Episode #74 5X Growth Secrets, Community Building Hacks, and AI "Easy Buttons" with Jason Hubbard

Jason quite literally grew up in startups with both parents being serial entrepreneurs. He has worked with early-stage startups ranging from those he started and ran, launching first products/brands, being the first employee, all the way to venture-backed unicorns. In his career, Jason has helped grow 3 top 100 Inc.’s Fastest-Growing Private companies. Most recently Jason ran growth at Astronomer as they 5X’d revenue and raised half a Billion dollars on their way to a unicorn valuation. Currently, Jason is COO at RevGenius where he is building the #1 place for revenue leaders and professionals to come to learn how to scale.

Follow Jason: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hubbardjason/

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Transcript

00:00 
Community means something very different than what I think a lot of people think it does. And to do community right, you have to be doing it for primary motivations that are not directly revenue. And, you know, you sort of have to be, we're doing the next right thing and revenue will follow. 

00:16 
So, Welcome back to another episode of the revenue re-imagined podcast. We have a very special guest with us today. Someone who is not only a leader in their space, but someone that we consider a friend of the show. 

00:34 
Jason Hubbard, who is currently the COO at RevGenius literally grew up in startups. With both his parents being serial entrepreneurs, he worked his way through early stage startups, ranging from those he actually started and ran all the way to venture back to unicorns. 

00:49 
Throughout his career, he's helped grow three top Inc 100 fastest growing private companies before now joining RevGenius, which is the number one place for revenue leaders and professionals to come and learn how to scale. 

01:04 
Jason, we've done a lot of work together, but we've never had you on the show. Thanks for joining us, man. No, great to be on here guys. Yeah, thanks for joining. And when I think of you and we've worked together now several years, I think like you're the master of like everything. 

01:19 
Like you do, you have your fingers in like a little bit of everything. In the go-to-market stream or in the go-to-market process, what is your favorite thing to do? What do you enjoy doing? And what can you drive the most value for within an organization? 

01:37 
That's a great question, not an easy one. My favorite thing to do is build growth engines. So, you know, oftentimes, I mean, where I've had the most fun in my career have been opportunities I've had to come, you know, largely, if not entirely from scratch, build, you know, demand gen growth, you know, all of that sort of things and do it in a place. 

02:00 
a format where I basically, you know, taken off the leash and just said, go run. And when I do that, like, I've been able to build pretty incredible things when most recently was that astronomer and ever the course of just a little over a year, we 5x revenue and took inbound, you know, from doing basically nothing from a revenue demand and standpoint to 80% of pipe and revenue by the time that I left. 

02:27 
And so yeah, that over a little over a year period is obviously pretty compelling. We also raised half a billion dollars over that period of time. So yeah, it's a lot of fun when I can come in and build that kind of stuff. 

02:40 
So buildings hard, at least I think it's hard. And there's a lot of talk out there about various different parts of or different aspects of AI. various different call it cheat codes if you will, or buy my 1999, 1999 dollar playbook to scale your go to market engine. 

03:04 
Is there an easy way to speed the process up, or is all this reliance on like, hey, how do we make it easier really fucking us and making it harder in the long run? Yeah. I look at what's going on with AI is just the latest iteration of people searching for the easy button. 

03:26 
Easy button has been all kinds of things over the years. It's been, hey, marketing automation, arguably was one of the first ones we got our hands on. Now I can go and acquire a giant lead list. I was one of the worst offenders when this began, so I can't really judge too much. 

03:45 
Loaded in and start just firing away spam at people, and something would come out the other side of it because we hadn't overwhelmed everybody's inboxes, and Gmail, and gatekeepers hadn't shut everything down, and all of that stuff, and so then we got that one swatted away, and then we got sequencing tools. 

04:02 
Sequencing tools was the next way to be more effective at basically doing the same shit we were doing with the mass e-mail marketing and all of that stuff. I think we all saw how that played out with the SDR, VDR teams scaling ridiculously high, and just feed on a great big list of contacts and some automation and having fire away at it. 

