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S2 Ep25 Building Communities and Embracing AI with Devyn Bellamy from HubSpot
59 Plays7 months ago
In this episode of our podcast, we had the pleasure of hosting Devyn Bellamy from HubSpot. Devyn is a remarkable individual who has made significant contributions to the HubSpot community, including founding Black at Inbound, a community within HubSpot that has now evolved into The Spot. Devin's deep involvement in the partnership program at HubSpot and his genuine awesomeness made this episode particularly exciting.
Watch Devyn's Ted Talk at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idynL1dJa5c
…
Dial It In Podcast is where we gathered our favorite people together to share their advice on how to drive revenue, through storytelling and without the boring sales jargon. Our primary focus is marketing and sales for manufacturing and B2B service businesses, but we’ll cover topics across the entire spectrum of business. This isn’t a deep, naval-gazing show… we like to have lively chats that are fun, and full of useful insights. Brought to you by BizzyWeb.
Links:
Website: dialitinpodcast.com
BizzyWeb site: bizzyweb.com
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction
00:00:05
Speaker
Welcome to Dial It In, a podcast where we talk with interesting people about the process improvements and tricks they use to grow their businesses. I'm Dave Meyer, president of Busy Web, and every week, Trigby Olsen and I are bringing you interviews on how the best in their fields are dialing it in for their organizations.
00:00:23
Speaker
You know, normally I start these by trying to say something fun and comical and misappropriate who the guest is in some, some like comical way so you can correct me. But our guest today is just really doesn't fall into that category. Cause he's just one of those people who's just genuinely awesome. Oh yes. Wouldn't you agree?
00:00:42
Speaker
I agree 100% is one of the original best folks and one of the faces of our favorite tool and partner. So this is super exciting. I can't wait to get into
Meet Devin Bellamy
00:00:54
Speaker
it.
00:00:54
Speaker
Yeah. So our guest today is Devin Bellamy from HubSpot. Devin is, well, I'll let him push out his bio. He was one of the founders of Black and Inbound. So we helped create a whole community within the HubSpot community. And also he is intimately involved in the partnership program at HubSpot. So we brought him on today to talk about that, but also just cause he's awesome. So I guess here's my comical story because this is a God's honest truth is you have a nice deep baritone Dave.
00:01:23
Speaker
Did I try? Did I try? Devin has a really deep baritone voice as well. So I made a crack to him on email a couple of weeks ago, like I was going to buy a voice modulator so we could have a deep voice contest, which I was clearly going to lose. So anyway, fun fact for our listening audience, you have to get your terms right. Just like anything in marketing, you have to get your terms right because
00:01:50
Speaker
If you go on Amazon and search for, I think, voice deepener, you are not going to like your results.
Voice Modulator Mix-Up Story
00:01:57
Speaker
It's going to, it's going to get weird fast. I'm not even going to bother trying call it their fun facts. If you're doing it, you're not doing it on a work computer.
Health and Weight Loss Journey
00:02:07
Speaker
Uh, Hey Devin, welcome for having me glad to be here. So I think the first question I want to ask, cause this is the first time I've seen you in a while. What happened to the rest of you?
00:02:20
Speaker
So I am losing weight. I've been focusing on health for significantly for the past couple of years. And I've lost a lot of weight and it's just mostly diet. It's 90% diet.
00:02:33
Speaker
That's magnificent. I'm going to have to do that too, then, because I'm working on getting started on that journey. That's amazing. But you look fantastic. Can't see that on the pod, of course, but just imagine a spelt man with a fantastic hat and a magnificent smile. I'm not going to fangirl too much. I don't want to trigger any more of Trigby's Amazon searches.
00:02:56
Speaker
I'm just trying to keep up. I, my vocal, I had my vocal cords cut 18 years ago because of a surgery. So that's why I, my voice is never particularly consistent. I used to have a really nice voice, but I can't shout. This is about the loudest in which I can ever be. Oh, I just learned something.
Role at HubSpot
00:03:11
Speaker
Perfect for podcasting. That way I can shout. Nobody really knows. They're just thinking I'm just being normal. The worst scenario you can have in the post.
00:03:19
Speaker
Exactly. So Devin, second question, hard-hitting question, do now in HubSpot. Cause you're one of those people that's a minor HubSpot celebrity and you're everywhere. You're all over LinkedIn. There's numbers of characters on, with the work you do with George Thomas. What is your official job besides, Hey, you can ask.
00:03:40
Speaker
Sure. My official job title is Senior Marketing Manager for Partner Go-to-Market Enablement, and it's a mouthful. So it's great that you mentioned Blackett Inbound, and we'll talk more about that in a little bit. But I want to say that of all the things I do at HubSpot, that is actually the one thing that I don't do anymore.
00:03:59
Speaker
I actually, some one phrase it is, I founded a community and then successfully exited. This is actually before I started working at HubSpot. Just a quick glancing over my history. I worked in broadcast for a long time, but I've always loved marketing. And then I got into marketing onboarded HubSpot and then just rode the orange ride ship to where I am now. With that being said, starting back at Inbound, that was cool. And then handing it off.
