Ep#23: From The NFL To The Ultimate Pivot with Kevin Jurovich
30 Jun 2025 · 48 min
Kevin Jurovich went from NFL player to wealth manager to founding Hubble, a platform connecting startup founders with mentors. A viral LinkedIn post about giving free advice to hundreds of founders led to a $900K pre-seed round and a pivot toward a curated mentorship marketplace with simple booking and Stripe integration.
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So I was 4 and a half or 5 years into my first company, into my founder journey, and it just hit me like a ton of bricks one day. And I realized this is absolutely insane. Like, this is crazy. This is way harder than I thought. Raising money was way harder. Building an actual product, getting it out of your mind into somebody's hands and it behaving properly. There's a science to it. And if you don't know how to do these sort of processes, you don't know how to hire people, you don't know what go-to-market is, you don't know what distribution is, you have a lot to learn, right? I was 5 years in, give or take 4 or 5, and I developed this love or this desire to anybody that has the courage to leave the shore and start a company, whether it's a tech company, a flower shop, a shoe shop, or anything in between, or chase a dream or be a creator, just leave the shade or the comfort of that steady paycheck and big brand and just say, I'm gonna do this thing, right?
Welcome to Startups Decoded, where we uncover what it really takes to build and scale startups. I'm Andy Walsh, founder Each week we will bring you actionable insights and real stories. Let's dive in. Hello and welcome back to Startups Decoded. Today we're going into the mindset, but also the self-awareness, I would call it, of a founder. And our guest today is Kevin Jurovich. Welcome to the show, man.
Andy, it's a pleasure. Thanks for having me. Excited today to talk and share a little bit about my journey and hopefully we can inspire a couple of people and talk about some interesting things.
Absolutely. And the reason we're talking today is that I came across you on LinkedIn and you've got a long history and relationship with LinkedIn as far as your own career. And to be able to listen to you in person for me was a treat because it gives me a sense of the person behind the words ultimately and the things that you talk about. And some people naturally feel relaxed in being themselves on social media of all kinds. Other people are very contrived. And I feel like that That the version we see in LinkedIn is 100% all you.
I appreciate that. I think that is a compliment. I appreciate you saying that. The older we get, we tend to care less about what other people think. I think for a number of reasons, at the top of that is just most people aren't even really caring anyways. So we stop trying to pretend to be something. And I think there's a lot of, there's a lot of peace in just being yourself. There's a lot of clarity in just talking about things that you're passionate about and whether they resonate with people or not, like that's besides the point. And yeah, I appreciate you saying that. It means a lot.
Yeah. And it's in a world that we live in today, I think it's even more important and I've covered it a lot as far as that vulnerability in building relationships and community that serve you for the greater good. But we're not talking about that today. To set things up, Kevin is founder and CEO of Hubble. I've recently joined Hubble as a consultant. Can you give us just a Quick 30-second spiel on Hubble, because we're going to unpack it much more today.
Yeah, I became a founder. I started my first company 7 years ago. And for the first 4 years of that journey, I made like, I like to joke and I say the amount of mistakes that I made, if we stack them on top of each other, I will take my stack against anybody's stack and say mine is higher. So because of like all these mistakes, I didn't have a ton of people to reach out to. I basically got my founder education through podcasts and This was even prior to people were even writing on LinkedIn. That wasn't even really a thing. And Hubbell really got birthed out of that, a way to be able to talk to somebody who's actually done what you're trying to do. Nothing ever beats just like leaving the shore of safety and just going for it. But if you can have a mentor or a coach or whatever word you want to use to describe that as something that if I want to start a podcast, you have a successful podcast talking to you for 30 minutes. What software you use, what's worked well, what hasn't. There's a lot of things that can be gained. And yeah, that's what Hubble is. It's an expert marketplace. If you're in tech startups, venture, you're thinking about launching a company, you're trying to find product market fit, you're trying to get ready for a fundraise, you can book people that have done all those things. And it's a safe space, right? It's a safe space just to be vulnerable. You don't have to put on the mask of when someone asks you, how's your company doing? And you know it's not doing well and you just say, oh, everything's great. This is what everybody says, right? But this is a place where you can just come correct, come honest, and get that valuable feedback. And it's been an incredible tool.
So good. And as I said, I've recently joined and I can say immediately before I even start booking myself, the community of people who are on there as coaches is top drawer. It is so good and already making some great connections before I even get started. So we'll explore that today and how Kevin got into it. He's got a fascinating story, but to give people some context, you've got a background which is not typical. You're definitely my first NFL player on the show, which is amazing. And I think people see sport as this really huge aspirational thing, and you've been there and experienced that. But I don't want to dwell too much around the football part of it. You had 2 years playing NFL and then you went into startup. I'd love to sort of start with, for you, that transition in state of mind as far as putting everything into a sport and career.
Yeah.
Having that finish up and then, then throw that same energy into startup, which I think has a really healthy intersection. I'd love to sort of start there today.
