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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.
bhp S2E11 - Chris Carolan, Profoundly-Full
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Chris Carolan, Profoundly: [00:00:00] It just so happens to be that when you get through that stuff, HubSpot is probably the best platform that you could build, grow, and scale a business on period.
So that's the other level that we're trying to accomplish. Let's get experts together and just start doing valuable things.
Dax Miller, hapily: On today's episode of the built hapily podcast, we have Chris Carolan of Profoundly.
Max Cohen, hapily: Chris. Chris, what did Dax tell you about this show, buddy?
Chris Carolan, Profoundly: Nothing.
Max Cohen, hapily: Nothing. Listen the show is called The built hapily Podcast.
And when we first started it the idea was, is we were gonna talk to other app. Solutions partners or app partners that have built [00:01:00] apps on HubSpot and we were talk about how you built them, right? It's like how you built it for the HubSpot app marketplace. But we quickly realized. There are people who have built more than just an app on the HubSpot app marketplace. And there's a lot of really interesting fun stories and lessons to be learned from a lot of these different experiences that people have had building~ fucking~ anything in the HubSpot world, right?
And you, sir have built quite the presence on the HubSpot Ecosystem zeitgeist. And you've built this not only wonderful content presence and machine that you've built with the Let's Build X and you've you deployed a number of very amazing ways. But now there's also this Profoundly thing, which I don't know the story behind, but I believe you were intimately involved in it, it seems, [00:02:00] right?
Chris Carolan: Founding pro,
Max Cohen: Founding Pro. Exactly. Obviously we know you very well, but Chris, for anyone watching or listening at home, it doesn't know who you are.
Tell us who you are, what you do, who you do it for, how you do it, all those fun things.
Chris Carolan, Profoundly: Oh, well thank you for those kind words. And I'm excited to kinda share what I feel like has been. A little bit of an epiphany over the past couple years about, how easy it is really to make a name for yourself in a space where you didn't have one before. But I'm a man of context.
I love context. I think it's so important to every conversation. So. I like to start from a bench chemist in 2007, coming down to Houston from Michigan after having a biology degree with a chemistry minor is where I started.
Max Cohen: didn't know that about you.
Chris Carolan: and I sat down at the bench after having worked years at a movie theater and at Kohl's and [00:03:00] retail. It's just me, a couple bottles of oil. I'm supposed to mix 'em together and no customers anywhere. And I was like, yes, no people I can just listen to. Man. If I had started listening to podcasts back then, I would be a different level. But I was spending time on Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings and Dark Tower series.
Just yeah, so. But moved up through the ranks of like production, quality control, research and development. So the operations side of things. But we sold the unique product that meant if somebody asks, can it do the thing? I've gotta answer that question. If somebody asks how much that costs, I gotta answer that question.
Something goes wrong with the product. I've gotta answer that question. So, at some point when I moved into like lab director role, I had to get intimately familiar with all of our products, all of our customers, all the supply chain, all the [00:04:00] ins and outs, how much they didn't know about the thing that we sold, and the products they were supposed to use them with AKA HubSpot, the platform and the apps that people try to plug in.
And I. Got the opportunity to say, Hey we could either bring in a new sales leader and teach them all about our products and services and customers, or we could bring in a lab manager and Chris could jump over because he already knows all those things. That was in 2013. Fast forward 2017, I'm at HubSpot after our first down year ever, and I got approval for marketing automation.
I. And actually chose Marketo first because I was in the Salesforce ecosystem. Didn't even know about HubSpot. It was between Marketo and Pardot. And it made sense to me. Oh, Marketo is built on Salesforce and Pardot's just like just bolted on, yeah. Easy choice. And [00:05:00] then. The first 30 days did not go well with Marketo, I could not get, couldn't even gimme admin access.
So day 27, I hit the HubSpot pricing page after having gone through the academy. That was my first okay, I guess I got this 10 k like approval. I guess I better learn what marketing automation is. Find the HubSpot Academy. Day 27, hit the pricing page. Within seven minutes, I get a call from a salesperson and I get out of my Marketo contract.
Max Cohen: There you go.
Chris Carolan: so implement HubSpot always from a full platform perspective, four times manufacturing space from 2017 to 2023, from 2 million to 500 million global. Then jumped into the Solutions partner program in August of 23. And yeah, I love helping people thinking of it from this customer pla like full bodied, [00:06:00] like not just lead gen, not just CRM, but how do we help the whole business build and grow on this full platform, right?
So that's my very contextual backstory that I hope you appreciated.
Dax Miller: Appreciate more than man. And the idea is this has been, you came into the solutions partner when I met you as a solo. Running your own thing didn't seem like it was solo, but it was solo and. The chemist game is a lot of sitting in the lab by yourself, solo mixing things with s schematics,
Max Cohen: Oils.
Dax Miller: alchemy. One of the things that we always look at and talk about with the HubSpot ecosystem is that, like you said, it's I wouldn't say it's easy, but it's straightforward, right? To make a name for yourself. What was it like when you joined in the solutions partner, and how did you try to differentiate yourself?