00:04:27
Speaker
who the person we're with now, Shaina, and now
Black and Inbound to The Spot
00:04:30
Speaker
her team, you have a team of people who run Black and Inbound and Black and Inbound, speaking of which has now evolved into something called The Spot. And it's this wonderful community. You got to check it out. All that being said, I just spent a whole lot of time talking about all the things that I no longer do.
00:04:49
Speaker
Talking about what I do, I am actually a HubSpot subject matter expert, not just a pretty face. HubSpot, the platform, I decided to make the cornerstone of my career back in 2015. And with HubSpot Academy, it's so insanely easy to skill up if you have the aptitude. So after working in the partner ecosystem with a couple of different partners, I ended up coming into HubSpot because of my familiarity with both the tool
00:05:17
Speaker
as well as the partner ecosystem. And having been both a customer as well as a partner, I have a unique perspective offering the voice of the partner when I'm in meetings.
00:05:27
Speaker
Um, given that I also have a history in broadcast, I couldn't not produce content. I was doing it before. And so I just started producing content for HubSpot, got noticed and promoted internally and I'm just getting on more and more interesting things.
Content Creation and Podcasting
00:05:43
Speaker
But I also produce Good Morning Ecosystem, which is a podcast.
00:05:48
Speaker
With Brian Garvey and Karen Ng, we are two powerhouses in the HubSpot ecosystem. And as you mentioned, I'm also on the Hub Heroes podcast with George B. Thomas and Max Cohen. I'm a marketer. I am a strategist, but to my little brother who is 12 years old, I am a YouTuber. So that's it? That's all you do in your spare time. Holy cow. That's amazing.
00:06:16
Speaker
So you have one of those business cards that folds over because you're online. It's actually the exact opposite. It's exceedingly blank. It doesn't say where I work. All it says is that, hey, I'm Devin. I'm a marketer. I'm a speaker. I'm a strategist. And here's my email address. I've been using the same business card for over 15 years. I actually got those business cards printed for the first time I was going to go to HubSpot.
00:06:39
Speaker
That's brilliant. Very cool. So a couple of things that I want to break out because we're all HubSpot nerds. So HubSpot Academy is HubSpot's deep-seated easy secret, which is that if you actually know how to use the tool and like it, then you're going to use it more and continue to pay for it. So they are readily open to giving hundreds of hours of resources
00:07:07
Speaker
which is bundled in the HubSpot Academy. So you can go through and learn anything about marketing, about website development, the inbound philosophy, how to use the tools. It's an embarrassment of riches for HubSpot.
00:07:21
Speaker
Great thing is that so much of the content and the methodologies are platform agnostic. So while we are HubSpot, we are promoting HubSpot and we are confident at the end of the lessons that HubSpot is the best tool to get the job done. But at the end of the day, you can run inbound with 40 different systems.
00:07:40
Speaker
Now, granted, are you going to need more hands, more people, and you're going to be pulling it out? You're not going to know what your, sure. But understanding the why behind the tool is, I think, and not, I think I know has been the key to my success in my career. And that's 100% Academy. So I'm going to, I know a question that Dave is not going to be brave enough to add. And I'll take one for the team here, bro.
TED Talk on AI Creativity
00:08:05
Speaker
You recently did a TED talk. I did. Yes.
00:08:09
Speaker
What was it? What was the subject of your TED talk? So the overall theme was emergence. The subject or the title of mine was AI Creativity for All. And it was, the idea was AI for creatives who have disabilities and how it can help people who have
00:08:31
Speaker
these vast creative ideas but don't have the skill set or tool set to make them a reality or manifest them even if it's just something is seeing it on paper. It can be a daunting task if you have disabilities.
00:08:47
Speaker
but AI really bridges the gap. And the thing is that when people look at me, hopefully they don't think of me as someone with disabilities because I've been working very hard all my life to pretend to be normal, but have quite a few ADHD, dysgraphia, and they've all impacted how I've been able to learn and how I've been able to process information, but also how to express myself as creative.
00:09:14
Speaker
I can't draw. I can't even write, really. My handwriting is atrocious. But as you can see from my work online, I'm a very creative, very visual person. And prolific. Yeah.
00:09:27
Speaker
But AI, there are ways to leverage those tools to assist with that. But that's really only the beginning about using AI to accomplish your goals and to live the life you want to live. And while it sounds outlandish, almost to the point of hyperbole, if you watch the TED talk, you'll see I tell the story of someone who's doing exactly that.
00:09:49
Speaker
And we'll link to the TED talk because I found it incredibly
Living with Dysgraphia
00:09:52
Speaker
fun and helpful. And just, it really takes you into the mind space to get ready to get your hands dirty with these tools. So I think without getting too far into this, what are your favorite tools for getting that done? And I do want you to tell us what dysgraphia is because I hadn't heard that before. I looked it up because I was like, really? He's afraid of bar chart. Aaron.
00:10:19
Speaker
Turns out it's what he said, the symptom of the atrocious headdress. Yeah, basically it's a fine motor skill issue. And it's basically because my brain moves faster than my hand. I have a hard time doing things. It's basically like trying to push a Twinkie through a straw.
00:10:41
Speaker
And that, I guess you could almost call it signal feedback, is really difficult for me. And so as I'm writing, what happens is that I'll get maybe two sentences in, and then it's almost like physical pain, the amount of mental discomfort for writing. And the slower I write, the more legible I make it, the harder it is. And there's no good. There's only bad and worse. My best is bad. And my good is worse.
00:11:08
Speaker
And is it different when you're typing? It's one of the things is that typing, because it doesn't require as many fine motor skills to accomplish, I'm a lot better at it. One of my challenges, however, is being able to see things and do things simultaneously.
00:11:27
Speaker
And so those typing classes where you had to look at the screen and type at the same time, I couldn't do that. So I still look at the keyboard when I type. Granted, I'm at 90 words a minute, but I'm still...
00:11:39
Speaker
Yeah. And I think the inability to multitask, I think that's one of those things. Yeah. I was going to say the technical term for that is called being male, I thought. Yeah. I guess you can call me advanced hyper-male. Yeah. That particular issue is with executive function, in this case dysfunction and
00:12:01
Speaker
prioritizing, basically people can look at a list of tasks and order them. Okay, I need to do this, that, and this. I look at a list of tasks and like my brain just shuts down. It's too much. I want to do it all at once. And then I try and do it all at once and don't do any of it. And it's not marished. I have a lot of tools in place for that. It's also a symptom of being a guy, you know? Yes. So what you do is you're given a list of tasks and then you roll up your sleeves and tell your wife that they're done. And even though they're not.
00:12:28
Speaker
They'll be done in six months. It's quite bothering me every six months. All right. So just to wrap this up, because I want to talk about other things. You're cool with charts, pie charts, bar charts. All right. All right. I love charts. Now here's a question that I wanted to ask about your TED talk, because I think.
00:12:45
Speaker
Dave especially, Dave really likes speaking. Dave spends a lot of his time looking for new ways to speak. It's an admirable quality. I tell people, and I think this is true, that there are days in which I'm a more engaging speaker than Dave, but Dave is consistently a better speaker than I am. So how does one get a TED Talk? Is there a website to sign up for? Because there was a whole evolution that took you a long time to get it.
00:13:11
Speaker
It took me a long time to get to where I am to have a story worth telling. Right. As far as getting a TED talk, what I would recommend doing is looking up your local TEDx and finding the ones in the region and finding who's running it.
00:13:29
Speaker
Cause they're basically like almost like licenses and you find out who's the license holder for your region, get to know them and then also find the website for and submit through that. I happened to go to the same gym as the license holder. And she's seen my work talking about AI through HubSpot and asked me if I wanted to speak on AI for Ted talk and I'm like, yeah, okay, sure.
00:13:50
Speaker
Spectacular. Okay. So we got off track just a second and I want to get your favorite AI tools before we move on. I know that there's some ways that you're using this and I'm assuming like some of these tools you can talk to or what's your favorite toolbox or what's your toolbox look like right now?
00:14:08
Speaker
Okay.
AI Tools for Productivity
00:14:09
Speaker
As far as talk, I do use a lot of dictation when I want to think and get something out because thinking and typing, they clash sometimes. But the dictation on my phone, the one that comes native with the Mac, that's usually good for me to manage my calendar. I use clockwise to manage my tasks. I am a huge Asana person. We use Asana at HubSpot. And even before we rolled it out, I was an Asana super fan.
00:14:34
Speaker
I have this motto if it's not on my calendar and it's not in a sauna then it doesn't exist. So those are the two things that leverage for me but when most people think i think generative ai and so at the risk of sounding like a total show i gotta say chat spot.
00:14:52
Speaker
I use chat spot more than any other AI tool. One, because it can like, it can reach out as opposed to just going into chat GPT. Everything you do with chat GTP is within chat GPT. With chat spot, I can say, Hey, pull this YouTube video and give me this and do that with me and it'll save this conversation. And it's just my own personal thing, but then it'll also kick it all into a spot.
00:15:17
Speaker
Yes. And I use it. I use ChatSpot probably twice a week minimum. There are aspects of my job that I am just too lazy to do. The Good Morning Ecosystems chapters in the YouTube description.
00:15:34
Speaker
AI generated. Ah, time stamps. They figured it all out themselves. And it's like all the chapters are in there. I have too much stuff to do to sit in here like, you know what? Let's mark this down as a chapter. AI, I trust your judgment. If I see something that's like glaringly, of course, that's not what they were talking about. I'll delete it. Other than that, like that's the primary use. I also like chat spot because you can generate images with it.
00:15:57
Speaker
And you don't have to leave the tool. It's just an all around just really powerful tool. And the fact that it ties into HubSpot is just an added bonus. It's the same as the HubSpot ethos in general, right? It's crafted, not cobbled. It's a whole bunch of things all tied together. So yeah, to not have to jump to three different things to create images and do things and integrate with your CRM. I love it. And it's chatspot.ai.
00:16:24
Speaker
The thing that I like about chat spot is there are a lot of features and benefits. And actually one of our last podcasts that Dave and I did was about AI. But the thing about chat spot, which is great is it's connectivity to other things. So you make this thing, how are you going to, well, you go here and you click here and you do this. I have a prospect that I'm working with and he's being charged a thousand dollars a month for somebody to write AI blogs.
00:16:51
Speaker
So he and I were at a coffee shop yesterday. I said, do you have a phone? He goes, yeah. I said, great. Pull it out. Pull out the stopwatch. And I showed him my computer screen. It was like, there's nothing on my computer screen right now. And he goes, yeah. I go, all right, start the clock. And I go, da, da, da, da, da. And what's a blog post that you'd be really interested in writing and having on your website? Tell me the topic of it.
00:17:17
Speaker
And he's, I don't know. He tells me like, all right, great. I quit. And then I stopped what I'm doing. Take my hands off the keyboard, drink coffee. And it was like, do you have any big weekend plans? He said, what? He has no idea what's going on. He was like, do you have any weekend plans? What are you doing this weekend? It's Mother's Day. I'm watching the Timberwolves game. What are you doing?
00:17:39
Speaker
He's like, well, I said, okay, stop the clock. Stop the clock. Okay. How long did that take? Minute 38. And I turned the computer around and there was a 500 word. Can I have $500 please?
00:17:52
Speaker
That's it. Thing is with prompt engineering and AI in general, I was literally just talking to a therapist this past weekend and I made a joke about AI replacing therapists and he had opinions. Let me tell you, I was like, and I'm saying it cause I'm like, I'm just going to let him get it all out. I'm just, I'm not even going to deal with him or just let him do his thing. But the thing is that.
00:18:15
Speaker
At the end of the day, the people are going to be successful. The people who know how to leverage the tool and the people who know how to do the prompt engineering. And there's going to come a time where that gap is bridged.
00:18:28
Speaker
But until then, until AI gets better with natural language, and then also at the same time becomes more accessible. And I don't mean from an ableist point of view, like physically accessible, like people get more comfortable utilizing AI at the feature on their phone or utilizing it. And the thing is that people are gonna continue to bundle it in as features. And so it's gonna continue to become a more prominent aspect of our lives, even if we're not aware of it.
00:18:55
Speaker
And the thing is, the jobs around these things are going to be about the people who know how to leverage AI. They're not even going to be experts at the jobs they're doing. Like, writer guy was not an expert writer. He just knows how to ask a thousand bucks to type in a... Yeah, and the guy was pissed.
00:19:14
Speaker
When I was done, I was like, look, I didn't do to piss you off. This blog still has to be edited and he had a very specific flavor and niche. He's not anywhere close to that. This is why you want to hire us because this doesn't sound like you and you write a check for three and a half minutes worth of work.
00:19:33
Speaker
You have to watch for bias. You have to watch for inaccuracy and hallucinations. Devin already nailed it. You have to know how to use the tools and to benefit from them. And that's probably where the expertise is going to come into play in the future, at least in the short term, until people read another algorithm to figure out how to get around that.
00:19:53
Speaker
But David is if you use the AI and goes up for the whole Internet, it's going to pull in anything that matches the whole Internet. Devin's doing like for for his Good Morning ecosystem podcast, he's using AI for descriptors based on the pod. It pulls in that content. Yes. Asking it to be clearly defining the parameters. It's a good rule of thumb for sure. But wow, we should probably talk to the guests instead of talking to each other. Look at us. Yes, let's
Deadpool and Ryan Reynolds
00:20:20
Speaker
do that. So I want to add blogs.
00:20:23
Speaker
Or, or maybe triggering, maybe we should take a quick break. Let's take a quick break. And when we come back, we're going to ask Devin about his love of Deadpool and buying email lists. Oh my. Who's chasing you?
00:20:42
Speaker
Today's episode of Dial It In is brought to you by BusyWeb, your partner in driving growth for business service and manufacturing businesses online. Are you a business service or manufacturing business eager to expand your online presence, generate leads, and boost revenue? BusyWeb has what you need. At BusyWeb, we specialize in helping businesses like yours with CRM, marketing, advertising, and website solutions.
00:21:07
Speaker
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00:21:24
Speaker
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00:21:44
Speaker
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00:22:13
Speaker
All right, we're back. So one last hard inning question, and then I know Dave wants to talk about community stuff is, are you excited, afraid, or a combination of both for Deadpool and Wolverine summer?
Email Lists Pitfalls
00:22:27
Speaker
The excitement level is, I would say palpable, but tangible. The excitement is tangible. Uh, there's very little that man can do to disappoint me at this point, because I, the thing is that
00:22:41
Speaker
I love Ryan Reynolds and I have since, since Van Wilder. And I love Deadpool and I have for many years. Like before the movies. Way before the movies. And then when the animatic was leaked and the internet blew up, that was just like the universe for me was just coming together. It was perfect. So I am in.