Yeah, that's great. I think the one thing anybody that's played it, you don't have to play pro. I think high school sports are just fun. It's casual. You show up to the games, practice is cool. Once you get to college or the university, the coaches are getting paid so much money that there's a ton of pressure on your performance, right? And the amount of dedication that it takes to play collegiately and Then professionally, it's insane. Like consistency, dedication, getting used to go— like putting yourself all on the line for something and losing. Because the higher you go up, the competition is better. You're not going to beat that person across from you every time as you did when you're younger. But I think like that is exactly the same in startups. As a founder, you got to be okay with going all in, not, oh, I think I'm— I always say you got to leave the shore. You got to have the courage to leave the shore, go all out and keep swimming, right? If it doesn't work and you drowned, you're not going to die. You can start a new company. You can pivot. But that's like the one key thing that I took from my playing days. I think the other thing is like, there's no such thing as a self-made individual. Like, if you're going to create something great, it takes a village. It takes a lot of people. You know, in our case, we have an exceptional team. I have a great co-founder. Outside of that though, our company is nothing without great experts or mentors or consultants on the platform. If those calls don't go well, And people aren't getting value out of them, right? We have no company, you know. So it's like every single expert, I've onboarded them personally. At some point, we will hire somebody for help. But it's like, yeah, it's important that we have quality caliber people. And just that mindset, I guess, from athletics is the crazy amount of determination, that consistency to continue to do those little things. You have to do a lot. You can't— you don't just get to show up and win the game. There's so much work that goes into behind the scenes and the whole offseason to when you play that first game and there's an actual scoreboard. The only chance chance you have at winning is by putting in all of that work. It's the same thing with a startup. There's no such thing as even Instagram, right? One of the quicker successes in the world. They started out as Burbn. They were a check-in app doing something completely different. Then they ended up pivoting. Obviously, we've all heard of Instagram, but you have to put in the work if you want to have that success or if you want to have that win eventually when that scoreboard comes on. And those 2 things with sports and with startups as a founder, identical. I would actually argue though, being a successful founder is even harder. Because at least in sports, you see the progress, like you're getting stronger, you're getting better, and you still are as a founder, but the scoreboard never shows any wins. Like you just get loss after loss after loss after loss. And then eventually one day you're like, wow, this thing is working. So it takes a little bit even more like stick-to-itiveness or fortitude to be a founder.
I love that synergy. And it's when you articulate it, it makes a lot of sense and seems obvious. But I think acknowledging that one, there's no such thing as an overnight success in anything. Like sport starts from a really young age. You have family supporting you, travel financially, into coaches, teammates. There's a whole group of people and startups are exactly the same. Like as a consumer, we may see a startup all of a sudden blow up overnight. And I guarantee you people would say like NVIDIA or OpenAI, it's like, oh, they came from nowhere. And it's like, no, they're around for a long time. It just, they got a lot of attention very quickly for different reasons. For what they were doing. And I think that that community piece is really important. And there's, I think we'll set a really nice tone for what we're doing today. And to sort of continue that story, to get you from football into Hubble, we've talked before a little bit about your story, and I'd love to get a bit of a peek as far as thinking about where you go to next, what you do. I know you had a corporate life, but then at some point you started doing a lot of reflection around your own story, right?
Yeah. I, it's funny, as you get As you get older and you grow, you go through certain things in life and you don't really understand what the ramifications or the results of those experiences will be. So this was a classic. I was playing football my whole life, right? I'm now like 26. I get cut from my last team. I'm like, what am I going to do now? Well, when I was playing at the— not at the peak, but during my career, I was making— this was a lot of money for like a 25-year-old, $10,000 a week, right? I'd get these checks in my locker once a week. I'd take those checks. I was the only person on the team that didn't have direct deposit. Because I like to take the check to the bank and I like to slap it on the counter because it felt good, right? I didn't come from a lot of money. That felt good to do that, right? So fast forward, when I was done playing, I spent more than I had saved, which is a classic mistake when you're young and you're making money quickly. It's very hard to understand what assets are versus liabilities, and liabilities are just more fun to purchase. So My next career was, okay, amazing. I have all these connections. I was kind of not part of the problem, but I was there. Why not be a financial advisor? I had no experience in stocks or bonds, or I didn't have a Series 7, nothing. I ended up applying at Morgan Stanley to become a financial advisor in training in this program. That was a crazy story how they selected me. But I remember being in a room and feeling like, I am the least qualified person to be here. We have all these like Columbia MBA finance folks, and we had Boston College, and we had Duke, and then here I am, a football player, right? She ended up giving me the job, and I worked in wealth management. Then I transferred to a team at Wells Fargo Advisors, and I worked in wealth management for 6 years with the goal to be the biggest and the best financial advisor to NFL players, right? So I live in Silicon Valley. Who do you think after 5 or 6 years, who do you think are my wealthiest clients in my book of business? They're all tech people. I have 2 clients that are athletes. I got 200 that are tech folks, and my highest earners were like tech founders that had exits or raised Series B or C and took these massive secondaries. And this was my introduction to tech. And even though I was born and raised in Silicon Valley, I had no admiration or even goal or thought to run a tech company ever. Once I saw these clients, they became more human to me. Because prior to this, it was Bezos, it was Zuckerberg, it was Elon. It was these like untouchable kind of founders, right? When you start sitting knee to knee with these individuals and you're talking to them and you're helping them with their assets and managing their portfolios, and you realize 2 things. Number one, the impact they're having on the world is way bigger than me sitting here in a suit managing this person's money, which is important, but felt like I was on the sidelines. And the second thing was, Hey, if this person can do it, I can do it. And I remember sitting like in my office and I was like 5 years in. I was like, if I don't do this now, I'm going to make a lot of money in my career managing money and managing these people's wealth. But I'm going to be 85 years old one day and I'm going to regret that I kind of stayed on the sidelines when this itch or this burning desire in my heart was to make a bigger impact in the world. And so I remember leaving that, sold my book of business and finance. I moved to San Francisco and had no idea of what company I wanted to start, but I knew I wanted to be at the epicenter. And so I put everything in my car, I drove up to San Francisco and I bought a, or I rented a studio.
