In spring 2023, HubSpot gave me the title of Evangelist. The role was a new one, HubSpot had never had an evangelist before. Because of the work I'd been doing on my own, in addition to my actual responsibilities, they invented this role for me and carved out a place in the org chart for me to live. I can't think of any other moment in my career where an organization was willing to take such a big bet on me.
People ask me how I planned it. I didn't. I just turned on my webcam and started recording videos. There wasn't a plan and there wasn't a goal. But looking back, there was a lot of groundwork I didn't know I was laying.
I joined HubSpot in 2015, spent a short time on the support team, and moved over to HubSpot Academy. At the time, Academy courses were of high production value. A lot of them were multiple hours long. We wrote them, read them off a teleprompter, and edited them. It was a huge lift.
Many of those courses end in a certification, and people post their certificates on LinkedIn. So for six or seven years, the full extent of my LinkedIn activity was a daily search: has anyone posted a certificate from a course I worked on? If they had, I'd like the post, write them a personal congratulatory note, and send a connect request.
Part of that was selfish. When you publish an online course, no one cheers. There's no big splash. Unless you go looking for the people who take it, you don't know if anyone is having a good experience. I needed some reassurance that my work was making a difference. People were amazed that their course instructor noticed them, and they'd open up and ask for help. I hit about 2,000 connections at one point and had no idea what to do with them.
Near the end of 2020, a friend in the HubSpot ecosystem, Daniel Curran, posted on LinkedIn asking for the most underrated HubSpot feature. Someone had already taken the one I wanted, so I went with a deep cut: the deduplication tool. A couple of people replied, "HubSpot has a deduplication tool? Where's that?" I started typing out, “click this, then click that”, and thought, you know what, I'll just make a video. It was probably 20 or 30 seconds long. People said, we really like this, you should do more.
So I went back to that original thread and made one video a day on the features people had listed, from November through the end of the year. People were showing up and resharing. I felt so famous.Then for 2021 I set a New Year's resolution to post every day for the whole year. That worked for about two or three weeks…then I was legitimately out of ideas.
At the time HubSpot didn't have a changelog or release notes. We had a very high velocity product team shipping multiple updates a day, but none of it was documented publicly. Internally, though, we got email notifications when things went live. One came through saying the HubSpot UI was now available in Italian. I didn't know if I knew anyone in Italy, but I had to post something that day. So I said, “Friends, guess what? HubSpot UI is now available in Italian. Let your Italian friends know”.
That video exploded. It turned out nobody in my network cared about Italian. They were excited to hear that HubSpot had released something. They told me they usually find out about new features because a button moved and they have to go hunt for it. That's when it clicked. They didn't need me to explain how to create a record. They needed to know the new stuff.
So I started hounding all the internal channels where updates are published and posting a new feature every day. I still do daily videos. I also host a weekly LinkedIn Live where we read through the product updates page and react to it live. From there it grew into webinars, a user group, and speaking at live events. All of it comes back to one idea: give people the information they want.
After about seven years, and many, many videos, HubSpot made me its first Evangelist, a role they custom built for me. It was the result of hard work, but also genuine care for the Hubspot Community. Proud to say that HubSpot has now put two more people into evangelist roles, growing the team to three.
Key metrics
- Moved into HubSpot's first-ever Evangelist role (spring 2023)
- Follower count grew to 40,000 on LinkedIn
- Co-host of Monday Morning Briefing on Linkedin Live with Max Cohen and the voice behind hundreds of LinkedIn videos
Hubspot