04:25 
I think AI is the next flavor of that. We have those avenues shut down, and we have this new shiny object and tool with AI. How can I go try and use it in the same lazy, easy button way? Can you use it in the easy button lazy way and be it effective? 

04:43 
Let me reword that. Have you found a great AI tool that allows you to just hit the proverbial easy button? All right. As we were talking about with these earlier, and it was all an arms race. So whatever, we had the marketing automation and it took Gmail, Microsoft, gatekeepers, all of that stuff to catch up from flagging a spam and trying to save people's inboxes. 

05:06 
We also got more sophisticated in catching what people were doing. They have same story with sequencing tools and stuff like that. So we're seeing the same thing happening on the AI front. Arguably each cycle gets a little quicker as far as the ability to be able to get out front of it and the arms race accelerates. 

05:22 
But, you know, so the answer to the question of am I seeing people doing that effectively? Yes. How long are any of these strategies or tactics effective for? Not very long typically, but everybody's poking, you know, around trying to find the chinks in the armor and how can they get away with, you know, using this as an easy button. 

05:40 
So it's interesting. One of the things you were just talking about is time to change. So, you know, back in the day, it was Google ads, and you could, you know, run Google ads, or actually, it was like email. 

05:50 
So email outbound marketing, like your open rates are super high, then you went to Google ads. And we see this ever accelerating market, like how often, or how long of a period of time do you believe it is that they should be relooking at these strategies? 

06:11 
Is it six months, three months, 12 months? Like, what's that strategy look like? I mean, you need to relook at the strategies. So there's one side where you need to do it on a regular cadence, kind of no matter what. 

06:25 
Because if you're not paying attention to it, then the ground's going to shift, something's going to change. And so you need to be going back and doing it, I would argue, at least quarterly, and you know, investigating how's it performing? 

06:35 
Are you seeing anything that you didn't expect? Or, you know, that you didn't know out of it. But then obviously, you may need to accelerate that based off of what you're seeing. And so, and that can be kind of either extreme. 

06:47 
It can be, hey, this is really not working. Why is this not working? We need to go investigate and figure out why early. Hey, holy shit, this is really working. Now let's figure out why and how do we get a poor fuel on that fire and make that even more effective with it. 

07:00 
And so, yeah, the short answer is, is with everything is going to depend. But you know, I should would do at least a quarterly cadence of like, hey, let's stop, let's pause and let's look at what's going on here. 

07:12 
Sorry, guys. What's going on? And then, you know, if something's wrong, then yeah, go, go figure out why. I love so we're looking at every every three to six months, like doing ICP work, doing buyer persona. 

07:28 
So that all makes sense what you're just saying. I'm like, making sure that's validating quickly. Sorry, no, you're fine. I'm used to it. Um, I think sorry, couldn't help myself. Building, tweaking, refining is hard and there's not a lot of companies that I think really do a good job and there's not a lot of companies that I think grow at a level that truly makes them happy, right? 

08:03 
And I think when that happens and you get the pressure from your investors to grow faster, go hire more people or go find the easy button and, you know, use AI or whatever to accelerate your go-to-market. 

08:18 
And listen, I'm not shitting on AI. I think AI is great. I think that there is a place for it. I think if used to augment your strategies properly, you could do something really good. What you can't do is use AI to put, in my opinion, anything together and then just ship it without looking at it because it hallucinates. 

08:38 
And too many people do that and you could tell whether that's in a pitch deck or a LinkedIn comment or a cold email or a call script or whatever it happens to be. You can inevitably tell when it's someone just using AI. 

08:49 
But let's step away from AI for a second and talk about other ways that, you know, you have seen be successful in really growing companies. And I think one of the ones that is all the rage right now, if done right, goes back to community. 

09:07 
Funny, you're the COO of a community. But community also, I think, is one that people try to hit an easy button and think, oh, let's just spin up a Slack group, call it a community, and man, we're going to grow our business. 

09:21 
I've yet to see that work successfully. I don't know. I have enough trouble getting Dale to answer me in Slack, much less for the people in the community. Talk to me about where people are going wrong with community and how y'all are trying to make something different at RepGenius, where people can go right with community. 

