Your biggest customers are enterprise and mid-market — and that's exactly the gap. The founders and small businesses who need HubSpot most are the ones your motion isn't built to talk to, win, or keep: they walk in confused, don't hit value for months, can't afford an agency, and bounce. That's the exact gap I close. I bring a founder-to-founder pipeline of net-new small businesses, a conversion method proven at scale, and a live case study — me, taking She & HER from zero to one on HubSpot, in public. Here's what that looks like.
An ICP-aligned flow of founders and small businesses — companies, not clicks — from communities your enterprise engine can't reach, brought straight into your funnel.
Behavioral-economics conversion — the lever that turns a confused free user into a paying Hubs customer, proven at Xbox scale (Section 03).
A dated slate of founder-dense stages I'm speaking at and events I'm hosting through November — where a peer referral converts the way trust converts.
A founder going 0→1 live on HubSpot — plus the confusing onboarding journey rebuilt from a product leader's seat, documented as repeatable proof.
This is built specifically for HubSpot — it works with your model (HubSpot for Startups, a dedicated build team, and co-marketing) and points it at the one thing that model can't buy: net-new small-business customers, and the conversion behind them. The events, the method, and the use-case build are all shaped around that.
She & HER is a community-based dating app for the sapphic community that launched at NYC Pride on June 28 as the only brand carrying the official NYC Pride logo, with national press. I'm already a HubSpot for Startups customer taking it from zero to one on Marketing Hub Pro and Sales Hub Pro — exactly the founder HubSpot wants more of, minus the marketing budget. When I talk about HubSpot from a stage, it lands because I actually use it — not because I'm paid to say so.
Desirée Mayon is a data scientist and product leader with 15+ years in ML across Google, Microsoft/Xbox, Etsy, and Nordstrom — and has built integrations and MCP tooling for Figma, Amazon, and NVIDIA.
Active partner in NVIDIA Inception, AWS Activate, and Google for Startups Cloud — the startup programs of three of the largest tech companies in the world.
A ~10-person team with an external brand studio — exactly the small, high-reach operator HubSpot for Startups was built to serve, running the whole stack from the inside.
A startup founder, and all of it at once: Black, Latina, queer, sapphic, HBCU grad, data scientist, and more. Those lenses are doorways into rooms your acquisition can't buy its way into — including the affluent small-business owners at places like Martha's Vineyard, whose use cases most people never build for. The brand travels with me into those rooms, and the audience follows the She & HER journey — built live on HubSpot — right back to your funnel.
“People don't trust a company rep pitching the tool. They trust a founder they can see using it — going zero to one, in public, on HubSpot.”
Everyone reads the funnel. Nobody layers behavioral economics on top — asking about affordability and fit conversationally, in a way that reads culture and feeling, not just numbers. That's what turns a confused free user into a paying customer in markets a cold funnel can't reach. For HubSpot — where a small business bounces if it doesn't feel value fast — it's the single biggest lever on free→paid Hub upgrades and retention that nobody in your category is pulling.
At Xbox, Desirée worked on converting Xbox Cloud Gaming (xCloud) users from free trials into paid Game Pass across emerging markets — the same regions Microsoft pushed cloud gaming into (India, Latin America, and beyond) to remove the $300–500 console barrier. The lever wasn't discounting; it was rewriting the onboarding questions with cultural and behavioral context so people converted willingly. Leadership's response was, essentially — "I didn't think of it like that." That is the exact motion HubSpot needs on the small-business onboarding journey.
The evidence: how you ask moves the number
This isn't a hunch. Decades of behavioral-economics research show that reframing the ask — not the offer — is one of the largest levers on conversion there is.
Here's what I'm speaking at versus hosting, with dates, size, and audience. Every one is dense with the founders and small-business owners HubSpot wants more of — and each is a set of trusted nodes, not a list of impressions.
| Event | Window | My role | Reach & audience |
|---|---|---|---|
| Replenish Her · The Powder Room — Martha's Vineyard | Aug 9–16, 2026 | Hosting | Invite-only week for founders & SMB owners (HBCU / entrepreneur week). She & HER brings the tech track alongside Eli Lilly, Pfizer & Merck — a "who's who" of small-business owners monetizing venues, events, and ventures. |
| Sapphic Hour × Chase Sapphire | September 2026 | Hosting | Queer founders, consultants, and lean-company operators — the exact profile that needs an affordable, well-onboarded stack. |
| Lesbians Who Tech — Summit | October 2026 | Speaking · mainstage | 110,000-member global community; 5,000+ at the summit — the largest LGBTQ+ professional event in the world. Founders & operators running lean companies. |
| Women Who Code — Leadership Summit ("Lead Differently") | Oct 6–8, 2026 · NYC | Speaking · mainstage Hosting workshop | A 76.6K-strong global community; the summit gathers ~200 executives and senior technical-women leaders, AI-strategy focused — the enterprise women-in-tech room (led by Leanne Pittsford, who also founds Lesbians Who Tech). |
| AfroTech + the Insiders program | November 2026 | Speaking Hosting Insiders | 40,000+ in person · ~3M+ interactions — the densest gathering of Black founders and SMBs anywhere. Hosting Insiders puts HubSpot in front of executives and small teams directly. |
| Chase Sapphire × AfroTech | November 2026 | Hosting | A curated founder & operator audience layered on top of the AfroTech window. |
Always-on reach behind the slate
Every number above is the floor — not the reach
A 40,000-person conference isn't 40,000 impressions — it's 40,000 trusted nodes, each carrying their network, in communities that watch and follow them. This is the behavioral economics of reach.
