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S3 Ep05 Dial It In: Building Innovation: Mike Eastwood on Creating Portal IQ
44 Plays2 months ago
In this podcast episode, the hosts interview Mike Eastwood, the founder of Webalite and creator of PortalIQ, a unique automated HubSpot audit tool. Mike shares his entrepreneurial journey, discussing his background in design and coding, the challenges he faced in developing PortalIQ, and how he leveraged AI to improve his coding process. The conversation covers the importance of niche markets, the value of community support, and the practicalities of balancing multiple roles as a solo entrepreneur. Additionally, Mike provides insights into his business strategies, including focusing on HubSpot partners for growth and the significance of creating a strong team.
Contact Mike:
Webalite
Portal IQ
LinkedIn
…
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
Connect with Dave Meyer
Connect with Trygve Olsen
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Transcript
Introduction and Hosts
00:00:08
Speaker
Welcome to Dial It In, a podcast where we talk with fascinating people about marketing, sales, process improvements, and tricks that they use to grow their businesses. Join me, Dave Meyer, and Trigby Olson of PhysiWeb as we bring you interviews on how the best in their fields are dialing it in for their organizations. Let's ring up another episode.
00:00:30
Speaker
Dave, I have outdone myself for this episode.
Memorable Past Guests
00:00:35
Speaker
but We have had Playboy bunnies. We have had somebody who hypnotized you. We have had people from all walks of life. ah We have even entered ah we have and interviewed the chat GPT robot on this podcast. So there's one final frontier that we have not passed. We have yet to be somebody who is literally in the future.
00:01:01
Speaker
not And I found him and we got
Introducing Mike Eastwood
00:01:03
Speaker
him. Our guest today is actually in the future as we speak. So I'm super excited. But boy, I heard we had a new sponsor. Do you want to go? Do we have an ad for the sponsor?
00:01:15
Speaker
Okay. Yeah, wait, of course. Yeah. Let's go. Let's do it. Do you find yourself in need of wisdom from a true master of magic? Look no further than Gandalf the Grey. The podcasts were legendary. Wizards meet modern day challenges. Join Gandalf as he shares tales of adventure, offers insightful advice, and provides magical solutions to everyday problems.
00:01:37
Speaker
Subscribe today and let the wisdom of Middle Earth guide you through your own epic journey. Available on all and major podcast platforms. Visit our website for more enchanted episodes.
00:01:49
Speaker
Wow, that's exciting. See, most people don't think that Gandalf is a real person, but we know differently.
Mike's Background and Journey
00:01:55
Speaker
We've been doing that. We've been doing it variations on a theme of this season so far. And we've been doing, Hey, so you want to, you want to do this or you want to do this as a way to make money. And so the next is, Hey, you got an idea for a business app?
00:02:08
Speaker
let's Let's maybe talk to somebody who's done that and figure out how it goes. so Our guest today is our friend, Mike Eastwood, who is the founder of Webalite, a digital agency specializing in HubSpot solutions. and He is also the creator of Portal IQ, the world's first fully automated HubSpot audit tool.
00:02:29
Speaker
With over 30 years of experience in design, marketing, and business strategy, Mike is recognized as a HubSpot Community Champion and a technical expert in building integrations and customizing CRM systems.
00:02:41
Speaker
His passion for helping businesses grows through smart, sustainable technology solutions, and has earned him an international reputation for innovation and excellence. And more to the point, as we are recording this on a Thursday afternoon, Mike, where time is it where you are? New Zealand, it's just gone nine AM on the Friday. He's hes getting literally in the future. Oh my goodness. Don't tell me what happens tomorrow. I'm not ready yet. That's pretty good stats so far.
00:03:11
Speaker
If you can tell me who win the wins the Mets game tonight, that'd be great. We met Mike as he was bringing his app online. And since then, we've actually. been fortunate enough enough to help him refine it and sell it to more HubSpot partners and in the HubSpot ecosystem. But I'm really excited to talk because I think a lot of people have an idea like, Oh my God, I should make this into a piece of software. So that's why we wanted to bring Mike on is to talk about
Portal IQ's Evolution
00:03:38
Speaker
what that's like. Mike, tell us about it. Why don't you tell us about your agency first and what you do. And you quite literally in New Zealand. So we're recording this in America and you're in New Zealand. So no joke, he really is to all ours in the future.
