From Agency to App: How OutboundSync Took Off in the HubSpot Ecosystem

In this conversation with the Built the HubSpot podcast, Harris Kenny, Founder of OutboundSync, shares the journey of evolving from a HubSpot Solutions Partner to a deeply integrated App Partner.

The discussion spans the critical gaps in outbound infrastructure, the real-world push from customers toward productization, and why going deep in a platform like HubSpot (instead of wide across many tools) created a sustainable competitive advantage.

If you’re building in the HubSpot ecosystem, or wondering whether you should, this is a candid, tactical breakdown of what it takes to succeed as a bootstrapped app business.

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Transcript

00:00 Welcome to Built the HubSpot, the series we’re exploring the stories of the company’s investing in going deep in the HubSpot ecosystem and building in a competitive advantage.
00:11 Today, we’re talking to Harris Kenny, the founder of OutboundSync. We get into all things from how we made them switch from being a solutions partner to an app partner in the HubSpot ecosystem, the maturity curve, of your potential buyers and their awareness and sophistication with your solution, and 
00:29 what it takes to make the right bets as a bootstrap startup building in the HubSpot ecosystem. This series is presented by Ampersand, the deep integration platform that’s enabling the best startups and AI agents to build deep product integrations with HubSpot and other tools that your customers are already
00:47 using without managing maintenance and complexity at scale. Let’s get into it. But we started as a solutions partner. So I was running a consulting company and doing sales, consulting, fractional sales revenue.
01:03 I guess now what you’d call a good market, GTM. And we had some customers head CRM, some didn’t, ended up encountering HubSpot over and over again and decided to join the HubSpot partner program.
01:19 And we were offering HubSpot services, implementations as well as outbound email. Which is kind of funny because HubSpot was always built on inbound.
01:29 And then people are like, hey, you know, you’re running these outbound campaigns, can we get this data in this year?
01:33 Basically, you know, really straightforward. And so yeah, I was all in on solutions partner agency. We were tearing up, we were gold tier and growing and things were going really well.
01:42 Went to inbound was getting really good support from our camp at the time, and he encouraged us, Jake Becil, he encouraged me to think about building out Up On Sync.
01:51 He felt like there was something interesting there, and you know, when I was working on this at the time we support getting Up On Data basically into HubSpot, and I’ll go into a little bit more what that means, but at the time, you know, the options weren’t good.
02:07 The sequesters that existed that our users were using, they didn’t have any grations at all, and since then, not much has changed.
02:13 And so basically the idea is like, if HubSpot is gonna be the system of record, if you wanna be able to have revenue attribution, if you wanna be able to have a smooth handoff to the sales team, then you’re gonna need the type of scaled outreach that’s happening in a tool like a smart lead or an instantly
02:29 or email bison, you’re gonna need that data to be in HubSpot as well, so that you can do all of those things.
02:34 And if you wanna maintain block lists and suppression lists, you need HubSpot to talk back to those other tools too.
02:40 so that if HubSpot has good data hygiene in it and it’s enriched and it’s current and it’s got all the right information, then you want to be able to use lists in HubSpot to make sure that that is feeding a block list so that any activity that’s happening off platform isn’t going to those people.
02:57 And then lastly, like from a compliance perspective, if you want to have tight filter on what comes into HubSpot and or have a unified consent opt-in, opt-in, opt-out, subscription type setting, you know, again, like the two platforms needs to be a bidirectional sync between the platforms.
03:11 So, you know, as we were doing the campaigns, they’re kind of like these use cases or pain points emerged, and it felt like, okay, there’s room for an app here, started playing around, built something and make.com, and then saw a lot of interest, and then we kind of went from there.
03:23 So that was kind of the genesis of Outbound Sync, and it was really, really completely informed by the fact that we were a solutions partner, and so we were in the portal with the customers seeing how other apps worked, seeing how apps like arrows worked and then comparing that to other apps that we 
03:36 tried where the integrations were just really bad. And it was like, wow, like what is even the point of installing this app at all?
