Ep. 184 – The Hustle Marketing Director, Scott Nixon

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Our guest today is the Marketing Director of The Hustle, Scott Nixon. 

The Hustle was acquired by HubSpot in 2021. Before the acquisition, Scott served as Head of Product and Growth, where he grew the daily email newsletter 50% Y/Y to 1.5m+ readers — and premium subscription 500% Y/Y to 10k+ paid subscribers. 

Prior, he developed the premium subscription for TechCrunch, led user acquisition at Surfline, and established the internal media buying department at Propel Media. He enjoys building products that people love and developing full funnel marketing strategies. 

In This Conversation We Discuss:

• Why Scott made the decision to leave TechCrunch for The Hustle
• Modern growth secrets to scaling a business 
• The Hustle’s approach to press coverage 
• What made the trends community on Facebook so engaging 
• Scott’s reaction to The Hustle’s acquisition and how he managed the process

Resources:

Connect with Scott Nixon: LinkedIn 

The Hustle – https://thehustle.co

Connect with Cameron: Website | LinkedIn

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Our guest is the Marketing Director of The Hustle, Scott Nixon. The Hustle was acquired by HubSpot in 2021. Before the acquisition, Scott served as the Head of Product and Growth where he grew the daily email newsletter by 50% year over year to 1.5 million readers, and the premium subscription by 500% year over year to 10,000-plus paid subscribers. Prior to this, he developed a premium subscription for TechCrunch, led user acquisition at Surfline, and established an internal media buying department at Propel Media. He enjoys building products that people love and developing full-funnel marketing strategies. Scott, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

You got a pretty interesting career. First off, I’m interested when I was reading your bio earlier, why would you have leaped from such a strong business like TechCrunch to a smaller, very entrepreneurial, and probably reasonably unknown at the time, The Hustle? What made the jump?

I’ve always been attracted to the high-risk and high-reward opportunities in my career. That started after my role with Surfline. I was a part of an early-stage startup where we raised $1 million and spent a year bringing that product to life. It’s still live but didn’t quite get to the level we hoped. I was looking for that next chance. I was looking for the next opportunity to dive in, lean into my natural experiences, and see how it would work.

When Sam reached out, the timing was quite perfect. I enjoyed my time at TechCrunch, to be quite honest. It was a difficult decision, but the product had gotten to a point where it was up to the writers and editorial staff to bring it to that next level. From a product and growth perspective, I was in a good position. Those conversations with Sam ended with a 32-ounce steak. The two of us were geeking out over some conversion rate statistics that he had put together for his premium product and testing different price points. It got my early-stage blood boiling.

The 32-ounce Tomahawk will pique anybody’s interest. It also drags on the dinner nicely. I was at a friend’s place, a former client of mine in Montreal, dropping my son off at university, and he cooked up five Tomahawk steaks for the guests. I was like, “This is obscene and beautiful at the same time.” How did you meet Sam? Where did you guys connect?

It was a cold outreach on his side. If you don’t know, Sam has a history of being a cold email expert. We sold a course to generate extra revenue prior to the acquisition by HubSpot. He has led courses. It’s one of his areas of expertise. A cool way to have that introduction be made was by cold outreach. It was not necessarily from my end to his but vice versa, which was pretty flattering, to be quite honest.

What was the cold outreach that intrigued you then? Was it that entrepreneurial environment? You hadn’t yet had dinner. You hadn’t yet talked to him. What was it that made you say, “Sure, let’s at least try it?”

I was a subscriber of The Hustle. I was following closely when I found myself as a performance marketing background and subscription marketing background individual entering into the media space. I found myself subscribed to The Hustle amongst others. I hit reply on this email that said, “Get excited about launching something soon. Here’s where you can sign up.”

I clicked and followed, went to a landing page, and signed up for this beta product. It’s a little product that was called Trends. It was looking for market validation. I hit reply and said, “This is cool. By the way, you have a typo in your header so you might want to fix that.” Anyways, it was a cool introduction because I had some context and he replied to me and said, “Thanks for the feedback.”