00:03:50
Speaker
Yeah, so we may need subtitles for this. That's all right. Most people can hear Dave. And when I get excited, I talk fast. So hold on. um So I'm going to rewind it back a bit before that. I trained as a designer, product design, and did a lot of graphics and branding, and then this thing called the internet turned up. And that's super exciting.
00:04:13
Speaker
And I kept asking people to code stuff, build a website for me, and it was just too hard for everyone. And so I started to learn how to code. and I'd built like hundreds, literally hundreds of websites and I had this blinding flash of the obvious where nobody actually wants a website. They want more traffic, they want more leads, they want more customers. And so that's when I started to roll into digital marketing. Just a few frogs before I discovered HubSpot and that was 2016.
00:04:48
Speaker
Hadn't looked back, became a partner really quickly. Currently a gold-tiered partner based in New Zealand and been a community champion since 2019. And one of the things I love about our community is, which we could talk about later if we took time, is just that generosity. So, such a good fit for me. And as TruthBe said, I like helping people grow their business. so I get excited and now I'm doing it with Acts. The origin story of PortalIQ in this office, which you can't see because you're listening, not looking. I had a lead in here, it's December 2021. We take our summer holidays and over the Christmas break. And I didn't quite know what to sell them and they didn't quite know what they wanted. And I said, let's run an audit on your HubSpot portal.
00:05:42
Speaker
And my
Challenges and Perseverance
00:05:43
Speaker
business manager's eyes just went wide and it's great. How much is that? $723. It's great. I just made it up. Great. Send us an invoice. I'm going on holiday tomorrow, so we'll pay now, but we'll see you in January. And it's cool. That's good because I haven't written it yet.
00:06:03
Speaker
So the guy leaves the room, goes on holiday and my business manager says, I won't use your exact words for the podcast. We don't have an audit. Spent in my head for a while. Came back on the 4th of January, sort of two weeks before everybody else and started writing. First week, 10,000 words fell out on how to set up a HubSpot portal.
00:06:24
Speaker
And I then built out the first report manually, which took forever. Next minute, I get a call from Australia and someone is, hey, you've got a HubSpot audit. Yeah. I just sold one for $723. So that's 700 Aussie. Is that done? Your customer. And I'm like, okay, maybe I'm onto something.
00:06:48
Speaker
But as you'll find out, that was an exciting beginning to a very long three, almost three years. And we've been with you since almost the beginning, Mike. And I remember in the conversations that you had, I think you're relatively unique in that you're an entrepreneur in the app space.
00:07:08
Speaker
and at least in the HubSpot app space that as a solo, you're getting your hands dirty and you're actually doing the coding and you're doing the communications. And so there's a lot of different hats that you're running that are different sides of the brain. So how how do you manage that and how did you work on growing the business while still handling the bug reports and the fixes and all this stuff that went into creating this amazing app?
00:07:32
Speaker
Not very well as the answer. So when I started this journey, I had a couple of contractors, a business manager, and one, one employee. Now it's just me. So I'm running two businesses. I've annoyed a lot of clients because I haven't been delivering to my equality, which I'd usually deliver to a lot of sleepless nights. Keshlow's been a nightmare and breaking news just ended a 15 year relationship. So.
00:08:03
Speaker
and that's there's no bad late When we asked for news from the future, I was hoping for good news. The good news
Portal IQ's Future and Improvements
00:08:10
Speaker
is this is the most exciting time of my life. The opportunity is amazing. The app is getting traction and I may get back to zero this year.
00:08:25
Speaker
yeah I'm not counting thousands of hours of work. So it's interesting. ah Tangent, which I can't expect it is the thought leadership that comes from trading in it and getting it in the market and making mistakes and recovering most of the time. Yeah. So there's so many good things have come out of it. There's been some destruction along the way, but the good news is it's super exciting where I am now. And.
00:08:57
Speaker
There are more zeros and I've experienced in my life as an outcome. and Do you mean that quite literally like zeros in terms of dot ah on checks and then also zeros in terms of coding? What's the value for the app? It's on a really good trajectory at the moment. And while it's going to take a long time to recover,
00:09:20
Speaker
probably 3,000 hours worth of work. It's on the right direction and I still haven't finished yet. Like I'm still improving it. I'm still adding features. I'm still getting ideas from other HubSpot partners going, hey, it'd be great if it did this. And it's like genius. Yes. That's one of the things I always worry about is if you have a really good idea, you build out the really good idea, then I think you're sort of constantly inundated by people who give you a case of the abbots.
