two together. So but yeah, like the community was just always so supportive and just unlike anything I'd ever seen.

Right. And I think what society teaches us is don't ask the dumb questions.

Yeah.

When reality is what is that going to propel you to do when you remove that gate and you walk through it? And you're like, I'm gonna ask because actually I don't feel comfortable asking. And I've spent, you know, 35 minutes fighting with Claude or fighting with ChatGPT to get an answer from the dev docs, and I just don't know what to ask it.

Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Um, and I'm not saying anything against those AI platforms. Those are good and great platforms. But again, if you don't know how to ask what you need to get out of it, you're gonna fight with it.

Well, I mean, I, I would, I would argue that's, Applicable to people as well, right? You, you might come into Slack, ask a question. You don't even know what you're asking yet, quite honest, right? And if you start talking to people, then you know the actual question and then you can actually start going down the right path.

Well, right. And that usually first response is, wait a minute, what are you trying to accomplish?

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, instead of saying, hey, I've got a problem with the API. Well, I doubt there's a problem with the API. It could be the what we're trying to do with the API.

Yeah.

So, um, but yeah, no, this, the journey of life is going to have a roller coaster. It's going to have its ups and downs, right? And it, if you choose the right people, if you choose the right to watch the right shows or don't watch TV at all, I don't watch TV. Okay. Um, partly because there's not really a lot of good uplifting things on there that will build your spirits up. Right. So the only time we have football, Is, I mean, sorry, the only time we have TV on is football, right? And it's Saturdays.

That can be pretty depressing.

Well, I mean, if you're a Bears fan, everything's good.

We don't watch too much on Sunday. I'm a Titans fan. Okay. So like, it's, I got you. Ignore the cup. Okay. Because it is an Atlanta cup, but me and my daughter go to an NFL game once a year for her birthday. So we try to travel.

That's cool.

That's cool.

Where we can.

But yes, it's, That community exists. Stop being scared and jump out and actually be a part of it and give back. Like I think that's just because you might not know the perfect answer. Try.

Yeah.

Okay.

Because then you'll learn something in that process as well.

Yeah.

No, I love that.

Preach, buddy.

Now you mentioned mentioned.

Oh, go ahead. Check.

Nope, I'm done. I'm done talking anymore.

No, I was gonna say you mentioned down roller coasters and one of those things as well as like a is kind of a low point on the roller coaster. roller coaster is when unfortunately we— I honestly, Justin, we could talk to you for hours and like this hour has flown by and there's— I mean, we would love to have you back at some point too because there's just so much more that we can discuss. But I did— I want to thank you because—

Yeah, man.

I think your take on everything and your— that renewed sense of having— or not just following the community, but like searching for it, or at least realizing that that is part of the answer. Right, to helping you kind of like propel yourself out of certain situations, right? Whether that be imposter syndrome or anything else. I really love that take on everything because like I said, I think if it isn't television, then it's just like this preconceived notion that like you have to be this sort of like, oh, well, that's the wizard in the corner that's just pounding on the keyboard and they just make magical things happen, right? And that's, you know, that's how it was with SEO and like around that same time when you're talking 2012 and things like that. But, you know, we really do appreciate you coming on and having this discussion because people, like you even said, people need to hear it, right? They just, you're not alone. There's other people like it. You know, we've had Carter on, we've had Anton on, and then there's just been, it's that same sort of lesson has continuously ring true, right? And that's like this sense of community, especially with us, with HubSpot and the developer Slack and things like that. A lot of us wouldn't even be here, you know, in this situation, like working here or anything like— so there's a, there's a lot to be said about that. But I am very, very appreciative of you being able to come on and talk about it with such, uh, compassion that, like, you have. So just a huge thank you for that. Uh, so, uh, yeah, everybody, uh, thank you for listening. Uh, you know what, please, if you're watching us on YouTube, make sure to subscribe to the HubSpot Developers YouTube channel. And, uh, yeah, you've been listening to Developers After Dark, and we are the show that puts The style and style sheets with pseudo-class mohawk.

Boom.

Right.

There you go.

Yeah. Bye, y'all.

Love it.