May 15, 2025 • 28 mins
“You either crush it and they don’t need you anymore, run out of leads, or just don’t get the results. Every cold email engagement has an expiration date.”
That was the reality for Noah Berk and his co-founder in 2016. Their business, built on cold outbound, worked at first. But behind the early wins was a model that couldn’t hold.
Highlights include: Cold Email: NOT a Long-term Sustainable Business Model (03:10), Doubling Down on HubSpot (08:18), Keeping the Lights On (12:08), And more…
Stay updated with our podcast and the latest insights in Outbound Sales and Go-to-Market Strategies!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Cool. Alright, you ready to roll? Let's do it. Alright. Welcome back to the Predictable Revenue Podcast. I'm your host, Colin Stewart. Today I'm joined by Noah Burke, the CO CEO of App to Duty eight, and we're gonna talk about product market fit from a services perspective Before we jump in, this episode is brought to you by Predictable Revenues Founder Coaching Services. Founders, let's be real. Scaling a company is hard. You're juggling product revenue and a million other decisions. But what if you had a proven framework and expert guidance to helpyou navigate the chaos? That's where our founder coaching service comes in. Whether you're trying to find your first customers or fine tuning your go-to-market strategy, we're here to help. Welcome to the Predictable Revenue Podcast, where sales leaders teach you what's working for them so you can build it yourself. And now Noah, I understand you started or the life of your first company or most recent company before you merged in cold email. And I'd love to hear the story. Sure. Noah Berk: So, me and my co-founder, we started initially the OBO group
(01:00):
which to give some context here recently merged with APP to date to HubSpot Elite Solution Partners. Obviously, I just fast forwarded eight years near history to explain where the merger came from. But prior to that, when we first got started back in 2016 me and my partner were looking for to do something cool and we said, Hey, what can we do? We wanna be business partners with each other. He's very an operat. Very much more on the sales side. And we knew sales and marketing was gonna be a big thing and we knew sales and marketing alignment was eventually gonna be a big thing. But obviouslyyou gotta generate revenue to create a business. And we said, what's the first thing we can do? And the time it was cold email marketing. And no one was really doing it that Yeah. Collin Stewar: With love. Noah Berk: Yeah. No one was really was really doing it at the time. And so we started off with essentially called email marketing. We had a sister company who was a digital marketing agency Hey, start on. And I think in the very first day we were sending out emails. We must've gone eight or nine positive responses to set up appointments out of like a hundred emails sent. We're like,
(02:00):
wow, this is amazing. This is gonna work so fantastic. And I did temporarily. I'll say the challenge is everyone wants it and there's a few things that end up happening. There is either a, you do such a good job. They don't need. You got them all the leads in the world they needed. B, you simply run outta leads to email or to reach out to in their demographic, or C you just didn't get them the results they looking for and don't wanna continue. There's always a expiration date oftentimes on theseengagements. A hundred percent. Collin Stewar: And then you started at a really interesting time in cold email because at that point in 2016, cold email still worked pretty well with some pretty basic stuff. And I think SPF was out, D Kim might have been out, but Dmar C hadn't come out yet. And between 2016 and 2018, as we saw and Google launched their TensorFlow anti-spam tools. And we saw reply rates just. Plummet. Oh yeah. And so that must've been like, oh, we're geniuses, we're kings of the world. And
then a year later, just the bottom's falling outta the business. Noah Berk (03:00):
Yeah very quickly we pivoted. Good job. And yeah, we were like, this is not a long-term sustainable business. Writing code, emails, setting up code, email platforms, sending out email. Listen, it's still business. I think you just probably, I get like at least a dozen emails a day saying, I wanna do your outbound email marketing. But at the time we were also getting into marketing automation systems and clients like marketing just. Do our content marketing or newsletter marketing set up for market automation, set up for newsletters. And so we started getting into market automation originally with a system called modic, which I'm not sure if you heard of, but it's an open source marketing automation system. It's still in existence to this day. Cool. And we're like, yeah, let's start with that. HubSpot was there. I'll get to that in a minute. That be set this for clients professional, not just. Of actually sending emails. Started using Modic. Then we learned pretty quickly there's,
when you deal with open source, it sometimes saw stuff on its own. So just sent a million emails that was never meant to be sent. No. Yeah, we had a few of those instances. Wow. A couple of those instances, a couple of times getting burned, you're like let's go look for the best platform on the market. And then ended up being HubSpot. And HubSpot was on this trajectory, so around became HubSpot partners. Started to grow from there and just switch what we were focused on. Collin Stewar (04:00):
I love it. So you started off on the, it's funny, we used to, so Aaron, my, my co-founder in the original entity that started as predictable revenue or the, I started a company, Aaron started a company we merged in 2014. Yeah. And Aaron and Brian from the founder of HubSpot are. Buddies or know each other and Brian. HubSpot's All inbound. Inbound. Inbound. Correct. And I remember one of the first sas, we were a sponsor and HubSpot was a sponsor. And obviously HubSpot was a much, much bigger sponsor, but Brian was walking by our booth all the time and he'd look at us and give us the finger and
smile and not in an actual be in a dick way, but just a funny you're the two opposite ideologies and it always just, yeah. That always tough me. Just what a funny, silly guy he was. Noah Berk (05:00):
Yeah. Yeah. He's great. The funny thing about it is what wasn't really ever talked about was how much outbound they were doing. So the whole concept was about inbound marketing, but their sales teams were all outbound marketing. Don't get me wrong, they were getting tons of leads coming in. It was a combination of both, but it was very much outbound motion. Even to this day, it's very much outbound. They call their conference inbound but they still do tremendous amount of outbound. They pretty much know everyone in the market at this point. So it's not like anyone's not familiar with who they're, but no. Brian. I. A Collin Stewar
like a big f you to outbound. And I'm like, guys, I could see in your LinkedIn you have a hundred BDRs, so what the hell is this page about? Noah Berk (06:00):
I get the whole, I get the whole concept. I get the outward, outward, vision versus probably what they were doing inside. So Totally. Yeah, so we ended up becoming HubSpot partners. And we were actually doing more than just HubSpot. We were doing, traditional marketing agency work as well. But very quickly realized we enjoyed being beyond the tech end of things. And Collin Stewar
(07:00):