00:09:50
Speaker
But that, yeah, that's great, but can it this? And you're like, sure, I'll make that happen. So how do you, as a keeper of the keys, and I could probably make another Gandalf joke here. See this one thing here, Dave, is Lord of the Rings was filmed in New Zealand where Micah's from.
00:10:08
Speaker
Yeah, so I'm actually in the city that Peter Jackson and lived in. And just out the window here is where the red carpet was. ah ah Amazing experience in Wellington.
00:10:22
Speaker
yeah um Anyway, I lost track of your risk for me with a giggle. Yeah, but back to the question is, you built the thing, right? And then you're constantly being hit with the yeah, but how do you measure the critical mass of to whether or not you're actually going to do something or not? Because I think every entrepreneur has that point in their life where a client asks, Hey, can you do this? And your answer is, sure, absolutely. And then you go out to the car and then you get a little what it is you just agreed to.
00:10:52
Speaker
There's a point where you stop doing that. where when did When was that point for you where you stopped just saying yes to everything? And the follow-up question is, how do you measure what what you need to change in your service offering and how do you code? it um Talking to people is the key. So, rewinding. First answer is, pretty soon, if you're doing an app, you're going to be the subject expert. You're going to know more about their use of the app in their business than they do. Ultimately, we can talk to a lot of people and get ideas, but it's up to us to clarify those ideas, simplify them, and implement them.
00:11:35
Speaker
The wishlist thing's hard because I want to help everybody's business grow. I want to implement features for everybody, but I've got very limited bandwidth. Even though I use AI to help me code, i'm still it still takes time in testing. I'm quite selective on just qualifying that statement. I'm reasonably selective as to which features I do when, and the key for me is, will somebody pay for it?
00:12:04
Speaker
And anyone that's looking at building that two tips first, sell it and get people to pay for it. Even if it's not much, sell it because there's a different conversation when somebody says, oh, that's great. I want one of those.
00:12:22
Speaker
to reaching and pulling out their credit card and zapping it whether it's monthly, one-off, whatever
Importance of Data and AI
00:12:27
Speaker
it is. The people that ask for features and put their credit card in are more valid than the people that keep their hands in their pockets. Another tip which I first saw on Zapier is I went to grab an integration to use a zap and found out that that wasn't there yet.
00:12:46
Speaker
Say, oh, that's interesting. So what they'd done is put the keywords for the apps, built out a landing page, filled in a form, measure the traffic, and then you start to filter. so If you've got an idea for an app, go build a landing page.
00:13:02
Speaker
And in your form, say join the waiting list. And I forget the exact wording I got, but there's a question like, I might pay for it. Definitely pay for it. No, I expect it to be free. And put that in as a required field because suddenly you'll get to measure the traffic to the page and you'll get to measure the conversions and you'll get to talk to the people that say, yes, I've paid for a solution. That can save a lot of heartache. That's brilliant advice.
00:13:29
Speaker
and For folks that are um listening along, yeah Mike's tool is relatively unique in that it goes through and identifies all the problems or opportunities inside of a HubSpot instance.
00:13:43
Speaker
so ortal PortalIQ helps to identify and spot what you might have set up wrong in your HubSpot account. Mike, can you give us like the 30-second elevator pitch on what PortalIQ really does and some of the biggest biggest benefits for folks so that we're all operating out of where where you're coming from?
00:14:05
Speaker
Yeah, oh it seems you're on video. I can hold this up. This is the first date. And so I've been using audits to sell for a long time. With HubSpot, as a partner, I found there are a lot of organizations that have got HubSpot and the person that set up might have left and other people might have come in and made a mess. We know who they are. They might've been onboarded by somebody that wasn't really that skilled and tried to fit them into HubSpot rather than HubSpot and into the organizations. What PortalIQ does is goes in and you install the app.
