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The built hapily podcast is about building apps, companies, and relationships in the HubSpot ecosystem. As HubSpot grows, so does the opportunity - and this podcast puts you in the room with the people making it all happen.
Hosted by Dax and Max, built hapily goes behind the scenes with HubSpot developers, solutions partners, startup founders and community leaders. Each episode delivers tactical insights into launching and scaling businesses around the HubSpot platform.
However, this podcast is about more than just building software. It's about building authentic connections, fulfilling careers, and lives you can be proud of. Guests share their personal journeys, hard-won lessons and philosophies for not just achieving success, but finding purpose and happiness along the way.
After all, this is about more than making apps. It's about building hapily - and you're invited along for the ride. Join Dax, Max and their guests to construct the life you've been dreaming of, one conversation at a time.
EP 4-2404-Podcast-Ali Schwanke
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Ali: [00:00:00] Regardless of platform, how quickly can you get them into rabbit hole behavior?
Max: You are all putting on a clinic for how to do that.
Dax: On today's episode of Built hapily, we got Ali Sh sh sh sh sh shwonky of Simple Strat YouTube HubSpot Hacks.
Max: Ali shares with us the journey of starting SimpleStrat, how the HubSpotHacks YouTube channel came about, and what they did to grow the channel. All on this episode of the Built hapily Podcast.
Dax: It's Built hapily. Maxwell Dax well.
Max: Hey.
Ali..
Dax: YouTube channel crushing it. I've learned from it. See ya all the time. What are you looking forward to today?
Ali: You know, when people ask us about our journey, I think that a lot of people hope that we had this like master plan [00:01:00] and I'm excited to share that the plan kind of unfolds as you get into it. So let's, let's make people remind people that some of your first stuff that you did was embarrassing
and it just gets better.
Dax: If you're not embarrassed by your for your V1, then you released too late. So HubSpot hacks, YouTube. How did you get into HubSpot in the first place? Cause everybody has a funny story. They stumbled into this HubSpot thing. It's not like you were born at the HubSpot offices or anything like that. How did you understand and learn about HubSpot?
Ali: Yeah. Someday you'll have an episode where someone was born in the HubSpot offices. So when you do have that, let me know. Our HubSpot journey started Simple Strat as a company started back in 2016, 2017, and I brought on an employee who was actually has gone on to be our co founder, Tyler Samani-Sprunk.
He's on our YouTube channel as well. One of the well known folks in the community, but he said, "Hey, we should maybe become a partner with some sort of software tool so that we can have a backing of a partner program". And that was [00:02:00] really his initial thought so we kind of just did it to make sure that as a new little company that we'd have, you know, some sort of marketplace credibility. And what we learned was you pay for the software,
you pay for the certification, they give you a badge and there you go.
Max: Yeah, run with it,
Ali: yeah, I run it. I mean, it was helpful for us in the beginning to go through that process, but quite frankly, you never know what you're getting into. So it wasn't like we were like, okay, we're going to look at these seven different softwares and figure out which one to be a partner.
We just kind of chose to go all in at least at that one. And then about three years after that, Right after we'd started HubSpot Hacks as a channel, we decided we're only going to focus on HubSpot. So we don't do work in other CRMs or other marketing platforms.
Max: What were you guys doing before the decision was made to kind of like start using HubSpot that first time like how did the company start like back then?
Ali: Yeah, I had been working in, I had been in house, I had been an agency, I had been in consulting my, myself. And so at that time I had, you know, wait for it, really well named marketing company, [00:03:00] Schwanke Marketing.
Dax: Let's just pump the breaks. Why are you discriminating against people like me? That have lisps and can't say Schwanke.
Ali: Let me make it easier for you. Schwanke rhymes with donkey. That's just going to
Dax: there we go
Ali: How you roll with it. But I had been doing consulting. I had been doing more of like CMO strategy. So go in, help an organization wrangle it, go to market, figure out what they want to do with their marketing team, help them hire, help them get their systems in place.
And, you know, a lot of times technology ended up being a part of that. So when I started simple stride, I remember sitting down at the kitchen table, writing out this manifesto and I, you know, you take it to your spouse and you're like, Oh my God, you're so proud of this thing. And you feel like, like a little kid where you read it and they're just like, Oh, nice job.
So to me it was like really awesome, but I don't think anybody around me got, you know, the more you talk about your vision, the more you do things, the more they realize that it's not just an idea and you're actually doing something. You know, moving toward it. So we started more of a marketing strategy.