Chris Carolan: Well, one of the things that was always interesting for me and frustrating when I was on the [00:07:00] inside of companies, especially 2017, I meet HubSpot, I meet, they ask you answer, I start listening to the HubCast with Marcus Sheridan and George. I. StoryBrand, all this stuff starts making so much sense to me as far as doing customer centric stuff.
And I'm seeing all these consultants and agencies, they're all sharing this message and none of it's getting through. So and I couldn't understand why, right? Until I came on this side. And then I see every manufacturing page that is on a partner website. It's like they just copied the SaaS page and replaced the word SaaS.
And this so immediately. And thanks to Ryan Gunn for being somebody who took a call early on as I was trying to understand. I was like, is anybody like, doing manufacturing? And he shared how they like. How he was approaching, like the different audiences that Aptitude 8 had and like [00:08:00] what their approach was.
So immediately I understood, okay, there's a spot for people with manufacturing, knowledge to have a space here. One thing when SLI and I started the agent, we knew the problem. Was not necessarily solvable either, right? Like manufacturing, you're not, there's often laggards are not gonna, their pipeline doesn't work.
Like we couldn't have a pipeline that's like, all right, two months and done, like no matter what. So a lot of these conversations I started having with HubSpot and our strategy and, with other partners, it just wasn't adding up. So it told me right away, there's a space to start speaking the language of manufacturing and this.
Kind of non SaaS approach to building out these systems in support of people like, 25 year sales vets who've been crushing it and never picked up a tool in their life. I just can't put HubSpot in front of them. And I learned all these, like the hard way inside and [00:09:00] expect them just to get on board.
So that was the understanding early on and we took a traditional approach to trying to capitalize on that. We created some podcasts, created industrial Tech Stack Live where it's like the weekly Zoom call and, there was just a big lift though to do it in that way.
And it wasn't scalable and we had to make choices of, content versus revenue. And unfortunately, fortunately now, unfortunately, then it's I was getting all the advice in the world to build the prospecting list and blah, blah, blah, and it's just not me, right? I'm just never gonna do that.
Which as a sales leader, you can imagine, it's not necessarily great for the bottom line at that point. But it wasn't hard to see where the niche, where the gap was right. Then it just became okay, how do I capitalize on it, effectively.
Max Cohen: So take me to where the idea for. [00:10:00] Actually pause this. Let's frame it up first. Tell us about let's build, right? And what that is.
And then I want you to take us back to the moment where the idea popped into your head or like maybe it was one specific moment in time or a series of events that led to it, right?
Talk about what that is and then how it came to be.
Chris Carolan: Yep.
Chris Carolan, Profoundly: So when I
Chris Carolan: am in the position to
Chris Carolan, Profoundly: move through a sales process and I start to feel the challenges of the status quo,
Chris Carolan: and I remember things like 50% CRM adoption rates and 70% digital transformation failure. Then when I'm trying to close deals that stuff, like the things that cause that get in the way of me closing deals, I'm not gonna put myself through that like a lot.
And
Chris Carolan, Profoundly: I will say, all right, let's try and solve for the source of the problem, no matter how [00:11:00] big is, no matter how big that mountain is.
Chris Carolan: initially, let's build, well now let's build, it's about, there's a bunch of people.
Chris Carolan, Profoundly: Of how fast HubSpot has moved.
Chris Carolan: Primarily
Chris Carolan, Profoundly: from marketing automation platform to full platform.
Chris Carolan: A bunch of people lack comp.
Chris Carolan, Profoundly: Almost everybody lacks complete knowledge of the platform
Chris Carolan: and at the same time we've got Kyle Jepson, you doing his best. To show up every day, like only he can, but Kyle Jepson, one guy, one video per day, 365 videos max, not including holidays and weekends, and 800 updates a year.
All right. That doesn't add up.
Chris Carolan, Profoundly: So
Chris Carolan: where is all,
Chris Carolan, Profoundly: where are all the people? Where are the rest of the Kyle Jepson's And
Chris Carolan: like,
Chris Carolan, Profoundly: how can we possibly keep up if we don't get like 10 more Kyle Jepson's from inside HubSpot and a hundred more from outside of HubSpot? [00:12:00] That is
Chris Carolan: what,
Chris Carolan, Profoundly: why I started, let's build
Chris Carolan: that kind of
Chris Carolan, Profoundly: that mentality of Hey,
Chris Carolan: if
Chris Carolan, Profoundly: we need more people.
Educating on HubSpot from
Chris Carolan: like
Chris Carolan, Profoundly: a news sharing perspective and not necessarily tutorials and how tos,
Chris Carolan: because as a one thing, I could never push the button on, like recording something knowing that next week they could change the view and like maybe it's out date and do I have to redo it? So understanding from the, like from the tutorials of the world and people making courses like how challenging I. That must be. So there was an inherent disconnect. And then in March of last year, I was like, okay, I keep telling everybody to be active on LinkedIn. I keep telling everybody to stop sleeping on LinkedIn live, yet I'm not doing it. So Celi, can you just help me figure out stream [00:13:00] yard? And I'm gonna just start going live.
And it started as, let me get 15 minutes. I would just do 15 minutes every day. We're gonna just go into, HubSpot and the first episode was Sync properties. That might be the only time I was less than 15 minutes,
Max Cohen: Yeah.
