Hire Me HubSpot: 5 Years Later
On this day in 2011, I launched my HireMeHubSpot campaign with help from many of my friends (especially Chris Hendrix who built the website, and Michelle Joy, Sean Argo, Michael Evans, David Sabot, Nathan Davison, and Tom Ufer who shot testimonial videos). Michael and Lisa Evans were also helping me out at the time by letting me live in their pool house (it was my homeless period).
I didn’t think it was ready. But my new girlfriend at the time got so frustrated hearing about it that she shouted at me “either launch it or I never want to hear about it again!”.
I had been having a recurring nightmare where I was applying to work at Burger King and the hiring manager just looked at me sadly and said “I’m sorry, I just don’t think you’re Burger King material.” So I never thought HubSpot would hire a college dropout like me. This certainty of failure was actually quite liberating because it meant I could do something weird and my worst case scenario was still that I wouldn’t get the job.
I thought that, at best, I’d get the attention of some small local marketing agency with the campaign. If I’d had even the faintest glimmer of hope that submitting a resume would work I probably would have done that instead at HMH would never have been a thing.
So I signed up for ad accounts on Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn to get the free credits and launched ads targeting people who worked at HubSpot to register for “The Free Webinar on Why You Should Hire Me.”
I’m really glad that I was granted an interview before the planned webinar date, though, because I had no idea how to actually conduct a webinar. I just knew that HubSpot did lots of them at the time. Not long after I’d packed two suitcases with everything I owned, sold my car to cover my airfare and afford the obscene down payment required to rent in Boston, and moved.
The campaign got me the interview and demonstrated that I at least had some idea of how to generate leads (I captured leads for about 30% of the people working at HubSpot at the time). And apparently I didn’t interview poorly enough to undo all of that progress.
I arrived at a job where literally everyone was smarter than me at things I didn’t even know I was SUPPOSED to be good at. Over the next 5 years I managed to sort of catch up. A little.
I learned a lot from HMH:
1) Launch the thing. Now. It will never be perfect and it’s already overkill.
2) If you do what everyone else does, you get what everyone else gets. Most people get rejected by HubSpot.
3) Ask for help. Your friends are willing to do free work because they care about you and want you to leave their state so you stop beating them at poker.
4) Don’t go after the job you think you deserve. Aim higher and work your way back from there.
5) No one knows you’re not wearing any pants if you shoot the interview video from the waist up.
Working at HubSpot has been the most pivotal professional experience in my life by far. Since then I’ve been a consultant to countless companies, built our eCommerce marketing efforts, led the marketing team that pushed our brand into Latin America, led the growth team that turned inbound.org and other projects into awesome tools for people, and now I’m writing for ReadThink.com.
Take that imaginary-Burger-King-interviewer!
I’m grateful that my friends and my then-girlfriend (who is my now-wife) pushed me and supported me in doing something so weird. I’m looking forward to more years of working with such great colleagues who constantly push me to be better.