00:14:45
Speaker
and it benchmarks the system, so it goes and checks your email settings, for example. It looks at your domain name, looks for things which will help your email deliverability. It goes through and checks how many marketing contacts you have, because if you're not using marketing contacts, then you're probably paying for contacts you don't need. So it goes through, those are like a couple of 68 different benchmarks it analyzes in the HubSpot portal.
00:15:13
Speaker
And then what it does, that it assembles a document, which actually comes out of the HubSpot CMS. It assembles a document with recommendations, tips, tricks, best practices. And then it filters out a list of recommendations so that you can go through and go, this is urgent and important.
00:15:33
Speaker
There's a property appendix, so you can go through and go, huh, why is credit card in there? Oh, an NCBC number and expiry date, like seeing some really scary stuff. You should not have credit card numbers. If you have credit card numbers in your HubSpot CRM, please go and delete them now. Thank you. First, email them to show at dial it in podcast.com. So to send all of them right over.
00:15:58
Speaker
Everything that Mike said is true. The next step in selling is really the magic here is there's two, when that instance that Mike was talking about, somebody's left and the company's left with their HubSpot portal and they really don't know which end is up. They really don't know where anything is, why it is the way that it is. You have one or two choices. You can say, everything's bad. Let's nuke everything and start over.
00:16:23
Speaker
And that's certainly one way to go. And the other way is to say, there's a number of things that are good here and there's a number of things that aren't so good. And if we want to make this better, let's work on the not so good, but also give credence to the things that are good.
Overcoming Business Challenges
00:16:39
Speaker
And so from my standpoint, because this is something that we use all the time, is this is an invaluable tool to be able to quickly give people a ah temperature check on what exactly they have and what exactly needs to be fixed, because it's always either There's a turnstile effect. It's always either dramatically better than they think it is, or it's considerably worse than they think it is. There's never middle ground. It's either really much better than you said, or really not. And one of the things, the exciting opportunities at the moment, no podcast is complete without AI being mentioned.
00:17:18
Speaker
If you're using AI to leverage your data and your data's bad, ah you're going to scale a mess really quickly and really efficiently. And you're going to end up with a much bigger mess, much faster than you thought. Your data is crucial. It is, in some HubSpot portals, there's just money left on the table because they're sending 1.7 emails per contact.
00:17:43
Speaker
all times, so you're not using email marketing. What? This is the best return on investment. You've got these people you've been working with. Can we please send them some offers? Can we at least warm them up and get them talking again? So your data has got to be good to do that. And I think it really helps having a tour guide, which is your HubSpot partner.
00:18:10
Speaker
Because they're going to help you prioritize, they're less emotionally traumatized by your data in your tech stack than you are. And they can help you prioritize and progress over perfection. Don't go in and the nuclear option is available, but you're going to lose a lot of value. Prioritize, work through apps.
00:18:33
Speaker
Set goals, set timeframes, and go out and do some marketing and some sales as well, because if you don't, everything stops. So yeah, find that balance, which is ironic for me, saying the word balance. but let's Let's get back to the narrative. So you sold it for $723 and process was unwieldy, right? Cause you had to take a lot of screenshots.
00:18:59
Speaker
write a lot of reports. At what point you decide, hey, how can I make this better? Again, another happy accident. So working on this idea and I built it out, I have a massive spreadsheet with all these different levers to pull. And there's, oh, HubSpot App Accelerator. It's like, oh yeah, all going to play.
00:19:22
Speaker
And the team was amazing. They're like, look, we love your product. We think this is a great idea. Can you just change the wording a little bit in your application? Yeah, sure. it's Read it up. Send it back. Could you just say more about this side of things? Because we really like, yeah, sure. um We just changed a few things in your copy and it went quiet. Next minute I get it added to a LinkedIn group saying, oh, you're part of the HubSpot app accelerator.
00:19:50
Speaker
No, and we're like fantastic. So chatting away and it's okay. So it's got these manual components and they said, no, sorry. It's like, it has to be automated. There's no manual. Like this is fully automated or nothing. Oh, okay. Okay.
00:20:09
Speaker
So we got through there and I built out the map, wireframed it all, sketched it, and it's great. And they're like, oh, this is fantastic. Super excited. You're presenting in 10 weeks. I'm like, what? I hadn't written a line. Not a single word.
00:20:28
Speaker
And I'm like, okay, so I start coding and team, let's just tell people I'm busy and and come and ask me questions. But if my head, mouth shut before you started. Yeah, I've been writing bad code for decades. I know how to write good code now. And with AI.