Stay with us.
We'll be right back.
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It's the best. And I've got so many questions come off that, but first I want to comment. I love that you are almost the Happy Gilmore novelty-sized check with your, with your football paychecks. That's so good.
They weren't quite that large, but it was the same exact idea, right? He wins a tournament and gets the big old printout.
Yeah. I mean, you're a kid in a professional sport and I understand that. Like, thinking about that experience and it's so integral to what you're doing now. And the focus for today, we're looking at pivots. And I look at just even that little bit of your story, I feel like that you've, if you look back, you'd almost call yourself a professional at pivots in the sense of different directions that you've gone to end up where you are now. Like, looking back, Would you say that any of that was intentional, or do you think that you pushed yourself in whatever you chose to push yourself in, realized there was a ceiling, or realized it wasn't going to work out, or whatever that motivator was, and you would just make a beeline and head off in another direction?
I am a firm believer when, whether you call it God or the universe or like a gut feeling, whatever you believe in, when you get that feeling, it's there for a reason. And if it doesn't leave and it just kind of sits on your shoulder, that's usually a good sign that you need to go after that, right? It doesn't mean you need to drop everything, but at some point in time, you're going to need to go after it. And I kind of glossed over this though, just to get my licensing, my Series 7 and 66, this was like one of the hardest things for me to do because I had no finance background, right? But I was able to do it. Then leaving that career, imagine growing this book of business and these clients and managing almost like $100 million. It took a lot of time to get to that point. Imagine leaving all that behind, right? So some of these decisions are not easy. Once I started the first company, you don't think there was many nights where I would go to sleep questioning what the hell I did and if I made the right call. I wouldn't let my mind ever go down that road like too far, but that was 50% of the nights that at least went through my head one time. You talk about pivots, it's more just like follow your instincts, follow your curiosity, you know, follow that burning desire of like, this is here for a reason. And then when I look back on it now, hopefully Hubble continues to grow and it's like a wild success. I'm never going to need to hire a financial advisor. You know, I don't know how much money that's going to save me in the end, but I firsthand now know how to invest, know how to preserve my wealth. I never would've had that Had I not gone through that.
And I call my career the same, being able to go down different paths, learn different lessons, and then apply it to things that I get more passionate about. Because at a young age, like even in college, you don't know what you want to do. You might be studying something, but your life will probably change 2, 3 times over, you know, when you become a full-fledged adult, so to speak. So being able to be open to that requires a certain mindset. Do you think that Looking back, that you've always had a strong sense of conviction that you backed yourself and went after something? Or do you think it's something that you've grown into more as a product of more nurture rather than nature?
That's a good question. As you're saying this, this is the first thing that's coming to my mind. When I think confidence comes from the little things that we tell ourselves and the habits that we make is something as small as I'm going to work out tomorrow morning. At 6 AM. When you actually wake up and you go to the gym at 6 AM and like check, like that builds confidence, that builds this like self— sense of self and self-esteem that I think over years and years of doing that, you almost develop this like eternal optimism that if it's there, I can do it. I don't even need to figure out every little thing. But I think it was a product of, and I'm not the most disciplined person in the world. I'm not trying to come across like that. It was just a product of like keeping those promises to myself, you know, kind of overcoming a lot of different obstacles in my life, you know, as a child and a young adult. And the more times you do that and you see it kind of work out in the end, the bigger you can kind of dream as you get older, right? And then the culmination of that was leaving this awesome career to like start this company. I don't think I would've had that had I not had a lot of little successes that were kind of similar. Yeah.
