HubspotIn 2022 I gave a talk at INBOUND called "Things Every HubSpot Admin Needs to Know." I was excited about the topic, but the conference organizers were skeptical whether anyone would show up. For a long time there was a belief that HubSpot didn’t need admins. This was something Salesforce required, HubSpot is so easy it runs itself.
Well, for the Admin focused talk there were lengthy lines out the door. That many people at INBOUND identified as admins. And from that moment on I knew that the HubSpot Admin was a real persona, and they were eager for more information.
I began by starting an admin user group. We organically grew and from that point on we've been meeting online every week for a couple of years now. Admins have in a way, become my people. They are bought in on HubSpot and are the ones tasked with understanding every part of the product.
As I got to know them I knew we could do a better job on resources tailored for them, much like we do with developers. “developers.hubspot.com” is a whole sub-site with documentation, communities, and many other robust resources. For admins however, it was really whatever I thought to do at the time.
I'd argued for a while that if we have developers.hubspot.com, we should have admins.hubspot.com. As anyone who works at a larger company knows, you can’t just spin up a site like this on a Tuesday. I made my case, and this year I finally figured out how to make it happen. In the spring, I worked to get the subdomain created. The security team worried admins.hubspot.com could cause problems, since something like admin.google.com is a control panel, but I got it through security, and the domain got provisioned.
Then I hit the next wall. I'm not on the website team, so I didn't have permission to edit the HubSpot website. I found my way to the right folks eventually. I had to continuously defend against easier versions of the idea like just using “hubspot.com/admins”. I stuck to my guns though.
We officially launched admins.hubspot.com at Unbound. Right now it's one page with a video of yours truly and links to my socials. But it exists, and that was the biggest hill to climb.
It matters for the business too. The CMO might sign the contract, but at renewal time you want the admin saying "HubSpot or bust."
It took years of showing up for this community to get here, and the page exists because I advocated for it. It's a little seed right now, but I have a good feeling that it’s only going to continue to grow.