Chris Carolan: think. But immediate, the immediate hit was like going in, clicking around, discovering HubSpot, and I got permission permission to do that by being a part of the admin hug.
I. January preceding that when
Chris Carolan, Profoundly: we showed up and started talking about, B2B order portals customer orders, deliverables inside a HubSpot, trying to create the Amazon experience,
Chris Carolan: and,
Chris Carolan, Profoundly: but the admin hug as a whole, like when product managers are getting surprised by their own product and Kyle's freewheeling, just clicking around, Hey, maybe it works, maybe it doesn't.
Chris Carolan: It's like
Chris Carolan, Profoundly: that kind of content that's a real life [00:14:00] HubSpot to me. And it also exposes people to a value of HubSpot. That's very hard to explain unless you experience it yourself. Like inside the ecosystem, we very much take for granted how easy it is to add another option to a property. When in other systems when you try to do that, you might bring the whole damn thing down, right? And that ability to click around and ~fuck~ around and find out basically is what separates HubSpot from everybody else.
Chris Carolan: Like
Chris Carolan, Profoundly: in my opinion. Being able to do that on the shows and also
Chris Carolan: like
Chris Carolan, Profoundly: giving the natural excitement about when you do find something, oh man, API, details for association labels are right here.
That's awesome. I can't wait to tell everybody, right? There's only one way to do that content and it's the show up and just get in there and not know exactly what you're gonna [00:15:00] experience. So.
Chris Carolan: Yeah,
Chris Carolan, Profoundly: that's how it started and what it means,
Chris Carolan: and then I'll share in July is when it I'm like one person okay, I'm only one of the 100 that I've described, so how do we get other people doing this?
I got a group together and sprocket tier individual consultants, as I was figuring out my place, I said, Hey, if you just had to show up once a week, start talking about, whatever your topic was, like, you gotta be passionate about it probably has to do with HubSpot, but not required. And five people raise their hand and now all of a sudden we've got Monday through Friday schedule and that's how, it started. And that's been so much of this ends up being like, how can I enable others? There's so much expertise out there, there's so many people doing random stuff. But they're creating.
And when we have 10 to 20 people just copy and pasting product updates,
Max Cohen: Oh God, it's the
Chris Carolan: not [00:16:00] super value blocks,
Dax Miller: It do.
Max Cohen: Yeah, who gets it?
Chris Carolan: right?
Max Cohen: Why does it exist? Who? And the worst is when they just run it through one single layer of ai and it just adds emojis and stuff to it. It's the same damn thing. I cringe so hard. Dude, Chris, do you have any crazy stats on is there like a I don't know, like a streak of how many days you went live or a, any how much were you keeping track of this? 'cause it felt like you were live every single day
Chris Carolan: I
Max Cohen: for a
Dax Miller: Still feels like that.
Max Cohen: Yeah. Are you still Monday through Friday Live Every single day.
Chris Carolan: Well, yeah, now, 'cause I've always found a way to be daily.
Max Cohen: Yeah.
Chris Carolan: And now it's the wake up with customer platform with George and Casey. That's where it's pretty hard to not, it's hard to talk about in a way. I do care about what other people think and I wanna enable other people, but in order to get it off the ground, it had to be me.
Like I had to show up and do it, and then everybody sees my face and it [00:17:00] becomes hard to detach, what's going on. But I had to take a break from wake up with customer platform just because it's like, all right, this is a lot, profoundly is launching. And then, but then I could show a couple episodes to somebody like Casey, right?
And she's okay, I can do that every day,
Max Cohen: Yeah.
Chris Carolan: and then do it a few times. Then George of course George, you wanna join? Yeah. I would've asked you if I hadn't already asked you to do 10 other things right together. Yeah, it was over 400 shows in a calendar from like March 18th to like January, February.
I forget when I calculated it, but it was
Max Cohen: It was just, it was business days. So there were days where you were pulling double, triple duty
Dax Miller: I swear I see on Saturday
Chris Carolan: Oh yeah. I think five or six. I've done some Saturdays. Nico and I have done quite a few Sundays with Singularity Sea Sayers. And that's where like you just [00:18:00] find it all, it attracts this similar group where I love the way George puts it, like we're here to play and it happens to be work.
Not the other way around. And when you can make that distinction, you find other passionate people that wanna help. We'll show up when we need to. If we couldn't make time for it during the day or during the week, let's create a space like to, to show up, on the weekend.
But yeah, I think my, I think five, like six maybe was the most like in one day. But at the end
Max Cohen: Six.
Chris Carolan: End of Q4, I had 12, 12 weekly shows. So not including one-offs and unboxings. 12 weekly shows including two dailies, one for AI and one for customer platform. And so the way I look at it, and this is I learned this back in 2020, like when I joined my first like corporate company. [00:19:00] They ask you answer and that mindset and creating content from subject matter expertise, I thought that subject matter expertise was gonna be the limiting factor.
It's never been like there's always experts around that know their stuff. The hard part is operationalizing it, getting them on a video, getting them to share, right?