03:42 And so seeing like, okay, there is a spectrum of quality here. And that’s up to the developer to decide what kind of app they want to build.
03:50 And that’s when it felt like, okay, maybe there is an opportunity here. If we want to really focus on quality and building for the ecosystem, you know, really deeply that I think maybe there’s a company here, maybe at a minimum, maybe there’s a product here.
04:02 You mentioned the demand that sort of felt like as you were building a little bit more product around this process, around some of the pain points, you said it feels sort of pull from the market.
04:10 Was that part, that pull primarily sort of HubSpot focus like we want more, we want to be able to do more in HubSpot.
04:16 There was a more from like we need this functionality to run better outbound campaigns that are not in HubSpot, which side do you think is the sort of more of the factor in going deep on this?
04:27 Yeah, so what was happening was that teams were, and still are, I mean, I really believe in the concept of the adoption curve, and I still think that from where we’re working on, we’re nowhere near, even close to the middle of the adoption curve, I think our users are still ahead of overwhelming majority
04:46 of the market, which is exciting because there’s growth to come, and I think that’s true of the HubSpot story in general, that HubSpot itself has a lot of room, I think, in the market to grow, but we were basically teams were like landing in spam.
05:03 They’re landing the spam folder. And so like, okay, we need to use a different tool. And so they would find smart lead.
05:12 And then they’d say, great, we use smart lead, but we also use HubSpot and we want to get this stuff back in HubSpot.
05:17 So that was generally like the order of discovery, we’re maybe misusing sales hub or, you know, I think you could argue like misusing outreach or sales loft tools that were not designed for how they were being used by users.
05:30 I think like outreach product, like team would say that. And I think like even the users would acknowledge like, yeah, this isn’t like exactly, you know, we’re maybe pushing it beyond what it was designed for or explicitly doing things it wasn’t built to do.
05:43 Right. This will sort of be clear on that point, that sending outbound email from a tool that is not designed to send outbound email, right?
05:50 Exactly. And a hotspot or one of these sales engagement type tools that are designed to send email to contacts that you already have who have offered in if you’re new about you.
05:58 Yeah, and especially at scale. So if you’re talking about emailing, like, I mean, literally two million people a month or something like that, you know, yeah, it’s not designed, some of these tools are just not designed for that.
06:10 So they would go find a tool that was designed for that and then they would say, yeah, but but I still need this data back in my system of record.
06:15 I need to like, you know, we need to phone home here, we need to get back. And so that was the opportunity to merge.
06:20 And then for us, like we’re a dedicated app, so we have a higher price point. I don’t know what the exact breakdown is, but I think certainly many, if not majority of the apps in the HubSpot app store or marketplace are free.
06:33 So it was already tough sliding being like, hey, this is a HubSpot app that you have to pay money for.
06:37 And so we had to move up in terms of pricing into the like multiple hundred dollars a month so that we could make the unit economics of the business work.
06:45 I mean, we’re a bootstrapped. We’re a small team. And then in parallel, I’m running my solutions partner agency where I’m getting upspot implementation.
06:52 You know, I’m getting paid for selling upspot and I’m doing the implementation projects. There are multiple months, four to five figure contracts.
06:59 And so then in parallel to be like, okay, well, now I’m going to go try to sell a single seat of outbound sink for a couple hundred dollars a month.
07:06 You know, it’s, it was really difficult to try to navigate that as an app developer. It’s just the economics of that was really tricky for a little bit.
07:18 But so we bundled it. So look, these are our services and we use our app. And that was how we got a user-based going.
07:26 And then people started saying, hey, we don’t actually want your services. We just want the app. And that was kind of a new era for the company.
07:31 I’m like, okay, great. You just want our product. That’s great. It doesn’t hurt my feelings at all. It’s no problem.
07:35 That’s exciting to hear that you want that. And so that was kind of a new era of, okay, now how do you support a product only?
07:39 And that was also tricky. And then slowly kind of made the transition over. We’re now we’re a full dedicated software company.