creative with our copy. And those very first clients also ended up becoming our first market automation clients. Those were the companies who were hiring us to, Hey, we need our backend systems all set up. We need to organize it. And so very quickly we got into market automation. We also got into CRMs eventually service, because there was only so much professional services with HubSpot at the time. We also got pretty extensive into Salesforce because there was a lot more professional services associated with setting up Salesforce. There was setting up HubSpot at the time.HubSpot is, at that time, very simple to use. There's only so much you needed from a third party company and that's why there was a lot of marketing agencies who, to this day still work with HubSpot. 'cause back in the day, 2008 or 2018, 2019. 2020. It was still relatively in the simple end. It wasn't until they rolled out their CRM product sales hub did the product start really becoming more sophisticated, where you could actually build a professional service organization around HubSpot. And it still took years before you could generate the type of revenue as if you were a
Salesforce. Professional services shop. Totally. Collin Stewar (08:00):
So your first customers came from the, your own outbound efforts and kind of customers pulling you in. I'm curious, how did you and your co-founder deci decide, Hey, let's pivot from. We're doing all this cold email. It works. It's very sellable 'cause everybody wants it. But it's very hard to make companies successful in the long run with it. Just finding clients that are patient enough to invest for the long haul is challenging. Yeah. How did you validate the decision? Was it very clearly outbound sucks, inbound's cool, let's go? Or was it more nuanced than that? Noah Berk
(09:00):
What really excited us was the evolution of the technology supporting companies, marketing efforts. CRM efforts and understanding. Going back to our initial vision of sales and marketing alignment, we were starting to see companies actually need people come in and think through sales marketing alignment. Now, this was even before the terminology revs was. Rev ops didn't become a thing until later on when you think of sales, marketing, service, operations and really creating a full funnel loop. And so we were pretty early on, but what we alsostarted to realize is companies were, when we moved and pivoted more to being that backend operations team for our company, it was a much more sticky relationship as well. So it led to longer term relationships with our clients and they also felt there was more value associated with it, especially now 'cause you can use these systems to market to existing customers, help with upsell, cross sell promotions. And it also didn't feel spammy, just not to say what we were doing with spammy. Obviously you're allowed do cold outbound email marketing to B2B
businesses, but it felt very much more, it felt genuine, it felt better. Collin Stewar (10:00):
I hear you. So you made, you decided to make the call or you decided to make the pivot and into the. The lighter side of the of the sales and marketing world. And again, if you're listening I'm, and you don't understand the con or you're missing the context. I'm not cropping on outbound. I did it myself for, of course, a hundred years maybe 150 years. So, I am, I. The pot calling the kettle black, I think, or I don't know, whatever you wanna call it. I'm curious about where did your next customers come from, because it's one thing to be pulled into a particular direction, but that can be, you're pulling yourself out of this niche that you had established and you're going into this new. Area where now we're, we got no pipeline for this. We've had a few customers pull us in this direction. Was it simply, let's just change the focus of our change, the messaging and our outbound campaigns and everything worked marvelously? Noah Berk
(11:00):
customers via through referral. So we had this relationship with a sister company that was a marketing agency. They were sending us like, Hey, this company wants set Salesforce. Can you support them? We were getting some leads from our website as well, and we were getting some leads just from our own outbound efforts. But also at the time when we were making this pivot, we were also doing marketing agency stuff. We were doing some SELs and P pc. So even though a bulk of our revenue is coming from technology, at the time you just grab revenue from wherever revenue's coming from, so you keep the lights open. I know it's not the most thoughtfulstrategy. If I can go back, I'm like, Hey, pick a niche and focus on it and go all day at that. That's correct. Advice. Collin Stewar: It's honest. Noah Berk: Yeah. It's, yeah. Collin Stewar: It's what everybody Noah Berk: actually does. Yeah. It's exactly. It's like I need to keep the lights on. I will take this revenue. And that's really what we were doing for quite some time. I used to think it was impressive. We got one lead a a week, maybe three to four leads a month. Heck yeah. We're doing awesome right now. And it was a lot of just. Reaching out referrals. It was a lot of, I did some cold calling. I did my own email marketing. It was the
(12:00):
same stuff we were teaching clients how to do, we were doing ourselves. But what ended up happening as we started getting these clients, agency clients, different types of clients, we started to realize like what work we really liked doing and what work we're really good at. And it was really the technology side of things. Fast forwarding 2019, 2020. Now we're getting involved in Salesforce. We also became Monday dot com's, first partner in North America which you guys have all probably heard. Yeah. And I have a I have a separate company that we spun out of the OBO group calledOrange Dot. That's the completely company that does everything on its own at this point. It's fun to watch their success, but they became at the time we were doing HubSpot, we were doing Salesforce, we're doing money com. And we're just growing that way and part of the reason we were growing is because companies. Ipot End Monday. Salesforce End Monday. So, we actually started getting referrals coming to us because people started finding out about what we do. And they were looking for a technology consultancy who knew those platforms. And so we made a bet like, Hey, listen, we're gonna
(13:00):
pivot away from doing marketing related services and anything of that sort to just focus on technology. And then the other big revelation was about 2019, 2020, HubSpot rolled out their Sales hub product. At least it had been around, but. Was going in a bigger scale. And they were looking for partners who could. Essentially set it up. And so we're like, Hey, we can do that. And we became HubSpot's first advanced implementation certified partner. Cool in the world. So all of a sudden that put us on the map and all of a sudden we started getting leads from HubSpot. And HubSpot wasbringing us in to migrate people from Salesforce to HubSpot to integrate HubSpot with Salesforce, HubSpot with Monday. So all of a sudden our lead channel went from us trying to cold call and do outreach to reps, bringing us into deals and then people finding us on the HubSpot directory. And so that really led to a lot of our growth. Collin Stewar: That's fantastic there. There's nothing better than having a major partner bring you in and saying, these are the folks that can do this type of work. It's agreed. Noah Berk: Yeah. It's Collin Stewar: in the best kinda way. Noah Berk: Yeah.