I don’t think he ever fixed that typo but that was that. Maybe that was it. I wanted to point out that typo. We sat down and I went and met up with him in the office. We clicked. Feeling his excitement as a founder, I get energized by that. For me, it’s like, “How do I take this? How do I package it up and how do I push it down into making it into a great culture and encourage people?” It led from one thing to the next, but being a subscriber was the catalyst.

How many employees were at TechCrunch?

I would say around 30 to 40 in total. With contributors, we’re probably closer to 75 to 100. That’s my guess. We have a pretty small staff in the office.

It’s way leaner than I would have anticipated it to be.

There were about ten sales and operations folks. We had 4 to 5 folks on the growth and audience development side. We had 3 to 5 engineers, including the Head of Product, and then most of the writers were offsite, so it’s hard to quantify just because of that. We did have folks that would come in, but it’s pretty lean. You’d be surprised. A lot of the contributors play a big role in building up this brand personality and making it feel big.

The Hustle: The contributors play a big role in building this brand personality and making it feel big.

Were there lessons you pulled from that?

Yes. It was fascinating. Within the first six weeks, I learned that the Head of Product was going to be heading off to her next project in her career. I found myself sitting in a room with our Director of Subscriptions, lead engineer, and two other engineers. We looked at each other and said, “Who needs to step up where?” That was a unique way to kick off everything. In addition to developing the go-to-market strategy for this premium product, I was also finding myself instrumental in the way that we were going to implement the software we were going to use, and how we were going to implement it into the website.

Was Michael Arrington still involved in TechCrunch?

He still does some guest takes on Disrupt and things like that. I don’t think he’s been around for a couple of years. What I learned most about his impact was I found his last blog post that said, “We’re selling to AOL.” The comments were all in there. The last piece that I read in there that I remember he was saying was, “This isn’t my blog. It’s your blog. Continue to provide good feedback, comment, and let us know what you want to hear, and help guide the direction of this brand and this product and our editorial direction.” They’ve done a good job of doing that. That’s something that his spirit lives on in that regard.

My question there was going to be the cult of leadership that you left one organization where there was that company. Michael wasn’t still there, but then in flipping over, The Hustle is a small company though. How many employees were there when you got into it?

We had around 20 to 25. We had already established a sales team in Austin, Texas. The Hustle was fairly mature when I came on board. However, it lacked leadership in a team that supported product and growth functions. That was the core area that I came in to help build up and lead. We were 2 out of 3 portions. We had healthy business operations and advertising revenue. The area that we lacked was around the growth projections and how we start to build a diversified marketing plan. To a large degree, it was a bit of a blank canvas in that sense.

Do you remember what it was like going in for your first 90 days? What was it you focused on when you first got there?

Sam Parr was running point on growth when I started. When I came in, the first thing I did was build trust by taking those channels off his plate, manning those myself, and grabbing the steering wheel on those. The secondary was I spent a lot of time looking at the trajectory of our advertising on Facebook. The costs inflating and things like that were a bit of a red flag for me. Those first 30 days were key in terms of shadowing folks and understanding how we got to where we were at. Most importantly, from a growth perspective, in order to give accurate forecasts to our ad sales team so they can go and sell, it required a deep dive into how we build a more diversified media plan.

Giving accurate forecasts to our ad sales team required a deep dive into how to build a more diversified media plan.

Sixty days was going, “I need overhead. I’m going to need some headcount on this. Here’s the team structure that I see working well.” Ninety days was the first hire and also revitalizing our internship program. It was cool to get help from talented folks. When you’re in the Bay Area, people are obsessed with The Hustle. That was a cool way to get some more excitement into the office, getting some fresh ideas, but also providing some mentorship in return.

If you were to give us some of the secrets to the growth success that you guys had or that you led then for The Hustle, what would they have been? What would you steer people away from? What are we still attached to that maybe we should let go of that used to work that doesn’t anymore?