07:45 We do not provide any services at all. Definitely majority of our income is a hotspot ecosystem and a hotspot users.
07:51 And then kind of here we are today. Team of three, we’ve got an engineer, we’ve got a CSM, we’ve got myself.
07:56 We ourselves obviously use HubSpot. We’re using our own product every day. We run our own app on campaigns and things like that too.
08:01 Yeah, I think that transition from, you know, full services provider to sort of software company with that transition period where you’re doing both It’s really interesting.
08:10 I’m curious that you mentioned on the adoption curve And for folks who don’t know you have a great article that will link here, but As you’re shifting away from you running the services using your own product to others Not wanting that service and wanting to do it themselves.
08:21 Are they have you found that they’re doing it themselves because they’re an agency providing that service to others they hide an in-house team to go run, that motion simply as you move up the maturity curve, it is a pretty specialized, sophisticated role.
08:36 How have you found that be from a, you know, the user base of OutboundSync? Yeah, definitely. Yeah, definitely. So, yeah, so if you go to our site, outboundsync.com, there’s like a resources page.
08:46 If you go to that, we’ve got an article that I just published called the app on maturity curve and developed from Early conversations that I had with you some time ago and then it took a little time for us to kind of like flesh it out But I’m really proud of what it is right now and basically the idea
09:00 so we’ve got like five levels of maturity even up on function within an organization and Level one being not doing any upbound basically and level five being a really sophisticated machine with feedback loops and dynamic enrichment and multiple vendors and You know multiple channels that you know it 
09:16 starts to get pretty cool what some teams are doing and for us You know, it was this process of like moving into like smaller and smaller parts of the endiogram for us to find a toehold to exist in the marketplace.
09:33 So it’s like you had to be using HubSpot and Smartlead. And so HubSpot has hundreds of thousands of customers, but Smartlead has like tens of thousands.
09:41 So now of the tens of thousands of Smartlead customers, some percentage of those are using HubSpot. And then you also have to care about these problems enough, revenue attribution, opt-outs and activity syncing for sales rep handoffs, you should care about those problems enough that you’re willing to
09:58 pay extra to solve them. And so now it’s like, okay, now the pindagram is even smaller, because that means basically you’ve got like some sales reps, basically.
10:07 And so most of the market isn’t there, and so what we have found is that working with agencies have been a huge unlock for us.
10:17 Some people I think talk about agencies as like a stepping stone. Like, oh yeah, we like worked through some agencies, we found some traction and now we’re kind of moving on.
10:24 And like for us, like I fundamentally disagree with that. I think agencies, I mean, maybe it’s my bias because I previously ran one, but I think they have like highly specialized knowledge.
10:34 I think their role is not simply to like do things that people don’t care about. I think people who run agencies are like really care about their craft and they have really particular insight about how things work and so like for us we found partnering with the best agencies was the way to get was the
10:55 way to get in the door with these customers and so like we eliminated the smart lead requirement basically and these were companies that were wanting to move up that out by maturity curve up to like a level three or a level four which around that level what you’re talking about is like having multiple
11:10 domains using multiple data providers using AI and dynamic personalization, things that are not easy to pick up right away using tools like Clay.
11:19 And so companies that had resources that had teams that were on so now we’re kind of like shifting back over to the hotspot side of the diagram again.
11:24 Whereas before like a lot of times we were like marketing within the smartly community, which I love, but there were power users within smartly and so it’s like, oh, we don’t need to convince every smartly user.
11:34 And if we can work with the power users with agencies and then they’re focused back over on the hotspot side of they are doing the best work.
11:43 So they’re finding the fastest growing companies that are running the most advanced hotspot instances with the most automation and when they want the workflows and they want timeline events and they want lists and they want reporting and dashboards, then it kind of like started to come into place a little
11:56 bit because they were doing the best work, they found the best clients and then they said, yeah, by the way, we use this tool called SmartLead.
12:01 Don’t worry about it, but it’s how we’re landing in the inbox and it’s how we’re doing all this cool stuff.