And a level of confidence comes through those things to be able to be resilient through change and have confidence to be able to back yourself to do something. It's 100% the mindset of a founder. And if you did a personality test on the like top 100 founders in the world, I would imagine that there's probably seen 70, 80% of the same qualities in each of them with How they think, how they, what their default status is, what they worry about, what they don't, et cetera. And I feel like what you've sketched out just then is right up that alley. And I think to be able to use it to do what you're doing now, again, I see all the dots coming together and I hear you on the, I believe in manifestation. I believe in a little bit of karma and things that's come your way. And I think that your ability to see the world through a different lens is the only way you can do that. So having different experiences, sometimes quite polarizingly different experiences really gets your mind thinking in that way.
No doubt about it. I can get into, I don't know if this is the right time to do it, but I can get into how I even pivoted from that first. Yeah, it's perfect.
Yeah. So at what point, because you built yourself on LinkedIn before a lot of people have jumped onto that and that it has in essence played a key role into the business that you have now. I'd love to hear that story.
So I was 4 and a half or 5 years into my first company, into my founder journey, and it just hit me like a ton of bricks one day. And I realized this is absolutely insane. Like, this is crazy. This is way harder than I thought. Raising money was way harder. Building an actual product, getting it out of your mind into somebody's hands and it behaving properly. There's a science to it. And if you don't know how to do these sort of processes, you don't know how to hire people, you don't know what go-to-market is, you don't know what distribution is, you have a lot to learn, right? So I was 5 years in, give or take 4 or 5, and I developed this love or this desire to anybody that has the courage to leave the shore and start a company, whether it's a tech company, a flower shop, a shoe shop, or anything in between, or chase a dream or be a creator, just leave the shade or the comfort of that steady paycheck and big brand and just say, I'm going to do this thing, right? I developed this, I'm going to help that person mentality. The best way that I realized, and I kind of stumbled upon it, was LinkedIn. So prior to 2 years ago, I never wrote on LinkedIn. If you go back, look past 2 years, there's really nothing in there. I had like 1,000 followers or 700 connections, whatever it was. And LinkedIn at this point was like this dusty digital resume that if I wanted to hire somebody, I might DM them. That was it, right? I log in, I start seeing people kind of write. And I'm like, oh, this is interesting. By this point, I had a lot of scars. I was in the arena. I had raised some money. I had hired people. I had investors. I was sending out investor updates, but I was making way more mistakes than I was wins. And sometimes that's life's best teacher, right? So I developed this idea of I'm going to start writing on LinkedIn and I don't care what I get back in return. I'm going to inspire, I'm going to educate, or I'm going to make founders laugh. And so for every post I would literally drop, I would say, is this an A+ in one of these buckets? And if it was, I fire it out. And I committed to this and I did it about 5 times a week. My following started growing like crazy. I think because I was never selling anything, I never made it about me. I wasn't talking about my company. It was just straight value on either hardcore objective facts or just personal stories that you couldn't debate because I went through it, right? And people resonated with both. So what ends up happening as your following grows, you start to get a ton of messages, a ton of DMs. And right around like the maybe 30,000 or 40,000 mark, I'm like, you know, I'm going to make it a point to help every single person that sends me a DM. So at the end of every workday, I would set aside an hour and I would help, whether it was like a 5-minute Zoom, 10-minute Zoom, 5-minute chat on LinkedIn, I would help every single founder that sent me a DM. And I did this for about 14 months and I got a lot of joy in doing this. But after 14 months, it felt like a relationship That was one-sided where my partner wasn't giving me the same love I was giving them, right? And we've all been in these relationships. They don't feel good. And this is right around the time I realized also, it's like, I have this other business. We have investors. I have a co-founder. We have employees. We're not a unicorn. There's a lot of work that, and attention that I need to be. I'm the CEO of that company. But here's this other thing I love doing. I don't want to give it up. And there was a competitor to what we launched. that kept reaching out to me like, hey, you should try our product, you should try our product. And it felt like the perfect time. So I said, you know what, it's worth a shot. When I announced, here's my first signal that like this was interesting because I had spent at this point almost 2 years, you know, writing or 14 months writing. I had over 100,000 followers. I developed a lot of close relationships with influential people in venture and tech and startups Well-known individuals that if you saw their photos or their name, you'd say, oh yeah, I know this person. When I announced that I was taking these mentorship calls, the amount of messages I got from those people saying, hey, that's something that I want to offer, right? I think it's a very human emotion to be able to want to give back, but getting a little Stripe payment after you do it is just enough to make it feel like Goldilocks's porridge, right? Like it's just like, okay, it's satisfying. So I end up doing that. I'm about 5 months into this and my company, we're all out of ideas. We get one more kind of push where we're like, I would never advise this, but it was one of these, hey, let's put all of our best ideas together. Let's stop shipping and let's basically ship this massive update in 2 or 3 months.
Right?