We would design a blueprint for you. And then we realized that they're just, [00:04:00] again, My background, I actually was an admin for another CRM that shall go unnamed in the marketplace, very popular. And I realized that there has to be some sort of customer database at the bottom of all of that marketing.
And that's really why we sought out something like. HubSpot.
Max: So, you know, we're like fast forwarding through a lot of the, you have this agency, you're working in HubSpot. And you talked a little bit at the beginning, it's like the, you know, the journey unfolds like, you know, sometimes in ways you don't expect it, right?
Where YT Channel spawn from?
---
Max: Where did the beginning of the HubSpotHacks YouTube channel kind of like spawn from? Like, was there some sort of aha moment in that like, Hey! No one's really doing this well on YouTube. Let's go do it. Or did like the project start as something different? Like how, like, what would you say was sort of the origin point of kind of the end product you have today?
Ali: Yeah. What I think a lot of people don't know is I think they thought we went into a room and came up with this great idea and we did all these things [00:05:00] and where it actually came from is we had a software company as a client at that point and they had a product that not unlike HubSpot when you get into it like they say it's so simple to use but That's actually true for mostly techie people.
It's not actually as simple for people that don't think with like tech first. So we said, why don't you create an entire channel dedicated to how to use your product better? It will lead to better product adoption. It will actually lead to people looking for things. We were good at SEO. So we knew that there was search traffic to be had on YouTube for this particular company.
And it was one of those, like, I don't know if you guys have ever had this in your career where it's Oh, that's a cute idea. Oh, that's so cute.
Max: Yeah. Good for you. Gold star. Yeah. Yep.
Ali: Gold star for you, but we're not going to, we're just not going to take that idea. And so we were like, darn it. No one else is really doing this.
So we thought, well, why don't we just like, this was one of those things that I think both Tyler and I are known for in our career where it's like, well, fine. Let me just show you, let me just show you how it would work. So we went and created a. Just like set [00:06:00] of videos that we could use with our clients and we just use loom.
It was just like, here's how to do this. Here's how to do this. It wasn't its own channel, you guys. It was just loom videos on our Simple Strat channel. And to tell you how sophisticated we were at the time, if anybody does any YouTube strategy, this is embarrassing. We use tags like marketing, midwest, learning.
Max: Yeah.
Ali: Okay. That what like, yeah.
Max: Both of those broad keywords. Yeah. Yeah.
Ali: So what we discovered though, is these short to the point videos actually then garnered traffic in a crazy way that we had never, it was just like, Oh my God, the video we posted last week has a thousand views? All were doing is showing someone how to connect their inbox. That's crazy. And then we were doing...
Dax: Sounds like a simple strategy.
Max: Hey, there you go.
Ali: Yes. So then once we actually got into that conversation, we realized that there were other people that were doing learning videos about HubSpot on [00:07:00] YouTube, but we found that we had a very specific hypothesis about what we believe people were looking for in those videos, and we believe that the current people making those videos were not serving that audience.
So we decided that we also unbeknownst to a lot of people in the community, we had employed a video editor at that time, and I had believed that video is the future of, I mean, this is 2017, like I'm like video is the future and every company was like, we agree, but we will not pay for it. So I had this high priced video editor.
Dax: Yep.
Ali: On my team. And he was just like sitting around probably looking for things to do. So we were like, well, let's put this guy to work. And so he, you know, got on B, B and H photo and ordered a bunch of stuff for our office, like was super excited to use the company credit card to get all of his like cool stuff for the studio.
And we recorded a set of like, I think six or seven videos to launch with, and we decided we're just going to lean into this, we're going to try it. And that's kind of how the channel started.
Max: There you go. And so, so the channel started as HubSpotHacks, right? [00:08:00] And it kind of went from there. And like, so, Where talk to me about like where it kind of You knew it was kind of taken off and like you knew you had something Right because I know you had that like those successful videos at the beginning But like you guys are up to like what when I did the notes here you guys like surpassing 21 000 Subscribers, which I have not seen a single Hub spot related not that you see a lot of them even but like a single hub spot related channel that Is commanding any kind of audience near that size, right?
Like where did you start to see it kind of? Hit a little bit of like, you know, the, that first sort of like round of success.
Ali: I think our channel is certainly one of those success stories that three months into it, if an executive would have walked into the room in our initiative, they would have been like, I see all this money going into this channel. I see all these people.
Max: Yeah.
Ali: Where are our leads. And zero, our growth looked like this.
It's a flatline. So we just decided to continue with it. And about six months in, we had [00:09:00] some staff changes. We didn't like stepped in and kind of looked, you just have to have enough data to make a decision to do something. So we had enough data at that point. We leaned in some things that were working.
