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

Funny story, my husband found one of my websites in. In 2004. I was studying abroad in Brazil. He was in Brazil, in Rio. He commented on my guest book. 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 husband.

Welcome to Developers After Dark. This is the show that puts the style and 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 places that I want you to go. Let me see what order I want you to go in. We, we appreciate everything that you guys do for us. But first off, HubSpot.com startups now this is going to be something, I'm going to pull up the actual website for you as well. This is where you're going to 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 going to be the place you're going to want to go and you're going to want to check out all the resources. It's going to help you do that. So if you can and if you have time, please go check that out. That's@HubSpot.com startups. Now one of the, if not the most important website you're ever going to want to go to is devs after darkpod.com twice for Dennis. Devs After Dark podcast. 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 @HubSpot developers 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 roll ups, 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 Hubble 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, 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 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. 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. That's the first step right in life. I'm Nicole Pereira and 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 Zan Tire to create the playbook for all hugs after that because they never had a super hug. We actually ran the largest was that about 800,000 people attended a HubSpot specific event that wasn't actually ran by HubSpot. We were, we were the first and the largest at that time.

Wow, awesome. Amazing. I love that. Now let me start out 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. A 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.

Please tell me you have the car.

Please tell me at the time, had a car. You know, it's. It's a. It's an interesting story because this was back in. I was 19, in, what, 2021 or 2021? 2001. Oh, my God. I can't even do the numbers in my head. And so it. 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. But, yeah, I. I sold ML. 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 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. And we didn't have ChatGPT, but we had Yahoo and I was a good Yahoo and I was a good Googler and I asked Jeeves a lot.

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 two parallel stories happening here. I was actually building websites in high school on Angelfire and Lycos, with guest books and web rings 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 guest book. 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 husband 20.

That's awesome.

That is fantastic.

That is awesome.

The best SEO story strongest the key search something like Brazilian American website showed up, right? So. So making these web pages or websites really simple. I mean really, it just takes HTML css, if you 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? You know, 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 like never got off it from that point on. Like I shared things like MySpace was using social media to market and grow businesses before then. After I was kicked out of the Mary Kay pink world for, you know, forbidden online marketing tactics, I went off to start a mommy blog. I had a 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 two blog platforms. So taught myself how to my way through editing php. I was always a code modifier, not really a code creator, if that makes sense, since the early days. And so even when I was making those websites in high school, I was like grabbing somebody's template and then changing it. I always had some starting material. And then I landed my first corporate job at the newspaper here, the San Diego Union Tribune, which I don't even know if 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, you know, scrapbooking supplies. And I was ranking page one for a lot of scrapbooking terms on my blog, like know girls, baby shower invitations or things like that. So SEO, since the 90s was my jam, probably my most versatile skill set, I guess you would say. And. But back then you were called a webmaster. Yeah, SEO wasn't a people or 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 and outs, you knew the outs, you knew all the stuff. At some point, I think those fields separated and then it got harder to do well on your website when people don't know the full scope of that. So 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 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? Sending the invoices. And I show up, I'm like, this feels wrong. 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? I bring it all in and I look at it and I go, okay, this is what we're going to do. We don't have any more budget. We can't keep going this way. What have we done so far? What haven't we done so far? Recycling code snippets that they pulled out four 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 four or five months. And they had been working on it for years. So here I am, you know, 26 multi million dollar project, just got it launched. They're like, how did she do it? I guess that was my first foray into project management and solutions architecting. 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 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 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 to 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 nine months after I was there, after I had two 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 two 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 baby 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, 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 IP systems and dropping cables in their walls and setting up their VPNs and their firewalls and. But then I was also, you know, print drivers. Oh, that was crazy. But then I was also like, Social media marketing, getting through website life, right? Like, it was. It was, you know, who am I? I. I felt pulled into. I wasn't it to the point where I was like, die hard 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 chiefmartech.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, we have all the. We were really inbound. Marketing wasn't even a term out here, right? 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. 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 going to have 12 tools. I was forbidden to use WordPress because 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.

You said COS shows just how OG you are. Because I don't think anybody's referenced that as the COS in a long time. Besides, like, maybe us here who have been like, through, 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 having that kind of tool?

I Remember, it was between HubSpot and Conteco, and it was the HubSpot rep who was like, I will give you a deal. Right. Um, but I think for, for HubSpot, even though we joke and poke fun at it, it actually had the best integration to Salesforce at the time. Um, I remember Salesforce was an early investor and so that was like one of the first native, you know, connectors that happened. Um, 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, 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 because I couldn't do it if I had to have multiple tools, you know.

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, you know, like one tool. I mean, that, that speaks volumes.

Let me ask you ask a question like a little bit further back. 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. 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 SAS product where my, 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 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 tell. Talk to me because I lacked the skill needed to convince people, educate people, motivate people, 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 said.

No, it's. And it was tough. And I think I see that a lot later on as I became an employer where brilliant people who just lack the. The. 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. But 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 I. I feel like I've been a lifelong student of communication in 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, 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.

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. We're not all there. Okay.

It's amazing.