00:20:52
Speaker
I can write good code faster because I can see when it does bad code and I can fix it. Whereas if you were just writing code of AI, you're in a world of pain. That's a, that warning should be underlined for anyone listening. So yes, I was good at coding, but was It was cobbled together and the whole mantra, if you're not embarrassed by your MVP, your minimum viable product, then you you've launched too late.
00:21:26
Speaker
so Next minute, I'm presenting in this office at 3 o'clock in the morning to 50 HubSpotters, including Dharmesh Shah, my superhero. And they're like, this is great, really good feedback, lots of excitement. And I'm like, I'm still not even close to getting it done. They're like, cool, we're putting it live in the marketplace.
00:21:50
Speaker
and fake it till you make it, completely real. So when I started, I was doing it manually. By this stage, I could run a few API calls and assemble stuff, go in and fix stuff on the fly. So the first audits I did, but there's a lot of lot of tweaking, a lot of manual stuff, and I built it so that I could go in and fiddle with it at any stage so that If the renderer didn't quite do its job, I could tweak that. Or if the HTML wasn't right, I could tweak that. Or if the benchmarking wasn't right, I could tweak that. Whereas now it's knocking out an order with 1.24 million contacts the other day and it just slows down.
00:22:38
Speaker
works through it and pops out 120 pages of PDF at the end without any intervention. Bake it to your maker and keep improving. Kind of reminds me of the story of what was the name of the girl who tried to do the blood machine that could test all that. Thanos. Yeah. Thanos. Yeah. The Thanos story. Cause she was, her idea was you could test for hundreds and hundreds of bloodborne diseases with just a single prick of blood. What she ended up doing was taking gallons of blood and then doing all the manual testing and then feeding it into her machine, which was basically a printer. Hmm.
00:23:18
Speaker
So that's that's where you were at the start. What was the next evolution of that? I didn't have any corporate fraud involved or taking- Well, sure. You're not trying very hard. It's only you and you're still in Tomorrowland too. So you should try harder and get them. We've done a few audits with the BusyWeb team and Jen's, you've got to meet Tim Ritchie from IntegrateIQ and it's great. And so we'd book a call.
00:23:44
Speaker
And he got me up ah the darkest hour and so like I can, I'm happy to share the screenshot. When you do your um projections, you've got expenditure and red lines going down and then green lines spring i' going up and then the compound curve dips and goes up. Mine was like massive red lines, hardly any green lines in the curve was just.
00:24:09
Speaker
going down. I was losing cash. I spent all my savings. I whipped all the cash flow out of my agency and it was still going down on a rapid speed. First time I met Tim and I'm just like, trying to swear again, what have I done? I was just And it's calm and collective. And so if you're an entrepreneur, you're in a pretty dark space. I think what you've built's amazing. And I'm booking a time now to call you in two weeks to make sure you're okay. Don't do anything stupid. If you do, call me first. And I'm like, at that stage on my, I've got a runway till April. If I'd stop it then, I've lost.
00:24:56
Speaker
50 grand of my savings, a few thousand hours, and I just have to write it off.
Gaining Traction and Success
00:25:03
Speaker
This was February, and so I did two months before I was going to kill it.
00:25:09
Speaker
and
00:25:11
Speaker
Went through and gutted all the costs. So I did the data enterprise startup grant with hotspots. So I had a massive discount for the first year, 50% by the second year. I thought, ah I'll be rolling in it by then. That there aid me alive, that cost going out every month. And I had no income at that stage. Like my first credit a card sale through the website wasn't until was April 2023. So we're talking over a year later before I had my like $50 sale.
00:25:52
Speaker
And then I get these drips and I get some more drips. And I've got a page we use confluence for our documentation. And there's a page in there with a champagne chart. And there's a first sale through the app store. First sale to somebody I don't know. First $10,000 and the first $20,000, which is actually two bottles of champagne and they go up in Fibonacci sequences from there.
00:26:20
Speaker
So I started getting these popping champagne whenever we hit these milestones and it started to turn around and I was so close to quitting. I was like that, when do you stop? When are you on the edge of a breakthrough um and how do you break through or are you just delusional and
00:26:46
Speaker
Keeping on pushing. So I don't know the answer, but if anybody wants to unload and share where they're at or they're stuck, which will will you'll be able to get hold of me because it's tough. What was your answer?