00:23:11
Speaker
Did you know that Van Wilder is actually based on a true story? I've heard, but I couldn't remember who it was based on. It's based on the actual life of the comedian, Burt Kreischer. Yes. That's right. That's right. I did hear that. That's right. Yeah. He, that was his six years in college. You can see it. Oh, I believe it. Yeah. Yeah. Van Wilder was a lot funnier than Burt Kreischer.
00:23:35
Speaker
All right. And to be clear, because I hit the pause button right as you were about to get really mad at me. So let's clear that up just so people, the clickbait warriors come after me. You buy a list. Absolutely not. Under no circumstances. Why not? One, because it'll make you a horrible human being.
00:23:57
Speaker
you're wasting your money because the ROI is so hilariously low. I've talked to executives who were flabbergasted with how bad the conversion rates were on their lists. And then I know a guy who runs a conference and when he sends me regular emails, they go to my spam folder. And it's like,
00:24:23
Speaker
For all of these reasons and so many more, buying lists is bad. If you want to find out who to talk to sales navigator, you have that to find out who's having conversations about things you care about or problems you can fix, or more importantly, find out what they care about and then how you can help them fix their problems, even if you're not the one that's ultimately solving it. But that's a whole nother soapbox.
00:24:52
Speaker
It is. And for me, it's more like, why would I buy a list just to accelerate the opportunity to upset as many people as possible?
Community Building Insights
00:25:01
Speaker
Exactly. Cause that's guaranteed 100% what you're going to do. Is it going to have a hundred percent success rate? No, but trust me, you're, you're going to be in the high seventies, low eighties. I just come at it from a little more plainly. When was the last time you opened, took an email seriously from somebody you didn't know? Right.
00:25:21
Speaker
So, okay, so never? Why would you then turn around and think that's a good practice for your business? Right. No such thing as a free lunch. There's no such thing as an effective bot list. Black and Inbound and The Spot, as it is now, was not your first community that you helped create, was it? It's correct. It is not.
00:25:42
Speaker
How did you build it? Yeah. What was it? How does somebody build a community from nothing into something? Because I think the thing that I always thought was so just amazingly cool about Black and Inbound is that it filled the need and it empowered the people in it to be more and also realize that you're not alone in the world, which is three rare gifts to give anybody. What's the building block and something like that?
00:26:06
Speaker
I will say that it's something that I've seen my mom do in the past. She actually did almost in retrospect, she did the exact same thing for the exact same purpose surrounding herself with like-minded professionals in order to build her professional network. And that at its core was what I needed.
00:26:28
Speaker
It was my first year in bound and I have this really like crippling social anxiety. It's most people think that they see me here and this gregarious charismatic personas who I am. No, this is a carefully crafted mask that has been holding action over decades. I am real life a hermit.
00:26:48
Speaker
I also had a huge meltdown, my first inbound experience too. It was overwhelming and I didn't feel included because I didn't see a lot of people who looked like me, but that's a given. You're used to that. For me, it was the additional imposter syndrome because I'm surrounded by all these people who do what I do on a level that I aspire to do it and they all have degrees. I don't have it. I dropped out of college and it was scary, but I also knew
00:27:18
Speaker
that if I wanted my career to go in the direction I wanted it to go, it was going to be through networking. It wasn't going to be through job posting. Chances are, for the jobs that I wanted, by the time I got to the job posting, they only posted it as a formality. They already knew who they wanted to hire.
00:27:35
Speaker
And so I wanted to be that person, but I, I, I couldn't think of a way to talk to people. So I just decided to start guerrilla marketing a hashtag. Cause I used to do door to door sales. Oh, I just took this hashtag. The product was the hashtag.
00:27:49
Speaker
The goal was to get people to start generating content on Twitter. And we have a hyper localized captive audience. And if I talk to enough people, law of averages state that I will be successful. So I just put on my salesman hat and my guerrilla marketer hat and just went up to every black person I saw.
00:28:07
Speaker
It turned into this amazing thing. And black and inbound is literally why I got the job at HubSpot, not because I'm the black and inbound founder. It's because Shana, the person who now runs black and inbound told me about a position that was open and referred me for it. It's working spot now. Excellent. That was literally the purpose of the network. But the thing is that with building communities, the hardest part of building community is finding things that people are excited enough about to build a community around.
00:28:38
Speaker
Like HubSpot, for example, our culture, our belief system, our ethos, and of course our product are all things people get very excited about. And so it's really easy to create a community about it, especially like when you look at the partner ecosystem, we are all like 10 toes down, we bleed orange. One of the first communities I ever created was for a trumpet player named Maynard Ferguson.
00:29:05
Speaker
Maynard Ferguson passed away in August of, I want to say 2006. He was his favorite trumpet player at a well time. And he used to come to Youngstown where I live every year. And I was very poor. Dortador Sills doesn't pay one. But one year, I finally got the money to go see him. And guess what year it was?