09:40 
Yeah. So community, like you hit on, is hard, especially if you're trying to tie it to any sort of monetization strategy or anything like that. And I think that tying to monetization too directly is where most of it fails. 

09:54 
And I think, what are people doing wrong with it? I think most people are doing most of the things wrong with it. I think that a list of people are doing things right with it is extremely narrow and small. 

10:06 
And the ones that are doing it are doing it with a very indirect focus on actual monetization or revenue. And I'll use to illustrate something that I think we did really well at my first SaaS company, Sears Insight. 

10:21 
And I also think that Salesforce, who was sort of the mothership, we were a Salesforce integration, does fairly well with this between Trailblazer and their Salesforce community and their meetups and all of that stuff. 

10:34 
Like they've got a very, very, you know, well built out community network with it. And it does, you know, it's all, you know, arguably their primary customer success support layer they have for most of their customers is this community that they've built. 

10:47 
Um, and you know, we did similar things and we take you back a lot of it at Cirrus where reached out to every consultant partner, ISB, whatever, and said, Hey, uh, use Cirrus Insight for free. Uh, we'll be a resource for you for anybody that, you know, internal stuff like that. 

11:02 
And then we went and we literally sponsored went to every Salesforce user group meeting or meetup that we could make it to. And so we built our own community in there off of that. And, you know, we did that, you know, it drove me crazy to no end. 

11:15 
Like I tried everywhere I could to try and track what our partners and stuff were doing from a referral, you know, revenue standpoint, all of that stuff. And no matter what I did, how easy I made it, how well I incentivized them, like maybe, let's call it 20% of them would actually leverage any of that. 

11:29 
And so, you know, I'd run into them at Dreamforce and be like, hey, do you talk to someone? So I was like, we sure did. That was our second biggest deal this year. They're like, oh, great. I was like, that's something your way. 

11:39 
I was like, you didn't even tell us. I mean, it drove me crazy. But, you know, our idea was basically, let's suck the oxygen out of the room. Let's be, you know, the go-to anytime somebody has a conversation and need whatever. 

11:52 
And let's be a support layer for all of these companies, you know, partners, customers, whatever. Because as a Salesforce integration, we had to get really deep. Like we were arguably more knowledgeable about Salesforce than 95% of Salesforce employees and workers. 

12:06 
I know this because I actually onboarded them when they bought our app. And so, community means something very different than what I think a lot of people think it does. And to do community right, you have to be doing it for primary motivations that are not directly revenue. 

12:23 
And, you know, you sort of have to be, we're doing the next right thing and revenue will follow. So you don't go into the community and just start pitching your product to everyone, right? And I mean, this is something that we struggle with at Red Genius, where we monetize the community, but we do it indirectly through, you know, sponsorships and partners. 

12:43 
And we could do that myopically focused on like revenue, in which case we're going to do damage to the community because we're going to be doing stuff for the sake of partners that the community doesn't really like or is engaged with. 

12:55 
And again, this is that easy button problem. Because then you're ultimately shooting yourself in the foot because then the community isn't engaged and doesn't grow in all of that stuff versus doing the hard work of finding stuff that aligns between those two. 

13:07 
I think you all do a good job. of this, right? You know, very rarely. I've never seen a post in RevGenius of, hey, come pay the sponsorship. I've also, anytime someone has slacked me and said, hey, I saw you, blah, blah, blah in RevGenius, and I want to sell you this, and I send it back to you guys, they're immediately gone, you don't allow that solicitation. 

13:30 
And I think you do a good job of keeping the community as a resource to help people. And that's what a community should be. There's another community out there. I will not mention the name, but I literally got three emails this week of, you know, I got your name from the such and such directory, and thought you might be interested in, one of them was a better, more targeted community. 

13:49 
So let me join this community to steal customers, that's going to go over really well, or just other sales pitches. And I think when I look at community and how to use it to accelerate your business, it's almost following the same premise of Outbound, right? 

14:05 
All you want to do... Just add some fucking value to people, like add value and address pain and the rest will come. Yeah, and the, you know, what you're talking about with the community. Yeah, I think so timing of this conversation is interesting, because Darren and I have been talking about, you know, do we, you know, do we look at taking on some, you know, investment, you know, to try and grow some initiative and stuff like that? 