12:05 And the clients are like, yeah, whatever, we want lead generation, we want meetings. So it sounds great. We trust you picked the best tool.
12:12 So that was kind of how we went from like initially positioning to I guess like modifying the positioning a little bit over time.
12:18 Yeah, I mean it makes a ton of sense and I think it’s it’s really interesting sort of transition into the gonna market for advancing some of the things that have worked in the helps body ecosystem that are maybe like non non obvious if you’re a SaaS company that is selling a product and you don’t care
12:31 about ecosystems even just the point that you’re like slicing a slice of a slice to get to the intersection of folks, and I mean, even within HubSpot, we have this at Arrows, obviously, if you sell a tool which is only for a specific hub, or most mostly used, if you use a specific hub, you maybe eliminate
12:47 a large percentage of that, you know, 240,000 HubSpot customers off the bat. So let’s get into the sort of good market motion a little bit.
12:55 What are some of the things that have worked for you or what are you sort of doubling down on or would suggest as like, you know, this is an area to push the specific to the HubSpot ecosystem?
13:04 system. Yeah. Well, I mean, I spent time really building some deep things inside of HubSpot that take time to understand and read through the API documentation and take advantage of things like timeline events.
13:15 You know, we’re working on UI cards now and so it’s like getting to know the platform. There’s a lot of stuff that if you build for HubSpot, that it enables, but it’s not obvious.
13:27 And if you look at the way most apps work, they’re just not doing those things. They’re not taking the time to do that.
13:33 Integration for them is one of many priorities. And if you’re looking at your product roadmap and it’s like rocks, paper, scissors, shoot kind of thing, you know, the integration like, you know, it’s rock and it keeps losing to build this other feature on our platform kind of thing.
13:49 And so for us, because we’re fundamentally an integration tool, that’s all the case, right? Like the building deep in the platform does win because that’s why people buy our product.
13:59 But I think that even companies that don’t make an integration to us can learn from that. And it can be the edge that can cause a product to be selected, you know, and especially to competitive space.
14:10 Going that like one extra layer deep, I think can make a difference because a savvy HubSpot admin will get it.
14:17 They’ll be like, oh, yep, got it. Because you built that, I can do this. Like there’s like a very quick in a single screen shot, they can see all the integration filter properties that they could select from a timeline event and know that what they’ll be able to do with it and then for them, it gets 
14:34 really obvious. And so what I found that like a lot of times, an admin, rev-ops admin, super admin, and this is true in Salesforce and in HubSpot, a lot of times they’re, what I’m finding is like their job is veto more than anything else.
14:45 And so when, because they’re kind of the guardian of the CRM and they’re the guardian of the system and sometimes that includes security requirements and things like that.
14:53 But other times it’s just like how deep does this go and what can it, what does it do, what access does it have, what permissions is it requesting, is it requesting for like excessive scope and things like that.
15:04 You need to build for the immediate like use case. So for us it’s like we’re generating leads, we need to see the leads, we need to track the leads and then we want to not email people we shouldn’t email.
15:16 That’s obviously the thing, the problem, those are the problems that we’re solving. But if we can build it deeply in a thoughtfully in a way that when the other person gets looped in and they’re on that call and they look at the screen and they’re like, yeah, looks good to me.
15:30 That’s all you need from that person. They’re not the end customer buyer, but they have their job to say no to things that will throw off the rest of everything else that’s going out within the organization.
15:45 So yeah, the going those extra layers deep and like really focusing on ecosystem and what has been provided for you as an app developer, I do think that’s a way to actually accelerate your revenue within an ecosystem because like for me for us like my focus is like how quickly if we’re going to build
16:00 into integration, how quickly can we be getting paid by users of those tools. So because we’re not venture backed, we don’t have tens of millions of dollars to burn.
16:11 If we invest engineering or something, we need to get money back relatively soon. It needs to be validated in market.