00:29:29
Speaker
2006, the year he died. It was rough. And so it was like, and I was
Maynard Ferguson Fan Community
00:29:37
Speaker
just gutted. And so I go on Facebook looking for a tribute, a place to put my emotions. And I saw that there were a couple Facebook fan pages and like a couple of bot profiles, but there was no real online Maynard Ferguson community.
00:29:52
Speaker
And then my grief unfortunately went away and my marketing mind turned on and I'm like, ooh, an experiment. Let's see if we can build a Maynard Ferguson community. Right. And so I went on Facebook, I built a fan page and I just started doing memes and stuff that had absolutely nothing to do with Maynard Ferguson just to get visibility.
00:30:13
Speaker
And then I started doing more stuff that would appeal to his target demographic, the people who lived through his era and then high school and college age trumpet players who think he's the greatest thing since sliced bread and will want to be just like him.
00:30:25
Speaker
And as I was putting the content out for them, I'm getting people who are repeat engagers. I reach out to them. I start promoting admins and it starts growing and growing. And now it is the official Maynard Ferguson fan book page. The direct link on it, the website link is going to his estate website, which is run in part by his daughter who is now the lead admin on that page. Cool.
00:30:54
Speaker
And we have over 76,000 members. So the thing is that I found something that I was excited about, identified that there were other people excited about, and then noticed a vacuum.
00:31:10
Speaker
in the community, of the community. And I just basically connected the dots, passionate group of the small passionate group of 76,000 people's impressive. But when you look at 8 billion, it's not even a drop in the water. But again, that marketing mindset, I don't need 8 billion people. I just need the people who are excited about what it is that I'm offering.
00:31:37
Speaker
And it was a huge learning experience for me in community building. And it has been something that I have dropped in every single job interview I have had since we broke a thousand. Wow. Yeah, for sure. And that translates into the partner community at HubSpot, right? So you're.
00:31:58
Speaker
building and engaging and connecting. And I could tell when you took control of the partner community or when you started being the advocate, because all of a sudden all the communications got warmer and more personal. So was that intentional? Three things happened simultaneously.
00:32:16
Speaker
One, I saw that we had absolutely no video and the video that we put out were basically like one of my videos and multi-billion dollar company, we can do better. Two, communications changed hands.
00:32:28
Speaker
But during that transition process is when we rolled out the videos with the communications predecessor, who is an amazing woman. And it's funny that she said they got warmer because I'm thinking about their personalities. The person who took it over is just this really warm individual. Oh yeah. And in the predecessor, she was all about business and she's all about GSD. She gets it done.
00:32:51
Speaker
And brilliant. The partner community, one of the things I love about it is that we're all very excited about it, about HubSpot and about the opportunity in the ecosystem. And it's a wonderful way for us to feed our families.
00:33:07
Speaker
So first being a part of the customer community and being vocal and visible in that, and then joining the partner community as a partner and being
Enhancing Partner Community
00:33:19
Speaker
vocal and visible in that. And then joining HubSpot, just vocal and visible is my default setting, but incorporating the videos into it.
00:33:28
Speaker
changed the tone of a lot of things, it just changed the feel of a lot of things. And when we were talking about emotion, it leaves little to interpretation in the way of emotion. And so I can read the exact same scripts. And in the beginning, I was reading literally the exact same scripts that were in the email.
00:33:45
Speaker
But just delivering it and being a broadcaster with the subject matter expertise is just that combination makes the partner communications a lot more interesting and trustworthy. Oh, 100%. And the thing that I think you do in just listening to all of those is you lean into the enthusiasm.
00:34:08
Speaker
That's part of your broadcaster background. You could do the broadcaster voice and still be deadpan, and it would be boring as cardboard. But you lean into it and you're enthusiastic and you embrace your inner orange nerd. That's what makes it fun. It's like Kyle Jepsen in our little ecosystem. He's absolutely a delightful human being and just the nerdiest, most hilarious dude I know. And probably more knowledgeable than anybody.
00:34:36
Speaker
Absolutely. But that's the secret sauce, I feel like, especially as you've been helping us build the HubSpot Partner community, because it's just you geek out about it with us. Right. And that's the key to community. You hit it right on the head.
00:34:56
Speaker
all just a bunch of people geeking out about a single thing they're excited about. At Black at Inbound, we're all excited about being Black professionals. A lot of us were the first in our families, and a lot of us were the only ones in our companies. And so there has to be a safe place for us to talk and bounce ideas off of each other. That's the exciting part. When you look at Star Wars, right? You look at all the different fandoms within Star Wars, and then you look at this niche group.
00:35:25
Speaker
of Stormtrooper cosplayers, right? And all they do is go around as a horde of Stormtroopers.
00:35:37
Speaker
And every now and then, a Darth Vader will show up in a limousine. It's fantastic. But the thing is that you would never expect a community to develop around literally arbitrary characters. Just these people who their love of the jabronis of the Star Wars universe, they're just gonna, you know what? We're going to create immunity around it.