So, if we do the math about like experts available, like my vision is a 40 hour like news network schedule and if I,
Dax Miller: Like you have a TV show, you have a network, you have. The Comedy Central though, with all your programming and it's what you have, it's not
Max Cohen: You got Hub. Hub, NN, dude,
Dax Miller: Yeah, I'll stop you right now and what it gonna be, you already have that. If I was think when you're speaking, I'm thinking of I don't know if you guys had cable when you were growing up and that blue channel that has all the different shows and when they're coming on, like you're just like, yeah, I have, all of the ai, I [00:20:00] have the customer platform, I got unboxing.
Like it's, you have that and that's the power of, that's the power of the internet and the power of attention. The power of social media. LinkedIn is free for now ish.
Chris Carolan: Yeah.
Dax Miller: And you have all these, if you're willing to do it and put it in, it's you've, what you've done a amazing job at is less operationalizing and more like ~shit.~
Just do figure it out
Chris Carolan: Yeah. And the power of what's been,
Dax Miller: figuring out like, ah, I gotta write this down. I gotta get a show brief. I gotta brief, I gotta send 'em a brief. They gotta agree with a brief, turn the camera on.
Chris Carolan: yeah. And that's been, everybody takes, it takes at least one go before they believe. Like even George, I remember we, we approached the our first customer platform hug in that way. 'cause I just don't. I try to lean into my strengths and not into my weaknesses. I don't like to prepare. I don't like to be like, I think scripting does a lot to reduce the impact of [00:21:00] content and the messaging.
Nowadays as everything moves so fast, if you script and it changes like the hour before you go live or somebody's not there, like we're just always in this position to be agile, so why put yourself in a position to not be right? We had the best conversation on this customer platform hug. Tony Dowling like started going down like the capitalism, the meaning of capitalism route, like on this call.
And George after was like, wow, that was some pretty good content. I wasn't sure. I'm like, yeah, dude. And that's where there's been moments like that where George was like, the goat like doing this since like 2013. If I can give him insight into how it could be done differently, how you can show up differently, then that tells me there's something there in terms of, it's not just me.
It's not just doing it the way I wanna do it [00:22:00] because I wanna do it that way. It's no, this is something that maybe hasn't been done this way before. Maybe there's an audience that we haven't reached because we haven't done it that way, and that approach is an online, and it's not for everybody.
I'll say that. Not everybody wants to go live. But I can tell you what, it's a great vetting mechanism for HubSpot expertise. If somebody is willing to show up, live about any topic and have a decent conversation about HubSpot, like I. It shows you're willing yourself, you're willing to put yourself out there, and you have to navigate these conversations that are unplanned.
And it's just, it uncovers a lot of perspectives that are usually hidden in one-to-one sales calls or, delivery discovery calls where that's the, how do we unlock that? Because that's what's missing outside, right? So yeah, [00:23:00] that's the continued
Max Cohen, hapily: What are your like. Future plans for this?
Max Cohen: What do you got? And obviously you can't, the stuff you can't say, that's fine, but do you have some stuff? Listen, I'm not gonna make you say everything right. But
Max Cohen, hapily: is there some stuff you're cooking up for the future that like you're super stoked on right now
Max Cohen: that you can
Chris Carolan: When is this? When is this gonna air?
Max Cohen: Oh, that's a good question for Ms.
A.
Dax Miller: scripting and it's gonna.
Chris Carolan, Profoundly: Okay. Alright. Yeah, so it's a big part of what we think will differentiate, profoundly at the end of the day. So profoundly media network type deal
Chris Carolan: where and what's fun about talking about this stuff is like without the network piece first. Without the people showing up with all these, without the ex, it's so hard to replicate this.
Chris Carolan, Profoundly: This is the moat, [00:24:00] especially moving into AI is my, in my opinion the expert relationships in that community. Is just a powerful thing that does not get recreated like overnight. It's very hard to pay for it. So, but that perspective of creating a place for experts to share. If their expertise get paid for it in some way, whether through sponsorships or just greater exposure because they're creating valuable content.
So many people have said oh, I have a Google drive worth of like half baked guides and all this stuff that if there were somewhere better than LinkedIn to share it. I would do it already.
Well, we want to be that place where you do it and it gets shared and people get value and it comes back to you in some way.
Also like from a curation perspective, like this problem of, I'm overwhelmed with content. Also, there's [00:25:00] huge gaps in the content available, like around Content Hub in Service Hub and Operations Hub and Commerce Hub.
Dax Miller, hapily: You the first one made me giggle ridiculously.
Chris Carolan: Like how do we make content about that stuff into the face of. Everybody's overwhelmed by content, right? So one is creating into those spaces, but also curating and creating the space to go that you're gonna get valuable content and starting to create pillars around these hubs around what's happening.
I expect, and I've already gotten feedback like this, helps internal HubSpot stakeholders too, right? Because there's no way they can keep up in a lot of ways. Also highlighting where content is already being generated. That's super valuable. So curation, can there be like an umbrella where like the, it's like Netflix makes their own content, but they also have a bunch of other studios that make [00:26:00] content for them, right? Can we just create that space and that's how we get to 40 hours right At the end of last year.
The way the math works in my head is I had 12, 12 people, 12 experts is what it took to have 12 recurring shows per week. I'm only 28 away from 40 hours.
Max Cohen: Yeah.
Chris Carolan: We've got, 80 cert, 80 ish certified pros right now on the profoundly platform. 12 would've been way more if I could have cloned myself.