One of the big areas around is knowing when to activate a paid acquisition strategy. That’s the first thing. I feel that when most startups get that first big check, the first thing they want to do is activate paid acquisition. In reality, the question is, is there an organic side to things? In hindsight, the candid answer is we could have done a better job of prioritizing our organic inbound traffic to try to scale that up. The easy lever is always going to be paid acquisition.

One of the things I would’ve done differently a little bit was to put in more resources, challenge our senior leadership team, think about that from a growth perspective, and balance those things out. You can spend money and if it’s backing out effectively and you know you’re doing it correctly, that’s great. At the same time too, if you’re lacking a strategy around organic inbound, you’re missing some low-hanging fruit.

What specific tactical things would you have done then to drive more of the organic inbound?

Eventually, we did put some effort behind it. When I talk about low-hanging fruit, it’s stimulus. We tasked our second growth intern who came on board. Our site is built on WordPress. It’s super straightforward. There are a million plug-ins out there. We plugged in Yoast SEO. We worked on that, and we set a priority to go through our top 300 to 500 stories and optimize those stories.

What’s awesome is that it provides a straightforward recommendation on how to optimize those stories, from your title to internal site linking, keywords, and adding those keywords in there. Those were some easy strategies that that plugin provides to you. It’s so easy that we could have an intern navigate that for us. That allowed our full-time resources to focus more on the paid acquisition because when you have cash on the line, you want to make sure that’s being spent effectively.

When you have cash on the line, you want to ensure it’s being spent effectively.

Did you leverage press coverage at all? One of the things I’ve always tried to do to drive SEO is more press coverage. Did you guys go after the press or did that happen more organically? Was it proactive or did it just happen for you?

It was proactive. Our former president had a bit of a network in the Austin area. We tapped into that. What we tried to do was try to have Sam focus his effort on getting on a lot of podcasts and YouTube channels, and doing written interviews that can be posted. Those were ways that we were able to leverage that CEO and that excitement around what we’re building, and then take it and put it in different formats that people are building in other channels. That was 100%. In terms of the standard press release, we didn’t do a lot of those to be candid. We did do one around Trends when we launched it, but we tried to leverage the excitement that Sam brings to the table as much as we could.

Where I was going to go next as well is this natural energy that he has as this cult leader. Does he like to stay operational or did he quickly hand that off to you and try to get out of the growth and operation side?

It’s a little bit of both. It was more of him coming in after not sleeping for a night. I was usually the first in our San Francisco office. There were days that he would come in and have exciting ideas. Outside of those ideas, he did prefer to have team leaders or folks like myself to try to operationalize the underbelly and how we make this work. That was one of the things that I learned quickly. We tried to work around everyone’s strengths, including Sam’s and everyone else’s. We try to take the operations out of his responsibility. When it comes to managing the books and getting his final sign-off, those were all things that he was required to do. We tried to take as much off his plate on that side as we could.

You talked about trying to build trust with Sam. How did you try to build trust?

I’ve worked in a number of handful of early-stage environments. Sitting down and having a real conversation and not holding anything back is critical. “Here are the areas where I see that needs to be improved,” and scaling those out from low, medium and critical priority. Sitting down and talking about those areas was what helped us build that trust.

Another thing that worked well too was Sam has an inner circle of founders that he keeps in close touch with, and I appreciated this. I spoke with a handful of them. This was about 60 to 90 days in. After each call, they all gave the green light, “This is your guy.” One day, I remember coming in and it was a bit of a compliment. Our Head of Finance goes, “You weren’t here last night but Sam was walking out the door and said, ‘We need to get 10 more Scotts.’”

That’s amazing. I’ve never heard of that. Was it to learn more about him or was it to build connections to let them know about you? What was the purpose of reaching out to his CEO network?