00:35:57
Speaker
And so the thing is that if what you're doing isn't exciting to someone, then you might need to reevaluate what it is you're talking about. Just because it's exciting to you, you might literally be the only person on the planet that you're excited about. However, conversely, there may be a really passionate group of nerds
00:36:20
Speaker
who are going to get excited about what you do, who are going to talk about what you do, and they're going to lure their nerd friends in, and then their nerd friends are going to get excited about it. And that's how you build community. And the thing is that it sounds like when you're talking about G-King, but then you can easily leverage it to something as simple as fantasy sports. You look at the escalation and growth of fantasy sports over the past 20 years, right?
00:36:46
Speaker
Fantasy sports boils down to statistics, and numbers, averages, and NERD stuff! And you have the mainliest, main, jockiest, jock doing- Oh, you're my team all cathequers!
00:37:03
Speaker
Dude, you're a nerd. You're a geek. You're just a geek about something manly. Therefore, we shouldn't be calling you a geek, but no, you're a geek too. But find out what people are geeking out about. And if you geek out about it too, then get to it. That's what makes when we were talking earlier, before we started recording about children's YouTube videos.
00:37:20
Speaker
One of the things about children's YouTube videos, and if you're a parent, you get exposed to these like Ryan and kids to kids and all these different things. These are kids that are geeking out about their toys, but then there's some section of toys. And so, you know, Ryan, he was all over the place with like my son, he is addicted to this one kid. All he does is sit on his dad's lap and play a farm simulator on the computer.
00:37:50
Speaker
And they're doing made up scenarios like going to an auction and buying a truck and, oh, we got to haul the truck, but we only brought the RV. You know what? Let's just put the truck on the RV and we'll just drive it home. And then just like crazy scenarios like that. And my son loves these things. And between that monster trucks and RCs, those are the communities that he is a part of. That you might not even be a massive community, but if we're talking about business, you don't need a massive community. You just need people who are excited and will eventually convert.
00:38:19
Speaker
My son does a lot of very similar things. I think the whole thing is galactically stupid. And I got a reality check because I told him that once. Like, why are you watching another person play next? Cause it just seems ridiculous to me. And he said, why do you watch people play basketball?
00:38:42
Speaker
It's the same thing. They're playing a game. You're right. That kid a fricking Pulitzer. That's the kid that needs a Ted talk. Yep. Yep. And so it, it was such an important lesson and one of the best things that ever happened to me, I think is.
00:38:58
Speaker
Years ago, I went to a Comic Con that was run by a friend of mine here in Minneapolis. And I got a lecture from my friend, 10 minutes about how I was supposed to behave, how I was supposed to interact with people, how we were supposed to dress, so I would fit in. Cause I'm one of those people who say, that sounds like a stupid and terrible idea, Devin, what time are we leaving? And so I got the lecture and I spent, I went there and I was quiet for one of the first times in my life.
00:39:26
Speaker
And I watched all these people doing very weird things. And what I slowly came to realize is this is their place to be themselves.
00:39:37
Speaker
And they don't have the rest of the world to do that in. So it's not for me to judge them in their place, doing what they love and what's important. So I think one of the admirable qualities about you is you lead with what you think are your deficiencies, but it's also the measure of a man, I think, is taking ownership of, think that you're not. You love Deadpool. You're open about what are medically classified as disabilities. I love professional wrestling. Can't explain why.
00:40:07
Speaker
But I do. We're talking about classifying disabilities. You know what? Let's take the last two minutes back. I don't think he deserves it. Here's the thing. Here's the thing. I stopped watching shortly after the raw era and NWO basically around the time Goldberg streak ended was when I stopped watching wrestling. And it wasn't just because I grew out of it. It's because it is the nature of me being ADHD.
00:40:37
Speaker
I will hyper focus on something and then I will lose interest in it, which is why I love the things that I hold onto like Deadpool. Deadpool is, it's one of my core interests, content production, one of my core interests.
00:40:53
Speaker
And so, like, when you asked me about my hobbies earlier, the joke is that I do what I love. My hobby is I'm constantly in it. But yeah, having a place to be yourself, especially at a con, because at cons, you're dealing with a lot of neurodivergent people, and you're dealing with a lot of sensitive people. And most of all, a lot of us are recluses who have been shunned by society for so long, and it's easy to trigger us while we're doing something as vulnerable as expressing what we love.
00:41:20
Speaker
And so you have a really good person in your life who will take the time to explain to you con etiquette. That's wonderful. It was such an important lesson too, because I realized that this place is not for me and that's okay. I can be happy for those people to have their place because it's okay for them to.
00:41:42
Speaker
Nate, the lesson wasn't in the lecture. The lesson, I think, was in the realization that everybody deserves a plate. And if you don't have one, you should find it. Or in Devin's case, we should make it. Can I tell you a quick wrestling story? I live in Minneapolis. There's a guy who is an independent wrestling promoter in Duluth.