(14:00):
So, so fast forward a couple more years, I think the challenge happens is that at the time we were doing HubSpot, salesforce and money.com and although it was a great strategy at first. You become, jack of all trades, master of not. Yeah. And it's too hard to be focused in three different verticals. And so that's when we decided to pull back from Salesforce, even though we saw Salesforce experience and shops at this business. Split out the money.com, practice that so separate company and then focus solely on HubSpot's, really niche on thatparticular market opportunity. Gotcha. Collin Stewar: And Noah Berk: it Collin Stewar: was great. What made HubSpot. What made HubSpot the answer for you? Noah Berk: We took a bet that as HubSpot continues to go up market, there's gonna be more and more professional services associated with the product. And we like the product a lot. So we're like, Hey, this is a really good product. It's competing more and more against Eloqua, more and more against Marketo and Service Cloud, especially with the rise of the HubSpot Sales Hub piece. We say there's
gonna be more opportunity here helping to figure out how to get this product to where it is. And we also realized being so early in the ecosystem. We're growing as the product's growing, so we know the intimate details of how the product works. Better than our competition. So immediately we say, okay, there's gonna be a moat that we're just building simply because we've been in this ecosystem so long that we're understanding the product better than how other companies understand the product. And then also it made it easy because HubSpot was sending us so much business. So Collin Stewar (15:00):
yeah, Monday's falling outta the sky. We just gotta build a bigger tarp to catch it. Noah Berk
especially if those opportunities are coming to us. Love it. Collin Stewar (16:00):
Yeah. And from a, how did you know, describe the moment you felt like we have product market fit. We're settled in, we're gonna do the same thing over and over again. Yeah. Yeah. What did that feel like? So it Noah Berk
(17:00):
clients different, what you put on your website is different, et cetera, et cetera. And we said let's just focus on the technical consultancy. You're gonna notice a trend here. We just kept getting rid of stuff. Yeah. First get rid of Mark Cold email, then get rid of marketing related services and technical, then get rid of Salesforce and, move on from Monday, spin that out, and then just focus HubSpot. Okay. And we just keep narrowing our focus to it was about 20 end of 2023, beginning of 2024. Then we said, okay, now we're just focused on HubSpot. As a practice. 'cause we see there's enough recurringrevenue. Clients are signing on for longer term contracts. You need someone who can actually help you manage and run your HubSpot instance. Which was a big wake up call. And also the project size were getting bigger, the clients were getting larger and we were also having the momentum of being one of HubSpot's elite partners. There's less than 1% of elite partners in the world. And we say, let's double down on where, what we're great at. And so I'd say the end of 20 23, 20 24. I know from 2016 to then we were running a profitable business, but it wasn't until then that all of a sudden we started scaling pretty
rapidly. Because now we knew we were a HubSpot shop. We position our website as a HubSpot shop. We position everything around us, HubSpot, all the information. Now all marketing is aligned, everyone in the organization, what do you need to work on in your free time? Work on HubSpot related, courses or work on this or work on that. So from our talent all the way to our sales and marketing, everything was aligned around being the best in the world at HubSpot. And then you fast forward to today and app to date is the number two HubSpot solutions partner in the world according to HubSpot. Collin Stewar (18:00):
Wow. That feels, that's gotta feel pretty good. It does. I wanna be number one though. That's what we're aiming for this year. Yeah. Whose legs do we need to break in order to get there? Oh, I know, Noah Berk
industry you enjoy working in. And also you gotta ask yourself, what can you be the best at? And then how do you maintain that? And especially as HubSpot's going up market enterprise, now you have to build new skill sets and new ways of delivering services that, again, continues to build a moat around what services you provide yourself. Collin Stewar (19:00):
I imagine there must have been hundreds, if not thousands of other HubSpot consultancies that were also doing work that also had smart founders that were willing to hustle and put the work in. What do you think it was that made HubSpot double down on you? Because I, I think if you trace the line like a lot being, as a services business. Making it, it being easy to find new revenue and to have great longevity and to have a support of somebody like HubSpot. These are rarities amongst services businesses. Yes. I imagine they had the pick of the litter. So, hands and ceo, EO was it knowledge of horticulture? What was it that made them choose you? Noah Berk
(20:00):
customers. We have. Our customer. We have our internal team and we have our partner HubSpot, and we treat HubSpot as such. So we treat HubSpot with a high level of service and we also focused on developing a co-selling methodology that enable them to win more business. So they're able to go back to reps, start talking to other reps. They start saying, wow, these guys are helping us win big business. They know what they're doing. We trust 'em. They develop, invest a lot into a co-selling motion. We'restructured unlike most other HubSpot solution partners at this day and age, both with our AEs, the solution architects, to our customer experience team, to our account managers. But the same thing in terms of how we deliver projects. We have project management, dedicated project management, technical project management, devs, ses we have consultants, we have delivery leads. So we have this rich mix of individuals who are able to not only help HubSpot sell and close more business, but also able to
help identify upsell opportunities in the back end. For HubSpot. So it was really focused on how can we sell better with HubSpot that enabled us to give us an edge in the marketplace. And when you say thousands, there's actually 7,000. Solution partners worldwide. So just a few. Collin Stewar (21:00):
Yeah, I think we actually signed up for one, 'cause Aaron knew all the folks in HubSpot and yeah, I feel like we signed up in 20 17, 20 18, and I remember being like, I don't love this work, so I'm not gonna double down on it. And like in hindsight it was probably, it would, it's obviously a great, it would've been a great motion for us because we had all these ins with HubSpot. But it comes back to was I the founder to build that? And absolutely not. 'cause I don't love HubSpot. I don't love the marketing side of things. I don't like that. They didn't like outbound. And there was just something about the way it worked that was better looking, but it rubbed me the wrong way. And it was probably because I started using Salesforce in thousand five and it was no, there was no actual, like right or wrong, it was just different from what I'm used to. And so