So this was what we were doing. The day that that thing came out, I was meeting 2 friends for lunch and I get there early and I pull out my phone. It's available on TestFlight. So I'm excited. Right? This is great. I start playing with it. This thing still sucks. Like, this is not going to take people away from Instagram. This is not going to take people away from TikTok. I was driving home after this lunch, not really dejected because this is part of the course as a founder. And one of my first investors from that company calls me. He goes, Kevin, remember that booking link thing you told me about?
Yeah.
I'm all, yeah. He goes, how's that going? So I tell him how it's going. I tell him all the things I don't like about the product, because what happens when you love a space, you instantly see all the things and ways it can be better. There was a lot of things. I had a lot of stuff. The way that it was very celebrity-driven, it was all about their, their stars. Their marketplace had the same 7 celebrities at the top. I felt like the prices were completely out of touch with reality. They made you take calls on a mobile app, which was on your phone, which is super casual. So you couldn't share a PDF if you wanted to go through like a pitch deck framework. There was a lot of issues with it, right? So I rattle off all that. He goes, look what I designed. So I pull into my house, I open up my computer. And if anyone's ever seen Limitless with Bradley Cooper, this is all I can describe this. Limitless, the guy finds these pills and basically instantly the sun comes out, the clouds part, and it's like instant clarity. The second I saw that, I knew we were going to pivot. I knew exactly what the go-to-market was going to be, who the experts were going to be. how we were going to onboard them, how we were going to be different, how we were going to win, who we were going to cater to. And this happened like instantaneously, but it only was a result of all of these years of just doing something else. And it just hit me like a tidal wave right then and there. That investor became my co-founder 2 days later. That was 5 months ago. We since launched 2 months ago. We raised $900K pre-seed. One little quick story that I'll share. One of my first viral posts that I ever posted a year and a half prior was Uber's first investor and how much his investment was worth at IPO. This thing got like 6 million impressions, 13,000 likes. And I'm looking back through the comments. I'm like, who the hell is this guy? He's got like 2,000 likes, right? So I click on his name. I'm like, shoot, that's the guy I just wrote about, right? He commented on it. So I connect with him. And you want to talk about a full circle moment? 5 months ago when we're onboarding our first cohort of people, He's one of the first people I reached out to. I had not DM'd him in a year, right, since we connected. And I said, hey, this is what we're putting together. You would be an amazing expert on this platform. He shot me a message 2 minutes later, said, I'm in. We get on an onboarding call. At the very end of the onboarding call, 30 minutes, his name's Mike Walsh. If you're listening, shout out Mike Walsh. He goes, hey, are you raising money for this? I'm like, yeah, we, you know, we were almost, we had raised maybe $600K at this Like, yeah, we might take like 1 or 2 more like strategic angels, right? I don't really shut them down, but I wasn't super inviting. And as soon as we get off the call, I was like, Kevin, you're an idiot. Like, this is the first investor in Uber. He's essentially signaling that he's interested, right? So I go to sleep that night. I'm like, okay, I'm going to tell him on Monday, like, we want you in. I get a DM the next morning, 6:30 in the morning. Straight out of Wall Street. He calls me pal. He goes, hey pal, I went in and he throws a dollar amount out there, right? And 15 minutes later, he had signed a safe and he wired the money. That story then I told him, this story is going to inspire a lot of people. Can I share it with the screenshot of what you wrote? He said, I'll go for it. Once that post went out, which was only 5 months, 4 months ago, every single investor that had ever followed me all the way up to 135,000 followers that I have came out of the woodworks and was sending me DMs and wanted to invest. And it's It's just a cool story, not about me, but I think more like just put in the work, just give first, and you never know when that thing is going to come back full circle and all of a sudden you're going to receive.
That is such an amazing story and it speaks volumes to the things that I'm passionate about as far as community and that giving part that you talked about, building network and being able to build relationships and trust and let people get to know you. Like the cold pitch situation, like using the literal example, if you don't have any relationship with that person, So much harder to communicate yourself, your business, what the opportunity is. It becomes very transactional. And what you've done then over a lot of years and a lot of time investment, built respect, built community, and people see you. And if they see you enough, they feel like they know you a little bit, even if they've not met you. And that's kind of what we got to. So I think it's a really a great story and reflection on what you've been able to do by sticking at something and also being self-aware around And like the people that you come into touch with and then making decisions based upon that.
Yeah, it's a beautiful thing. And anybody who's thinking about like whether it's starting a podcast, whether it's writing on LinkedIn, whether it's whatever it is, if you're passionate about it, start getting it out there. But take the approach for that first 6 months, do not even think about what you can get out of it. Just think about what you can give. If you're able to play that long game, I promise it comes back around tenfold.
Yeah, a great story as far as community and what you're doing. To continue on that thread, I think part of it that I see in that is an openness to discuss 2 things. And one of those is vulnerability, the other one is failure. And I think that failure is used too quickly in the world of startups. And I think that without knowing, my anticipation is that you're going to be in the same lane here in the sense of failure is a point in time where you learn something Failure feels finite, and I don't think it is. I think the true sense in the startup world is go, okay, I got to this point and it's not going any further. Like, what direction do I go now? Do you think that the difference that you have now compared to professional sport, that failure means different things? Or have you always felt the same way? Because like in sport, you can fail in a moment, you can fail holistically. There's a lot of of things within that, but the word gets overused is what I'm sort of pushing at here.