16:17 And so one of the ways to do that is to do it the right way. So if you’re thinking about building a hotspot app for the first time, if you’re a bigger company, you need to think about what would a hotspot user actually want to make a case for it, or if you’re a new app developer, it’s kind of the same
16:29 thing. So by going a little deeper, you can get money faster because people will be like, okay, cool. And maybe that means like starting narrow and just nailing one thing and then okay, here’s where we’re going next, where we’re going next, we’re going next, it’s like associations, we log associations
16:43 up to the company object, there’s like a lot of little things that we’re doing that when you show people they get it and they’re like, okay, yeah.
16:48 And then therefore they have a willingness to pay because they know it’s saving them time. You know, we can talk about super next because super bits into that.
16:56 Yeah, I think there’s a lot of things that are like that that are to a point, if you less better or less deeper.
17:04 There’s lots of advantages and I think it’s interesting to just primarily about sort of speed to revenue on the like the front side of a deal, right?
17:09 Like how quickly can we get that or like avoid the know from somebody who would otherwise block a deal. I think there’s interesting opportunities too when you go deep on what Hubsbot gives you as an app developer to increase expansion, increase retention.
17:22 And I think this is a unusual way of approaching things if you are not sort of approaching things through an ecosystem lens, right?
17:30 It’s like Like, the advantage of a timeline event in HubSpot isn’t just that somebody can, you know, use that timeline event directly in a workflow or in reporting or whatever.
17:39 It’s like, you open up the surface area or the potential for more people to see your product in HubSpot. As you mentioned, great.
17:47 So the segue into Superd, because one of the things that I talk about with folks a lot is like, what do you enable in HubSpot?
17:53 Like, what is the thing that somebody can do because of your app inside of HubSpot? and you have sort of a pretty interesting approach like helping accelerate that full folks.
18:02 Because a lot of apps you install and it’s like, oh, you’re right, the data might be kept from this app, but now I have to go build something.
18:07 I have to figure out what to do with it. Yeah, totally. You sort of shortcut that loop. Yeah, I mean, SuperD has been a big part of that, right?
18:13 So SuperD.io, we use SuperD’s packages feature as an app partner to pre-build lists, workflows, and reports. And so if I say, listen, if you’re running outbound and you want to be able to attribute that app onto Revenue, you need a report.
18:27 Well, we built the report for you. Here it is. And so from a single link, they can install the Chrome extension, deploy that report, or they’re in that entire dashboard.
18:36 We have a dashboard with like 30 different reports in it. They can deploy that whole thing. And because we’re using webhooks as well, you know, a user could, if they sit down and focused in under an hour, they could have their app on campaigns sinking fully into Hublot with all the activities and everything
18:51 like that. And then piping right into reports and be able to track Like the full activity set and then any conversion that happens on those contacts in under an hour.
18:59 And then also have workflows that are triggering like call tasks for the reps to follow up on replies and things like that.
19:05 And so Superd enables that in a way that’s really, really powerful. So yeah, I mean, you want people to actually use the application to actually use the data.
19:12 I think for us, our first problem was like the data layer. And now what’s happening is we’re finding that our data because we did it in a way that’s really conscientious about how a HubSpot works and the HubSpot data model.
19:24 We’re finding is that our integration is forward compatible. As new features come out, I’ll like refresh the UI and HubSpot and be like, Oh, yeah, turns out app on sync supports the all bound timeline.
19:39 I don’t even know what the all bound timeline is. I’ve never even heard of it. But because we how we’re logging that email activity, and we looked it all the options and the API docs and we did it the right way, yeah apparently we support that now which is cool.
19:53 So I do think HubSpot does a good job if you follow the docs as they ship things like we have found that.
19:59 And that’s been pretty nice and that is not necessarily typical of every platform. Definitely not. And I think they’re surfacing more at ways also.
20:08 Like they’re adding more ways within the application to sort of like find oh an app does this for an app solves this problem.
20:16 You know, so that I think is where I think things are getting potentially interesting in a way that helps about does that, that is not, again, not typical for other CRMs.
20:23 And I think it’s a really good step for the platform and for app developers because it gives you better visibility and distribution.