00:27:01
Speaker
I thought that this was going to be the big one for me. I've had lots of failures over the years, whether they're apps or businesses or products or service offerings. And I thought this is one because every time you fail, you learn something. You don't learn as much from your successes.
00:27:20
Speaker
so Luckily, I've done a lot of learning. I can see the market size. I can see the impact. I can see the value I add. I can see the return on value is way higher than the price I offer. I have evangelists like yourselves that are going, hey, good, talk to Mike. um so on I always so thought this would be the one and it still might not be.
00:27:47
Speaker
um But the other outcomes which I had thought about are pretty amazing at the moment. What I think is especially compelling about that is to hear that it was a struggle because from the outside, from us looking at the app and the delivery and the value that it gives to us and our clients, I'd have never known that it was a struggle at all. Just, holy cow, this is an amazing tool that helps a ton of people.
00:28:15
Speaker
and we Like you said, we've been evangelists for portal IQ for a long time because it saves us dozens of hours in setting this up and it makes a compelling case for us as agency partners or customers to say, yearss let us take a look at your portal and tell you where you need to improve.
00:28:33
Speaker
And so that gives it to you. One of the things that I think you started not necessarily looking at from a holistic perspective, but it seems like you've pivoted into is that agency owner like engagement. So partnering with other partners instead of just going direct to consumer because with other partners.
00:28:53
Speaker
but Let me interject just for clarity's sake. When Dave is using the word partner, what he's really meaning is is marketing agency. So Mike has a marketing agency. We have a marketing agency. And so one of the things that I think, Dave, if I understand your question is there's a trust involved here. Like we've met Mike once in actual life, but we have this guy halfway across the world that we're trusting with our clients information and data that he's not going to do anything with it.
00:29:21
Speaker
Yeah. The big thing that I'm getting at is how did he pivot it into finding partners to help him resell? Yes. That seems where you're going to scale. Got it. I just wanted to make sure that everyone listening understood what we meant by Parker. Yeah. Um, definitely the HubSpot partners. So to put a number out there in the last few months, I looked at a 96% of revenue and the last 90 days was HubSpot paths.
00:29:48
Speaker
Like that's a few things here. So one, I pivoted the business. It's not a full pivot. It's just, I've course corrected is probably a better term. Uh, rebranding, renaming, which is happening at the moment to make it less focused on me and more focused on the agency. I had a partner program from day one, which is, has been great. And so that idea that the partners are generating the opportunities, then I i have a generous share with them.
00:30:16
Speaker
to help them get the opportunity and make it profitable for them. From a personal point of view, I love helping agencies grow. I know how hard it is. I know there are days where everything is against you. And I also know that there are days where you get one new lead, maybe two new lead, maybe a new customer, and that can change your entire organization from just scraping by to, phew, we can pay wages this.
00:30:45
Speaker
helping agencies like that. And I'm also indirectly helping the customers get more out of HubSpot. So I'm helping those businesses as well. I knew it was good for me to sell using audits. This calculation's a little bit dated, but if Webalite, my agency, paid for every order, I would have spent $1,080 and got $50,800 worth of work back.
00:31:13
Speaker
And some of that's recurring. So that number's gone up since I last ran that calculation. So I know there's an ROI for an agency. I know there's an ROI for the HubSpot user. So the value, there's ROI for HubSpot. Like if I can make a half percent dent on churn, that's multiple millions of dollars for HubSpot saved. So it's all my.
00:31:40
Speaker
What's striking me as we're talking guys is that this is, this is such an important part of my life because this is my day-to-day life. But for anybody who's listening, this sounds incredibly niche and also now that you're up and running also incredibly successful. So is that something that you think is repeatable for people who are trying to come up with their ideas just to lean into the niche of it all?
00:32:06
Speaker
The word niche scares the hell out of me. I'm from a small city, like we've got couple of hundred thousand, 400,000 in the greater area and a country of 5 million. So I've always been in business and if an opportunity turns up, it's like, oh, how can I help? You got a wallet? Yes, good. So there I had never niched and it's only something I've done after in the last couple of years.