There were people ready to participate. It's just I couldn't figure out, and I didn't have the resources like to, to hop to figure out how to detach myself as a host. I actually tried it at some point, and even Claude was like, no, what are you doing? You're half the, you're half the show here.
You can't just, not everybody's just has learned from 200 days of doing shows how to [00:27:00] host and how to have a, a. An agile conversation about HubSpot. So I couldn't just like, all right, hand it off. You guys can do the show now. So that's, I think that's what I want the future to be, and we are definitely on a path towards that.
Max Cohen: Yeah.
Chris Carolan: If we haven't launched already by the time you guys are hearing this.
Max Cohen: Yeah.
Max Cohen, hapily: Now you mentioned profoundly
Max Cohen: in there without telling the story
Dax Miller: Yeah, I need to know with Brian RV and these names, these Slack community, it's all popped off of nowhere.
Dax Miller, hapily: You've done a great networking effect and built something around that network to solve a problem
Dax Miller: that one of the things that you said on a side conversation with me was
Dax Miller, hapily: a problem that couldn't be solved.
Dax Miller: So tell us
Chris Carolan: It's still in the process. We are hopeful to solve it. We are well on our way. This [00:28:00] is where like we do have every type of stakeholder in the ecosystem. So partners like solutions partners, app partners, hubs, spotters, different departments inside of HubSpot. Everybody knows at least that
Chris Carolan, Profoundly: profoundly exists
and where our value wants to be.
And for me,
the mission is very simple. It's, help people that need help with HubSpot find the help that they need.
Chris Carolan: And that can be an individual, it can be a team of people, it can be content. Probably gonna be AI by the end of the year, right? But understanding that it cannot be transactional because nobody knows what the hell HubSpot means. Like we talk about job titles and roles and all this stuff. Like HubSpot is the ambiguous word. That causes all the confusion.
Chris Carolan, Profoundly: So how do we create
Chris Carolan: like
Chris Carolan, Profoundly: this
Chris Carolan: kind of
Chris Carolan, Profoundly: concierge experience
Chris Carolan: where it's a 15 minute call that you might say you need data [00:29:00] cleanup. And very quickly that explodes into an ERP integration conversation, right?
And trying to handle that perspective of we've got all these people of different types, so like from. Hands to keyboard people that can help with HubSpot all the way to trainers and mentors, versus, the HubSpot admin that just needs, a quick custom code of workflow. All the way to business leaders that need to know what the hell they're supposed to be doing with their HubSpot.
And that's where it first came from when I was trying to figure out my place in the ecosystem as a. Like an individual who very much wants to help people with HubSpot, but doesn't want to sell a bunch of HubSpot, and doesn't wanna build stuff for every right? Doesn't wanna build stuff for everybody.
I want you to be own. You own your HubSpot, you manage your HubSpot. If you've invested your, in HubSpot, that's one of the [00:30:00] biggest value adds is that you don't need an admin team of people to to manage and maintain your HubSpot. But nobody in the partner ecosystem, the way the partner program's built is incentivized to help those people.
So that's where it started. So my first thoughts were like,
Chris Carolan, Profoundly: Hey, what if there was like a HubSpot coach?
Chris Carolan: Partner type that could just the strategic success layer that doesn't exist.
Chris Carolan, Profoundly: You could add it in without displacing anybody else in the ecosystem. '
Chris Carolan: cause everybody else, and I understand it's just how business works is that incentivized to hit KPIs, to sell product, to build product?
That's just the way they way it works. So that's strategically, that's where it's coming from.
Chris Carolan, Profoundly: And as let's build, it turned into let's build media and I started getting more and more, experts on board in a very don't have to go through this vetting [00:31:00] process way that they can show up and add value
Chris Carolan: and they will tell you when they can't too, which is just important because none of them are incentivized to try and force it.
In a way that gets, say its points, for example. So that's where it started. We launched to a small group of pros in December of last year and launched to the world on January 23rd. And it's pretty undeniable in my opinion, that part of what we are able to accomplish and why we are able to tackle this challenge is the scale of the solution.
There's been a lot of directories in the past outside of solutions partner marketplace. There's been Upworks, there's been, fives, why haven't they solved? For me, it's a combination of that expertise, like express through content plus the networks that people like Brian Garvey and [00:32:00] Jason a akar show up with where I, I, it took me a minute to understand how powerful Jason's.
Network is like in the game since 20 12, 20 3000 followers that are probably like 100% HubSpot. And it's powerful. So that scale to just jump right to platform yes, we have a marketplace, but we also have community. We've got, some media ideas some education campus style ideas, being able to jump right to platform. Is a challenge for sure, but we have the pieces in place and you wouldn't be able to solve it with just the marketplace itself. And you're just unlikely to be able to progress past this problem of, Hey, I, I have this HubSpot problem here's how I want the help with it. And then getting proposals back and being like, oh, that's not the problem at all.
That's what we hear about in the partner space all the time, [00:33:00] and that's, if we were just to do more of that, then we would just be another, job board basically.
Max Cohen: When we have a lot of these conversations about things that people built whenever there's a really good name of the thing, I always try to get people to relive that moment. Pro profoundly, this is an 11 out of 10 name for exactly what
Dax Miller: Man, hold on. When you said it like that, I was like, oh
Max Cohen: didn't get it?