00:42:01
Speaker
And he gets a lot of big names. This is pre-pandemic, so I haven't done it in years because he stopped doing shows. But before that, he would fly big name people into the Twin Cities and then ask me to go pick them up.
00:42:15
Speaker
And then I would drive them up to Duluth by two and a half hour drive. So I've met this guy once in my life, but we have a relationship where he trusts me enough that he will give me the name of big celebrities and ask me to pick them up completely blind and drive them. And that's another weird community thing that if you explained it to people, they're like, are you kidding me?
00:42:39
Speaker
Yeah. So I've spent two hours in a car with Bobby, the brain. Heenan. I've spent two hours in the car with sting and I tapped out and this will be relevant to you and nobody else in wrestling. One of his shows, he had the NWO one. So he asked me, will you pick up Hall Nash and Walt, Waltman?
00:42:59
Speaker
He did. And I was, and I thought about it for a day and I was like, you know what, I am not man enough to be in a car with Hall Nash and Waltman. That is, that is my limitations as a man. I am not going to survive that trip. And I'm a large man in and of itself. And I like to think of myself as a tough guy. I used to think of myself as tough until I saw my wife give birth.
00:43:21
Speaker
I, nope, I can't do it. Nope. Thank you. Sorry. I don't know what he did, but. And that was back in the days when you were driving a Prius. So I borrowed a car for that. Okay. Got it. Speaking of wrestling stories and community, I have something similar to share along that vein. I'm big on community. There was this, there is work downtown Youngstown. Back then I lived and worked in downtown Youngstown. And I took a lot of pride in my state, still do. There was this restaurant that had just opened up and I went in and their menu was a word dot.
00:43:51
Speaker
and not even a well-formatted word doc. It was just like literally we typed out what we sell, put numbers to it and printed it. And I'm like, I'm sorry guys, not in my downtime. And so I ended up making them a new menu and completely rebranded the restaurant and just basically took them under my marketing wing. It was charity, it was out of love. And so I ended up getting real tight with the guys.
00:44:15
Speaker
I'm at the restaurant all the time. I literally have a key in the alarm code. Like, I'm there all the time. But one of the owners of the restaurant
00:44:24
Speaker
is a pro from a slur. And he needed to film a promo for a match of the guy coming up. And his opponent was the heel, which means bad guy. And the heel, what I did is I filmed it for the heel. And the heel, he goes in the restaurant. He roughs up one of the owners, the owner's brother, roughs him up, pushes manager around. And the funny side note is that one of the dishwashers who had spent a significant amount of time in prison was not aware we were filming.
00:44:54
Speaker
Yeah. Escalated very quickly, but thankfully de-escalated justice. So if you're in, if you're in Youngstown, are you talking about Al Snow? No, though I'm familiar with the name. No, this is, uh, Oh my goodness. Uh, I'm drawing a blank on his first name. His last name is Martini. Um,
00:45:18
Speaker
Joey Vincent Martini. Oh, okay. Yeah. He also goes by JVM, but yeah, he's a local wrestler. I think you most he's gotten as being a chopper. Yeah. Okay. And that's a whole nother. We actually did a podcast with a friend of mine who's a professional wrestler and there's this whole like subset. And when you go into wrestling locker rooms that everybody stops what they're doing and they come and introduce themselves to you.
00:45:44
Speaker
And so I used to, years ago, I used to manage a pro wrestler and I'd walk into the locker room and all these people like from ECW and people that I know would walk up to me. Hey, I'm Tommy Dreamer. Yeah, I know, man. Hey, can I get you anything? No, why would you get me anything? I don't know. It's Tommy Dreamer. Okay. Nice to meet you. There's always these communities and you have people whether or not you've found them yet.
00:46:07
Speaker
is an open-ended question, but it's so great for you to help us figure out how to create a community of our own. And I think the work you're doing is extraordinary in the community building here. Yes. Thank you, Devin. Appreciate it. Yeah. The community is the best place to find your people because you're already surrounded by a whole bunch of like-minded individuals.
00:46:26
Speaker
for me professionally, cause I have a consulting company that I never talk about and I do work exclusively work of word of mouth and 90% of my consultants came from black and inbound and the caliber of work that we produce is outstanding. And a lot of it is being done with people who otherwise wouldn't have an opportunity to produce content on that scale. So it's great.
00:46:52
Speaker
Last question before we wrap up, we believe in naked and blatant self-promotion. Oh, thank God. Okay. Hey, you gotta listen on the way through. You can't stop halfway through at this. We play all four quarters. Where can people find you? And most importantly, I know we'll put it in the show notes, but where can people find your TED talk? Because your TED talk is extraordinary.
00:47:13
Speaker
Thank you. You can just look up my name, Devin Bellamy on YouTube and you'll find it. It's literally the first thing that comes up. So you can look me up on YouTube. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. Those are the two places where I spend the most time online with people that aren't friends and family. Yeah. And he's a great content creator to follow on LinkedIn too, because a little minor tweak that he's offered me in the past has really changed my LinkedIn. Yeah.