Yeah, yeah, it's a lot of these things aren't failures. It never sucks to lose, right? Or to not win or to not have the success that you thought with a product launch, with a game. It's never a failure though, if you're actually learning, if you're actually getting better. A startup in and of itself is a series of experiments to try to find product market fit and try to find a product that people solves a problem for people, right? You don't get there by literally just waking up one day and just having this idea and it coming out in the first version of your product and it working. I've literally never met one founder whose first idea and product actually worked. Never. It's not the case. So it's not failure. It's an iterative process, right? We launch something, we learn. There's this phrase that I repeat over and over again, and I have no idea where I got it. I must have heard it on a podcast or a book a long time ago. And I, I repeat this to my team all the time. We are not here to be right. We are here to get it right. Right? So it's a new product, it's a new UX change, it's a new design enhancement. We're not trying to be perfect here. We're not batting 1,000. We're trying to get it right. And I think what that approach allows for is, if you want to call it failure, we're running these experiments and we're seeing which ones land and we're seeing which ones resonate and we're seeing which ones get us closer to our goal and which ones don't. And that's the nature of the game. So how can we run these experiments as fast as possible, but have that openness and that freedom and that lack of stress behind each of these decisions? Because I think too many people think they're gearing up for this big launch. It has to be perfect. Everybody's going to care. Nobody's going to care about your launch. I promise you, there's going to be a 0.001% of the world that cares about it, right? The rest of everyone's not even going to know about it. There's literally no pressure. We're going to get it out there and we're going to test the results. We're going to talk to the 2 people that used it and the next version of it will be better, right? So just take that approach and just taking that approach, you know, it's not failure, but yeah, I guess the outcome wasn't what we wanted. So it can be considered a failure, but that's, that's the nature of a startup.
Yeah, I agree. And I always talk about as far as what you're thinking that you want to test, how that manifests, what the outcome is, and then where you go to next. It's like an ongoing cycle. And where I want to go next, which is connected in a way, but like the word perfection is something that I feel has had a real change and shift in this year as businesses get to market faster. All the feedback that you see and whether it's just LinkedIn that I'm getting a barometer from that, but it feels like the people are all focused on shipping fast, testing and learning rather than build this perfect MVP. And whether that's just me hearing it a lot or whether it's actually happening.
Yeah.
Would you say that you're very much in the, like, get it live, test and learn type camp?
So this is a little nuanced because I think my view on this is a little contrarian because on one hand, yes, I believe that you should ship something, but it's a little, here's why it's nuanced. I think if you read or you listened to people on LinkedIn or talk a lot about startups, they're talking about launching crappy MVPs, right? They're talking about just get it out the door. You can't do that anymore. Like the MVP that you launch has to work well. It has to actually solve a problem. Otherwise people are not going to stick around long enough for you to iterate till it finally does. So, and the reason I do agree with this, it's let's say you have this grand vision, right? For this product. Well, what's the one tiny little feature that you know you can do extremely well that you know people care about, right? Let's just launch with that. So it's less about maybe the whole vision of the idea for the long term of the company, and you're launching with something more minimal, but it doesn't mean that you're launching with something crappy. It doesn't mean that it should be clunky. It should work extremely well, right? So we should iterate quick, but I think it's about less than more, if that makes any sense. And I think that's the key distinction. You still do it fast, but we don't sacrifice the quality. We just do less. There's less of an offering. We just do one small core thing.
Yeah, good advice. And I agree, it's do something well and actually offer some value for someone because a first-touch bad product experience for me is definitely a killer because you lose trust instantly, right? So you need to build trust with a group of people who know nothing about you. You don't have brand awareness, you don't have product engagement, all the things that they want. So having that one thing, doing it well, Building trust, building on top of that is a really strong way to do it. And just equate that to what you've done with Hubble. I'd love to get a sense when that started in the sense of not timeline, but where it started for you as far as the product development, testing, and validation to now, now that you've got a lot of people who have been inducted and using the platform, what that looks like. So that's journey.