therefore equals bad. So not an intelligent decision, but more of it's just not what I'm accustomed to, Noah Berk (22:00):
but, and honestly, when you were looking at it back then, it wasn't anywhere. You couldn't involve a Salesforce at the time. No. You could maybe move your marketing cloud, at the baton par odd over the HubSpot because the HubSpot's main product was integrating HubSpot with Salesforce. But as a CRM, it wasn't able to do what a lot of companies want. Nowadays, it's a direct competitor to Salesforce. We work with incredibly large organizations. Thousands and thousands of seats are migrating from Salesforce to HubSpot 'cause it's that sophisticated and it's that capable now of a product. But when you were there I get it. Trust me, I pulled out my hair plenty of times trying to client say I wanted to do this. And it seemed like it was. Table stakes. The next thing you know, it's can't be done. Collin Stewar
(23:00):
It doesn't, like you can't do this. It seems so simple. Yeah, but I don't wanna get into Team Red or Team Blue versus Team Orange. Yeah, of course. Because I don't think there's any value in that conversation. They're both good. Depends on what color you like. Agreed. I wanna double click on your co-selling methodology. I think this is something that's so interesting. The majority of service companies I've talked to, the majority of startups I've talked to. Struggle to get any value out of a partnership relationship, myself included. I've had a number of partner callsand I've only had a very few of them that have actually produced any revenue for me. So tell me what you did differently. I. Noah Berk: Yeah, so I think you, so we also have, God, every day I get emails from someone who wants me to sell their app that's built on HubSpot. And so we have go to market partners, and then we have a referral partner relationship 99% of the time the referral partnership. So for example, if someone needs a calling system, we may recommend Kie. If someone needs a SMS, we'll reckon another solution. And they want to do go-to-market actions with us,
(24:00):
but it's not worth it. One, we don't generate enough revenue off of the software sales. Two, they're more of an add-on. There's no real differentiator. And then unlike HubSpot, which is our core product where we can actually make professional services fee, our bulk of our revenue comes from professional services. And so what attracted us to HubSpot wasn't necessarily the commission, although that's great. It's the amount of professional services dollars that we can generate on these engagements. And so when we were looking at the co-selling motion, and maybe that's really mysales background, as I said, Hey, listen, we need to put a lot of effort towards selling better. With HubSpot, and if you're gonna help them sell bigger, larger deals, you need the technical expertise at the front of the sales process to help assist in closing these deals. And that means you need to be polished, not just in terms of how you scope and how you put together proposals, but also. How you can build a narrative for why HubSpot's gonna help the client achieve whatever dream they wanna achieve. So we just put a lot of effort into how do we better sell with them to get
(25:00):
wins. So we really developed an entire methodology from, okay, yeah, lead comes in, how do we communicate about it? What are all the steps? It was clearly defined for their sales reps. This is what's supposed to happen. A here's what we're what charge. So everyone on. We put systems in place for easy communication, easy feedback loops for what's going on. So I think there's very, like if you're a HubSpot partner, a Salesforce partner, a Workday partner, a ServiceNow partner, like those are true like solution partners versus a lot of appsout there Hey, let's be partners together. But it's certainly not worth the go to market effort. It's gonna require to be an effective partner. You're better off just saying, I'm happy to send you a lead if I get it. Versus building your business off of that because one, there's not a pro serve revenue to support your business. And two, it's more of an add-on versus a standalone application. Now, we originally thought that about monday.com. We thought monday.com was just gonna be like an app partner that we just refer to, not realizing,
oh my god, there is a lot of work to do on a monday.com. There's a lot of professional services. So I think I talk about. Oh, HubSpot. I think in North America there's 3000 partners. But in comparison there's 40 in the money.com ecosystem, so a lot less competition as well. Collin Stewar (26:00):
That's great. Yeah. I think there's one, one of the biggest ones is here in Vancouver, in North Vancouver. Noah Berk
(27:00):
eight. Combined, we are the largest pure play technical consultancy in the ecosystem now. And our goal is very, quite simple to become. Number one in the entire ecosystem. Right now we're number two. So it helps to be, to say we're gonna become number one here. But for us as an organization, it means traveling where hotspots going, hotspot, continue. Go to enterprise. So that means we're improve our methodology for how we deliver work. How we expand upon our work. Obviously AI is the buzzword of the day but it's probably more than just, probably it's more thanjust a buzzword, but also how do we incorporate AI into both our internal, how we get work done, as well as the services we provide to clients externally. So one of the things we constantly talk about seeing at the bleeding edge we always have to push the boundaries of what the technology is capable of doing. Our job is to recruit and hire the best talent to workit. So it's creating a world-class culture that everyone wants to come work at. Creating an environment that everyone's man, I get to do the most fun work possible. I get to be at the leading edge of this
Cool. Alright, you ready to roll? Let's do it. Alright. Welcome back to the Predictable Revenue Podcast. I'm your host, Colin Stewart. Today I'm joined by Noah Burke, the CO CEO of App to Duty eight, and we're gonna talk about product market fit from a services perspective Before we jump in, this episode is brought to you by Predictable Revenues Founder Coaching Services. Founders, let's be real. Scaling a company is hard. You're juggling product revenue and a million other decisions. But what if you had a proven framework and expert guidance to helpyou navigate the chaos? That's where our founder coaching service comes in. Whether you're trying to find your first customers or fine tuning your go-to-market strategy, we're here to help. Welcome to the Predictable Revenue Podcast, where sales leaders teach you what's working for them so you can build it yourself. And now Noah, I understand you started or the life of your first company or most recent company before you merged in cold email. And I'd love to hear the story. Sure. Noah Berk: So, me and my co-founder, we started initially the OBO group