It is absolutely amazing. And you've also too, like, it's not just because from that point, I imagine, then could you have mentioned being, you know, an employer? Multiple. Right. HubSpot agencies. Like, top HubSpot agencies. You've been instrumental in creating that. That, that. That has to take, you know, that has to take some of those things that you're mentioning. And it has to. You have to either sharpen on it or become better at it because you. You can't get to that. To that next level in the ladder without. I'm okay as a person. Like, yeah, some people don't like talking to me. But, you know, like, that's never. That. Those two things never equate with someone who, like, creates, 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.

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. 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. 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 guy at the bottom who's 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 a imbalance in benefit to this relationship. Otherwise the human part is lost. So it's a constant struggle to try to keep balance.

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 employee. 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 do that. So that, 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 this guardrail.

Right.

But they're, they're a guardrail set. Like, like the goals can. 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 got to 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 are 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 five other CEOs who I know could hire them. Right. Because it 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, seven past employees that work at HubSpot, so I feel like I'm just. They're everywhere. They're just disseminated out to. To join other lands. Right. And bring us all in uniform together. So. Yeah.

I mean, misalignment doesn't necessarily mean a bad. Thing is. I mean, if you're misaligned, 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. We've been working on this.

You should take the leap. 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. 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, let's take that first agency launch, right? That first creation of that. Were there any type of like I want to call them 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, like one of, 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 where there are things like you were mentioning to them that are like, hey, you may not realize this when you first start, but you might want to 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 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, 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, you, it's all over the place. You hear people talk about Persona brand and still people ignore it. And I think that's, that's the one thing I pay, 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're building the product we offer. Right? Talk about your experience working here. Talk about what you're learning and build your expertise. We ride our flags together. But one day when you're sailing your own ship, right, you're going to have a whole crew following you over there.

So that's a bit, that's a, I like that analogy because 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, they, they don't exist anymore. But like, I work for Dreamtown. Like that is what I, it's, 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 you know what I mean? So that's, you know, I, I think that's, I'm glad you mentioned that because I think that's something people miss. Because, you know, because, and I think too, like, and I'd love to get your take on this. It's like you lose, you know, not that you lose that, but you don't do that necessarily at the start because you're young and like when you join a place. And I know, and I know you said just a little while ago that like for you, some of those things weren't necessarily an issue because you, 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 guy 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. 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. 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 passed 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 tip 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, like, 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 my spouse or something like, I'm not being as thoughtful in conveying my message. So it's like, an addiction, Right. An addiction to just blunt communication. I've worked hard to be effective. I'm not softening it. I'm just being more effective in how I communicate. Yeah.

Yeah, for sure.

Me, as an individual, 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. 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 at you, you do feel hurt. And, I mean, I even went through this myself, and this was something that I just. Just very recently was able to detach from previous work that I had done to where, like, somebody changes it or they. They change the way in which I had originally made it and intended. And it's like, yep, not my thing anymore. So I got to accept that. Like, that's. So, like, that does take a lot of work to do, though. And 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, A.J. you mentioned building apps and building. You know, just building in general. A question we had for you, Nicole, was your. 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. They've either created businesses or they've created things. 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. I don't do website stuff anymore because I, you know, 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 felt that 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, 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. We were ranking for the question, what is Rev Ops? 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. Like, Rev Ops 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 going to 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. 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, screw it 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 screw it up, let's fix it. That's a totally different attitude than you screwed up. Let's put you on a pit. 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 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 have a database. So I had like, I had the content, I had the configuration, I had like the structure, the underpinning of what it was supposed to be. 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 screw ups. But the fortitude to go, I have to fix it, right? I don't walk away from 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 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 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 and 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 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.

You know, let's see, 500 sites. If I think about updates and plugins, that's at least a million.

Like oh yeah, and let's. 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 picked up 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 want to 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 going to 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 hard 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. 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, and I feel like I've. 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 import knowledge but not have to mandate compliance. I think all that compliance and HR stuff killed it for me. 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 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. I could not handle the people side of the business so much anymore. It was a lot. And I over index 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. 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 decoder, not really total solutions, architect, scoping software, troubleshooting code with developers, articulating how this world needs to work. I've even presented on your events teaching developers how to develop, but I never did it myself until Deep SEQ 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 deeper, 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. And so that's where I'm at. So if anybody wants to talk to me about Vibe coding, you just 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, oh, I launched a business all by myself. No, I transitioned to having developers, but my prototype gave them the map.

Right, 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. It. 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. 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 five years ago or when you're. 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, you know, a unique story, and yours is one of those. And that's why we wanted to talk to you today. 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 want to call it entrepreneurial or whether you want to 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. 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 want to thank you because that's.

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.

Thank you for having me. I think I represent a group of people who, who don't have, like, Guidance. Right. Like, 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. It just manifests itself in many different ways, 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 want to wake up early in the morning and who works all night and who doesn't want to be in an office. I was the person who needed lots of time to create things and just give me the space. And all of a sudden, next week, you're going to have a product that's my story. And I think a lot of people, once they find their little. 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.

This is what.

This is what we live for here, is doing this. So we really do appreciate it. And, you know, I want to be. I want to 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 a raise. A raise. That's right.

Bye.

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