14:31 
Do we look for an acquisition partner? You know, what does this look like? And on the, you know, taking on the fundraising side of things, like we looked at everybody else that's gone that route, and it's gone disastrously for every one of them. 

14:44 
Yeah, because you focus on the business model and the community suffers, and then whenever the community suffers, then you've lost the your entire purpose of being. And so, you know, that, you know, having to answer to a board having to answer to, you know, your investors, your venture fund, whatever, tends to kill the entire community model. 

15:05 
Yeah, and so there's this, the whole thing with community is super interesting from a like providing value perspective. But how can people leverage community like sales reps, for example, right? Like, what's the best way for them to get in there? 

15:23 
Is it, you know, I think about it a lot, like LinkedIn, you got to engage, you got to participate, but a lot of people just don't do it. Like, what's, what are a couple things that people can do to like, increase the value that they deliver to the community? 

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15:54 
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16:15 
Whatever that is that you can provide that is valuable to somebody. So if somebody is looking for mentorship, if somebody is asking about a preferred platform, a solution for whatever, you've got some background or expertise in it. 

16:30 
If somebody is looking for a job, if somebody is looking to hire somebody, like wherever you can provide value and lean in, do that thing. Jason, I'm curious. You've built and worked at really all sizes of companies. 

16:47 
You've raised substantial sums of money. You've driven substantial sums of revenue. What made you want to, I don't want to say come to RevGenius, but what made you want to like focus on community versus another product? 

17:03 
Yeah. that's the question. Yeah, a lot of what I mean, one, just relationship with Jared and wave sort of things played out. And you know, yeah, everything sort of just kept moving in that direction. 

17:17 
So I decided not to fight it. But you know, back to what I achieved at astronomer, the the entire way we were able to achieve what we did there was, you know, if you're not familiar with astronomer, they largely own the airflow open source project. 

17:32 
And so that's an enormous community and a non traditional sense of it, of these open source, you know, participants, you know, consumers of it to the tune of like millions of downloads. I mean, this thing's massive. 

17:45 
And it was only by tapping and being able to ride that community and be able to do that in a sophisticated value add way, that we were able to achieve those ridiculous growths that we growth metrics that we did. 

17:56 
And so, you know, counter intuitively, I was doing the growth through community, while astronomer in leveraging incredibly effectively. And so, you know, that actually took me a little while to put those pieces together when I was looking at red genius was like, Okay, yeah, this makes sense. 

18:13 
You know, there's a lot of play. And I mean, arguably, it was even harder to do on the astronomer side of things, because you're dealing with devs and engineers with an open source project, like, talk about about the most quickly audience out there for trying to do demand gen with office a community. 

18:28 
Yeah. What's the next best thing that is going to be coming out? So we have AI generating, we have a lot of challenges with email deliverability, like, where is go to market from a CEO perspective going? 

18:44 
And how can we be best aligned to get there? Yeah, I'm extremely biased on this side, the side of things. I mean, incredibly firm believer in strong coordination unification between cells and marketing so that you know, and ideally that you're doing this and you know, at least for the most of the B2B market segments in an ABM type coordinated fashion. 

19:12 
We had obviously a long standing debate last year around this idea of a GTM leader within organizations where we started seeing those titles starting to crop up. I know somebody who has that title. You guys know my opinion on that, which was we were largely playing a game of semantics. 

19:34 
You know, that title or role was what we used to call a COO. It's what we had envisioned largely whenever we came up with the CRO title. It's what people had in mind largely with the chief growth officer. 

19:47 
I think we've been putting different titles on thinking that would solve a need. The need ultimately is like it's hard to find these people that can synthesize across all of the organization as well as across the entire user journey. 

20:03 
but I think it's becoming ever more critical as things get more complex, things get more integrated and go-to-market gets more difficult and sophisticated. These roles are gonna become more and more and more critical. 

20:15 
I mean, somebody that can actually effectively leverage AI and as somebody that can largely do this type of stuff. You've gotta be able to think across systems and across your entire go-to-market motion, figure out how do all these pieces fit together. 