We stopped doing things that weren't working. I've, you know, we've become masters at reading the YouTube. Analytics and knowing what it's telling us. And we stepped in and said, let's now start putting in specific calls to action across all of our content. So prior to that, there wasn't really a whole lot of call to action.
It was just can we get someone to watch and can we get someone to share and can we get someone to listen? And I think that's the hardest thing to teach people starting a business is they want to do, they want to build the thing that they hope they have in 20 years, But you just don't know what that thing is.
So we just like goal number one, can we get people to subscribe? Can we get them to watch? And then the best thing in the world happened for us. The worst thing for the whole world was the pandemic happened. And we just happened to be in this place where when people laid off their staff, the ones that were left behind was like, what the heck is HubSpot?
And how do I use this thing?
Max: Yeah.[00:10:00]
Ali: And our channel was the first thing that often came up for that because no one else was doing it. So we just, we were in the right place at the right time. But then I would say what's made it consistently perform for us. We have anything that we're doing. Like we do two webinars a month.
Now we do a video every week. We do shorts. Like we're a team right now of 13 people. That's it.
Max: Yeah.
Ali: We're producing more content than most corporations have with an agency, right? Everything we're doing has a insane process around it. And it is like, we have an assembly going over here. So we figured out what's work and we're still visiting and re optimizing now, but like what got it, what really like was the inflection point was realizing what we were doing that was working and then.
Trying then to use that as a lead vehicle. We didn't launch it knowing that it would be a lead vehicle. Honestly.
Max: I, you know, so it, the, I'm going back to my My HubSpot implementation days where you know, back then it was still all just marketing hub, right? So like a lot of the conversations that we had once the [00:11:00] initial setup was taken care of, it all switched into like back then you weren't just doing onboarding the product, you were like, literally being an inbound marketing consultant, right?
And you know, the a lot of the painful conversations I had to have with people was about like content strategy and getting people into this mindset of like, Hey, It's okay for you to go out and share your expertise, but a lot of people had a tough time saying, well, why do we give that expertise away for free, especially consulting companies?
Because they're like, listen, we get paid for our knowledge, right? Why would I go create content that gives it away for free? Because then people aren't going to hire us, right? And for me, you know, the sort of like physics around that, that I always try to explain to people is like, listen, Yeah. When you put your knowledge out there, right one, that's stuff that people are actually looking for that has that have problems that you're your content solving for right when they go and consume your content, one of two things are gonna happen, right?
Or maybe three one, which is the [00:12:00] most likely scenario. Nothing's gonna happen because with marketing, most of the folks that interact with your stuff aren't gonna do anything. regardless, right? Two, there's going to be people that listen and digest your content and actually go out and solve their problem, right?
Which is great, because they're going to then you've created a promoter of your content, they see you as an expert, and they might go share it to somebody else, right, or actually recommend it to somebody else or something, which is great. Or three, which is the scenario that a lot of people like is like, They're going to go try to do the thing that you taught them to do, realize it's too hard and say, Oh, these folks actually knew what they were talking about.
I should go back and hire them. Right? Like that's kind of the physics of what happens when you put your content out there. How have you guys seen it like, have a, like a benefit to your business being a consulting business, right? Like at its core, like a, like any HubSpot solutions consultant is right.
How have you seen this like positively impact things like getting new business, getting new opportunities, lead generation, things like that, specifically from the YouTube [00:13:00] side of things? Yep.
Ali: Ya, if we're talking specifically driving Youtube, we is a secret. Our strategy is get on our email list and you'll get our bi weekly email with our newest videos. I mean again, like the thing that I think is challenging is, you know, Ali, what's your secret?
Consistent execution. Consistent newsletter.
Dax: No! I don't want to do that.
Ali: know,
Dax: to doing this over and over again.
Ali: let's be honest. There's a lot of creativity that goes into that too. But you know, we also, we use HubSpot as a company. And so we, I can open up our HubSpot portal right now, and I can tell you the percentage of original sourced leads that have come from YouTube because they are categorized with UTM parameters.
Just, you Like it's incredible. I actually screenshot quite often. I'll share on LinkedIn and say, look at how many people we got from YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, Reddit. I mean, it's just when people are wanting to say like, where do your leads come from, if you can't say those types of things, or if you're using like zoom info, importing into HubSpot, and then you're sending people to YouTube.