(01:00):
which to give some context here recently merged with APP to date to HubSpot Elite Solution Partners. Obviously, I just fast forwarded eight years near history to explain where the merger came from. But prior to that, when we first got started back in 2016 me and my partner were looking for to do something cool and we said, Hey, what can we do? We wanna be business partners with each other. He's very an operat. Very much more on the sales side. And we knew sales and marketing was gonna be a big thing and we knew sales and marketing alignment was eventually gonna be a big thing. But obviouslyyou gotta generate revenue to create a business. And we said, what's the first thing we can do? And the time it was cold email marketing. And no one was really doing it that Yeah. Collin Stewar: With love. Noah Berk: Yeah. No one was really was really doing it at the time. And so we started off with essentially called email marketing. We had a sister company who was a digital marketing agency Hey, start on. And I think in the very first day we were sending out emails. We must've gone eight or nine positive responses to set up appointments out of like a hundred emails sent. We're like,
(02:00):
wow, this is amazing. This is gonna work so fantastic. And I did temporarily. I'll say the challenge is everyone wants it and there's a few things that end up happening. There is either a, you do such a good job. They don't need. You got them all the leads in the world they needed. B, you simply run outta leads to email or to reach out to in their demographic, or C you just didn't get them the results they looking for and don't wanna continue. There's always a expiration date oftentimes on theseengagements. A hundred percent. Collin Stewar: And then you started at a really interesting time in cold email because at that point in 2016, cold email still worked pretty well with some pretty basic stuff. And I think SPF was out, D Kim might have been out, but Dmar C hadn't come out yet. And between 2016 and 2018, as we saw and Google launched their TensorFlow anti-spam tools. And we saw reply rates just. Plummet. Oh yeah. And so that must've been like, oh, we're geniuses, we're kings of the world. And
then a year later, just the bottom's falling outta the business. Noah Berk (03:00):
Yeah very quickly we pivoted. Good job. And yeah, we were like, this is not a long-term sustainable business. Writing code, emails, setting up code, email platforms, sending out email. Listen, it's still business. I think you just probably, I get like at least a dozen emails a day saying, I wanna do your outbound email marketing. But at the time we were also getting into marketing automation systems and clients like marketing just. Do our content marketing or newsletter marketing set up for market automation, set up for newsletters. And so we started getting into market automation originally with a system called modic, which I'm not sure if you heard of, but it's an open source marketing automation system. It's still in existence to this day. Cool. And we're like, yeah, let's start with that. HubSpot was there. I'll get to that in a minute. That be set this for clients professional, not just. Of actually sending emails. Started using Modic. Then we learned pretty quickly there's,
when you deal with open source, it sometimes saw stuff on its own. So just sent a million emails that was never meant to be sent. No. Yeah, we had a few of those instances. Wow. A couple of those instances, a couple of times getting burned, you're like let's go look for the best platform on the market. And then ended up being HubSpot. And HubSpot was on this trajectory, so around became HubSpot partners. Started to grow from there and just switch what we were focused on. Collin Stewar (04:00):
I love it. So you started off on the, it's funny, we used to, so Aaron, my, my co-founder in the original entity that started as predictable revenue or the, I started a company, Aaron started a company we merged in 2014. Yeah. And Aaron and Brian from the founder of HubSpot are. Buddies or know each other and Brian. HubSpot's All inbound. Inbound. Inbound. Correct. And I remember one of the first sas, we were a sponsor and HubSpot was a sponsor. And obviously HubSpot was a much, much bigger sponsor, but Brian was walking by our booth all the time and he'd look at us and give us the finger and
smile and not in an actual be in a dick way, but just a funny you're the two opposite ideologies and it always just, yeah. That always tough me. Just what a funny, silly guy he was. Noah Berk (05:00):
Yeah. Yeah. He's great. The funny thing about it is what wasn't really ever talked about was how much outbound they were doing. So the whole concept was about inbound marketing, but their sales teams were all outbound marketing. Don't get me wrong, they were getting tons of leads coming in. It was a combination of both, but it was very much outbound motion. Even to this day, it's very much outbound. They call their conference inbound but they still do tremendous amount of outbound. They pretty much know everyone in the market at this point. So it's not like anyone's not familiar with who they're, but no. Brian. I. A Collin Stewar
like a big f you to outbound. And I'm like, guys, I could see in your LinkedIn you have a hundred BDRs, so what the hell is this page about? Noah Berk (06:00):
I get the whole, I get the whole concept. I get the outward, outward, vision versus probably what they were doing inside. So Totally. Yeah, so we ended up becoming HubSpot partners. And we were actually doing more than just HubSpot. We were doing, traditional marketing agency work as well. But very quickly realized we enjoyed being beyond the tech end of things. And Collin Stewar
(07:00):
creative with our copy. And those very first clients also ended up becoming our first market automation clients. Those were the companies who were hiring us to, Hey, we need our backend systems all set up. We need to organize it. And so very quickly we got into market automation. We also got into CRMs eventually service, because there was only so much professional services with HubSpot at the time. We also got pretty extensive into Salesforce because there was a lot more professional services associated with setting up Salesforce. There was setting up HubSpot at the time.HubSpot is, at that time, very simple to use. There's only so much you needed from a third party company and that's why there was a lot of marketing agencies who, to this day still work with HubSpot. 'cause back in the day, 2008 or 2018, 2019. 2020. It was still relatively in the simple end. It wasn't until they rolled out their CRM product sales hub did the product start really becoming more sophisticated, where you could actually build a professional service organization around HubSpot. And it still took years before you could generate the type of revenue as if you were a