20:29 I’m curious sort of on that note that, you know, if you’re building it the right way, if you’re investing the time in the integration, how much time you find and sort of maybe building it the right way mitigates a lot of this.
20:40 But like, what’s the sort of upfront cost of integration versus like ongoing, you know, helps about change something we need to think about how a new approach to this, you’re always in a dynamic environment and you have an integration with something, right?
20:53 Like anything can change at any point. Like, how do you sort of account for that in planning and like road mapping?
20:59 Yeah, I mean, that’s true. I mean, if you look at these iPass tools, these integration platform as a service tools, that’s kind of their main selling point.
21:05 Like, oh, we’ll take care of that for you. I think there are some really cool teams shipping some really cool solutions there, but I am a little skeptical of the pitch.
21:16 What I’ve found is that the details matter and a lead in HubSpot is not the same thing as a lead in Salesforce.
21:26 If you are not talking to users and you’re not understanding the relationship between the lead and the rest of the data model in HubSpot or Salesforce and you decide to move between them and you look at them interchangeably, you’re going to have problems.
21:41 I think it’s possible to use an iPaaS and not have these issues definitely or like of course it’s possible but like The connection is one thing maintaining it is another Understanding the context is another right like there’s like so yeah I mean and this is I kind of like chuckle when I see people 
22:00 being like I built you know this week It’s Docusign I built Docusign 17 minutes with cursor and whatever. It’s like that is that is cool But it’s like, that’s never been the moat.
22:11 I mean, that’s not the reason why Airbnb is Airbnb. Like, Airbnb sites are very simple. Craigslist’s website is very simple.
22:18 I mean, that’s not historically, I mean, yes, occasionally companies come around and their technology is remote. This an FTP setup, right?
22:25 Totally. Right. Yeah, it’s a great example. So it’s like, you know, I mean, there’s other reasons why people buy things and use things and integrations are part of that.
22:33 So yeah, I do think that like maintaining overtime matters, those things change over time. It’s like a non-trivial thing and I think that there are some bypass solutions that it will be better enabling for that than others Others I’ve seen are like very thin and I’ve talked to other founders who have
22:47 been like hey We’re working on a HubSpot integration and we tried out these two different other tools and they didn’t give us what we needed So you know, I would say like You just you just got a guy looking to that a little bit.
22:57 But regardless if you do it on your own or if you’d use one of these tools Like you’re gonna have to spend some time getting to the platform And I think if you asked anybody at any of these other tools, they would tell you that and And some of them may make it easier, and they may speed up some things
23:09 for you. I think for us, because it’s so core to what we do, it didn’t make sense. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a good approach.
23:15 Like it just depends on what you’re doing. For sure. And I think that’s a great point. Like the context matters.
23:20 The nuance of the ecosystem matters because everybody’s trying to do things slightly differently. And as tall as everybody wants to use it slightly differently and the sort of the devil’s and the details of those kinds of things.
23:31 Yeah, I mean Salesforce. I mean, like we went the first few months of Salesforce and like nobody’s using lead object.
23:37 And then all of a sudden, we just had like, but now we’re moving up in the Salesforce ecosystem and bigger Salesforce companies are now reaching out.
23:43 And like, yep, we need that. And then like yesterday, like, oh, actually, we want to go right to opportunity. I’m like, okay, we got to build that too.
23:49 Which like, I mean, it’s totally, they explain their use case. And I’m like, yeah, that makes sense. You know, and I think that like Salesforce is much, much more complicated than HubSpot.
23:57 There’s just so many more things that are possible. And just like little weird stuff that how Salesforce uses the task activity as a catch-all for a lot of different things that I didn’t fully understand before.
24:07 There’s no equivalent exactly one-to-one match for timeline events in Salesforce. But tasks kind of perform like a multi-functional, like a Swiss Army knife kind of thing.
24:24 Once you get in it, then you talk to more users, and then you’ll start seeing, oh, there’s more here that people want.