20:28 
And I mean, that's one of the biggest power that AI brings to it is the ability to plug into all of these variety of things, bring in inputs from a lot of different places and then be able to spit out coordinated things across all of that. 

20:40 
But that takes an entirely different mindset approach to things than what most of our leaders and most of our roles are doing right now. You're spot on, I think. And again, it goes back to the easy button, right? 

20:55 
Let's do what we've always done and expect different results. And I say this a lot professionally, personally. Shit, I said it to Zachary this morning. Dude, nothing changes if nothing changes. And the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. 

21:14 
We are in an era where more companies are being founded than I think I've ever seen in the very hyper competitive spaces. Not everyone is going to win. And I believe a large part of it is how you build and eventually scale your go-to-market motion. 

21:33 
How do you bridge that go-to-market gap and go from stability to foundation to repeatability to scalability? Dale, you see what I did there, right? But to do that, you have to start with the right people. 

21:47 
So you're starting a company tomorrow from the ground up. You're the CEO. Who are your first two or three hires and why? Great question. I'm extremely biased on this one as well. Go figure. Not non-traditional in the in the answer. 

22:05 
So one, one of my first hires of whatever their roller capacity is, is somebody that balances me from a strengths and weaknesses standpoint. So I am a, you know, a big picture person, a strategy person, somebody that can figure out, okay, we're here, we want to get here. 

22:23 
How are we going to do that? The second that I can see the finish line, and I'm like, okay, all of, yeah, we proved that this is possible, and all you got to do is just go repeat and finish what we're doing. 

22:35 
I lose complete and total interest in getting to the finish line. And so somebody in whatever their capacity that is highly organized, and has that attention to detail, is somebody that always wind up, you know, hiring extremely, extremely quickly within that, you know, arguably needs to be one of the first hires. 

22:52 
And, you know, the beauty is they can do kind of whatever, you know, the similar track, my best hires to a one have been people with broad-based general backgrounds. I mean, some of them being people I hire straight out of liberal arts colleges with a degree in something that had nothing to do with what they wound up doing. 

23:13 
And I think part of this is just the nature of who does well but it's certainly a lot of it's just my management style and what it's like to work with me. I hire people to come in and own something and figure it out and be the resident expert in whatever that piece of the puzzle is that they're responsible for. 

23:32 
Even if they're not that person the day one, like that they're gonna get there very quickly and I'd be an idiot not to go to them for whatever that thing is. And so I look for people that bring really two things, intellectual curiosity and hustle. 

23:45 
And if you can bring those two things to the table, I can teach you damn near anything. If you don't bring those two, then I've proven that I am really, really awful at trying to teach and instill those things. 

23:56 
And so if I've got somebody in that can balance me on that detailed finished product side of things and I've got people that bring that hustle and intellectual curiosity, then I can kind of slot in and build out whatever we need based off of needs off of that. 

24:12 
But those are my priorities from a hiring standpoint. And I would put on top of intellectual curiosity which I really like is coachability. Cause you may be curious, but if you can't be coachable, like you could be giving them all sorts of great information but if they don't apply it, that's super important. 

24:32 
In any role for the record, like, sorry. But we talk about this in any role. How many people have we all as leaders hired likely earlier in our career who checked every single box and they were great at everything and they were fantastic but couldn't coach them on shit. 

24:48 
And it was, well, I know better cause I've done this, don't tell me how to do it. Whether you are an AE, the COO, shit, even the CEO, are you coachable? And I can tell you as a CRO, learned something from one of my reps every single day that I would take and apply. 

25:04 
And if you don't have that mindset, my firm belief is not only are you a bad leader, you're just an asshole at that point. And I mean, I would I would argue that if you're truly intellectually curious, then you are coachable by, by definition, agree. 

25:19 
And so, you know, I think, I think you can be somebody who wants to go and look for things to be the expert, but you're not really being intellectually curious, right? Like you're, you know, and so approachability has to be part of true intellectual curiosity, I think. 