That's fine. [00:14:00] Now you're using it as a mechanism to nurture those people, but you can't show it up on your database. Right. But we're sending people to a newsletter, but. I think, Max, like what you said is a hundred percent correct. There's two things that we've noticed, and this is something that I think is true of anybody that's willing to stay
in a content lane. And we talked a little bit about like being distracted right before we started recording, but people tend to get new ideas and they think it's beneficial to their audience and what your audience wants from you as your audience wants you to stay in your lane, I don't know what to do with you
if you start talking about other stuff, stay in your freaking lane. So we only talk about HubSpot to us. It might be like, Oh my God, we've been talking about HubSpot now forever. Like we're tired of it, but we have new people every single day that are like, I just found your channel. I love it. I feel like I know you guys, I've watched all your videos and I know I'm ready.
Like we're going to get HubSpot and you're going to be the ones that we're hiring. So they haven't converted at all. And they're saying that, and then I've got people, I had a lead coming yesterday from someone that was like, they've never hired us, Max. They've never [00:15:00] worked with us. And yet he knows us because I post our HubSpot hack videos on LinkedIn every week.
And so he's like, if you need HubSpot help, like those guys are the ones to go with. And that when I hear that we have a referral from someone that I'm like, who is that again? And they're just like, Oh yeah, we're, I'm a fan of your channel. That's it. That's all like, that's the residual effect that comes off of that.
Max: Promoters of your content can be even way more valuable than a single customer paying you, right? And I think a lot of people don't understand how to like, Leverage that because it's not something that's like super easy to track. You know what I mean? It's kind of just like you gotta kind of trust me here right that if someone's out there singing your praises and like Telling the masses to go see your stuff like that's that many more eyeballs that are going to consume the content and potentially buy from You right?
Yeah, that's awesome.
Dax: it's super interesting. My question for you, cause what's interesting to me is. Well, Maxwell and I, we have a journey to embark. We have made a blood pact. This blood pact think we have date. So
Max: We've made [00:16:00] multiple blood packs, but we also make multiple apps that get in the way of the blood packs sometimes
Dax: So we're in this blood pact of like, hey, we are going to get loud on the internet on YouTube. We know how to hit record. We are past our own shame. And we will get on and say, whatever, as you, I mean, Ali you just met me. You see me eat a large salad disguised as a burrito without shame. And, but what tips do you have for YouTube?
mentioned don't do tags that say Midwest got that down. What advice do you have for the actual optimization of your channel? Whether it be tags, how long the description is, call to actions in the video what have you seen that's been kind of most reflective in actually your YouTube channel, your YouTube strategy?
Ali: Yeah. I think the hardest way, the hardest reason, or let's take a step back. The reason that's hard to answer is it is your typical marketer's answer. It depends. It varies. And I would say that [00:17:00] the biggest piece of advice I would give people that are looking to get results from a medium.
So whether that's LinkedIn, whether that's YouTube, whatever, that's TikTok. Yes, you can hire consultants and yes, like you should, there are multiple people who know how to do those things, who have, you know, beat you to that. Like, again if I do a behind, if I, if you give me access to your channel, like YouTube Studio, I guarantee you in about five minutes I could probably understand where you've got some issues and what you could fix.
Like just having looked at all that. But the first thing that I have people do is go watch the videos that you're, the audience you're trying to get in front of is already watching.
So too often, I think we, what, this is what happened to us in the beginning is our video editor, wonderful, talented person was used to watching all these like, like, video creators that created all sorts of just like cool, like, you know, crossroads and you're, you know, doing flips and all these cool camera tricks.
And over here, we're over here, like, let me teach you how to press click and add this to a workflow. Like, you're not going to make that super exciting. That's not sexy. Like our [00:18:00] goal is education. And so. If you're looking to, I don't know what kind of content you're creating, but let's say other people are creating apps about you know, how to be more productive.
So let's say your chain, let's, I'm just going to use this as an example. If it, let's say your channel is about notion. Okay. Are you talking just about notion? Are you talking about notion use cases for salespeople? Are you talking about how like everyday families could use notion? Like, cause if that's the case, families are watching other videos about other things in their house.
They're not just watching notion videos. So. When we study what people are looking at when they're looking to learn HubSpot, we know two things. One is like, I read the knowledge articles. I read all of them. I still don't freaking know what to do.
Max: To her.
Ali: Just show me. And then the second thing is, there's, if you go through the HubSpot integration marketplace, and I've told this to so many software companies that we've worked with, like, if you have a software And you say you integrate with HubSpot, you need to have HubSpot Hacks do a tutorial video [00:19:00] sponsored for you.
Because the question that we get is, does it actually integrate?
Max: Yeah.
