by:
MiaSrebrnjak
Hi HubSpot Community members!
I recently had the opportunity to sit down and chat with one of the top contributors in the HubSpot Community, Karsten Köhler, to discuss his participation in the community, why he does what he does, and to learn a little bit more about the man behind the 12k+ solutions on community.hubspot.com.
When talking about the HubSpot Community, internally or externally, it's not uncommon that Karsten's name comes up: "Oh yeah, his Community reply helped me with a HubSpot question the other day! Great guy!"
@karstenkoehler is a Community Champion 🏆 and one of our most esteemed Community members. He is #1 on Community Solutions & Upvotes leaderboards and has authored more than 12.000 solutions in his 5 years of engaging with the HubSpot Community. 😮
A true Community legend and a wonderful human, Karsten has been an invaluable source and knowledge & support for Community members and the HubSpot Community team over the years, and we want to thank him for his time and dedication. 💛
We collected questions for Karsten from the Community team & from Community Champions! 👇🏻 Happy reading! 🙂
Q: It would be awesome to understand your weekly routine. How do you balance your time from being active on the Community and your own work priorities?
Karsten: Over the years, keeping an eye on the HubSpot Community has definitely become a habit for me. Except for time-off (when I ignore the forums entirely, no excuses), there are very few days where I don’t check for new threads or replies.
In terms of my routine, I typically block some time before I start my client work in the mornings and I do the same when I wrap up my day. On most days, this would be some 30 minutes in the morning, 30 minutes at the end of the day. Throughout the day, I keep an eye on my email inbox for replies to threads and I look into new threads between meetings. In that sense, it’s maybe similar to checking any other social network when one has a moment of free time; it’s just that I don’t grab my phone to check LinkedIn or Reddit first, instead I open my browser to check what’s going on in the HubSpot Community.
Q: Assuming that you recommend others to be active on the Community. What's your pitch? How can others benefit from being active on the Community?
Karsten: A lot of people would probably turn to the HubSpot Community for exposure (and there’s absolutely nothing wrong about that), I see the biggest benefit in constant, everyday learning. For me, reading so many threads, answers from other members and replying myself, I’ve sharpened my skill to understand problems quickly and figure out the fastest way to a potential solution.
Regardless of your level of proficiency in HubSpot, the HubSpot Community is probably the best way to understand what’s possible on the platform, which workarounds there are when something doesn’t seem to be possible, and challenge yourself with creative ways of problem-solving. As much as I love the HubSpot knowledge base and academy, they simply don’t have this practical element to them.
Q: What's your favorite question or type of question to answer?
Karsten: The one where the original poster doesn’t realize that they have access to features which make it very easy to solve their original query. There are of course many instances where HubSpot makes things more challenging than they could be. On the other hand however, HubSpot users sometimes expect a solution to be complex and challenging – when it can be achieved within a few clicks.
A lot of HubSpot customers with Professional and Enterprise subscriptions probably are not aware of at least 25% of the things they could be doing with their HubSpot portal. These are often features that don’t get a lot of attention in general, were released recently or seem a bit intimidating.
I love these questions because the original poster receive their solution and a better understanding of how to get more value out of their HubSpot subscription.
Q: On average, how long does it take to write a solution?
Karsten: Some questions are very transactional, users asking about a specific documentation or expecting a straight-forward answer – these often don’t take much longer than 1-2 minutes to answer. The same is the case for repeat questions that have been asked before (and which I have answered before). If you follow my forum activity, you’ll notice that I often link to older posts of mine. No need to rewrite everything everytime.
More challenging and complex questions can take me up to 15-20 minutes. The same is the case with threads that go beyond 'one question, one answer', and evolve into longer discussions or troubleshooting.
Q: It's not a question, just keep rocking 🙌
Karsten: Thank you! I really appreciate that, I really do.
Q: How does the HubSpot Community help YOU?
Karsten: In the beginning, 2019 and 2020, it helped me build skill and confidence in my HubSpot skills. I had been using HubSpot for a couple of years at that point already – but within very clearly defined use cases. In 2019, I started consulting HubSpot customers as a freelancer. The HubSpot Community helped get an understanding of many of the issues HubSpot customers typically face. In that sense, the forums are an unfiltered stream of the challenges customers and users have. When engaging with posts, I could figure out solutions for challenges that I knew my clients might eventually face. When my clients eventually had similar questions, I didn’t have to start from scratch. I could draw from having looked at a problem a few different ways already.
Now, a few years later, the HubSpot Community gently forces me to stay up to date with the many, many HubSpot product updates. It’s easy to get lazy and fall behind, considering the number of updates the HubSpot product team is pushing out.