This was a little unique because I was an expert on a different sort of similar type of platform. I already knew it was going to work, right? Like, I already knew right away based on it's a marketplace. I have all these experts that want these other people that want to become experts. So that's one side. People are already booking calls with me. I'm just one person. There's millions of other people just like me with different domain expertises, right? So I knew day one this was going to work. We just need to get the right people. We need to make the booking experience super seamless. But if you look at our design, for an example, it's very Look at our website. It's very simple. There's one hero section. There's a button that says find an expert. It takes you to a marketplace. There's images of individuals. And if you click on a person's photo, there's their expert booking profile. And it's very simple. There's 3 buttons. You can click 15-minute call, 30-minute call, or 45-minute call, right? Is that our grand vision for Hubbell just to stop there? It's not. But that was the way in. And that's the sort of the foundation, right? We want to try to make as many interactions and calls and connections as possible. And there's a lot of stuff that we're going to build on top of. I'll just throw one thing out. In 2 days, we launch our advisor plan. So if someone books a 15-minute call with Andy and they love Andy and they want to keep working with Andy, Andy wants to keep working with them, they can subscribe to Andy now for a month, right? Which is something that's a little different than a 15-minute call, but it's a natural progression, right? I'm going to save a lot of these other cool core features that are coming But I think it underscores what I said prior to this, which is we're not launching with something crappy. If the book button doesn't work and the Stripe integration doesn't work and you can't complete a checkout, you think people are going to stick with us? They're gone, right? We made what worked work well. It's very simple. And now we get to start building on top of it, leaning into the feedback that we're receiving.
So good. And it equates to what you were saying before. And again, going right back to the very start where you were talking about your life as far as professionally and how you built a network of people. And there were things that you were looking for. You were living and breathing the problem and we're hearing that feedback as well. So to build something that is simple in a sense of what it offers, but it solves a large problem in 2 ways as far as one, having people you can reach out to. Like if you did that on LinkedIn, it'd quite often just go nowhere because they get overwhelmed with people, but they're looking to do those things. It's like you're providing a really curated filter. In the sense of quality control.
People inherently want, I don't care how evil somebody is, people want to help. You just have to facilitate the transaction and make it happen seamlessly. And, you know, like, I remember when I moved to San Francisco, this was how I literally met my first VCs. Like, listen how awful this is. This is what I did. I moved to San Francisco. I'm like cold emailing VCs, getting zero responses because I didn't even know what a pitch deck was back then. I don't even know what I would send. I wish I still had that email. That's probably super embarrassing. I was stumbling in San Francisco, walking around, and I found this park called South Park. Anybody who's familiar with the Bay Area or the tech scene in San Francisco would know this. I didn't know this. All of the VC headquarters, they used to be on Sand Hill Road. If anyone's ever heard of Sand Hill Road, it's very like, was trendy in the '90s and the 2000s. All those firms still have offices there, but they have headquarters now in South Park, right? This was like in prior to COVID. And I'm walking around, I'm like, oh wow, like Kleiner Perkins right there, General Catalyst right there, like all these. And it's a little tiny quaint little park. And so I roll into this cafe and I get a latte. I'm like, this place is really nice. It's one of the oldest parks actually in San Francisco. And I sit down and within like 2 minutes I realized everyone who's around me is a founder pitching a VC. There's like 15 of these meetings in this tiny little cafe. And like, it's tiny. You're shoulder to shoulder. You can hear everything that's happening, right? And I'm like, I'm coming back here tomorrow. So I basically would go to this cafe every single day. I did this for a couple of months. I would get a latte and this avocado toast, and I would just wait for founders pitching VCs. And if the VC left their email, because this is pre-COVID, people weren't even doing meetings on Zoom the same way they're doing now. If the VC wrote their— said their name or their email, I would literally write it down. I would get home from the cafe, 20 minutes later, and I'd be like, Andy, I know this is a little creepy. I was at Cafe Centro today. I'm about to launch a startup. I would love to talk to you about it. Right? And then came the whole lesson with them being like, oh, I'm actually a biotech investor in the growth stage. And I'm like, oh yeah, I'm creating a consumer app and pre-seed. So that was like an education in and of itself. But like, that's what I had to do. You could go on Hubble, you could go on any of these other mentorship platforms, not just Hubble, Well, you could go search right now, VC. You could talk to any of these VCs on our platform. There's 35 of them under $50 and just flat ask them, hey, at what point would my business be too good to pass on? What sort of metrics would I need? They'll tell you, right? I didn't have the luxury to do that. I probably spent $1,000 on lattes and kind of got nowhere.
It's a great story. And I heard one on, it was Venture Unlocked, Samir Kanji. Hosts that and really established VC. But he was talking about, I can't remember the fund and the fund manager's name, but he owned a rug store right near Sand Hill Road back in the '90s. And he just got to know all the people that were there that were spending money with him and having conversations. He got fascinated by the whole thing and ended up launching his own fund that became really successful. And it was just being in the circle of these types of people that had these conversations that just inspired him, drove to what he's doing now.
It's incredible.
I need to find his name because it's such a good story. And it's called—
I know that story. I've heard of it because I remember it's a big company. They either were like the first investor in like Pinterest or LinkedIn, like a big company. I remember them, them, the founders telling the story being like, I showed up to the VC's office and it was actually a Persian rug store. And I asked the lady at the front, hey, where's this person? And she points to the back room and we're walking through all these rugs, right? And we sit down and he actually has a big office back there. And that's the person who was the first investor. And I don't remember what company it was, but it was a super big established company. So yeah, that's cool.
