Industrial Strength Marketing

HubSpot wants to buy us! A tale of hammer, nails, and gifts with Nicholas Holland, HubSpot VP of Product- Marketing Hub

• Nicholas Holland, HubSpot VP of Product, Marketing Hub • Season 3 • Episode 19

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HubSpot’s Nicholas Holland shares his caution-preneurial tale and happily ever after story on positioning and value proposition creep all Industrial Marketers would do well to heed. 

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The Industrial Strength Marketing Show is a top manufacturing podcast that explores the personalities, cutting-edge strategies, tools, and technologies transforming the industrial and manufacturing sectors. Each episode, hosted by James Soto, covers marketing, sales, business development, and integrating martech and AI into industrial B2B strategies. Tune in to gain actionable insights to help you stay ahead in the industry.

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James Soto:

Welcome to Industrial Strength Marketing, the show that challenges leaders across the supply chain to make marketing the strength of their business. Hi, my name is James Soto. I'm the industrial marketer best known for founding industrial, the marketing agency trusted by leading global brands all across the world. I am sitting down with industrial leaders, marketers, and innovators to talk about their career insights in marketing that makes an impact and can mak an impact to your business. So ll right, today, I'm excited to e kicking off season three of he show with a two part ser es. With a great interview wit HubSpot's very own VP of p oduct, Nicolas Holland, I've g t to warn you this is kind of a aw episode with Nick and he's ac ually gonna let you get to kn w him. As he actually irons ou the story of how he joined Hu Spot mistakes he made along the ay. And things that happened hat serendipitously led him to oining the organization. And so or you, business leaders, arketers, listeners, you know, eople interested in martech, you're not going to want to miss this important lesson learned about the need to focus on problems have a value proposition and really look at your customer segments so that you're keeping yourself in check That you're what you're doing i really best suiting their need. So, and to set the stage a lit le bit about Nicolas because we re just gonna get right into it is that he's a respec ed entrepreneur, he founde a company called CentreSourc, about a 50 person, agen y digital dev, and he is very we l known in multiple communiti s east coast and in here n Nashville around real y entrepreneurship. And, a d recently, he his most rece t venture was Populr, which is sales enablement platform, an in really more in the form of self enabled content platform so you can really activat teams, he's going to tell yo that story. But today, Nicola is a leader of produc development. VP of product fo the marketing hub at HubSpot, s this and the following episode and even an encore after it we're gonna talk about a numbe of things, his journey, we'r going to talk about a little bi about from inbound t experience. And then we're gonn talk about these five ke lessons he learned. So check ou this short episode, I think it' really good context, and you'r gonna have some really grea content coming up. Let's ge started I thought where we could start is really, really talk about what happened with populr.me. Because like, you have this established agency, you know, you know how you know that game. It's, you know, you serve it every day. And and I think I

Nicholas Holland:

-yeah, it was man. remember seeing once you got this wonderful gift that HubSpot sent you was like a barbecue set o I forgot what it was-

James Soto:

And you were trying to sell the business, you know, at the time, or you were, you know, you were trying to get investors.

Nicholas Holland:

That's why they had sent me-

James Soto:

How did that go down? How did that go down?

Nicholas Holland:

I think the way to look at that story was I had the agency. At our height, we had I guess 42 or 43 employees. And I continually felt unhappy. I don't know what else to, to say. Like, I always thought that I was destined for something bigger. I spent all the time reading the TechCrunch articles. And so, you know, I had an idea to do Populr which originally, you know, is to effectively make democratized web creation stuff for the non techie people and specifically the, the initial idea was to like help the sales person be able to put some sales enablement materials together. And I did a just a terrible job of running a company. You know, we raised a bunch of money and did some things that were pretty atypical for Nashville at the time, we got into a pretty well known accelerator out in Silicon Valley called 500 Startups. And just like most young unskilled entrepreneurs tend to fall into I fell in the trap of like, with Populr, I didn't stay true to who I was building it for. We drifted over time and soon, I began to lean on one of my superpowers, which is, you know, I was very gregarious about all the problems it could solve and you know, every time I saw a problem I basically you know, when you're a hammer every problem looks like a nail. I spent all the time telling everybody about Populr way I could do so by the end that was helping HR I was helping real estate I was helping, you know, I remember at one point, I know what the sound of willpower snapping sounds like. It's where effectively I was selling to a Asurion on in Sprint stores. And they wanted to roll out Populr to, you know, hundreds of stores across the nation to do training for their reps, let the store manager do training. I was like, sweet. And they were like, you know, how much does this cost? And I was like, it's $20 a person. And they're like, sweet, well, we have like two people that work on this, I guess it's 40 bucks a month, and we can start using it. And I just remember, just out of body experience, where I'm selling to Asurion and Sprint, a $40 a month solution. And so anyways, your question is that, I realized that I had messed up so many things in that business, and I was pretty tired. My CTO was pretty burned out, tech was good, but I'd done a pretty piss poor job of directing it. And so I said, we're gonna sell this. And we, we talked to the usual players here in town, and there was some interest. But at the time, somebody put me on Hubspot's, radar. And HubSpot basically, was super cool. We chatted shop all day long. They were very complimentary love what I was doing. And, and they specifically said, well, we'll put an offer in to buy you. And I was like, Yes, it's gonna happen. And the problem is, is that they, you know, for the, for the listeners here, the business owners, I think they'll get this, they say, we'll do this, but we're not giving any money to your investors. And I said, I'm sorry, what now they were like, we're going to effectively do this as an acqui-hire, your technology is good. But we see what you've done more like a treasure map. And more like your skills and your team skills. Your tech itself is built on an incompatible platform. So if we were to do it, we'd have to rebuild it too you have all these investors, but we don't want to give the money to them, we want to give the money to you. So meaning that they were going to do a big package like an acqui-hire package, and not pay back any of the money that we had, right? They wanted you- They wanted me and the team.