He had this network of founders that were strategic advisors to some degree. They had their core competencies as founders, whether they’ve had an exit or not. Several of them did. It was leaning into their insights and strengths, and trying to get as many learnings as I could out of it. It was also a little bit of a pass or go for this guy as a core leader or as your ops leader on the team.

Where’s your network? Where do you go to connect and learn with your peer group?

I have kept in touch with folks. I have a passion for both growth stage businesses and coming in, “Here’s the playbook. Here’s how we scale fast. Here’s how we make people happy. Here’s how we reduce the delta between our percentage to goal and our actual goal.” That’s one area, but the other area that I’m always fascinated by is this early stage. I’ve worked on a few side projects in the past. I found folks through networking. I found one through Craigslist when I moved to California fifteen years ago. I happened to look on Craigslist. That was before AngelList and things like that. I’ve kept in touch with a lot of those folks.

When there’s an opportunity, it’s understanding individual core strengths and where they add value. One of the things we’ve promoted to promote our product, Trends, is you’re only as good as the 2 to 3 folks that you surround yourself with. That’s true. It’s being deliberate and intentional about taking up their time and taking up your time.

The Hustle: Understand individual core strengths and where they add value.

Making sure it’s a two-way street in terms of that value, but it’s touch and base and seeing how things are going. Folks float in and out of the growth stage or established companies back to startups. Once you get a taste, it’s hard to not have an interest in going back. That’s where my core network comes from. It’s those two different arenas that are super valuable, depending on what I’m trying to work on.

I got mildly obsessed with one of your products, with the Trends Facebook group, the website, and Sam’s podcast that he and Shaan do with My First Million. What is it that made the Trends community on Facebook so sticky, attractive and engaging? What have you done?

When we try to describe Trends, we always say people come for our premium weekly newsletter, but they end up staying for the private community.

I went in expecting, “The community is all of my peers,” and it’s not. It’s like big CEOs down to the frontline. This is my first job as a digital manager, but it’s almost like everybody is equal and there to engage. It’s intriguing.

That’s what’s fun. Sam has always done a good job of calling out folks as an introduction post. Any intriguing figures that are coming in, Brian Halligan for example, around our acquisition time, we tried to leverage those as posts and try to call attention to them. What we’ve found is that they want to engage with people. They want to talk to folks. They know this is a super intriguing group of people within this private Facebook group. They want to add some value. They want to learn from people themselves. Everything should be a two-way street. That’s some of the things that we’ve seen.

The Hustle: Everything should be a two-way street.

Another area is it’s just by our community engagement. It took us a while, about a year and a half, before we hired a formal community manager. Other than that, we had some customer service and customer success folks that were helping us out, but that’s a key part too. You need to filter out low and high quality if you see duplicate content and things like that. It’s critical in order to make sure we’re maximizing the opportunity to engage, whether it’s attractive for someone who has exited a $20 million sale of a business or someone who is thinking about launching a business. You can clearly see through the thought process that they share that they’ve got something cool on their mind, and they need some validation around it.

Was there a price point discussion that you guys had with that as well? For the price, it’s almost irresponsible for people not to join.

Shameless plug. Yes, it is irresponsible. When I joined, Sam conducted a number of tests. We also continued to conduct tests around payment, the price, the trial, and things like that. There are a lot of restrictions around it. For example, in DC, you’re no longer allowed to do 30-day trials. It’s too long. In terms of the price point itself, we did tinker around with the thought of raising that to say, $1,000 or maybe creating an entry-level and then an a la carte model. Once we were post-acquisition, we froze all of those changes until we are acquired by HubSpot.

We’re still revisiting those conversations. What we want to do is make sure that it is affordable for folks. to get in and be able to engage. At $299, it’s not a large amount but it’s enough to make you think twice. That’s the part where it is a reasonable enough number, but I tend to agree with you about the caliber of folks that we have inside that community. It has been long discussed internally if we should be bumping up the price, and then maybe grandfather folks into the original price.