Ali: they say actually integrate, they have questions like, is it one way sync? Is it two way sync? How many objects does it pull over? Is there, you know, a series of errors? Like, show me what this app does because you product marketers are over promising what it actually does.
And so when we found out that's kind of what people are asking, you can find a ton of gold in other people's comments on their channels, find out where people blow you blow up your competitors or find out where people blow up a video of being like, you didn't show me this PS. We have people that like that on our channel, like they blow us up, but that will give you a lot of insight on what's not being shared on YouTube.
That you can tackle.
Max: And from that, so I think what's unique here is like, you not only have had this like success in YouTube, like in general, like YouTube practice, right? But also like your you're bringing a lot of this data into HubSpot. Like what sort of, like, I mean, I think like what the one integration that HubSpot has with YouTube is [00:20:00] like the enterprise marketing, you get like a, you get that weird dashboard that's like stuffed in enterprise and like hidden away for some reason, what sort of like things do you need to do on like the HubSpot side of things to effectively.
track, you know, you know, traffic coming from YouTube and things like that. Is it just like UTM parameters and like putting links in the description? Or does it go beyond that? Like, like, what else have you guys kind of learned from weaving HubSpot into that YouTube strategy and connecting it all together that you think is interesting for folks?
Cool.
Ali: The simple answer is that is going to be the way you'll track it. I mean, HubSpot, you guys know this, is smart enough to know where traffic came from. So if it came from YouTube, it's going to label it as YouTube. If you use HubSpot campaigns as a way to kind of, folder or structure your UTMs, you can then use other campaigns and actually say which video it came from. Again, I will say that people get way too wrapped up in all of that. Yeah. It's like this never ending conversation about attribution that everybody says [00:21:00] they fix it. And we're all like liars. Like, it's just not, it's not fixed and it's not going to be fixed because consumers literally, like we, we over here are being like, stop tracking me.
And marketers are like, we want to know where you came from. So like that doesn't live together, but what you need to be thinking about more is, so there's a book, like, I feel like I've become this, the author and I've never met, but I feel like I've talked about it on every episode. I should be a sponsored, like distributor of his book.
It's called oversubscribed. And he talks about the 7 11 4 rule, and he talks about 7 hours of content needed to build a relationship across 11 touchpoints in 4 channels. And that's kind of how our relationship gets built. So if you think about this, the, my goal on YouTube, my goal on my blog, my goal on LinkedIn is like, if I see an interesting post from someone on LinkedIn, I'm like, I go follow them.
And then I go back to their other page and I read all the other posts. How much can you, regardless of platform, how much, how quickly can you get them into rabbit hole behavior where they just are like, I'm binging, I'm in here. I'm doing this thing [00:22:00] now.
Max: Eating it like Dax's and his burrito earlier.
Ali: Yes. Yeah. I mean, they're going to
be
Max: Smash.
Ali: there.
Dax: Thats perfect thing to when you talk about this rabbit hole behavior, the, we, I mean, we unashamedly say, yeah, you want people to be a crackhead about your content. Why? Because it is, you're speaking to them. You feel them, you know it. And that's the mission. And when I find something in me in regular life, like video game stuff or music making, it is
I see the video. It. It is me right to the channel. There's the stuff most likely going to subscribe, especially when people like us are content overloaded. And we not going to that subscribe is very high value for some people, for people like us, I'm sure people that are listening. So I think that's super key.
And one of the things that you touched on that's super important is all the touch points. So that helps me, bridges me to a question about the content multiplier, right? You guys spend all this time. It is literally your job, your entire team. Of building video content, how do you, what type of system do you use to [00:23:00] repurpose that content?
A five minute video could be all this stuff. What are your plans or what is your structure or infrastructure that you could tell us about multiplying content from one medium to others?
Ali: Yeah. We have, we've gotten together and said, we know that the main video needs to do its job. Cause I think sometimes we try to just, we as companies try to get things out the door knowing that we're going to have 25 pieces, but you just have 25 kind of like half baked cookies and you're like, all right, nobody wants to eat this now.
They're all kind of like meh but the video has to be really good. And then I think one of the biggest challenges we have right now, so we're doing it well, but one of the biggest challenges is we are a tutorial. Company or a tutorial channel and shorts are not something that typically does well and in tutorials, like you can do tutorials and shorts, but because people use shorts differently, they're not going on there to learn how to set up your entire workflow with webinars on a short, like they're not going to watch 29 shorts.
That's just stupid. So. We're currently [00:24:00] revisiting how we do that in like the YouTube shorts land, but we're also seeing now, okay so when we first started repurposing content from our YouTube channel over onto LinkedIn, we would just share the link and that used to be actually like right when we did that is when YouTube made a preview on LinkedIn.