Chris Carolan: Exactly.
Max Cohen: get it Where you can find prose, brother.
Hey dude. Hey
Dax Miller: You have to digest it. And I
Max Cohen: I had this moment where I what hapily meant. The whole reason, Hey Dax, the whole reason we're on this call is because what hapily came out. I saw what it was and I said I. Oh, I get it. And I texted Connor and now we're here doing a podcast with Chris, that, that's exactly how this [00:34:00] happened, by the way.
But profoundly,
Dax Miller: that is good. Damnit.
Max Cohen: gets credit, first of all, who gets credit for the name? It's either you or it's Brian, or maybe it's some other figure
Dax Miller: behind name. There
Max Cohen: maybe you guys did it together. I don't know what it was. But talk about the moment that you thought of that name or that it was thought of or whatever, because man amazing name.
Yeah.
Chris Carolan: Well, first of all, thank you. It is pretty amazing and it's amazing from a marketing standpoint to be able to use that word
In all the ways.
Max Cohen: Yep.
Chris Carolan: It's either, I think it was a combination of Jason and Brian. It definitely was not me. I was not in, I was like, I don't know. 'Cause I, from a product and business naming perspective, my usual suggestion is let's be as literal as possible so that people don't have to figure out.
Max Cohen: Yeah.
Chris Carolan: What we are and what we're selling and stuff like that.
But as more of these [00:35:00] nuances start to pop up, and there's always the examples of there are companies who've been awesome that like HubSpot, what does that mean? That didn't mean anything like before, they showed up. There's lots of examples where that can be successful. So it took me a minute to get on board.
But once I was, and that's where. Jason drafted up this logo. Once I saw the logo, I was like, okay. All in, like I've never felt so right. Like in my life.
Max Cohen: That the astronaut with the trophy.
Nice. Yeah. Wait, did the
Chris Carolan: yeah.
Dax Miller: Kool-Aid. I was like, I get the drink in the Kool-Aid.
Max Cohen: drinking out of the cup,
Chris Carolan: It probably will be someday. So many different things
Max Cohen: Did the logo come before the name? Okay. So they, they had known the name. We're gonna have to Dax now we're gonna have to get Jason and Brian on here to talk about it. That too because I need to know that moment that they were like, oh, whoa. [00:36:00] Had thought of it for the first time because it's it's
Dax Miller: One thing, I'll interject with this. When you talk again to bring back this whole network and like the people and drawing from people's experiences and Jason experience, HubSpot is the perfect place for this. Like it, it couldn't be like the most serendipitous ecosystem for something like this to happen.
Not because it's small, because it is, but because of the ambiguity of like everything, everything's changing. Everyone's in this. Dropped on this planet and everybody's trying to figure this out at the same time. Oh my God. It's like now there's a new season, everybody, there's this whole season thing going on, like it's snowing now.
Cold. We should do like something about it. Oh my God. The season came again. At the same time, everyone's figuring out humanity and like how the ecosystem and how the universe works all at the same time, but it's this subset of people. 'cause like Jason, I have experience with Jason back with chemists when me and Tyrone were trying to build the HR platform.
Which was the beginnings of his like thing [00:37:00] that went off. It popped off crazy without us because we blew it and messed it up. But conceptually, we're all like in. We are. We are all in the same humanity, in the same universe. When it was the Big bang, when it poof like HubSpot's, not just the marketing hub thing, poof.
Big Bang Planets, ecosystems, plant. The planets are hubs. All this stuff just happened. Everyone's trying to figure out, looking at the stars. So to come in as the guidance and you got, you're basically making like the parliament of sorts of okay, who needs a miller? I got one. Who needs a ERP like builder or integration person.
I got one. And you're starting to spread the teams out, like the original union of this universe. I can just see. And then the astronaut like puts that. Masterpiece together for me, but it is still early. But this is the place it had to happen. It's like how did, out of all the planets and all the things that could have possibly happened, like something hit started life, this is it.
And I think that to me is what my crazy brain picture.[00:38:00]
Chris Carolan: That's the part like I left out, like the way that we're approaching this can definitely only work. Like I've never experienced another ecosystem where this could work because a lot of what the pros are buying into is the vision right now of not just being another Upwork or Fiverr, but also being different from the solutions partner marketplace where it can be hard to be found.
The whole point of it is like. You have all these experts that can definitely help with all the problems that we're seeing, but they've not, it's hard to find them. They have to do work on LinkedIn, which is like the worst to do it in this way. Like you have to be active every single day. And it's it's a hat that nobody, I like wearing it.
But I am in the minority in terms of the kind of the expectation. Like you have to let the serendipity happen. Like you have to be willing for that part. [00:39:00] 'cause LinkedIn metrics suck. Like they don't tell you anything, especially lives and videos like. We started doing The Daily Show with George and Casey and we all like, so I stream from the profoundly page, they stream from their profiles.
And do we really have to do the work every day to add up all the impressions of the videos every day? Or do we just accept the fact that each of us are getting pinged, either through our notifications or through our dms, people are showing up outta nowhere. Are second level connections at leadership spots in non SaaS businesses, like the target market that everybody wishes they could access and they try to figure out these targeted ways to get to them, right?