I’m not sure if you should bump it up. I think it is more of the exposure that’ll continue. I don’t even think you’ve hit your inflection point with it. For $1,000, I’d be like, “I don’t know.” For $299, I might go, “What the hell? Just keep going.” I want to transition over to that COVID stage that you had to go through and then the acquisition with HubSpot.

One thing I’ve noticed with the community that’s intriguing, this might be a shameless plug because there’s no question attached to it, but when your community manager says no to a post, they tend to come back and say, “If you tweaked it in this way, then we can let you post it.” I’m like, “That’s cool.” Any other community, they’re like, “We disallowed your post.” Whoever your community manager is, huge props to them. It’s intriguing because it doesn’t turn you away. It educates you and it sucks you back in going, “You do like my idea.” It’s cool.

That was a long time coming for a while. When we hit 5,000, we have a lot of people in this group. This is getting big. Now, we’re up to 14,000. The biggest thing is providing super valuable feedback to folks on how they can tweak it. We don’t want to shy people away from contributing or trying to get involved with the conversations. It’s important for us to provide a direction and let them know why. Sometimes we get stuff that is flat-out. Come on. You know why we’re flagging this.

Those are the easy ones, “Buy my new crypto course.”

It’s like, “You got Steven Seagal behind this,” or I don’t know about this one.

The only question I have about COVID because it’s been overplayed is you said you made the decision to close down your Bay Area office and keep the Austin office open.

We did. That was a tough conversation because that office served as a bit of an incubator. We had a lot of shared learnings. We had folks, friends of friends, and founders that were coming in. We had a children’s vitamin startup in there. Another guy who was coming in had a media startup too. Another startup we had in there was a ramen startup. We had all these different cool eclectic products that people were launching and former product managers from various companies.

Besides that, I’m looking at our internal team and it had gotten to a point where we had about 4 to 5 core individuals going in each day. Some of them were commuting from Cupertino or elsewhere. We’re talking about 1 hour, 1.5 hours or 2 hours sometimes each way. It was ridiculous. I saw the opportunity once we went fully remote. We were successful for the first 90 days in that capacity. That’s when I flagged it. Sam reached out and said, “What do you think we should do? Should we keep this office? Should we keep it going? Should we maybe power it down?”

I knew deep down Sam wanted to keep it. I knew he enjoyed having that office and the ability for our investors, friends of friends, and friends of our investors alike to all come in and share that office. The biggest thing was we could be taking that and then reinvesting it in a number of areas like employee perks. We could be reinvesting that in potential growth. I know exactly what we could do with that extra $15,000 a month.

Those were some of the things that we talked about. Knowing that we still had an office down in Austin, Texas left us feeling okay, but that was a tough call. Any time you’re powering down an office, especially since The Hustle started in San Francisco, so to lose that core base felt a little weird at first. It’s a little uncomfortable. Over time, a lot of companies are going to become more comfortable with having this hybrid or fully remote model.

Many companies will become more comfortable with the hybrid or fully remote model.

Let’s face it, the Bay Area is now in Austin. It’s huge. It’s like they built the first Hyperloop one directional from San Francisco to Austin and everybody’s like zoom. It’s being sucked over.

That is so true.

It’s extraordinary. You then made the decision to go remote. Let’s talk about HubSpot. I’ve spoken at their conference a couple of times. It’s an amazing but massive organization. When did Sam talk to you? Clearly, he was talking to them before everybody else was. How long and how did that discussion go when Sam told you?

He reached out in the fall of 2020 and it was around late September or October. He said, “I had an interesting inbound this week or last week.” I said, “Who was it?” He said, “I can’t tell you right now because nothing is in stone. What do you think about us getting acquired by a publicly-traded SaaS company?” I said, “That’s a little unconventional, to say the least, because you’re looking at other acquisitions in the marketplace and you’re looking at folks being acquired by larger media brands to expand their offerings.”

