# Swell AI Transcript: S3 Ep05 Dial It In_ Building Innovation_ Mike Eastwood on Creating Portal IQ.mp3 SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Dial It In, a podcast where we talk with fascinating people about marketing, sales, process improvements, and tricks that they use to grow their businesses. Join me, Dave Meyer and Trigby Olson of BusyWeb, as we bring you interviews on how the best in their fields are dialing it in for their organizations. Let's ring up another episode. SPEAKER_02: Dave, I have outdone myself for this guest, for this episode. We have had playboy bunnies. We have had somebody who hypnotized you We have had people from all walks of life Uh, we have even entered we have interviewed the chat gpt robot on this podcast So there's one final frontier that we have not passed We have yet to somebody who is literally in the future. Yeah Or not. And I found him and we got him. Our guest today is actually in the future as we speak. So I'm super excited. But boy, I heard we had a new sponsor. Do you want to go have an ad for the sponsor? SPEAKER_01: OK, can't wait. Of course. Yeah. Let's go. Let's do it. Do you find yourself in need of wisdom from a true master of magic? Look no further than Gandalf the Gray, the podcast where legendary wizards meet modern day challenges. Join Gandalf as he shares tales of adventure, offers insightful advice, and provides magical solutions to everyday problems. Subscribe today and let the wisdom of Middle Earth guide you through your own epic journey. Available on all major podcast platforms. Visit our website for more enchanted episodes. SPEAKER_02: Wow. That's exciting to see. Most people don't think that Gandalf is a real person, but we know differently. We've been doing that. We've been doing variations on a theme this season so far, and we've been doing, Hey, so you want to, you want to do this or you want to do this as a way to make money. And so the next is, Hey, you got an idea for a business app? Let's maybe talk to somebody who's done that and figure out how it goes. So our guest today is our friend, Mike Eastwood, who is the founder of WebAlight, a digital agency specializing in HubSpot solutions. And he is also the creator of PortalIQ, the world's first fully automated HubSpot audit tool. With over 30 years of experience in design, marketing, and business strategy, Mike is recognized as a HubSpot Community Champion and a technical expert in building integrations and customizing CRM systems. His passion for helping businesses grows through smart, sustainable technology solutions and has earned him an international reputation for innovation and excellence. And more to the point, As we are recording this on a Thursday afternoon, Mike, where time is it where you are? SPEAKER_03: New Zealand. It's just gone 9 a.m. On Friday. SPEAKER_02: He's literally in the future. SPEAKER_01: Oh my goodness. Don't tell me what happens tomorrow. I'm not ready yet. SPEAKER_03: It's a pretty good start so far. SPEAKER_02: If you could tell me who wins the Mets game tonight, that'd be great. We met Mike as he was bringing his app online. And since then we've actually. been fortunate enough to help him refine it and sell it to more HubSpot partners and in the HubSpot ecosystem. But I'm really excited to talk because I think a lot of people have an idea like, Oh my God, I should make this into a piece of software. So that's why we wanted to bring Mike on is to talk about what that's like. Mike, tell us about it. Why don't you tell us about your agency first and what you do and you quite literally in New Zealand. So we're recording this in America and you're in New Zealand. So no joke, he really is to all ours in the future. SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so we may need subtitles for this, excuse me. That's all right, most people can hear Dave. And when I get excited, I talk fast, so hold on. So I'm going to rewind it back a bit before that. I trained as a designer, product design, and did a lot of graphics and branding, and then this thing called the internet turned up, and that's super exciting. And I kept asking people to code stuff, build a website for me, and it was just too hard for everyone. And so I started to learn how to code. I built like hundreds, literally hundreds of websites, and I had this blinding flash of the obvious where nobody actually wants a website. They want more traffic, they want more leads, they want more customers. And so that's when I started to roll into digital marketing. Kissed a few frogs before I discovered HubSpot, and that was 2016. Hadn't looked back. Became a partner really quickly. Currently a gold-tiered partner based in New Zealand. And been a community champion since 2019. And one of the things I love about the community is, which we could talk about later if we've got time, is just that generosity. So, such a good fit for me. And as Trudeau said, I like helping people grow their business. I get excited, and now I'm doing it with Axe. The origin story of Portal IQ, in this office, which you can't see because you're listening, not looking, I had a lead in here at December 2021. We take our summer holidays in over the Christmas break. And I didn't quite know what to sell them, and they didn't quite know what they wanted. And I said, let's run an audit on your HubSpot portal. And my business manager's eyes just went wide. and it's great. How much is that? $723? It's