Salesforce. Professional services shop. Totally. Collin Stewar (08:00):
So your first customers came from the, your own outbound efforts and kind of customers pulling you in. I'm curious, how did you and your co-founder deci decide, Hey, let's pivot from. We're doing all this cold email. It works. It's very sellable 'cause everybody wants it. But it's very hard to make companies successful in the long run with it. Just finding clients that are patient enough to invest for the long haul is challenging. Yeah. How did you validate the decision? Was it very clearly outbound sucks, inbound's cool, let's go? Or was it more nuanced than that? Noah Berk
(09:00):
What really excited us was the evolution of the technology supporting companies, marketing efforts. CRM efforts and understanding. Going back to our initial vision of sales and marketing alignment, we were starting to see companies actually need people come in and think through sales marketing alignment. Now, this was even before the terminology revs was. Rev ops didn't become a thing until later on when you think of sales, marketing, service, operations and really creating a full funnel loop. And so we were pretty early on, but what we alsostarted to realize is companies were, when we moved and pivoted more to being that backend operations team for our company, it was a much more sticky relationship as well. So it led to longer term relationships with our clients and they also felt there was more value associated with it, especially now 'cause you can use these systems to market to existing customers, help with upsell, cross sell promotions. And it also didn't feel spammy, just not to say what we were doing with spammy. Obviously you're allowed do cold outbound email marketing to B2B
businesses, but it felt very much more, it felt genuine, it felt better. Collin Stewar (10:00):
I hear you. So you made, you decided to make the call or you decided to make the pivot and into the. The lighter side of the of the sales and marketing world. And again, if you're listening I'm, and you don't understand the con or you're missing the context. I'm not cropping on outbound. I did it myself for, of course, a hundred years maybe 150 years. So, I am, I. The pot calling the kettle black, I think, or I don't know, whatever you wanna call it. I'm curious about where did your next customers come from, because it's one thing to be pulled into a particular direction, but that can be, you're pulling yourself out of this niche that you had established and you're going into this new. Area where now we're, we got no pipeline for this. We've had a few customers pull us in this direction. Was it simply, let's just change the focus of our change, the messaging and our outbound campaigns and everything worked marvelously? Noah Berk
(11:00):
customers via through referral. So we had this relationship with a sister company that was a marketing agency. They were sending us like, Hey, this company wants set Salesforce. Can you support them? We were getting some leads from our website as well, and we were getting some leads just from our own outbound efforts. But also at the time when we were making this pivot, we were also doing marketing agency stuff. We were doing some SELs and P pc. So even though a bulk of our revenue is coming from technology, at the time you just grab revenue from wherever revenue's coming from, so you keep the lights open. I know it's not the most thoughtfulstrategy. If I can go back, I'm like, Hey, pick a niche and focus on it and go all day at that. That's correct. Advice. Collin Stewar: It's honest. Noah Berk: Yeah. It's, yeah. Collin Stewar: It's what everybody Noah Berk: actually does. Yeah. It's exactly. It's like I need to keep the lights on. I will take this revenue. And that's really what we were doing for quite some time. I used to think it was impressive. We got one lead a a week, maybe three to four leads a month. Heck yeah. We're doing awesome right now. And it was a lot of just. Reaching out referrals. It was a lot of, I did some cold calling. I did my own email marketing. It was the
(12:00):
same stuff we were teaching clients how to do, we were doing ourselves. But what ended up happening as we started getting these clients, agency clients, different types of clients, we started to realize like what work we really liked doing and what work we're really good at. And it was really the technology side of things. Fast forwarding 2019, 2020. Now we're getting involved in Salesforce. We also became Monday dot com's, first partner in North America which you guys have all probably heard. Yeah. And I have a I have a separate company that we spun out of the OBO group calledOrange Dot. That's the completely company that does everything on its own at this point. It's fun to watch their success, but they became at the time we were doing HubSpot, we were doing Salesforce, we're doing money com. And we're just growing that way and part of the reason we were growing is because companies. Ipot End Monday. Salesforce End Monday. So, we actually started getting referrals coming to us because people started finding out about what we do. And they were looking for a technology consultancy who knew those platforms. And so we made a bet like, Hey, listen, we're gonna
(13:00):
pivot away from doing marketing related services and anything of that sort to just focus on technology. And then the other big revelation was about 2019, 2020, HubSpot rolled out their Sales hub product. At least it had been around, but. Was going in a bigger scale. And they were looking for partners who could. Essentially set it up. And so we're like, Hey, we can do that. And we became HubSpot's first advanced implementation certified partner. Cool in the world. So all of a sudden that put us on the map and all of a sudden we started getting leads from HubSpot. And HubSpot wasbringing us in to migrate people from Salesforce to HubSpot to integrate HubSpot with Salesforce, HubSpot with Monday. So all of a sudden our lead channel went from us trying to cold call and do outreach to reps, bringing us into deals and then people finding us on the HubSpot directory. And so that really led to a lot of our growth. Collin Stewar: That's fantastic there. There's nothing better than having a major partner bring you in and saying, these are the folks that can do this type of work. It's agreed. Noah Berk: Yeah. It's Collin Stewar: in the best kinda way. Noah Berk: Yeah.