And now people are in like these mini blog posts are what's working. Okay. So how do we take the content we have now and create mini blog posts about the business case around the tutorial and then point them to the tutorial. So it's always staying on top of like, what is the other platform want from us?
And then how do we take this original? So we've now got a process where
it's like, this is what we're teaching. What's the business use case. And then we're literally like going through this assembly process of brainstorming so that then our team can take it to whatever platform that they might need,
but our goal is to have something out from our our teams, at least, you know, two times a week on their personal profiles.
But I mean, we have two webinars a month. We have a video a week. Like we probably have enough content for everybody to have a post like every hour [00:25:00] of every day. Why nobody wants to see that much stuff from us, right?
Max: Can I selfishly sidetrack you really quick because i'm sure you've kind of run into this. How the I know that like linkedin is just Maniacal now about keeping you on linkedin and something that i've
Ali: platform is.
Max: Yes when you said when you mentioned like, you know, you post to LinkedIn and then it has like the video preview and like, now I feel like every single time I posted some external source on LinkedIn, it just drills into the ground, the engagement, right?
Have you guys found any successful like workarounds on like how to promote YouTube content on LinkedIn? Because I'm assuming this is something that a lot of other like, you know, HubSpot folks are going to want to know about too, right? Is there anything that you guys have found that works in today's day and age, or is it really truly about making sure that like, the content is translated to be native to LinkedIn?
Ali: Okay, so excellent question. I love this question 'cause I'm with you on that. Like I even posted a link in LinkedIn as a [00:26:00] comment and LinkedIn hides it because it considers it not relevant.
Yeah. Yeah.
Goofy So, but if you're using LinkedIn to promote your YouTube content or any, I'll say YouTube specifically think about when someone's on LinkedIn, no one wakes up in the morning and says, I can't wait to interact with a long YouTube video on an external link on LinkedIn. Right? No one says that. Usually. So think about the thought process someone has when they go to LinkedIn. Okay. It's LinkedIn. What, who shared what, what happened? And Oh, wow. Cool. That sounds like something I want to learn, or I want to discover, or like, that's a challenge I'm having. I'll either bookmark that for later or whatever.
And if it's valuable enough, it will take us off the platform, but a lot of times it has to be valuable enough that you go searching for it. So think about like, I have a, I have an Instagram ad right now that I've My Instagram, like saved posts are literally like categories like food. I want to make funny things, you know, shoes I want to buy.
So I saved it to shoes I want to buy, but I don't ever go back to that post. I just, I'm like, Oh yeah, that, that pair of Sorrel shoes. And so I [00:27:00] go back to the Googles and I type in Sorrel. And so I think in this case, if you're using LinkedIn and you use YouTube playlists, let's say you have a playlist that you can say, you know what?
I have talked to tons of people that are new HubSpot users and every single one of them struggles with five things. And so I'm, I created a playlist called dumb, simple, stupid videos every HubSpot user that's new in their job in the first five days should watch. That's a terrible title for search.
That's an excellent title for LinkedIn because no one's ever going to forget that.
Max: Interesting. Yeah. So it's more so it's like you're promoting that this exists somewhere else. And you're being very explicit about where you should go and what you should look for, but you're not necessarily tanking your engagement through external links,
Ali: Yeah. And you're posting a screenshot of that.
Max: Got it. And then that would tell, okay, I need to go to YouTube.
I need to go watch
this.
Ali: Yeah. Cause I think, so here's the thing that also is hard to explain to people that are not marketers like you guys get this, but I think [00:28:00] everybody's like, we need to give them a link and how to get there. And I was like, listen, my son is a kid and he knows how to like go online and type in something he saw on a Twitch video to find it.
Like let's not assume that people are that stupid. So they can go to YouTube. And if they can't, they're going to send you a direct message. Like if they want it bad enough, they're going to find a way to track you down. Unless you're again, an idiot and you have your profile closed down and no one can DM you don't do that.
But that's, that would be how I would approach that for you guys.
Max: Nice. Okay, so back to our regularly scheduled programming here. I just,
Because I know you've been there.We're trying ng to figure it out too, right? We, I think we hit a hundred subscribers and we're like, yeah, it's the best. You know, we're getting there. So, Something that like I think you hear a lot in the inbound world and when people are really struggling with content creation, a lot of times you hear kind of the platitude of like, Oh, go get like your subject matter experts to like participate in the content creation process. You are all putting on a clinic for how to do that, like you [00:29:00] have so many different personalities that we see, like, you know, yourself, we see Tyler, we see will on there, right? How, like, do you go about, you know, either like encouraging or like creating a safe space for folks to like, come into this like, content creator mode and like be content creators themselves, while also like balancing this like existing job that they have, right?