One of the key differentiators with our acquisition was the excitement around potentially starting a movement around having our own media in-house as a SaaS company as opposed to only focusing on advertising on third-party placements and platforms and things like that. That was what kicked things off over time. The more that we started to work through the due diligence, and I appreciated all the questions and the way that that was being handled, it was a good experience for a lot of folks.

When Sam told you, did you panic? Were you okay with it? What goes through your head?

I was excited. A lot of folks aspire to go through that type of experience in their career even just once. For me personally, I was excited about the opportunity. I’m pretty calm-headed. I’m the type to lay out your options on the table and then discuss them openly. In this case, I was 100%. I can say with confidence that I was more attracted to this type of opportunity of an acquisition. It’s an unconventional opportunity to go in and then bring our value to the table for a company of that size and caliber. It was a humbling experience to have that conversation with Sam around that. My immediate instinct was, “This is awesome. This could be super cool.”

What was it like going through the actual acquisition process? Did that start get distracting? Was it a bit of a pain in the butt? Was it easy?

It’s a little bit of everything. It depends on the line of questioning. If you ask Sam some of the questions about finance and things like that, we have a wonderful Head of Finance who did an awesome job of cleaning up our books and going into our acquisition. That put us in a good spot. Our team was in a good spot, at that point, serving as Head of Product and Growth. I had a team of twelve total with some middle management.

In that capacity, we were able to tap into some folks in the inner circle and bring them in to help us collect and gather the information that was required through the process. Everybody stayed mum about it in terms of the public view, and then we were able to get together and work on stuff. We did have tight timelines at times. That was challenging. Especially going into the holidays around late December to early January, that’s when the push was coming to shove and we needed to get these final questions put together.

The Hustle: Tap in some folks to the inner circle and bring them in to help us collect and gather the required information.

That’s when we had to get a little bit more in the data, build some charts, build reporting around our trajectory and how things have been going, and reveal a little bit more underneath the different layers. Overall, everyone who was tapped to participate in that did a wonderful job. They got a lot of the answers in a very timely manner. It was overall pretty smooth.

That part happens, and then all of a sudden, it’s the integration and you tell the marketplace. The market was clearly excited. It was like, “Amazing.” It made sense too. It intuitively all of a sudden made sense. What was it like when you started to integrate with them and how did that process go?

They have an MBA leadership program. We were assigned an individual from that program. HubSpot had gone through one acquisition prior. It was an analytics company. Besides that, in terms of the true hubs on top of their CRM, that is their bread and butter. That is their competitive advantage. The fact that they haven’t acquired a lot of third parties and meld them all together and try to connect these code bases. They have one solitary code base across everything and it’s all interconnected, which was what makes it such a beautiful product.

For us, working with this one key individual, I was tapped to lead a lot of the olive branch over to the different teams that we were going to be integrating with, and the folks we would be working with. I found myself in a position where, first of all, it was getting everyone over the finish line in terms of revisiting comp packages and all those types of things. Those can be difficult conversations and arguably, the most important because our team is everything.

We wanted to make sure everybody was happy going through that process. Once we got everybody through at that point, I became the go-to in a lot of cases for procedure and operations, going and helping in trying to navigate our vendors that we work with through security and compliance reviews because they’re publicly traded. Now we’re talking CCPA, GDPR, and all the fun stuff. We were trying to get all these things through the final stages.

Candidly, it took us about six months. We did a retrospect on the entire experience and the individual who had led it within the HubSpot side. It was a super well thought out and detailed retrospect. If we ever go through some form of acquisition again, I would look at that document and say, “This was spot on. These are the things that I would’ve done differently.” It was pretty cool though.

Did they make any cuts in your organization? Did they cut any areas or any key people? How did you guys manage that with the survivors?

One of the difficult parts of this acquisition was the sun setting our advertising sales. We did have to make a decision. Those folks were extended an opportunity to interview with HubSpot. They tried to create a path forward for them within HubSpot or take some type of severance. The options were laid out for folks. They were given some time to think it over. Most folks ended up taking off. In fact, some of them are running their own advertising sales agency focused on newsletter revenue on third-party placements right now. Overall, we did retain a couple of key folks. During the first 90 days within HubSpot, we had to power down and honor our commitments.