Q: How do you feel rewarded / what motivates you to be engaged in the Community?
Karsten: I’d be lying if the achievements and leaderboard weren’t a part of it, especially when I started in 2019. I saw @Phil_Vallender's contributions and thought that it would be cool to get the same level of exposure. Phil is a legend and his contributions to the HubSpot Community were a huge help to me when I started as a freelancer.
Since then my motivation has changed a bit and it’s honestly simply very addictive to solve smaller and bigger HubSpot challenges. It’s a way for me to keep my HubSpot muscles trained, all while helping people get more value out of the tool. Knowing that someone got a solution which would otherwise have taken them hours or days is a very nice feeling.
Q: How do you keep up to date with all the new features of HubSpot?
Karsten: This is probably the hardest part about joining the HubSpot ecosystem now – having an overview of the existing features and following all new additions to the product. The pace at which the product team is putting out these releases is wild. Few days go by when there isn’t an update.
I’m grateful that I’m in the position of having used HubSpot for more than a decade now. I experienced the launch of the HubSpot CRM, Service Hub, Operations Hub etc. Seeing the HubSpot ecosystem develop over time definitely helped staying up to date with new features. Joining now would be a lot more intimidating.
I’m also happy that HubSpot decided to make product updates available and searchable in the HubSpot app directly.
Besides that, it’s mostly discipline – checking product updates is a routine for me similar to checking the HubSpot Community for new threads and replies.
Q: Was there a specific moment that made you feel you wanted to commit more to the Community?
Karsten: Early on, I was approached by the HubSpot Community team about the Champion program – looking back, that was probably it. It felt (and still feels) nice and exclusive to be a part of a small group of like-minded professionals.
Q: What advice would you give someone who wants to start helping more in the community but isn’t sure where to begin?
Karsten: I’d suggest observing – and asking questions. I don’t see that happen a lot, strangely. The HubSpot Community is free to access and offers a wealth of information. I know that it can feel like trying to drink from a fire hose but as a newcomer, there is no need to engage with it all. Pick a product (for example, Marketing Hub), and start checking the board on a regular basis. Follow along what’s being discussed and whenever you don’t understand something, don’t hesitate to ask.
The people who engage the most with the HubSpot Community, the community champions, are some of the nicest people I’ve met online. Ask questions and you’ll likely receive a friendly explanation. Besides completing the software certifications in the HubSpot Academy, this is probably the easiest way to skill up in HubSpot if you don’t have the opportunity to learn on the job.
Q: What skills do you feel you’ve developed the most by being so active in this community?
Karsten: Clear communication and reading between the lines. The majority of posts submitted in the HubSpot Community come without context and detail. (In a perfect world, all troubleshooting posts would include detailed descriptions of steps taken and screenshots where personal data are blurred. Often, this information is not included.)
Posters are often not aware how crucial this information is and, in their defense, online you rather want to share less than more. As someone who’s providing help, if you want to avoid unnecessarily going back and forth, you need to make sure to ask the right questions and to do so in a way that matches the language and proficiency level of the requester. Doing this a few thousand times, I think I have refined my questions enough to get the context needed to provide a solution quickly.
Q: What playlist 🎶 do you listen to when answering Qs on the Community?
Karsten: I don’t have a dedicated playlist – considering how much time I spend in the HubSpot Community, this would probably get repetitive fairly quickly. Often I start a radio based on a recent favorite song of mine or I work my way through the entire discography of an artist, most recently: revisiting Hiromi and The Black Dahlia Murder.
Q: So many people learn from him - who does he learn from? Who inspires him?
Karsten: I’m a big fan of the HubSpot Admin HUG format. It’s great to get early access to product update information and the Q&As are a nice way to engage with the product teams behind new features. When I hear about new product updates or see them in action, the gears in my head immediately start turning and I find myself playing around with ideas and configurations.
Another source of inspiration are, of course, the other community champions in the HubSpot community. Most champions have their area of expertise and I love seeing solutions and ideas in threads that aren’t necessarily my focus area.
Last but not least there is the occasional LinkedIn post that I stumble upon and that gives me ideas – both from people posting in the HubSpot bubble but also about other platforms. @KyleJepson does an amazing job of explaining new features and concepts in an easily understandable way. I recommend following him. Once you do that, you’ll see posts from like-minded people pop up in your feed almost immediately.
Thank you, @karstenkoehler, keep on rocking! 💛🙂
Mia, Community Champions, and the HubSpot Community Team
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