great. I just made it up. Great. Send us an invoice. I'm going on holiday tomorrow so we'll pay now, but we'll see you in January. And it's cool. That's good, because I haven't written it yet. So the guy leaves the room, goes on holiday, and my business manager says, I won't use your exact words for the podcast. We don't have an audit. It's been in my head for a while. Came back on the 4th of January, sort of two weeks before everybody else, and started writing. First week, 10,000 words fell out on how to set up a HubSpot portal. And I then built out the first report manually, which took forever. Next minute, I get a call from Australia and somebody says, hey, you've got a HubSpot audit. Yeah, I just sold one for $723. So that's 700 Aussie, zap, done, new customer. And I'm like, okay, maybe I'm onto something. But as you'll find out, that was an exciting beginning to a very long three, almost three years. SPEAKER_01: And we've been with you since almost the beginning, Mike. And I remember in the conversations that you had, I think you're relatively unique in that you're an entrepreneur in the app space. And at least in the HubSpot app space that as a solo, you're getting your hands dirty and you're actually doing the coding and you're doing the communications. And so there's a lot of different hats that you're running that are different sides of the brain. So how do you manage that and how did you work on growing the business while still handling the bug reports and the fixes and all the stuff that went into creating this amazing app? SPEAKER_03: Not very well is the answer. So when I started this journey, I had a couple of contractors, a business manager, and one, one employee. Now it's just me. So I'm running two businesses. I've annoyed a lot of clients because I haven't been delivering to my, the quality, which I usually deliver to a lot of sleepless nights. Cashflow has been a nightmare and breaking news just ended a 15 year relationship. So. SPEAKER_02: When we asked for news from the future, I was hoping for good news. SPEAKER_03: The good news is this is the most exciting time of my life. The opportunity is amazing. The app is getting traction and I may get back to zero this year. I'm not counting thousands of hours of work. So it's interesting, a tangent which I hadn't expected is the thought leadership that comes from trading in it and getting in a market and making mistakes and recovering most of the time. Yeah. So there's so many good things have come out of it. There's been some destruction along the way, but the good news is it's super exciting where I am now and. there are more zeros than I've experienced in my life as an outcome. SPEAKER_02: Do you mean that quite literally, like zeros in terms of checks and then also zeros in terms of coding? Well, sort of. SPEAKER_03: The dollar value for the app, it's on a really good trajectory at the moment. And while it's going to take a long time to recover, probably 3,000 hours worth of work. It's on the right direction. And I still haven't finished yet. I'm still improving it. I'm still adding features. I'm still getting ideas from other HubSpot partners going, hey, it'd be great if it did this. And it's like, genius. Yes. SPEAKER_02: That's one of the things I always worry about is if you have a really good idea, you build out the really good idea, then I think you're sort of constantly inundated by people who give you a case of the yabbits. by that yeah that's great but can it this and you're like sure i'll make that happen so how do you as a keeper of the keys and i could probably make another gandalf joke here see this one thing here dave is lord of the rings was filmed in new zealand where mike is from SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so I'm actually in the city that Peter Jackson lived in. And just out the window here is where the red carpet was. Amazing experience in Wellington. Well, yeah. Anyway, I lost track of your risk for me with the Gandalf. SPEAKER_02: Yeah, but back to the question is you built the thing, right? And then you're constantly being hit with the yeah, but how do you measure the critical mass of whether or not you're actually going to do something or not? Because I think every entrepreneur has that point in their life where a client asks, hey, can you do this? And your answer is sure, absolutely. And then you go out to the car and then you Google what it is you just agreed to. There's a point where you stopped doing that. When was that point for you, where you stopped just saying yes to everything? And the follow-up question is, how do you measure what you need to change in your service offering and how do you code it? SPEAKER_03: Talking to people is the key. So, rewinding, first answer is, pretty soon, if you're doing an app, you're going to be the subject expert. You're going to know more about their use of the app in their business than they do. Ultimately, we can talk to a lot of people and get ideas, but it's up to us to clarify those ideas, simplify them, and implement them. The wishlist thing's hard because I want to help everybody's business grow, I want to implement features for everybody, but I've got very limited bandwidth. Even though I use AI to help me code, I'm still, it still takes time and testing, but I'm quite selective, I was just qualifying that statement. I'm reasonably selective as to which features I do when. And the key for me