Yeah, they're fascinating stories. And like the way that people get creative now to do that is amazing. I would love to get a bit of a read as far as where Hubble's at. I see it as a B2B2C platform in the sense of you get that network of networks effect by nature of the people that you're bringing on. and their audience, if you're a founder, like what sort of things would you say they would come to Hubble for?
Yeah, if I'm a founder, depends on the stage, right? That's the beautiful thing about it. So if you're a first-time founder, how about like how to launch an MVP, how to run user discovery interviews, right? How to go from 0 to 1, basically. Like there's tons of founders out there on Hubble that are venture-backed, that are 4 or 5x times founders that have failed a lot. They've had success, Almost all of them, almost every single person you're going to talk to on HubSpot, I promise you, is going to be humble. They're going to be wanting to talk, wanting to share their wisdom. So if you're an early-stage founder, maybe it's that. If you're a little later stage, right, let's say you're getting into the seed round, it'd just be like talking to people that have raised their Series A. Hey, what did you need to raise seed? What did— when you talk to the 20 investors you talked to, what were a couple KPIs? Because we have similar business types. What were a couple KPIs that you needed to cross, right? So if you're a founder, there's that. There's also the element of like, we have some designers on there, we have some PMs on there. So if you want to ask questions about that, about maybe your product, about some UX, about improving design, about potentially even like, you know, we're not Fiverr, but potentially kicking off a relationship with a designer, maybe off of the platform you end up, you know, finding your next person to help you design your next screens. So there's all kinds I think the beauty, at least for now, it's all tech startup and venture focused. So everybody you're going to talk to is related to that somehow, not always exactly specifically, but it always touches. You're not going to talk to a fitness trainer and you're not going to talk to a cyclist at least yet. So yeah, there's, there's all kinds of professionals, all kinds of domain experts. But I think the thing that I'm at least most proud of at this point is like, they're all quality caliber people.
Yeah. And I would 100% agree and not because I'm on there, but the people that I've And it's, for me, I equate it to, I remember the early days of my first business having non-executive directors who helped us a lot. And it's almost like a taste test or micro advisor in a way to be able to pick someone's brain who's an expert with no obligation other than a small little cost to be able to get that insight. And then to your point, you know, that could expand into a relationship as a subscription or even into fractional work.
Yeah.
To bring that person on to help drive you from A to B.
Yeah, it's like, it's truly, there's 2 things. It's truly a safe space. Like I know founders are out there right now listening to this. How many times when people ask you how things are going, do you literally lie through your teeth and say, yeah, everything's great? I mean, this is 98% of the founders I talk to, right? Is it great? It's not great. Hubble can actually be a safe space where you go in there and say, hey, our retention is 6%. This is maybe a product specialist, a growth specialist. What can we possibly do? Here's our product. What would you advise on how to improve this retention? Right? Because it sucks. That's the sort of dialogue that you can actually have on Hubbell that's useful. You don't need to pretend. I think the other thing that's cool that happens when someone books a call with me, and I know I'm not alone with this, I make it a personal mission because it's my name, right? It's me. They're booking it with I go into the call like, I'm going to make this the best money this person has ever spent. And it's almost like you feel indebted to this individual to give them so much value or make a couple introductions that it ends up being for the person booking it, some of the best money that they spend, you know? So it's really the— it's the start of a relationship.
Yeah. And I am an advisor, mentor, board member. There's lots of things that I do. And I love, love meeting new founders. And like, one, for their personality, just finding inspiring people, but two, learning what they're working on. It helps me with what I'm doing, and not as in replicating ideas, but just inspires me for lateral thinking, future thinking, ways that they're looking at the world that you and I don't, is always fascinating.
It's so important to get around people that have high energy and are doing stuff, and they're not just talking about people, right? I think that's one of the magic things about San Francisco. And in Silicon Valley, but not just there, other places, people are building stuff. There's good energy. We can get on Zoom calls like this, have these conversations, go back and forth, and we're going to leave these conversations with more energy than we started, you know?
Yeah, I agree. And it's been a pleasure of mine to be able to start this and launch this, and it's become something much greater than I anticipated. And for me, it's a humbling reflection of the people that I've met and connected with through the years as well of wanting to share their knowledge and support with what we're doing. So I think that's a really good place to end up today. Kevin, thank you so much for taking an hour out. I know you're off on vacay tomorrow, so I appreciate you making this time for us.
Of course. I think this was the perfect send-off. Now I get 3 days off.
It's amazing. Well, I'm glad I got to share this little moment with you before you head off. It's been a treat. I suggest everyone should check out hubble.social. I'll put all the links, of course, in the show notes and share it on socials as we go live. There'll be a lot of content out there. I appreciate you joining today, Kev.
Thank you so much for having me, Andy.
Awesome. Thank you. You're on Startups Decoded. We're back every week. Share, give us ratings. It helps keep going. Bring in those sponsorship dollars too. I'm open to conversations and collaboration. I look forward to speaking with you again next week.