James Soto:

I knew it. I knew it cause- and by the way, for anybody listening to our show, like you've built, you know, you've been a big part in and advocate for digital, for marketing for the startup ecosystem, and as self deprecating as you've been, that's not how it's been perceived. That's not the value provided in so many different ways. And even though you were at this stage with that one product, you know, we knew how you ran, we knew your thinking around code and leadership around it. So, I so, so I would, that's your truth. But I'll be honest with you, I knew it because I knew he was like, man, this guy is sharp. He knows how to run a product roadmap, he knows how to think. But man, you were being the hero for the whole thing. You were ultra pivoting, you're finding a market. You were being embedded in San Francisco and trying to like, be into that world, which is maybe a little bit different from I think, you know, I think the culture that you came up in. And so I saw that gift they gave and there was like custom made and everything that's like, Okay, this is yeah, this is this is that kind of deal. So-

Nicholas Holland:

Well, I'll say what's even cooler about that though, is with my VCs, they basically said, you know, I talked to Hubspot a little bit and said, you know, can we give them something? And they said, yeah, we'll give him like 100 grand or something like that. And, and I remember talking to my VCs, and they were like, Well, yeah, it's called the little bag of money lesson. He's like, if you're asking me what I rather have no money or a little bag of money, I'll take the little bag of money. And so I laughed about that. But long story short. The VC said, you know, if you've got an offer on the table, why don't you put uh, put some feelers out and another local company, Jeremy Bowles, his company Kindful ended up saying we'll buy it and they said, we don't want to get into a bid war with HubSpot. But um, but ultimately, I said, you know, if I don't have to have golden handcuffs, and I don't have to move, and you guys can match and we can get it to the investors and we'll, I'll be happy and so Kindful was good. And that's what they did. And so I ended up selling the Kindful. And so the gift to show you how classy HubSpot is, that gift came when they saw the announcement that I had sold to kindful so they still sent that even after I was-

James Soto:

That was legit when they when they thank you for that.

Nicholas Holland:

Isn't that cray? How,classy to send it six months after I basically turned them down and they did it now the reason why I say that so classy is because that after that after that all gone down they said hey, we've got a cool option for you to run our innovation or labs division ozut of Dublin. You want to give it a shot and I was like sure. And so that's how I got started with them because CentreSource the agency was already winding down. And and I had already sold out Populr and so that's I got started.

James Soto:

Yeah, that's awesome. And so I think the lesson I heard, you know, like, I like keep a little notes of like, kick butt quotes, you know, to me, because I always like, I can never remember him, right. And, you know, it's this thing about Populr and you know, Zig Ziglar said, "Don't become a wandering generality, be a meaningful specific". So Zig Ziglar says, You must not be a wandering generality. We need to be a meaningful, specific. And then I think when you think about positioning, we think about our businesses, we think about, are we addressing the problem in the market, and as we are looking for opportunities, I think we have to sometimes realize that if we are not doing that, it's you know, we are acting as the hammer and everything looks like a nail. But I think, you know, I think Nicholas was the product. And he was really something that I thinkHubspot was very interested in, they saw his talents, I know him, I consider him a friend. And I know his amazing talents, and I think you're gonna see them in the product itself. So on that note, I just want to pause and set up next week's Part Two with Nicholas, where you will hear the inside scoop on his view of transitioning our thinking as leaders as marketers, from inbound marketing to really considering the massive impact of looking at it at every touch point of the customer's experience. So I want to thank you so much for making time in your day to listen to the industrial strength Marketing Show. I hope you heard just even one thing that inspires you to make marketing even more a strength of your business and for insights from industrial marketers. If you just like to reach out to us, visit us at industrialstrengthmarketing.com next week is going to be awesome. We'll see you then.

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James Soto

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Virginia Roberson

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