is, will somebody pay for it? And anyone that's looking at building an app, two tips. First, sell it and get people to pay for it. Even if it's not much, sell it. Because there's a different conversation when somebody says, oh, that's great. I want one of those. to reaching and pulling out their credit card and zapping it, whether it's monthly, one-off, whatever it is. The people that ask for features and put their credit card in are more valid than the people that keep their hands in their pockets. Another tip which I first saw on Zapier is I went to grab an integration to use a zap and found out that that wasn't there yet. It's like, oh, that's interesting. So what they've done is put the keywords for the apps, built out a landing page, filled in a form, measure the traffic, and then you start to filter. If you've got an idea for an app, go build a landing page. And in your form, say, join the waiting list. And I forget the exact wording I got, but there's a question like, I might pay for it, definitely pay for it. No, I expect it to be free. And put that in as a required field because suddenly you'll get to measure the traffic to the page and you'll get to measure the conversions and you'll get to talk to the people that say, yes, I've paid for a solution. That can save a lot of heartache. SPEAKER_02: That's brilliant advice. SPEAKER_01: For folks that are listening along, Mike's tool is relatively unique in that it goes through and identifies all the problems or opportunities inside of a HubSpot instance. portal IQ helps to identify and spot what you might have set up wrong in your HubSpot account. Mike, can you give us the 30-second elevator pitch on what portal IQ really does and some of the biggest benefits for folks so that we're all operating out of where you're coming from? SPEAKER_03: It seems we're on video. I can hold this up. This is the first night. And so I've been using audits to sell for a long time. With HubSpot, as a partner, I found there are a lot of organizations that have got HubSpot, and the person that set up might have left. And other people might have come in and made a mess. We know who they are. They might have been onboarded by somebody that wasn't really that skilled and tried to fit them into HubSpot rather than HubSpot into the organizations. What PortalIQ does is it goes in and you install the app and it benchmarks the system. So it goes and checks your email settings, for example. It looks at your domain name, looks for things which will help your email deliverability. It goes through and checks how many marketing contacts you have, because if you're not using marketing contacts, then you're probably paying for contacts you don't need. So it goes through, those are like a couple of 68 different benchmarks it analyzes in the HubSpot portal. And then what it does, it assembles a document, which actually comes out of the HubSpot CMS. It assembles a document with recommendations, tips, tricks, best practices, and then it filters out a list of recommendations so that you can go through and go, this is urgent and important. There's a property appendix so you can go through and go, Oh, why is credit card in there? Oh, and CBC number and expiry date. Like seems to really scary stuff. You should not have credit card numbers. If you have credit card numbers in your HubSpot CRM, please go and delete them now. Thank you. SPEAKER_02: First email them to show at dial it in podcast.com. Just send all of them right over. Everything that Mike said is true. The next step in selling is really the magic here is there's two, when that instance that Mike was talking about, somebody's left and a company's left with their HubSpot portal, and they really don't know which end is up. They really don't know where anything is, why it is the way that it is. You have one or two choices. You can say, everything's bad. Let's nuke everything and start over. And that's certainly one way to go. And the other way is to say, there's a number of things that are good here, and there's a number of things that aren't so good. And if we want to make this better, let's work on the not so good, but also give credence to the things that are good. And so from my standpoint, because this is something that we use all the time, is this is an invaluable tool to be able to quickly give people a temperature check on what exactly they have and what exactly needs to be fixed. Because it's always either there's a turnstile effect, it's always either dramatically better than they think it is, or it's considerably worse than they think it is there's never middle ground it's either really much better than you said or really not. SPEAKER_03: And one of the things the exciting opportunities at the moment my podcast is complete without being mentioned. If you're using AI to leverage your data and your data's bad, you're going to scale a mess really quickly and really efficiently. And you're going to end up with a much bigger mess, much faster than you thought. Your data is crucial. It is, in some hub swap portals, there's just money left on the table because they're sending 1.7 emails per contact. all times. So you're not using email marketing. What? This is the best return on investment. You've got these people you've been working with. Can we please send them some offers? Can we at least warm them up and get them talking again? So your data's got to be good to do that. And I think it really