It's just a different. World we're in right [00:40:00] now. But it I listened to the one book from Gary V that I listened to was last year, day trading attention, and I listened to it in May. So I've been doing Let's Build every day for about two months. And basically that book was all the permission I needed to just go harder and keep doing it.
And his message of, you don't have to play the game. Just understand this is the game, like showing up every day. As a business leader, as a business, if you are not showing up every day, you will lose the game. And that's, I think more, more important than ever. It's just very hard to do when you're used to.
Campaign calendars and content strategies. And I couldn't even get, I always know when I'm trying to get AI to give me a strategy that I appreciate and have to kick it out of like human based training mode, [00:41:00] where it's nah, I wanna do this B2B, HubSpot like news network kind of thing.
And so give me a content like schedule, like for that. And it's like, all right, like webinar on Monday, like Friday do this and it's once a month. I'm like, no, dude. Pretend we're an actual news network and now give me the schedule. And it's okay, seven o'clock, eight o'clock, nine o'clock. There we go.
Dax Miller: And I'm CN and I will die if I don't come out with another article in every 10 minutes. Yeah, if you're those news articles and news sites, you have to come out with articles every 5, 6, 7 minutes. Imagine if they didn't come out with the news article in an hour, like they would lose drastically.
And I think that's the equivalent, that's the right way to think of it, is like it is news. The news thrives on a cycle. Immediate cycle used to be. Catch the six o'clock news, nine o'clock news. 10 o'clock news.
Max Cohen: that also, there is no [00:42:00] Salesforce bend for HubSpot. There's no HubSpot, Chris, right?
Chris Carolan: has been noted. Rob Jones and I are talking about that very thing.
Max Cohen: exactly.
Chris Carolan: And who better
Max Cohen, hapily: The thing that I'm like really excited about with,
for profoundly is
Max Cohen: as much as I understand at that this moment, it's
Max Cohen, hapily: not everyone can afford to work with a partner.
And not everyone wants to work at a partner. Or even with a partner,
Max Cohen: sometimes, someone just want I can't tell you like how many times, like I've been hit up on LinkedIn where someone's Hey, do you know who someone who's like really good at this? And I have to be like, everyone I know who's a really good at this is working at a partner and they're gonna want to get a retainer and they're gonna charge you a whole bunch of stuff for in, in an hourly, blocks and like all this kind of stuff.
And they can't just like. Grab time with 'em and pay 'em for advice on something, right?
Max Cohen, hapily: That hasn't existed
Max Cohen: there, hasn't. It's just, maybe I know one or two people that are like looking for a job or something that can do some like work on the side. But like
Max Cohen, hapily: that sort of,
Max Cohen: it's almost it's like
Max Cohen, hapily: [00:43:00] hyper-focused HubSpot gig economy
Max Cohen: type avenue.
Max Cohen, hapily: Where you don't have to be a whole agency.
Max Cohen: They're fine, they're taken care of. They have the partner network, they've got HubSpot behind 'em, they've got all this and all that. But especially in an age where, hey let's not lie about it. Like the economy's not looking great right now.
We're going to, there's gonna be a lot of layoffs. That's just gonna happen, right? And there's gonna be a lot of people saying Hey, if I can't find work at an agency right now. Like, where can I go and use these amazing tools I have in my brain, and continue doing the work that I love.
And so, this would be a great avenue for those folks. I think also too, people trying to, they could name for themselves in this space. I know you and me have had conversations about this before in the past, Chris. It's tough, right? If you don't work at an agency or you don't have your own agency, how hard is it for you to, get, make any sort of traction in the partner program?
So I think this is like great for everyone. 'cause not only is it gonna offer one
Max Cohen, hapily: a more affordable alternative [00:44:00] for HubSpot customers who need help with HubSpot,
Max Cohen: right?
Max Cohen, hapily: It's gonna provide job opportunities
Max Cohen: for folks that are either just getting started or maybe in between roles at partner companies or people who just don't want to work at a partner agency anymore.
And three, what was my third one? There was a, there's another one that I had. Oh.
Max Cohen, hapily: It's gonna drive some competition in the partner world,
Max Cohen: I think, too, right?
Max Cohen, hapily: Because it's gonna be another thing that partner agencies have to compete with.
Max Cohen: And so hopefully
Max Cohen, hapily: that makes
Max Cohen: their,
Max Cohen, hapily: their pricing more competitive, their offering's more competitive.
Max Cohen: They can differentiate and be able to position, Hey, why?
Max Cohen, hapily: Do you need to hire
Max Cohen: like
Max Cohen, hapily: a whole team versus just an individual
Max Cohen: and making that like much more worth it and things like that. And
Max Cohen, hapily: it'll
Max Cohen: probably
Max Cohen, hapily: be great for HubSpot sales reps too. They're like, Hey, listen, if a partner's outta your budget,
Max Cohen: right?
Max Cohen, hapily: You got a guy, you got people,
Dax Miller: Yeah, go here, find the.
Max Cohen: the reason I think this is so much better than something like a Fiverr or like a, a of work or like whatever, right? It's like you go on there and this [00:45:00] is, to my extent like. You wanna filter by skills. It's like HubSpot is just a generic skill.