I won't pretend to have a huge following yet — but followers are the easy thing to chase and the hard thing to keep. Reach is the opposite, and it's already here. Straight from my own Instagram, trailing 30 days: a small follower base is throwing off views and reach many times its size — and most of it lands on people who don't follow me yet. That's the gap a follower count can't show, and exactly what HubSpot's engine (Marketing Hub) is built to convert.
And it climbs every time I show up — a Fox Soul segment, a mainstage talk, a single reel at 10.6K views. The reach isn't mine alone, either: Pamela Holmes (@pamelaholmess) — a verified Wilhelmina model on the She & HER team, ~6K engaged followers across Vogue Runway and the NYC/London fashion world — brings her own audience into every activation we run. What's missing isn't reach — it's the consistency and tracking of an engine to compound it into customers, and into a real B2B and B2E funnel. That engine is HubSpot — so the follower gap isn't the counterargument, it's the case study you get to watch close, live, on your stack.
Source: Instagram Professional Dashboard — @desiree.mayon, trailing 30 days (July 2026). Views ≈ 18× the follower base; 61.6% of views from non-followers.
Cold acquisition spends impressions on strangers who don't trust you yet — expensive, low-converting, blind to the markets with the most upside. Route the same intent through a trusted node and reframe the free→paid ask with behavioral economics, and the curve bends. That gap — between a cold impression and a trusted, well-framed ask that converts to a paying Hubs customer — is the net-new lift.
Reach that arrives pre-trusted — a peer in the room, not a banner — so the same spend starts far higher up the conversion curve.
Behavioral-economics framing on the onboarding itself — the difference between a confused free user closing the tab and becoming a paying Hubs customer.
Referred customers refer the next one. The lift isn't a spike — it's a flywheel that lowers acquisition cost every cycle.
To be clear on the word "partner": I'm not a Solutions Partner reselling onboarding for profit-share and kickbacks. I'm net-new — I bring the small-business customers your enterprise motion can't reach, and I serve as your end-to-end use case. Here's the shape.
Already active — Marketing Hub Pro + Sales Hub Pro, five core seats. This is the stack I run the 0→1 build on.
I bring net-new SMB customers and act as your use case — not client onboarding for kickbacks.
Your dedicated team helps build the use case and the onboarding journey; we co-market the 0→1 story to the markets you can't reach.
What I bring
What I'd want from HubSpot
You have the enterprise base, the team, and the tools; I bring the net-new small-business customers you can't reach — and the 0→1 case study to prove HubSpot can win them. Not a reseller, not sponsored posts — a founder who converts.
The heart of this is that I'm the customer, in public. Alongside the events, I'd take a documented onboarding and user-journey teardown from a product leader's seat — turning the confusing 0→1 setup (the "three-to-four-months-to-value" problem) into a followable journey, built on Marketing Hub Pro and Sales Hub Pro with an Apollo AI integration powering the funnel.
Deliverables beyond events
For the strategy, the use-case build, and the event slate — sized as a hittable starting point that grows on renewal as the net-new proves out. HubSpot's side is largely in-kind: the dedicated build team, HubSpot for Startups pricing, and co-marketing.
We prove it before anyone commits at scale — a 90-day pilot with the build team, anchored on dated windows. AfroTech in November (mainstage + the Insiders program, dense with minority-owned SMBs) is the natural anchor; NYC Pride is already banked with the CRM data in hand; the Martha's Vineyard week in August is the near-term window. Each is a measurable net-new campaign, so your leadership sees the customers, where they came from, and how they were produced — before the deal goes deep.
When I weighed my options, HubSpot stood out for the one thing that makes this real: you have the team to actually build it with me, the brand founders already trust, and the depth — Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, the tracking — to follow a 0→1 journey end to end, all the way through to my investor and nonprofit pipelines. HubSpot for Startups already got me moving. I'd rather go all-in with the partner who can build this with me and make it last — and make you the case study for a market you haven't been able to reach.