helps having a tour guide, which is your HubSpot partner, because they're going to help you prioritise, they're less emotionally traumatised by your data in your tech stack than you are. And they can help you prioritise and progress over perfection. Don't go in and the nuclear option is available, but you're going to lose a lot of value. Prioritise, work through it. set goals, set timeframes, and go out and do some marketing and some sales as well. Because if you don't, everything stops. So yeah, find that balance, which is ironic for me saying the word balance. SPEAKER_02: Let's get back to the narrative. So you sold it for $723 and process was unwieldy, right? Because you had to take a lot of screenshots. write a lot of reports. At what point do you decide, hey, how can I make this better? SPEAKER_03: Again, another happy accident. So working on this idea, and I built it out. I have a massive spreadsheet with all these different levers to pull. And there's, oh, HubSpot App Accelerator. It's like, oh, yeah, we're going to play. And the team was amazing. They're like, look, we love your product. We think this is a great idea. Can you just change the wording a little bit in your application? Yeah, sure. It's read it up, send it back. Could you just say more about the side of things? Because we really like, yeah, sure. We just changed a few things in your copy. And it went quiet. Next minute I get it added to a LinkedIn group saying, Oh, you're part of the HubSpot app accelerator. And we're like, ah, fantastic. So chatting away, and it's, OK, so it's got these manual components. And they said, no. Sorry? It has to be automated. There's no manual, like this is fully automated or nothing. Oh, OK. Even, no. OK. So we got through that, and I built out the map, wireframed it all, sketched it, and it's great. And they're like, oh, this is fantastic. Super excited. You're presenting in 10 weeks. I'm like, what? I hadn't written a line. SPEAKER_02: Not a single line of code. SPEAKER_03: And I'm like, okay, so I start coding, and team, let's just tell people I'm busy and come and ask me questions, but if my headphones are off, mouth shut. SPEAKER_02: Did you know how to code before you started? SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I've been writing bad code for decades. I know how to write good code now. And with AI, I can write good code faster. Because I can see when it does bad code, and I can fix it. Whereas if you're just writing code off AI, you're in a world of pain. That warning should be underlined for anyone listening. So yes, I was good at coding, but it was cobbled together. And the whole mantra, if you're not embarrassed by your MVP, your minimum viable product, then you've launched too late. So next minute, I'm presenting in this office at three o'clock in the morning to 50 HubSpotters, including Dharmesh Shah, my superhero. And they're like, this is great, really good feedback, lots of excitement. And I'm like, I'm still not even close to getting it done. They're like, cool, we're putting it live in the marketplace. Fake it till you make it, completely real. So when I started, I was doing it manually. By this stage, I could run a few API calls and assemble stuff, go on and fix stuff on the fly. So the first audits I did, there's a lot of tweaking, a lot of manual stuff. And I built it so that I could go in and fiddle with it at any stage so that If the renderer didn't quite do its job, I could tweak that. Or if the HTML wasn't right, I could tweak that. Or if the benchmarking wasn't right, I could tweak that. Whereas now it's knocking out an audit with 1.24 million contacts the other day. And it just slows down, works through it, and pops out 120 pages of PDF at the end without any intervention. Bake it till you make it. And keep improving. SPEAKER_02: Kind of reminds me of the story of what was the name of the girl who tried to do the blood machine that could test all the Thanos. SPEAKER_03: Yeah. SPEAKER_02: Yeah. Yeah. The Thanos story. Cause she was, her idea was you could test for hundreds and hundreds of bloodborne diseases with just a single prick of blood. What she ended up doing was taking gallons of blood and then doing all the manual testing and then feeding it into her machine, which was basically a printer. So that, that's where you were at the start. What was the next evolution of that? SPEAKER_03: I didn't have any corporate fraud involved or taken. SPEAKER_02: You're not trying very hard. It's only you and you're still in tomorrow land too. SPEAKER_03: You should try harder and get them. We've done a few audits with the BusyWeb team and Jen's, you've got to meet Tim Ritchie from IntegrateIQ. And it's great. And so we book a call. And he got me at the darkest hour. And I can help you to share the screenshot. When you do your projections, you've got expenditure and red lines going down and then green lines going up and then the compound curve dips and goes up. Mine was like massive red lines, hardly any green lines and the curve was just going down. I was losing cash, I'd spent all my savings, I'd whipped all the cash flow out of my agency, and it was still going down at a rapid speed. And first time I met Tim, and I'm just like, yeah, I'm trying not to swear again, what have I done? I was just And he's calm and collective. He's like, you're an entrepreneur. You're in a pretty dark space. I think what you've built's amazing. And