00:32:34
Speaker
And so that small pond mentality means I look at a pond with 220,000 customers and go, which HubSpot has, plus or minus, and goes, that's a pond big enough to dive into without hurting yourself. And then I've niched down again and gone, there's, they say 8,000 HubSpot partners, but realistically there's 1,500 of us that actually do the work. Right.
00:33:02
Speaker
and so Yeah, meshing down to a target market of 1,500, it seems ludicrous. But I know who they are. I know where they live. I know what time of day it is. I know what their pain points are. I know they're good people. I've had one one sales demo where I wouldn't work with them. One. And I've done a lot of demos. When I first started as a HubSpot partner, there was ah a HubSpot, a hug.
00:33:30
Speaker
Like a HubSpot user group, a hug just around the corner. And I emailed people and said, look, I'm just becoming a partner. Just wanted to let you know I'm in the room. I don't want to steal your clients or anything. And they're like, oh, come and say, hi, what do you need? How can I help? Who do you need? You need to talk to this person. If you need any development help, just ask. We're going some really good people. How can we help? I'm like, hang on. You're meant to be my competitors.
00:33:56
Speaker
And so the HubSpot Partner Agency as a community is ah amazing. And yeah, um I love working in that space and I've got a big bucket of apps that I want to build over here. I just need resources and time and yeah, all that imaginary stuff.
00:34:16
Speaker
The HubSpot community is, it's an interesting community for sure. I even had a similar experience this week where I lost out an an opportunity and I figured it was either me or this other company in town. So I called them up, said, Hey, did you win this business? They're like, no, it wasn't us. And I believe them because they would have told me. And if I lost to them, I would have tipped my hat and said, yeah, that was a good choice too.
00:34:40
Speaker
Yeah, there's a podcast by April Dunford, who is really interesting. She talks about the brand story and product stories and creating marketing messages. And
Advice for Tech Entrepreneurs
00:34:55
Speaker
one of her talks, one of my takeaways is that 40% of Sales are lost through an action. So it's too risky to buy a new CRM was her example so I'm just gonna sit on my hands. She's way more eloquent than me. I'm happy to share a link if we can put it in the notes. Sure. and Absolutely. And so for me that's always from a sales opportunity is it's a no not now.
00:35:24
Speaker
If they've chosen another partner, it's still no, not now because they may get three months in and go full. Uh, no, we're getting a divorce already. Yeah. No, that was the point. Happy to share that link. It's choosing. There's a great old Bob Seeger song called against the wind. And he has a line in it that I always try and ask people the question. You're through the looking glass. You've got um a burgeoning and input app. empire So my question with apologies to Bob Seeger is this.
00:35:53
Speaker
What do you wish that you didn't know now that you didn't know that? I think it's that sense of time and I'll explain that. I had a terrible sense of time. The only reason I know how long we've been talking is there's a little number just there. If you ask me what day of the week, normally I can't tell you.
00:36:16
Speaker
And that time thing is really tricky when you're trying to get something out. It's imperfect. You're having to start all hours fixing something to makeups good enough to send out. It's just takes so long. I think that time thing is, I'm never going to be realistic with that.
00:36:34
Speaker
I accept that, but I need people around me that are that can help with that. The entrepreneurial operating system talks about the visionary integrator, which I know a lot of HubSpot partner agencies use. I need that integrator to help me be realistic or focus or otherwise I'm like full new feature. It's three o'clock in the morning. Where is everybody? And that timescale on.
00:37:04
Speaker
weeks, months, years. so Mike, as you're looking at your past and looking at rolling out new apps, there's probably quite a few things that you're also going to do very differently than you did at the beginning. What would you do now or what would you tell yourself three years ago to get you started and get you going as fast as humanly possible?
00:37:26
Speaker
It's really hard to know if I could have done it faster. though I think that the leverage with team is what I lack and there are some opportunities at the moment that are probably going to change that forever. Team is super important, which seems ridiculous standing here on my own talking about team, but if you can create a team, uh, has unity in the heading in the same direction at the same time.
00:37:52
Speaker
there's leverage there, there's speed, there's safety, those you know it's we all have bad days and if there's a team then that's diluted a little bit and so we can carry through at a faster throughput. So I think But I've done this off no money, no money in, out of my savings. But so don' I I didn't have the budget to go out and drop a quarter of a million dollars to build this. And I probably would have looked at the numbers and went, no, that'd be madness. Yeah. Putting the right team together is super important and will be faster and easier. And you'll still have challenges with teams. There always is. Yeah. It'd be a bit less lonely.