Like, how did you know, Like, what are your strategies about, like, bringing your subject matter experts into the fold and, like, enabling them to be content creators?
Ali: Yeah, this may be where we have an unfair advantage because we're now at the point that the last I mean, when we'll join two years ago and we've added four more HubSpot specialists to our team since then. And because of that, those people have joined us knowing they, we already have a channel. And so whether or not we bake this into their interview, not everybody wants to be in our channel that's a preference, but when they come into the fold, one of the questions is like, do [00:30:00] we do, are we on your channel?
And so we have folks that's like, they're working to that because that's, they want to be part of that experience. And then we have others that want to establish a brand for them on LinkedIn. And, you know, some companies are going to say like, you know, you need to approve everything and everything has to run through this.
And we're just like, if you did something awesome for a client here's the parameters. You can't share personal, you know, identifiable information. You need to make sure that everybody like, even if you solved a problem for a client and it was a terrible problem. You can, we do not post things like this client was so stupid and they had this dashboard that looked like this.
Like, don't do that. You're going to get fired if you do that. But on the other hand, it's also a, use loom, like it's a, I mean, for everything we use loom all the time. And so we're constantly looming each other. We're looming. And for those of you don't know what loom is, it's like a screen recorder.
We're using loom to talk to our clients. So our teams are always talking over a video showing stuff on screen. So it's just our [00:31:00] mode of content creation and consulting that I think just makes a culture that makes that easier.
Max: Speakin of loom, what's, like, your Video creation, like stack, like are you guys using like Camtasia or Final Cut or like,
Dax: Peel it back.
Max: Yeah. Like how are you guys using technology to enable you guys to create content, like at this level? 'cause I'm assuming other people watch your videos and go, how can we do it like that?
Right?
Ali: Yes. Yeah. What I think is interesting is people still ask the questions like, what mic is that? And what lighting do you have? And I was like,
Actually, don't ask those questions. Those are like, those are table stakes. But I'm looking at my browser bar right now because I am a technology, like, I just love tools and the ones that we use on a regular basis are Adobe Premiere.
That is where all of our editing of the long form comes in. We're using Descript to pull out transcripts, we're using that for shorts, we're using that for some of the audiograms kind of stuff. We're using we're testing out. We're not very, Far into the process. Cause it's a little [00:32:00] challenging with Opus clips which is an AI tool that pulls out, like, we'll call them spicy takes.
Like you guys should try this with this episode upload the entire video. I think you get like two to three hours for free with your trial. It does have a water stamp on it, but like definitely worth a try. We use, I mean, depending on what we might need, sometimes we'll dive into Canva, we tend to be Adobe purists over here.
And so, we definitely are. I can, I like even myself, like I can cut a video. Three times faster in Adobe premiere than I can in Canva because it's just, it's made for that.
Dax: Canva has video editing. I never even messed around
Yeah.
Ali: Canva has video editing. Yeah. I would say the same. We used to use a tool called gosh, like screen recorder or something for non
Max: I'm back. I'm back. Those
Ali: something like that.
Yeah. I mean, one of those like that, and I used to be good at that one. And then when I really got, like, I started doing a lot of video and doing stuff in Adobe premiere, I'm like, nope, all these kind of like, Like iMovie, I like want to throw my computer against the wall. I'm like, I can't do this. Like not
Dax: ever use Camtasia?
Ali: I use Camtasia way back in the day. Yeah, I don't, [00:33:00] we don't anymore. There's a new one that we're testing out and it's I think it's called, Oh, hang on. Let me see if I can find it real quick here. It is called, um, tele. tv.
Max: Someone sent me that the other day. Yeah.
Ali: Yeah. You know, what's interesting though, is I think so many times and I'll I'll use this as an example.
So we had a client that we were doing a, so we do this for clients too. Like we actually help them with their content strategy and get them on YouTube and podcasts and that kind of stuff too, with the intent of driving traffic, like we're not just podcast producers, but We redid a video for them and the biggest thing for them was we took a video that the beginning was meh, made the beginning much stronger, add a hook to it, get that attention, you know, grabbing that you want to.
And the person at the, after we showed it, they were like, I love that. The question they asked me was, What software did you use to make that?
Max: Mmm.
Ali: And my answer is always like, it's not about the software.
Max: No.