I'm booking a time now to call you in two weeks to make sure you're OK. Don't do anything stupid. If you do, call me first. And I'm like, thank you. At that stage, I've got a one-way till April. If I stop it then, I've lost 50 grand of my savings. a few thousand hours, and I just have to write it off. This was February, and so I had two months before I was going to kill it. Went through and gutted all the costs. So I did the enterprise startup grant with HubSpot. So I had a massive discount for the first year, 50% by the second year. I thought, I'll be rolling in it by then. That ate me alive, that cost going out every month. And I had no income at that stage. credit card sale through the website wasn't until, I think it was April 2023, so we're talking over a year later, before I had my $50 sale. And then I get these drips, and I get some more drips, and I've got a page, we use Confluence for our documentation, and there's a page in there with a champagne chart. And there's a first sale through the app store, first sale to somebody I don't know, first $10,000. And the first $20,000, which is actually two bottles of champagne and they go up in Fibonacci sequences from there. So I started getting these popping champagne whenever we hit these milestones and it started to turn around and I was so close to quitting. I was. Like that, when do you stop? When are you on the edge of a breakthrough? And how do you break through? Or are you just delusional and keeping on pushing? So I don't know the answer, but if anybody wants to unload and share where they're at or they're stuck, I'm sure you'll be able to get ahold of me because it's tough. What was your answer? I thought that this was going to be the big one for me. I've had lots of failures over the years, whether they're apps or businesses or products or service offerings. And I thought this is one, because every time you fail, you learn something. You don't learn as much from your successes. So luckily, I've done a lot of learning. I can see the market size. I can see the impact. I can see the value I add. I can see the return on value is way higher than the price I offer. I have evangelists like yourselves that are going, hey, go talk to Mike. So I always thought this would be the one. And it still might not be. But the other outcomes which I had thought about are pretty amazing at the moment. SPEAKER_01: What I think is especially compelling about that is to hear that it was a struggle because from the outside, from us looking at the app and the delivery and the value that it gives to us and our clients, I'd have never known that it was a struggle at all. Just, holy cow, this is an amazing tool that helps a ton of people. And we, like you said, we've been evangelists for portal IQ for a long time because it saves us dozens of hours in setting this up. And it makes a compelling case for us as agency partners or customers to say, here's, let us take a look at your portal and tell you where you need to improve. And so that gives it to you. One of the things that I think you started not necessarily looking at from a holistic perspective, but it seems like you've pivoted into is that agency owner like engagement. So partnering with other partners instead of just going direct to consumer because with other partners, SPEAKER_02: Let me interject just for clarity's sake, when Dave is using the word partner, what he's really meaning is marketing agency. So Mike has a marketing agency, we have a marketing agency. And so one of the things that I think, Dave, if I understand your question, is there's a trust involved here. Like we've met Mike once in actual life, but we have this guy halfway across the world that we're trusting with our clients' information and data that he's not going to do anything with it. SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the big thing that I'm getting at is how did he pivot into finding partners to help him resell? Yes. That seems where you're going to scale. SPEAKER_02: Got it. I just want to make sure that everyone listening understood what we meant by partner. SPEAKER_03: Yeah. Definitely the HubSpot partners. So to put a number out there, in the last few months, I looked at a 96% of revenue in the last 90 days was HubSpot partners. That's a few things here. So one, I pivoted the business. It's not a full pivot. It's just, I've course corrected is probably a better term. Rebranding, renaming, which is happening at the moment to make it less focused on me and more focused on the agency. I had a partner program from day one, which has been great. And so that idea that the partners are generating the opportunities, then I have a generous share with them. to help them get the opportunity and make it profitable for them. From a personal point of view, I love helping agencies grow. I know how hard it is. I know there are days where everything is against you. And I also know that there are days where you get one new lead, maybe two new lead, maybe a new customer, and that can change your entire organization from just scraping by to, phew, we can pay wages this way. helping agencies like that. And I'm also indirectly helping the customers get more out of HubSpot. So I'm helping those businesses as well. I knew it was good for me to sell using audits. This calculation's a little bit dated, but if Webelite, my agency, paid for every audit, I would have spent $1,080 and got $50,800 worth of