(14:00):
So, so fast forward a couple more years, I think the challenge happens is that at the time we were doing HubSpot, salesforce and money.com and although it was a great strategy at first. You become, jack of all trades, master of not. Yeah. And it's too hard to be focused in three different verticals. And so that's when we decided to pull back from Salesforce, even though we saw Salesforce experience and shops at this business. Split out the money.com, practice that so separate company and then focus solely on HubSpot's, really niche on thatparticular market opportunity. Gotcha. Collin Stewar: And Noah Berk: it Collin Stewar: was great. What made HubSpot. What made HubSpot the answer for you? Noah Berk: We took a bet that as HubSpot continues to go up market, there's gonna be more and more professional services associated with the product. And we like the product a lot. So we're like, Hey, this is a really good product. It's competing more and more against Eloqua, more and more against Marketo and Service Cloud, especially with the rise of the HubSpot Sales Hub piece. We say there's
gonna be more opportunity here helping to figure out how to get this product to where it is. And we also realized being so early in the ecosystem. We're growing as the product's growing, so we know the intimate details of how the product works. Better than our competition. So immediately we say, okay, there's gonna be a moat that we're just building simply because we've been in this ecosystem so long that we're understanding the product better than how other companies understand the product. And then also it made it easy because HubSpot was sending us so much business. So Collin Stewar (15:00):
yeah, Monday's falling outta the sky. We just gotta build a bigger tarp to catch it. Noah Berk
especially if those opportunities are coming to us. Love it. Collin Stewar (16:00):
Yeah. And from a, how did you know, describe the moment you felt like we have product market fit. We're settled in, we're gonna do the same thing over and over again. Yeah. Yeah. What did that feel like? So it Noah Berk
(17:00):
clients different, what you put on your website is different, et cetera, et cetera. And we said let's just focus on the technical consultancy. You're gonna notice a trend here. We just kept getting rid of stuff. Yeah. First get rid of Mark Cold email, then get rid of marketing related services and technical, then get rid of Salesforce and, move on from Monday, spin that out, and then just focus HubSpot. Okay. And we just keep narrowing our focus to it was about 20 end of 2023, beginning of 2024. Then we said, okay, now we're just focused on HubSpot. As a practice. 'cause we see there's enough recurringrevenue. Clients are signing on for longer term contracts. You need someone who can actually help you manage and run your HubSpot instance. Which was a big wake up call. And also the project size were getting bigger, the clients were getting larger and we were also having the momentum of being one of HubSpot's elite partners. There's less than 1% of elite partners in the world. And we say, let's double down on where, what we're great at. And so I'd say the end of 20 23, 20 24. I know from 2016 to then we were running a profitable business, but it wasn't until then that all of a sudden we started scaling pretty
rapidly. Because now we knew we were a HubSpot shop. We position our website as a HubSpot shop. We position everything around us, HubSpot, all the information. Now all marketing is aligned, everyone in the organization, what do you need to work on in your free time? Work on HubSpot related, courses or work on this or work on that. So from our talent all the way to our sales and marketing, everything was aligned around being the best in the world at HubSpot. And then you fast forward to today and app to date is the number two HubSpot solutions partner in the world according to HubSpot. Collin Stewar (18:00):
Wow. That feels, that's gotta feel pretty good. It does. I wanna be number one though. That's what we're aiming for this year. Yeah. Whose legs do we need to break in order to get there? Oh, I know, Noah Berk
industry you enjoy working in. And also you gotta ask yourself, what can you be the best at? And then how do you maintain that? And especially as HubSpot's going up market enterprise, now you have to build new skill sets and new ways of delivering services that, again, continues to build a moat around what services you provide yourself. Collin Stewar (19:00):
I imagine there must have been hundreds, if not thousands of other HubSpot consultancies that were also doing work that also had smart founders that were willing to hustle and put the work in. What do you think it was that made HubSpot double down on you? Because I, I think if you trace the line like a lot being, as a services business. Making it, it being easy to find new revenue and to have great longevity and to have a support of somebody like HubSpot. These are rarities amongst services businesses. Yes. I imagine they had the pick of the litter. So, hands and ceo, EO was it knowledge of horticulture? What was it that made them choose you? Noah Berk
(20:00):
customers. We have. Our customer. We have our internal team and we have our partner HubSpot, and we treat HubSpot as such. So we treat HubSpot with a high level of service and we also focused on developing a co-selling methodology that enable them to win more business. So they're able to go back to reps, start talking to other reps. They start saying, wow, these guys are helping us win big business. They know what they're doing. We trust 'em. They develop, invest a lot into a co-selling motion. We'restructured unlike most other HubSpot solution partners at this day and age, both with our AEs, the solution architects, to our customer experience team, to our account managers. But the same thing in terms of how we deliver projects. We have project management, dedicated project management, technical project management, devs, ses we have consultants, we have delivery leads. So we have this rich mix of individuals who are able to not only help HubSpot sell and close more business, but also able to
help identify upsell opportunities in the back end. For HubSpot. So it was really focused on how can we sell better with HubSpot that enabled us to give us an edge in the marketplace. And when you say thousands, there's actually 7,000. Solution partners worldwide. So just a few. Collin Stewar (21:00):