It's not about software. It's the [00:34:00] strategy and it's knowing what people will watch. And I think that's the secret behind the secret that
Ali: unfortunately, like it's out, you guys, the secret's out, but
Max: no software is going to make the video better.
It's your strategy.
Dax: 100 percent man. It's all about what you use as a skateboarder. We made all our videos. We were final cut. I never had a Mac back in the day, but I was final cut. All day. I can use final cut in a heartbeat. And then I started using premiere on my own computer. I can use premiere. It's, it is nothing about the tool.
You can make music out of literally anything. This burrito wrapper, make a
So it about like the source of it. So people, I don't think people get, people probably do get hung up on like, I need the next hottest, newest tool to do what I need to do. But then again, now you're just.
Now you're driving a Formula One race car in a drive thru at McDonald's, like, you can go 500 miles an hour, but you can't get the cheeseburger. You can't do it. So it's super sad. Well, Ali, this is beyond belief. You've gone over where you came from, where you're at. What are you looking forward to?
What kind of new mediums are you really looking to explore as you, I would say, [00:35:00] blossom via YouTube? But are you looking to explore any other mediums? What's next?
Ali: yeah, for us as a company, I mean, YouTube is simply one of our strat, our media that we helped and kind of augment what we're building as a business overall. Cause we actually, you know, contrary to belief, we're not just HubSpot influencers. We are, we have a full company behind us and we're helping folks around the world.
I think for us, we're most excited to see what's next on the HubSpot platform. Like I think we're just scratching the surface of what the capabilities are. And even with like the new CMS features, like there's going to be specific features that make it possible for you to host people. Podcast inside of your HubSpot, inside of the HubSpot CMS.
And there's all sorts of like very interesting things that are just coming out and I'm super excited about that.
Max: Is there Yeah, I didn't Well, I know You gotta run soon, but One thing I have, like Was wondering is like You're seeing a lot of partners kind of start to create like their own learning products, right? Whether it's like a, you know, a paid webinar series they do or like a paid training or some sort of like exclusive content type thing.
Have you guys ever [00:36:00] thought around like other monetization you know, avenues like is YouTube memberships and like, you know, exclusive content, something that you guys have ever toyed around with? Or is it more so keeping it for a You know, awareness and inbound marketing device. Like, is that ever something that's like crossed your guys mind or you're thinking about now?
Ali: We've definitely tossed it around. We've talked about it several times and I think the, it comes back to the classic business case of, you know, how, what problem are we solving by moving in that direction and is the payoff going to cannibalize anything else that we're currently doing and. It will also like, once you build a community, I don't know if you guys have built communities, but communities require ongoing maintenance, or suddenly they become like.
You just never want to be the person that's like, Oh, I joined a community. And like, well, this is terrible. There's nothing here. So we'd ever want to be the owner of almost like a wasteland of resources where no one's actually creating any value.
Dax: Yeah, gotcha.
That's funny. Well, one of the things we like to do, Ali, at the end of these is kind of do a quick fast three questions that [00:37:00] you were not expecting. I'm gonna have to ask you, what is your favorite animal?
Ali: Cats. I love cats.
Max: Hold on. What's that?
Dax: Second question. I know you weren't expecting to be today, were you? only got one eye. I gotta go find that thing. Anywho. Favorite breakfast cereal.
Ali: Ooh, favorite breakfast cereal for me has to be crackling oat bran.
Dax: All right. Crackling. Does it crackle?
Ali: No, but it tastes like oatmeal cookies.
Max: Oh, well, that's an understatement.
Dax: Okay. You brought that off. Okay. If you, all right. Oh, okay. She's so mad. She's like, dude, stop. My last one is you mentioned shoes. [00:38:00] Favorite brand of shoes that people have heard of.
Ali: I love running. So my favorite brand of shoes are Mizuno. Yeah,
Dax: Yeah Oh,
Ali, this has been a pleasure. Love chatting with you. Shout out where they can find you. Cause I think you're not a stranger to the internet.
Ali: two places that are probably the most prominent one would be search me on LinkedIn, find me on LinkedIn, connect there and then head to YouTube and search HubSpot Hacks. We also have a new channel coming out called Marketing Deconstructed channel and podcast that's coming out. So probably by the time this airs it'll be up.
So we're working on loading content on there this week.
Dax: Hey, appreciate coming on and we love having you and don't be a stranger. We'll be bothering you so we can probably plug some hapily apps, give you a little to do. We would love, that would be great. We should do some co marketing.
Ali: Yeah, that'd be
Max: for sure. Awesome Ali. Thank you so much we appreciate your time
Ali: Thanks guys.
[00:39:00]