work back. And some of that's recurring, so that number's gone up since I last ran that calculation. So I know there's an ROI for an agency. I know there's an ROI for the HubSpot user. So the value, there's ROI for HubSpot. Like if I can make a half percent dent on churn, that's multiple millions of dollars for HubSpot saved. So it's a win. SPEAKER_02: What's striking me as we're talking, guys, is that this is such an important part of my life because this is my day-to-day life. But for anybody who's listening, this sounds incredibly niche. And also, now that you're up and running, also incredibly successful. So is that something that you think is repeatable for people who are trying to come up with their ideas, is to lean into the niche of it all? SPEAKER_03: The word niche scares the hell out of me. I'm from a small city, like we've got a couple of hundred thousand, 400,000 in the greater area, and a country of 5 million. So I've always been in business, and if an opportunity turns up, it's like, oh, how can I help? Have you got a wallet? Yes, good. So I have never niched, and it's only something I've done after, in the last couple of years. And so that small pond mentality means I look at a pond with 220,000 customers and go, which HubSpot has, plus or minus, and goes, that's a pond big enough to dive into without hurting yourself. And then I've niched down again and gone, there's, they say, 8,000 HubSpot partners, but realistically, there's 1,500 of us that actually do the work. Yeah, niching down to a target market of 1500, it seems ludicrous. But, I know who they are, I know where they live, I know what time of day it is, I know what their pain points are, I know they're good people. I've had one sales demo where I wouldn't work with them. One. And I've done a lot of demos. When I first started as a HubSpot partner, there was a HubSpot, a hug. like a HubSpot user group, a hug, just around the corner. And I emailed people and said, look, I'm just becoming a partner. Just wanted to let you know I'm in the room. I don't want to steal your clients or anything. And they're like, oh, come and say hi. What do you need? How can I help? Who do you need? Oh, you need to talk to this person. If you need any development help, just ask. We've got some really good people. How can we help? I'm like, hang on, you're meant to be my competitors. And so the HubSpot partner agency as a community is amazing. And yeah, I love working in that space and I've got a big bucket of apps that I want to build over here. I just need resources and time and yeah, all that imaginary stuff. SPEAKER_02: The HubSpot community is, it's an interesting community for sure. I even had a similar experience this week where I lost out on an opportunity and I figured it was either me or this other company in town. So I called them up and said, Hey, did you win this business? Like, no, it wasn't us. And I believe them because they would have told me. And if I lost to them, I would have tipped my hat and said, yep, that was a good choice too. SPEAKER_03: Yeah, there's a podcast by April Dunford who is really interesting. She talks about the brand story and product stories and creating marketing messages. And one of her talks, one of my takeaways is that 40% of sales are lost through inaction. So it's too risky to buy a new CRM was her example. So I'm just going to sit on my hands. She's way more eloquent than me. I'm happy to share a link if we can put it in the notes. Absolutely. And so for me, that's always, from a sales opportunity, it's a no, not now. If they've chosen another partner, it's still no, not now, because they may get three months in and go, fool, no, we're getting a divorce already. Yeah. No, that was the point. Happy to share that link. SPEAKER_02: There's a great old Bob Seger song called Against the Wind, and he has a line in it that I always try and ask people the question. You get through the looking glass, you've got a burgeoning app empire. So my question with apologies to Bob Seger is this. What do you wish that you didn't know now that you didn't know that? SPEAKER_03: I think it's that sense of time. And I'll explain that. I had a terrible sense of time. The only reason I know how long we've been talking is there's a little number just there. If you ask me what day of the week, normally I can't tell you. And that time thing is really tricky when you're trying to get something out. It's imperfect. You're having to stay up till all hours fixing something to make it good enough to send out. It's just takes so long. And I think that time thing is, I'm never going to be realistic with that. I accept that. But I need people around me that are, that can help with that. The entrepreneurial operating system talks about the visionary integrator, which I know a lot of HubSpot partner agencies use. I need that integrator to help me be realistic or focus, or otherwise I'm like, oh, new feature, it's three o'clock in the morning, where is everybody? And that time scale on weeks, months, years. SPEAKER_01: So Mike, as you're looking at your past and looking at rolling out new apps, there's probably quite a few things that you're also going to do very differently than you did at the beginning. what would you do now or what would you tell yourself three years ago to get you started and get you going as fast as humanly possible? SPEAKER_03: It's really hard to know if I could have done it faster. I