Yeah, I think we actually signed up for one, 'cause Aaron knew all the folks in HubSpot and yeah, I feel like we signed up in 20 17, 20 18, and I remember being like, I don't love this work, so I'm not gonna double down on it. And like in hindsight it was probably, it would, it's obviously a great, it would've been a great motion for us because we had all these ins with HubSpot. But it comes back to was I the founder to build that? And absolutely not. 'cause I don't love HubSpot. I don't love the marketing side of things. I don't like that. They didn't like outbound. And there was just something about the way it worked that was better looking, but it rubbed me the wrong way. And it was probably because I started using Salesforce in thousand five and it was no, there was no actual, like right or wrong, it was just different from what I'm used to. And so
therefore equals bad. So not an intelligent decision, but more of it's just not what I'm accustomed to, Noah Berk (22:00):
but, and honestly, when you were looking at it back then, it wasn't anywhere. You couldn't involve a Salesforce at the time. No. You could maybe move your marketing cloud, at the baton par odd over the HubSpot because the HubSpot's main product was integrating HubSpot with Salesforce. But as a CRM, it wasn't able to do what a lot of companies want. Nowadays, it's a direct competitor to Salesforce. We work with incredibly large organizations. Thousands and thousands of seats are migrating from Salesforce to HubSpot 'cause it's that sophisticated and it's that capable now of a product. But when you were there I get it. Trust me, I pulled out my hair plenty of times trying to client say I wanted to do this. And it seemed like it was. Table stakes. The next thing you know, it's can't be done. Collin Stewar
(23:00):
It doesn't, like you can't do this. It seems so simple. Yeah, but I don't wanna get into Team Red or Team Blue versus Team Orange. Yeah, of course. Because I don't think there's any value in that conversation. They're both good. Depends on what color you like. Agreed. I wanna double click on your co-selling methodology. I think this is something that's so interesting. The majority of service companies I've talked to, the majority of startups I've talked to. Struggle to get any value out of a partnership relationship, myself included. I've had a number of partner callsand I've only had a very few of them that have actually produced any revenue for me. So tell me what you did differently. I. Noah Berk: Yeah, so I think you, so we also have, God, every day I get emails from someone who wants me to sell their app that's built on HubSpot. And so we have go to market partners, and then we have a referral partner relationship 99% of the time the referral partnership. So for example, if someone needs a calling system, we may recommend Kie. If someone needs a SMS, we'll reckon another solution. And they want to do go-to-market actions with us,
(24:00):
but it's not worth it. One, we don't generate enough revenue off of the software sales. Two, they're more of an add-on. There's no real differentiator. And then unlike HubSpot, which is our core product where we can actually make professional services fee, our bulk of our revenue comes from professional services. And so what attracted us to HubSpot wasn't necessarily the commission, although that's great. It's the amount of professional services dollars that we can generate on these engagements. And so when we were looking at the co-selling motion, and maybe that's really mysales background, as I said, Hey, listen, we need to put a lot of effort towards selling better. With HubSpot, and if you're gonna help them sell bigger, larger deals, you need the technical expertise at the front of the sales process to help assist in closing these deals. And that means you need to be polished, not just in terms of how you scope and how you put together proposals, but also. How you can build a narrative for why HubSpot's gonna help the client achieve whatever dream they wanna achieve. So we just put a lot of effort into how do we better sell with them to get
(25:00):
wins. So we really developed an entire methodology from, okay, yeah, lead comes in, how do we communicate about it? What are all the steps? It was clearly defined for their sales reps. This is what's supposed to happen. A here's what we're what charge. So everyone on. We put systems in place for easy communication, easy feedback loops for what's going on. So I think there's very, like if you're a HubSpot partner, a Salesforce partner, a Workday partner, a ServiceNow partner, like those are true like solution partners versus a lot of appsout there Hey, let's be partners together. But it's certainly not worth the go to market effort. It's gonna require to be an effective partner. You're better off just saying, I'm happy to send you a lead if I get it. Versus building your business off of that because one, there's not a pro serve revenue to support your business. And two, it's more of an add-on versus a standalone application. Now, we originally thought that about monday.com. We thought monday.com was just gonna be like an app partner that we just refer to, not realizing,
oh my god, there is a lot of work to do on a monday.com. There's a lot of professional services. So I think I talk about. Oh, HubSpot. I think in North America there's 3000 partners. But in comparison there's 40 in the money.com ecosystem, so a lot less competition as well. Collin Stewar (26:00):
That's great. Yeah. I think there's one, one of the biggest ones is here in Vancouver, in North Vancouver. Noah Berk
(27:00):
eight. Combined, we are the largest pure play technical consultancy in the ecosystem now. And our goal is very, quite simple to become. Number one in the entire ecosystem. Right now we're number two. So it helps to be, to say we're gonna become number one here. But for us as an organization, it means traveling where hotspots going, hotspot, continue. Go to enterprise. So that means we're improve our methodology for how we deliver work. How we expand upon our work. Obviously AI is the buzzword of the day but it's probably more than just, probably it's more thanjust a buzzword, but also how do we incorporate AI into both our internal, how we get work done, as well as the services we provide to clients externally. So one of the things we constantly talk about seeing at the bleeding edge we always have to push the boundaries of what the technology is capable of doing. Our job is to recruit and hire the best talent to workit. So it's creating a world-class culture that everyone wants to come work at. Creating an environment that everyone's man, I get to do the most fun work possible. I get to be at the leading edge of this
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