00:38:39
Speaker
For sure. And I suppose AI has a little bit of ah a help in some of that virtual team, right? Because you're running code and ideas through various LLMs and getting some feedback and some help out of that. And that probably wasn't there when you were starting, right? It's only been really great. It was only recently recent for me. And by the first time I'd installed it, paid $10 a month. Anyone complains about $10 a month, they're not valuing their time correctly.
00:39:08
Speaker
turned it on, I had a play, forgot it was on. And and then one day I'm typing and it just was like auto complete. I'm just like, what the? Oh, that's right. I've got AI turned on. So I go through and it's just like completing lines.
00:39:26
Speaker
And I'm like, how am I going to do this? It's got to go out to an object. It's got to pull something in, pull the relationship back. And then it just goes brrr. And I'm like, what the? And I read it and it was like.
00:39:40
Speaker
That is genius. And I ran it and it didn't work. Oh, it made something up. I make stuff up all the time. i So I went in and went, and hey, you made this bit up. I want you to do this and this and filled it in. So on a bad hour, I'd save 10 minutes. On a good hour, I might save 40 minutes. And so for me, that is a phenomenal game changer. I'm self-taught as a coding. So I've done a lot of bad stuff in my day.
00:40:10
Speaker
So I've learned a lot of the mistakes and the patterns and I study on YouTube a lot, I read what I can. So for me, my superpower is that I'm thinking about the marketing, I'm thinking about the partner, I'm thinking about the customer, I'm thinking about HubSpot, I'm thinking about all these things at the same time. So even if I code a bit slower, my speed is like pretty fast compared to a team. And way cheaper, the pay is terrible. So.
00:40:39
Speaker
Yeah, leverage AI and it will make stuff up. So it's going to get things wrong and it's really good at writing tests. So usually when you get to the end of writing your code, you're done and you don't want to write tests, go and test all your methods. With AI, it is so easy. It's, there's no excuse not to. Those people that start with writing tests and then create their code, I take my head off to you. I'm too impatient. I want to get in there and do stuff. AI has improved the quality of my code significantly and given me more leverage.
Closing Remarks and Future Collaborations
00:41:14
Speaker
So it's interesting that they talk about peer programming. In the olden days, you'd have two developers sitting in a computer next to each other, writing code together. I feel like it's at a really good spot with AI. So if anybody's doing it, it's essential. If you're on the details, I use VS Code, which is a free Microsoft coding environment.
00:41:35
Speaker
And I have Git Copilot installed and the HubSpot extension installed and a few other things. Game changer, absolute game changer. Mike, last question. Where can people want to learn about agency? If they want to get a portal IQ license, which we absolutely encourage, where can people find you?
00:41:58
Speaker
Website's easy to find me, so my my company ah agency is Weberlite, and I'm tightening the focus down to just being a HubSpot geek is the specialty there. Anyway, you can visit the website. PortalIQ.com is where you can see the audits in action and learn more about that. a Little teaser, we've been testing a free um HubSpot health check, which is like a 10-page audit.
00:42:24
Speaker
uh, free of charge, which HubSpot partners will be able to offer. Um, so I'm happy urge to share that nice HubSpot community, big shout out to the HubSpot community at community.hubspot dot.com from memory. I'm in there a lot so and I'm in LinkedIn a lot. So there's lots of ways to find me. Awesome. Thank you, Mike. Dave, anything classy and inspirational as we finish?
00:42:51
Speaker
I think the key thing that I'm taking away today from Mike is that it's imperative to make big bets and to stick with it. And the cool thing about Mike's journey for me is he's got more grit and more stick to it-iveness than any coding team. And the fact that he did this all by himself but mostly is just bonkers and couldn't ask for a better friend and partners. Mike, thank you so much for hanging out with us today. yeah man yeah wait on Can't wait for the next collaboration. Thank you, Doug. Thank you for being here. Yeah. So this has been an episode of Dial It In produced by Nicole Fairclaw and Andy Wachowski. And with apologies to Toni Cornerheiser, we will also try to do better the next time.