think that the leverage with team is what I lack and there are some opportunities at the moment that are probably going to change that forever. Team is super important, which seems ridiculous standing here on my own talking about team, but if you can create a team that has unity and a heading in the same direction at the same time, there's leverage there, there's speed, there's safety, we all have bad days. And if there's a team, then that's diluted a little bit. And so we can carry through at a faster throughput. So I think But I've done this off no money, out of my savings. So I didn't have the budget to go out and drop a quarter of a million dollars to build this. And I probably would have looked at the numbers and went, nah, that'd be madness. Yeah, putting the right team together is super important and will be faster and easier. And you'll still have challenges with teams, there always is. Yeah, it'll be a bit less lonely. SPEAKER_01: For sure. And I suppose AI has a little bit of a help in some of that virtual team, right? Because you're running code and ideas through various LLMs and getting some feedback and some help out of that. And that probably wasn't there when you were starting, right? SPEAKER_03: It's only been really great. It was only recently recent for me. And by the first time I'd installed it, paid $10 a month. Anyone complains about $10 a month, they're not valuing their time correctly. turned it on, I had a play, forgot it was on, and then one day I'm typing and it just was like auto-complete. I'm just like, what the? Oh, that's right, I've got AI turned on. So I go through and it's just like completing lines. And I'm like, how am I going to do this? It's got to go out to an object, it's got to pull something in, pull a relationship back, and then it just goes brrrr. And I'm like, what the? And I read it, and it was like, that is genius. And I ran it, and it didn't work. I was like, oh, it made something up. I make stuff up all the time. So I went in and went, hey, you made this bit up, I want you to do this and this, and I filled it in. So on a bad hour, I'd save 10 minutes. On a good hour, I might save 40 minutes. And so for me, that is a phenomenal game changer. I'm self-taught as a coder, so I've done a lot of bad stuff in my day. So I've learned a lot of the mistakes and the patterns, and I study on YouTube a lot, I read what I can. So for me, my superpower is that I'm thinking about the marketing, I'm thinking about partner, I'm thinking about customer, I'm thinking about HubSpot, I'm thinking about all these things at the same time. So even if I code a bit slower, my speed is pretty fast compared to a team. and way cheaper, the pay is terrible. So yeah, leverage AI, and it will make stuff up, so it's going to get things wrong. And it's really good at writing tests. So usually when you get to the end of writing your code, you're done, and you don't want to write tests, go and test all your methods. With AI, it is so easy, there's no excuse not to. Those people that start with writing tests and then create their code, I take my hat off to you, I'm too impatient, I want to get in there and do stuff. AI has improved the quality of my code significantly and given me more leverage. So it's interesting that they talk about pair programming. In the olden days, you'd have two developers sitting at a computer next to each other writing code together. I feel like it's at a really good spot with AI, so if anybody's doing it, it's essential. If you want the details, I use VS Code, which is a free Microsoft coding environment, and I have Git Copilot installed, and the HubSpot extension installed, and a few other things. Game changer. Absolute game changer. SPEAKER_02: Mike, last question, where can people want to learn about your agency? If they want to get a Portal IQ license, which we absolutely encourage, where can people find you? SPEAKER_03: Websites, easy to find me. So my company agency is Webilite, and I'm tightening the focus down to just being a HubSpot geek. That's the specialty there. Anyway, you can visit the website. PortalIQ.com is where you can see the audits in action and learn more about that. A little teaser, we've been testing a free HubSpot health check, which is like a 10-page audit, free of charge, which HubSpot partners will be able to offer. So I'm happy to share that. Nice. HubSpot community, big shout out to the HubSpot community at community.hubspot.com from memory. I'm in there a lot, and I'm in LinkedIn a lot. So there's lots of ways to find me. SPEAKER_02: Awesome. Thank you, Mike. Dave, anything classy and inspirational as we finish? SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think the key thing that I'm taking away today from Mike is that it's imperative to make big bets and to stick with it. And the cool thing about Mike's journey for me is he's got more grit and more stick-to-itiveness than any coding team. And the fact that he did this all by himself, mostly, is just bonkers and couldn't ask for a better friend and partner. Mike, thank you so much for hanging out with us today. Yeah, thanks. Can't wait for the next collaboration. Thank you, Doug. SPEAKER_03: Thank you, Trippie. SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so this has been an episode of Dial It In produced by Nicole Fairclough and Andy Wachowski. And with apologies to Tony Kornheiser, we will also try to do better the next time.