25:33 
Yeah, yeah. As we kind of wrap some of this stuff up, I'm curious, so you've been you guys have built basically a lot of the community stuff from the beginning. What's, what's one or two lessons that you would have did differently as a COO going into building out this massive community called RebGenius? 

25:53 
Yeah, another great question. I, I So a lot of what I would have done differently were things that I had to come in kind of fix going into it. So I wasn't there for the building of, but I literally within the first three months that I was the ZOO of Red Genius had to let go everybody save Jared, the founder. 

26:20 
So that's a lot of cleaning house. I mean, literally nobody in there still. And I mean, it was a variety of wrong people, wrong roles, as well as just things were that inherently broken. And so a lot of people are resistant to change. 

26:36 
And when you've got to change that much that quickly, you either lean in or you've got to get out of the way. The other big one was I did not get my arms around quickly enough. How tight things were relative to our primary business model versus relative to our appetite and ability to be able to go and look at trying net new business opportunities, revenue streams, whatever. 

27:03 
That was doubly so in a down market that was last year where our revenue fell off a fair bit. And so we made two or three bets last year that based off the data and the results and stuff like that were arguably not bad bets. 

27:20 
The product market fit was pretty strong. The demand was absolutely there. Our ability to be able to support those initiatives in the manner that they needed to be to be successful was absolutely not there. 

27:32 
And so we were sort of in a scenario we were halfway trying something that we needed to put full effort behind. But to do so would have been a all in bet where to try and actually go in and put everything that needed to be in there to support it. 

27:48 
If that had failed, then Red Genius may have not still been here. And so I failed to recognize that dynamic early enough. And so we had some struggles last year of attempts to bite stuff off at a time that we could not afford to try and bite it. 

28:07 
It's recognizing the mistakes, adapting to them and knowing that like, listen, mistakes aren't always bad bets, right? Like, you can make a good bet that turns out just to be wrong at the wrong time. 

28:22 
And that's okay. How do you recover from that? So you, you've learned very quickly. Yeah. Or, or you, or you die, or you die, or you die. Yeah. So, I mean, you know, case on point there was, hey. no more new initiatives or distractions for the foreseeable future until we've got things on a better footing financially. 

28:45 
We've got revenue that's back up to where it was or above. We've put some more padding and cushion in the bank. And we've got to be disciplined about this. And so it's going to be nothing but slapping of hands and nose until we get to that point and being very disciplined about that. 

29:02 
And that's arguably been my primary role in value to add since then. Chief hand slapper. I love it. Absolutely. All right, what do you say we do some rapid fire as we try to wrap up, I'm 30 minutes here, a ton of value. 

29:20 
Let's pick your brain a little bit. Jason, are you an early bird or a night owl? I am by nature a night owl, but after having kids, I'm more of an early bird than I would like to be. So short answer, I'm a not sleeper enough. 

29:37 
If you weren't in tech, what other job would you have? I would have what I tried to escape from the business world into, which is academia. I actually wound up in Knoxville for a doctorate in philosophy. 

29:53 
Very cool. Other than your mobile phone, what is the one tech product you cannot live without? And you have to say it that slow. Do my AirPods count as not my phone since they have to be connected to it? 

30:18 
Sure, cool, AirPods. What's the first? They're literally part of what's in my pocket on a day-to-day basis. How many of them have you put in the laundry? Ooh, one pair and they still aren't. Really? What's the first app you check when you wake up in the morning? 

30:38 
Uh, text messages, SMS. What is your favorite guilty pleasure snack? Guilty pleasure snack, ice cream. You and Dale. Last one wrapping this up. Dream vacation destination. My literal plan after my youngest goes off to college is to sell everything, buy a sailboat, and spend a few years sailing around the world. 

31:03 
So we'll call it that. Nice. Love that. Love that. Cool, man. Jason, thank you so much for joining the show. I'm assuming people can find you on LinkedIn, LinkedIn backslash in backslash. Uh, Jason, Hubbard Jason, I think. 

31:21 
There you go. Hubbard Jason. There we go. And go check out RevGenius, RevGenius.com. Thanks for joining me. Thanks, Jason. Guys, it's been great. Thanks, guys.