24:31 And so like it’s not a one and done thing you’re going to ship the integration and then users are going to start using it And they’re going to have feedback and whether it’s maintenance or going deeper like what’s going to happen on most engineering teams is like okay We don’t want to think about us 
24:43 about again for like six months We just worked on it for the last couple of sprints like we’re done, right?
24:47 It’s like no because now you have users and they’re expecting Right, you know, even if it’s not new features. Yeah, right.
24:54 They’re like well, can you do this? Can you do this? Which like you have to be up for that otherwise you shouldn’t build it right because like of course a user would want to use your product, which is like what they’re asking for, right?
25:04 Yeah, for sure. I mean, that’s a great way of putting it. I think that’s helpful, helpful sort of consideration for folks.
25:11 So last question for you. For somebody who is, and maybe I think you sort of have an interesting perspective, as you mentioned, just sort of relatively recently made the shift to also supporting other ecosystems.
25:23 For somebody who’s sort of not in the house, but ecosystem, or doesn’t have an app integration, you know, whatever the current status.
25:31 What would be the piece of advice or the model that you would have them go through to figure out, is this a bet that’s worth making for me?
25:40 What was your framework on both all-in on HubSpot or the first starting point being with just HubSpot to something beyond that?
25:51 We’re bootstrapped. That informs how we think about the market and the world and what we do. For us, the question is like, are there users already who have this problem?
26:03 Do you have users already on HubSpot who would like to do things better or differently? The reason why we started building Salesforce in the first place is that we found users were using HubSpots Salesforce data sync to get the data into Salesforce.
26:19 I got a customer service ticket with a screenshot of a contact record in Salesforce and they were like, like, hey, why is this happening?
26:26 I mean, I was like, well, what are you talking about? How did you even get that in there? And they’re like, oh, well, we buy your hotspot.
26:35 We bought the hotspot integration, but just to put it into Salesforce. And here’s how we’re doing that. And it was like, oh, okay.
26:42 And we had like quite a few users who were doing that before I even knew it. Like they never asked, we never talked about it.
26:49 It just sort of happened. And so that’s what led us into building for Salesforce. And so I would say with like an ecosystem investment, ideally there should be something there already, you know, like I’m not building for, you know, whatever random like CRM for architects or something like that.
27:11 Because, you know, I’m sure there’s a lot of great architects out there and they probably have a great CRM option or maybe they use HubSpot.
27:17 I don’t know. But you have to look for the users like what’s come up for us on a few calls is actually snowflake Like upmarket people saying actually I want to send this to the data warehouse first and then from snowflake I want to push down to HubSpot and that’s come up enough times now where I’m like
27:31 huh and then they explain their use case And they’re like okay, yeah, that actually makes sense. So for me the because reboots are actually think about it incrementally We place smaller beds.
27:40 It’s like What’s the Billy Bean thing? The Oakland A’s where they would do the money ball, you know It’s like, we’re hitting singles and doubles.
27:49 We’re not swinging for the fences. So when we write code, it needs to work. When we write docs, people need to read them.
27:56 When we onboard someone, we want to retain that customer. It is not like a high stakes, you know, bed a lot, win a lot, but probably lose everything.
28:06 Kind of thing for our business right now based on our, the nature of what the business is. And so that’s my bias.
28:14 But I would say like, see what the users are what they’re asking for and make sure that there’s value and then know that you can probably stretch them.
28:22 But there has to be like an existing something. And then you can stretch them and help them use it. I would say many of our users don’t take advantage of our prebuilt reports and workflows.
28:30 And so now we’re kind of shifting into education mode and trying to expand that use case and and do more.
28:37 But in the beginning it was just like does anybody care about this? I can worry about them making the most of it later but like do they care at all and and then we check that box and now it’s like okay let’s become let’s become part of there it’s become an essential tool for them in HubSpot.
28:53 That’s a great place to leave it. Thank you so much for doing this. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Built for HubSpot podcast.
28:59 If you’d like this show please subscribe to the podcast, follow us on YouTube, follow and subscribe to Built HubSpot on I’ll see you in the next episode.