We kept our Head of Sales on and he was able to lead those through. One of the folks, Alex Cunningham, has done such an awesome job. She steered the ship and led our account management through our final advertising commitments, and then segued over. She is now essentially the Head of Account Management for HubSpot. Our advertising placements are exclusively HubSpot. She is essentially transferred over and made them her number one client in a certain sense. That’s what’s cool.

Did you say that all of your ad placements now are exclusively HubSpot?

We’re cross-promotions. We completely powered it down.

I did notice that on the show, it was HubSpot, but I didn’t recognize that it was only then.

We powered down eight figures of ad sales and decided that was the direction we were going to move in. Ultimately, the purpose of looking ahead is to honor this mission of inspiring and educating professionals. You may know this, but there’s a certification program, the HubSpot Academy. When you bring all this to light, it’s education. It’s the inspiration and giving people the keys to excel and leverage their CRM.

That was one of the things that we ended up doing. It was moving our ad sales in a different direction and honoring HubSpot exclusively. We still get a lot of inbound requests through LinkedIn or elsewhere. I’m like, “How did you even find this form? I thought I buried that.” When you look at the landscape right now, it’s expensive to advertise on channels like Facebook and Google. The cost keeps rising, so they’re looking for other alternatives to reach a highly qualified audience and newsletters are just that. It’s a good match for HubSpot.

You’re welcome to introduce them to us for the COO Alliance and the show. They can sponsor both, and we’re looking for good ones.

I will do that.

Were you guys involved in the podcast launch, the HubSpot podcast platform? Are you guys running that or are you partnering with them? How does that work?

It’s a bit of a split role. I support Sam in a lot of capacities. We’re around budget and things like that for supporting the My First Million Podcast. My First Million is now part of the HubSpot Podcast Network. What’s neat is that it’s going to be an assortment and a collection, and each one has a target audience and trying to create some decision framework around what to launch next, and what audience are we appealing to.

Those are all cool decisions that we have to make. HubSpot hired an executive producer. They’re going to sit within a HubSpot team and the content team. Also, we’re hiring a Senior Podcast Marketer. That person is going to be in charge of organic paid opportunities, booking guests, and a number of different capacities to help play in the success. It’s a broad vision at the moment. We’re trying to tighten that up and define it by type and what our goal is for each one and things like that. We’re going through planning phases right now to see what’s next and how The Hustle can add value.

It’s an interesting stage for sure. I want to go back to the 22-year-old Scott. If we go back to you just graduating college or just getting started in your career, what advice would you give yourself as a 21 or 22-year-old that you maybe know to be true now but you wish you’d known when you were much younger?

My biggest piece of advice to 22-year-old Scott would be if a position or a company doesn’t sit right with you and it doesn’t feel you are learning enough, you’re feeling complacent in that role, there’s a lack of clear vision and strategy from the top-down, or there’s a lack of top-down, bottom-up formulation of goals, trust your gut and move on to the next opportunity where you’re going to be able to provide more value and get better oversight and direction and meet halfway on those things. Looking back, those are some that I think we can all agree on. Leaving a company and moving on to the next opportunity is one of the toughest decisions that you can make as a young professional. Trust your gut. If it doesn’t sit right and feel good, then move along and find that next opportunity that’ll be a great stepping stone for you.

Trust your gut and move on to the next opportunity, um, where you’re going to be able to provide more value and where you’re going to get more, uh, better oversight and direction.

I love that. You’ve made another great leap with this acquisition by HubSpot. You’re part of a great organization. Scott Nixon, the Marketing Director for The Hustle, thank you so much for sharing with us on the show.

You bet. Thank you so much, Cameron.

I appreciate it.

Important Links

• The Hustle
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• My First Million podcast
• HubSpot Academy