When, behind that is a billion different things, right? So I think something like HubSpot really warrants and justifies an entire sort of I don't know if gig economy is the right word, but maybe it is, right? Like a more gig economy type, platform that is built for the nuances of HubSpot, right?
Because the skills can be. Different things in the HubSpot Universe features, hubs soft skills and strategies that go behind all that kind of stuff. Versus just oh, HubSpot, come on now, dude. That's so, it's so
Dax Miller: Yeah, it's working, I can work so.
Chris Carolan: Yeah. And I would,
Dax Miller: big we got a big, you got a big gap to fill, which is awesome. And I know we're working on time, so I wanted to give you your last final, I know of your final thoughts, Chris.
Chris Carolan: that last piece of will be my last plug because I've been [00:46:00] doing this value first thing, and that's gonna be launching too. And again, it's only because of this expert led
Chris Carolan, Profoundly: let's get experts together and just start doing valuable things.
Chris Carolan: And this came up last year when I was doing the superhuman.
Framework with George, we got to the end of it and it's man, this is awesome. But
Chris Carolan, Profoundly: I don't know any leaders who're just gonna be able to show up and say, let's start doing things differently.
Chris Carolan: They do not know how to, they don't know how to get past things like sales, compensation, like
Chris Carolan, Profoundly: to be able to make change
Chris Carolan: in the way that they need to.
So what we end up doing is, all right,
Chris Carolan, Profoundly: you come in with a HubSpot problem.
Chris Carolan: Okay. Nothing,
Chris Carolan, Profoundly: HubSpot's not the problem.
Chris Carolan: Sorry. Like
Chris Carolan, Profoundly: it's your processes, it's the people who are in charge or not in charge of HubSpot. It's how you think of HubSpot as a way to execute your business strategy,
Chris Carolan: [00:47:00] right?
Chris Carolan, Profoundly: So immediately we start to go outside of HubSpot and how can we help people with that?
Chris Carolan: That's what this value first, stuff is all about. So that we can like. It's not trying to bait and switch.
Chris Carolan, Profoundly: It just so happens to be that when you get through that stuff, HubSpot is probably the best platform that you could build, grow, and scale a business on
Chris Carolan: like
Chris Carolan, Profoundly: period. So that's
Chris Carolan: like
Chris Carolan, Profoundly: the other level that we're trying to accomplish.
Chris Carolan: It's been fun, it's been resonating with a lot of people. I'm trying to figure out how the hell I do all this stuff. But that's where Claude comes through in a lot of ways. So excited to be working with ai and helping people with that too. And just at the end of the day, working with a bunch of great people like you guys, shout out to Max for being there at the beginning of let's build and.
Digging into some event, hapily. We had a lot of good fun about that. And that, [00:48:00] like those
Max Cohen: to unbox soon, buddy.
Chris Carolan: Those moments told me like, okay, gave me the permission as well. I was like, it's okay to just go and have fun and have some good
Max Cohen: Yeah, dude.
Chris Carolan: Just dig in. So I always appreciate you for doing that, max.
Max Cohen: you for
Dax Miller: Man, well check it out. We like to ask three questions before we sign it off. First question, Chris, what is your favorite animal?
Chris Carolan: Cat
Max Cohen: move on. Perfect.
Dax Miller: Perfect. Next question,
Max Cohen: No, no notes.
Dax Miller: second question. Your most hated breakfast cereal. One. You
Chris Carolan: most hated breakfast cereals.
Dax Miller: one you like. I tried it.
Chris Carolan: fruity Pebbles
Dax Miller: Also a great answer.
Max Cohen: Aren't good.
Chris Carolan: should be,
Max Cohen: snacks are honestly terrible. Also
Dax Miller: No. We can fight about sugar
Chris Carolan: Fruity Pebbles has such promise and just turns into mush
Dax Miller: It's [00:49:00] literally a wet Kleenex experience.
Max Cohen: Oh, and wait. Also, can we just talk about how like Rice Krispies by themselves are like immaculate though?
Dax Miller: Yeah, you can grow Rice Krispies. You grow into heavily.
Max Cohen: yeah.
Dax Miller: As an adult, you are like, yo, this should just bang it. Last question is favorite video game character?
Max Cohen: You got 30 minutes.
Chris Carolan: Ah~ shit,~ I was not ready for that. Is clouds too safe? I feel like it might be
Dax Miller: No cloud is acceptable
Chris Carolan: Cloud Strife.
Dax Miller: Cloud strife.
Chris Carolan: yeah. Final Fantasy. My favorite series. So.
Dax Miller: Cloud strife. I'll take cloud. You didn't have, at least you didn't say UFI or something silly.
Chris Carolan: Yeah, let's not overthink it. We won't
Max Cohen: gonna say, crash, Bandicoot,
Chris Carolan: Yeah.
Dax Miller: Acceptable [00:50:00] anyway. Chris, I game a couple times. It's fine.
Max Cohen: Got, yeah.
Chris Carolan: Well, I appreciate you guys having me.
Dax Miller: We appreciate, know what you're doing appreci.
Max Cohen: Much love later, buddy.