S5 Bonus: Ditching the SaaS Tax: Rebuilding HubSpot-Level Marketing Automation on Open Source with Adrian Tobey of Groundhogg

Adrian Tobey lives in Canada. He got started in his tech career right out of high school, working for his father's digital marketing agency. In high school, he was interested in computer science, and developed video games and useful UI for his school. Prior to digital marketing, his father was a jazz musician, and Adrian followed in those footsteps to play the trumpet. For University, he had two options - go to school for computer science or for music... and chose the latter. During school, he was working full time for his Dad's agency, building websites, email campaigns and such. While he was doing this, he built his first product called Form Lift, which is a Wordpress form builder for Infusion Soft.Around 3 years into school, he failed his first university course - a discrete computer science course around computer runtimes, big O notation, etc. He had invested a ton of money into the his degree already, but he started doing the math, and estimated he wouldn't complete school until 2025 because he was part time.With that in mind, he dropped out of University school, and thought - what next? He didn't want to do agency work forever. He took a look at how expensive, convoluted and clunky marketing technology tools can be. He vowed to create the ultimate suite of tools, and to do it on Wordpress.This is the creation story of Groundhogg.SponsorsCourierImg.lyRoutableCTO.aiCloudways offers peace of mind and flexibility so you can focus on growing your business instead of dealing with server management. With Cloudways, you get an optimized stack, managed servers, backups, staging environment, integrated Git, pre-configured, Composer, 24/7 support, and a choice of five cloud providers: AWS, DigitalOcean, Linode, Google Cloud, and Vultr. Get up to 2 Month Free Hosting by using code "CODE30" and get $30 free hosting credit.LinksWebsite: https://www.groundhogg.io/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adriantobeyCheckout our episode stacks on Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/ Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy