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The built hapily podcast is about building apps, companies, and relationships in the HubSpot ecosystem. As HubSpot grows, so does the opportunity - and this podcast puts you in the room with the people making it all happen.
Hosted by Dax and Max, built hapily goes behind the scenes with HubSpot developers, solutions partners, startup founders and community leaders. Each episode delivers tactical insights into launching and scaling businesses around the HubSpot platform.
However, this podcast is about more than just building software. It's about building authentic connections, fulfilling careers, and lives you can be proud of. Guests share their personal journeys, hard-won lessons and philosophies for not just achieving success, but finding purpose and happiness along the way.
After all, this is about more than making apps. It's about building hapily - and you're invited along for the ride. Join Dax, Max and their guests to construct the life you've been dreaming of, one conversation at a time.
[00:00:00] There's no question of what to do if you wanna be successful in HubSpot, there is a clear playbook. It's not like I wonder what to do. There is a playbook and you will be successful if you follow this playbook.
[00:00:09] Then it's just oh, your ATS could also be one of the greatest marketing tools ever conceived. Do you ever think of that? That's a weird place to live in.
[00:00:17] On today's episode of The built hapily Podcast, we have from NewEdge Growth and El Blake Brock.
[00:00:23] Blake tells us the story about how they built an ATS on HubSpot by how they started working with companies that were in staffing, all of a sudden realizing they had a great product idea and how they brought that to market in the HubSpot ecosystem. All that and more on this episode of The built hapily Podcast.
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[00:00:58] Blake. [00:01:00] We tried to build the built hapily Podcast so that we could see dope people building dope things. Welcome to the built hapily podcast. Where are you coming from and what are you doing right now?
[00:01:11] Coming from KC guys we are a technical rev ops agency. Not just in KC but across the country and even globally. We are doing what most of the folks in our space are doing, helping our customers create sustainable revenue engines and revenue growth through our proprietary framework of strategy, process, organization, results and technology, or the sport of growth.
[00:01:36] That has led to a lot of cool stuff that we never would've thought that we would focus on. So yeah, we work with the same PE-backed SaaS companies that everyone in our space does. But we carved out a niche in the staffing and recruiting space that
[00:01:50] Our mission of bringing rev ops to recruiting and now we're talented.
[00:01:54] We're targeting talent acquisition teams at enterprise level companies, which includes SaaS as well [00:02:00] as enterprise staffing companies themselves with our own ATS Matador.
[00:02:04] Got it. That's where the connection was.
[00:02:07] This is the funny, this is the best part that I feel about HubSpot, right? One of the best is the community and the people. Everyone's nice. Everyone just kinda showed up. It's all like we all got lost at the same theme park. We're all sitting around like the beer tent.
[00:02:19] We're just like, I know where we're going. We're all chilling. We're gonna do this. We're gonna hang out. Cool. So how did you fall in? How did you fall into HubSpot? Because I know you didn't show up and be like, you know what this is, I'm going into HubSpot. I see this. This is what I want. You probably had some random stuff.
[00:02:32] Would love to hear
[00:02:32] You, you nailed it, man. So we started this business really in 2020. So we back a napkin put the business model together in a coffee shop, Q4, 2019. Everything came together. Q1, 2020 covid hit and we threw a hell Mary. And a few different customers caught that Hail Mary. And what that turned into was maybe there is a need for some sales efficiency was really the theory that we had [00:03:00] back then.
[00:03:00] And it was really the way that we thought it was easy to understand Rev ops. So you fast forward a little bit, we signed a huge banking customer. They're a very large business bank and they had a $2 million plus spend annually on the revenue tech stack. And like we know we have so much tech debt.
[00:03:19] We're not using any of this for what we're supposed to be using for nothing is integrated. We have no clear picture of the data. We can't make informed decisions. We know it's not a tech problem. We're not even sure where we're going, and we're like, I. We got you. We're gonna run a rev ops assessment for you.
[00:03:35] And they're like, we don't know what that is, but it sounds great. Right? And this is a, I think right now there are 30 billion assets under management, so a good sized business bank. And the result of that ended with. A recommendation of them to consolidate onto the HubSpot platform, and it decreased their tech spend by 50% and increased ROI an incredible amount.
[00:03:58] I can't remember the percent [00:04:00] today, this was a while ago. But as part of that, we're like, you know what? We shopped HubSpot for these guys, but we want to be part of this movement. We felt like HubSpot was building a wave. Across go to market and rev ops and really moving up market. And we wanted to be on that wave.
[00:04:17] We wanted to be like you guys. We wanted to help claim that wave and really control where it went. And so here we are, five years later one of the premier HubSpot partners and bringing a bigger tech stack to that space as well.
[00:04:30] So you guys hadn't used HubSpot before that you had found a HubSpot through this, like larger okay, we've got a company that wants to do, revenue operations, even though I don't even know if that's what it was called five years ago, but that's what you ended up doing. I. Then you helped him shop around for software and that's where you first got the taste of the sprocket.
[00:04:51] Is that the Well,
[00:04:53] thought being agnostic was key and in reality there's no scale in ag agnostic tech. So we went [00:05:00] all in.
[00:05:01] That's awesome. Very cool. So, all right, so you where you tell me about a moment. Along the way, setting that first customer up where you guys realized oh ~shit, ~this is the thing that we want to use for everybody else. What was that moment like? Or what sparked that moment?
[00:05:17] What was the thing you realized?
[00:05:19] Yeah, so we had worked in Salesforce. We had worked in smaller CRM solutions. We had done a lot of this work, but as we're looking at what this customer and a lot of our early customers wanted to achieve, the biggest value proposition that we saw and that they saw was time to value.
[00:05:36] Meaning that because of the ease of use, because of the configurability and what is now really more customization capable but it's still configurable. Like that meant that we could do really hard things really quickly through configuring what HubSpot had pre-built up.
[00:05:53] Got it. Nice. So it was like, oh ~shit,~ we can get. Faster, we get more done faster on this and [00:06:00] it makes more sense to go all in on it. Right. That's also wild having a giant banking customer for the first four A on HubSpot. That must have been an interesting experience, especially five years ago. Now it's probably, I'm sure there's a lot of things that they've done recently that makes that a little bit easier with, the sensitive data and all that other kind of stuff.
[00:06:20] So then now weird is like the. You had mentioned that you were you were starting to find a niche with the sort of staffing and recruiting agencies, things like that. How did that sort of evolve to where you were like, oh, we like working with this type of company.
[00:06:37] Like how did that happen?
[00:06:38] Yeah, so, very similarly, about three years ago, we signed a very large enterprise healthcare staffing company, and our initial contract with them was, Hey, can you figure out our reports on Salesforce? I'm like, sure, we'll figure this out, but that's not your problem. We'll get you to a point where this is usable.
[00:06:59] But [00:07:00] it's not your problem. And signed a small deal with them that now a little over three years later, we've fully migrated them off of Salesforce onto the entire HubSpot Enterprise Suite.
[00:07:11] See ya.
[00:07:12] they have a 30 plus year old homegrown, ATS platform that does everything in the HRS Hs, H-C-M-A-T-S space.
[00:07:22] And now they are in the process of moving all of that onto Matador or HubSpot as an ATS. It's been gradual, but they've been for the last 12 months, moving more and more of their recruitment function onto HubSpot as well.
[00:07:37] And it's not just them. They're owned by a global PE firm who only scoops up healthcare staffing companies of
[00:07:46] You're set. You're set with the this. Yeah, this thing. Right? That's huge. I remember what's funny when. In late 2019, me and Ty started chemist and one, it was I [00:08:00] wouldn't say like it was a solutions partner. It was like we were having these apps, but then people were like, Hey, can you do this?
[00:08:04] And we're like, sure, why not? One of those things was an ATS and we blew it due to our apps, like starting to blow up and us just doing this as some random thing. We're like, oh, we. We are not gonna be able to do this the way it needs to be. But that acronym, the ATS has, I've heard it over the years.
[00:08:22] Like where's that? Where's that? And that's that. That's that man, you know what Max, if we did that one, then we would crush it. And when I was looking in a NewEdge and doing research, I was like, oh, we did it.
[00:08:33] Yeah. So yeah. So this is, yeah. So to tee this up for people listening, right? NewEdge Growth, which is your partner agency or your partner company, right? You built a product on HubSpot's CRM called Matador or ATS, right? So. Just so everyone knows, this is the context of the conversation we're leading into.
[00:08:53] Right. And the big thing that kind of excited me when I saw this right, is and then hearing your story [00:09:00] it's even better, right? Something I've been saying for a long time is like, Hey, the app marketplace is like one of the next big possible horizons for current HubSpot partners delivering services only today, right?
[00:09:12] Because especially when you see. HubSpot partners like niche into a specific like niche, right? Like in your case you guys over time decided, Hey, we really working with these staffing agencies, right? You pair that like niche like understanding of a particular industry or business type or whatever it is.
[00:09:32] But then you also pair that with a super deep understanding of HubSpot that you gain from delivering services there. All of a sudden you start to become the expert in this is what HubSpot can do. This is what people in this specific niche wanna do. Here are the gaps that, or the things that make it difficult to use HubSpot for those type of people.
[00:09:51] And what's really cool is like HubSpot is through. Opening up their API and creating an app marketplace and like doing all these things. HubSpot is [00:10:00] basically saying, Hey partners, you know what's best to build next on this platform and we're enabling you to do it. And so what I find like really interesting about your guys' story is that like you set yourself up perfectly to be a company that did that, where you go, Hey, we know a lot about.
[00:10:20] ATS. We know a lot about staffing agencies. We know a ton about HubSpot. We know why doing ATS on HubSpot sucks. We're gonna go build an actual product on HubSpot that solves for that, right? So what I want to hear from you is like it. What it sounds like is that you guys were you were building something and maybe you started to build it more than a couple of times, but there had to be some point where you're just like, oh.
[00:10:44] ~Shit.~ Maybe there's like an actual product here that we're building on HubSpot. Can you tell me about was there a moment of realization? Was there, conversation you got, like, where was that? Tell me about that moment in time where you guys said, let's turn this into like its own sort [00:11:00] of like thing and thus Matador was born.
[00:11:02] Or, tell me about that. As detailed as you want.
[00:11:06] you're exactly right. Part of this was anticipating HubSpot opening up the platform and making it easier to build on. We're excited about that progress. But that, that hypothesis, that HubSpot would open it up the way Salesforce did, the way Dynamics did started a couple of years ago.
[00:11:25] And for us, we kept working with these huge staffing companies and revenue was not a problem. It was more. The fact that they lacked a revenue engine. They lacked scale. They lacked true sustainable revenue growth, and they were reliant on. Companies and products, especially in the ATS space that have just been around forever and have captive customers because who else are you gonna go to?
[00:11:52] And while there have been many new entrants to the market, what we saw over and over again was a lack of attention to [00:12:00] what the customer actually needs. And understanding that recruiting is part of the go-to-market. Model for recruitment agencies, staffing agencies, and talent acquisition organizations.
[00:12:12] Recruitment has to be measured the same way, which means data has to be collected very differently. It cannot be siloed. ATS platforms that have been around forever we're siloing the recruitment data and one area of their product and building light CRM capabilities in another area of their product.
[00:12:30] What happened was all of these customers were stuck. They couldn't, not only did they not understand how to digest the data, they didn't know how to use the data, which literally meant that they were paying a lot of money for a platform that was essentially excel on steroids. And we saw this as an opportunity to say, there's no reason that we can't build our own data model, deploy it using super little plug for super, deploy it using.
[00:12:55] We just had Matt on last week. We, yeah. Yep.
[00:12:59] so we've got [00:13:00] our base deployment. Coming outta super and then we're building on based on customer need and really outcomes and what the process looks like for their go-to market model. And that all happened, like we started this build about 18 months ago after having conversations with some of the largest healthcare staffing companies, not only in the country, but in the world where they couldn't solve these problems either.
[00:13:23] And we were able to work with them to really brainstorm what would great. Look like if we can make this great, not just good, what would great look like? And we started there with the understanding that we have to perfect the data model first. And that part, it depends on a very deep understanding of recruitment and talent acquisition.
[00:13:42] And so our entire data model applies rev ops for recruiting. And that's why that became our mission. The rest is all table stakes. It's features, it's functionality. If we make the data model work, then this is a scalable platform. These, for these companies.
[00:13:55] Dude, that's the same thing with event•hapily It's all because of the data model. Right? You'd be [00:14:00] surprised like how much of just someone's use of HubSpot is fundamentally broken just 'cause they don't have the right objects related to the right objects. You know what I
[00:14:09] they, how.
[00:14:10] it's wild.
[00:14:11] It.
[00:14:12] And how you use them together and how you report on 'em and all that stuff, it's a lot of times it just comes down to your objects. Right? So so Matador, is it like an app someone logs into or is it more like a really super curated build of HubSpot? Or is it a combination or like what are the elements that are like proprietary that make it unique,
[00:14:32] so they're buying HubSpot just like they would buy HubSpot in any other purchase process. Any other procurement process. We have an AI engine behind the scenes and integrations across. HubSpot, clay Gong, OpenAI, and other third party applications that power our data model that makes things like auto sourcing for pipeline opportunities, auto sourcing for well-matched, well qualified archetypal fit [00:15:00] candidates automated.
[00:15:01] So button press activation of these things where the data is flowing right into HubSpot and
[00:15:06] Yeah.
[00:15:07] That's really what makes this special. Like we didn't recreate the wheel. We used what was already great for CRM and HubSpot for revenue intelligence and gong for data automation and enrichment and clay.
[00:15:20] And we built the AI engine to power all that.
[00:15:23] Nice. Yeah. And it's really of the sum of the parts, right. And put together in a very like unique and highly tailored and very smart way. And it's held together with a bunch of like smart integrations that you have that'll talk to each other in a very certain way.
[00:15:37] That's what a product is.
[00:15:38] it's a pro. You know what I mean? Yeah.
[00:15:41] Either off the shelf stuff like Clay and Gong and all these things, right? Or it's JavaScript, it's versal, it's function, it's languages thrown together with a UI pieces, and that was the biggest thing, right? We always had a vision, like from day negative one.
[00:15:57] When I saw and heard of HubSpot, which was again, same about [00:16:00] time, somebody was like, Hey, my, I need a migration from HubSpot. I was like, what's that? What's that? What's that?
[00:16:05] So what the, what a day.
[00:16:07] The idea is once you see it, you're like, oh, it would be dope if I used this as a database and I just made whatever.
[00:16:13] Right? Like I would, my, my BHAG back in the day was to go to targe and be like, Hey, you know that, remember back in the day when you go to Kmart and you'd look at the point of sale system, it was like black screen with the green do it was literally like Atari, that point of sale. That's what my, was ingrained in my mind of how rudimentary.
[00:16:30] Point of sale system for it at like grocery stores and like stores, they still are, right? You go to a restaurant and you look at it, you're like, the hell is that Windows nt? What are you doing? And I was like, well, what if you just made like a really nice wrapper and it was like hush spot behind the scenes?
[00:16:43] Turns out that's what a Salesforce ISV is like. They build products. I can go sell it right to Targe, I can go sell it to Whole Foods. I can go sell the thing. And that's just like the next piece. And a lot of partners aren't smelling that. Who's poised to. [00:17:00] Run with that industry. Right? Dharmesh, said really recently I could see a $10 billion company on HubSpot where I can just go, you just go to the bank.
[00:17:08] You just go to the staffing company. You're like, I have the solution. You pay me, I deliver the solution, and
[00:17:13] dude. I mean
[00:17:14] and all this stuff thrown in together, package. Perfect. They have no idea. They, it just is great to them. That's
[00:17:20] be even crazier. It'll be even crazier when it's white labeled, right? So imagine like you open up HubSpot and you see the Matador logo on the top left, right? I remember I literally, when I was in a solutions engineer, I remember having a I was assigned to a deal and I was working it with, a sales rep, and I was talking to this, it was like a commercial real estate company, and I was talking to him and I was like, can you show me your real estate, like the app that you're using or whatever. And I can't remember what it's called. It was like real estate something, whatever. And she logs into it and she's she goes, yeah.
[00:17:51] And I was like, oh, you didn't tell me you had Salesforce. And she's whatcha, are you talking about we don't have Salesforce? I'm like, this is Salesforce. It just has a different logo on it. This is [00:18:00] Salesforce. And she's oh, like she had no, no clue. And this was like their, tech person.
[00:18:05] Right. And it's interesting, it's Salesforce has done this whole thing where like companies are literally taking Salesforce white labeling it, and reselling it as like a different product. Like HubSpot's headed in that direction, like a hundred percent. Right. And I think we're on the horizon of seeing again, products there.
[00:18:20] There's apps, there's integrations, and then there will, the next thing is products built on HubSpot. Right. And I think this is like a great example of the closest thing to that, right. Before it actually happens,
[00:18:34] because you could only do it so much. Right. And that's the, there's been so many leaps and strides in the past year or two. 'cause when we built real city, that was the entire point was, I want to take on Zillow. We started building the framework to take on Zillow and be like, you know what? Own your data.
[00:18:49] People don't come to your website and then get poached by like a different agent. And behind the scenes it HubSpot, all the email automations. And I was like, okay, now how do I white label this thing? And they're like, you can't. I was like, what? That [00:19:00] was the whole point of having this so I can make a Zillow and sell it to people and have a better version with cooler stuff and dah.
[00:19:06] And it was, probably 10 years too early. But the The key takeaway is that our. Are you technical in diving into the docs? Do you understand the platform? Do you understand what's new? What's changing? Do you subscribe to the postman? Do you have all the endpoints to know what's happening as it comes out?
[00:19:22] Because not many people will be poised to build it when the doors open and seems like you guys are, there's a few people that have really OGs that have done it, jamming on the contact style and, but still made like a UI that is just the HubSpot.
[00:19:37] Yeah.
[00:19:38] If you're poised to do that, then you have the next big thing.
[00:19:40] You have the next, you can go and do run with it because you have all the information, you've gone through all the pain. You guys know the industry, you know the niche. Build the product, and then it's yours, and you can charge the 10 k, 20 k, 30 KMRR because it's yours and you run with it.
[00:19:55] I was gonna say, that's the holy grail that, that I know you guys are chasing, we're chasing. If [00:20:00] you're building an app on HubSpot, you're waiting until it is our product. Right. And we know, we know quote unquote that's the direction. 'cause that's the direction that upmarket companies in the past, that Salesforce dynamics moved.
[00:20:13] And when that happens, you guys are gonna be ready. We're gonna be ready. Others will be ready. That got a head start.
[00:20:18] All right, so, so I want to get, I want to get real conspiratorial. Okay. So I. I remember this back when I was still doing implementation, right? So I would have customers, I forget exactly how this would, I would get asked this or how I would get in this conversation, but people would ask me like, kinda like, where do you see the future of HubSpot going?
[00:20:41] Or what are you excited about? Right? Because it's usually at the tail end. I'm done working with like the customer and move on to their CSM and we'd talk pie in the sky where it's HubSpot going, blah, blah, blah. And the thing that I always said to people is I can't wait to see.
[00:20:55] What HubSpot does after it, takes everything it learned about how to communicate outwardly and [00:21:00] turns that inward on its own people, which basically means how do you all of a sudden use HubSpot to attract, engage, and delight talent for your own company and the people that work at your own company, right?
[00:21:09] And like, where is HR hub? Where is people hub? Where is this, where's that? And I've been saying this for years and years and years. This is gonna happen. Like you will see HubSpot eventually. Growing your business is not just like selling stuff, it's growing the people that you actually have working for you, right?
[00:21:25] There's a lot of different ways to think about that. Think about it, it made the jump from a marketing tool to a customer service tool, reinventing itself as a CSM and doing sales. There's no reason it can't do HR recruiting and all that kind of stuff, right? Like it's just another function of your business, right?
[00:21:42] And where I think. It really started is I'm like, the second I see them do user based workflows, I'll know they're headed in that direction and that happened. Right? And you also start to see them start to do other kind of little sneaky things. Oh, you can manage your [00:22:00] out of office stuff now you can manage this, you can do that.
[00:22:03] And they start doing these like little teensy things, like slowly moving them in the direction, almost like getting. It almost feels like they're trying to bait their customers into asking for there to be features around managing their own internal people is like what? It is feeling like they're nudging people to get them to a place where it's oh man, well if I can do this in a workflow, like why can't I do like this with a
[00:22:33] It's like the user when you start to be able to use the user object in other places, right? Because imagine if you could do not, I wouldn't say payroll, right? But like time or time off. You got your calendar, you've got your round robin stuff. What if you could plug that into HubSpot and now the HR people, this is like the rippling and all those, like you got all the
[00:22:52] brother. Hey dude. They just bought cashflow. Okay. What do you, they could pay [00:23:00] someone one day, like you, that's the thing. If you could take money, you could probably figure out giving money and cut the pay. Like I really think, 'cause dude Dharmesh is used to say we want to be like a business' operating system.
[00:23:13] The operating system doesn't just do marketing, sales and service my friend. Right. And so I think that's always been in the cards, but like they haven't set it. Right. Blake, I wanna get your take on it because you're very much building, a product that has to do with, people man, like hiring people.
[00:23:35] Like it's like the first sort of bit of it, right? And I've had I had customers way back then saying, can we use this for an ATS? And I'm like, I don't know what an ATS is, but I guess you mark it. And attract people and they could fill out a form to apply. And it was like starting to make sense in my head, right?
[00:23:50] And then of course it came down to well, we can't store their social security number, or like, all this sensitive information that we need during the hiring process and all this kind of stuff. And some people backed off it a little [00:24:00] bit, but that's different now. Right. But what's your take on that conspiracy?
[00:24:04] Do you think we're headed in that direction?
[00:24:06] Yeah, I think it makes too much sense. We get these requests all the time, so almost in every case where it's an enterprise staffing company who also hires their own people. Clearly. This question comes up. In fact, we just answered this question late last night for one of our new customers on ATS, and it comes down to a few.
[00:24:27] Immediate concerns around security and control over the data. And what I mean specifically is you have an entire revenue organization and that includes recruiters and recruitment teams inside of one HubSpot portal. When you start to introduce internal hiring, so talent acquisition, hiring the next DATs, hiring the next max, how do you make sure that people can't access private?
[00:24:55] And sensitive information about those folks, whether it's interview transcripts or [00:25:00] personal data like an SSN or payroll type information. So pay rate and benefits and all these things that have to be protected. So like right now, the only way to completely silo that is two portals synced, right?
[00:25:15] So portal to portal
[00:25:17] Multi organizations coming up is gonna be some, something like that. It could be multi-department.
[00:25:22] Yes. Right. So portal to portal management. Becomes really important. And that's something that, that I know is, in the works business units play a role there and can certainly dictate access team-based access to different data. But the key is gonna be portal to portal sync and management.
[00:25:41] Until there are like, until there's some kind of better control in place. That one's gonna be the best.
[00:25:47] Yeah. Interesting.
[00:25:49] And I.
[00:25:49] also, okay,
[00:25:51] So just a really, I think really cool thing that I'll open the kimono a little bit with you guys. Sourcing and hiring based on [00:26:00] skills and experience and certifications and licensing and industry and all these things. It's table stakes. It's easy. You can train ChatGPT to do this in, in, a month.
[00:26:09] It is really not that complex, but something that we're working on right now is building out performance prediction and modeling based on psychological factors and. Looking at cultural fit and role fit and the work type fit, and then building that into what we call candidate, DNA company, DNA and job DNA.
[00:26:30] And all the relationships between those. Basically saying Max and Dax, these are the archetypes that they fit. They'll be successful in our company or in this customer for these reasons. And we're going to predict performance with a confidence rating of X, right? And then post-placement. How do we maximize our investment in Max?
[00:26:51] How do we maximize our investment in Dax, putting together enhancement and performance management programs based on who they are psychologically, not what they [00:27:00] are on paper.
[00:27:01] Yeah.
[00:27:02] And you build this on HubSpot. Come on man.
[00:27:05] HubSpot's the operating system. Right. It's all in the engine behind the
[00:27:08] There's other stuff involved, man. Just if you sell stuff, you got Stripe. Is it Stripe hooked up to the platform? Probably. Are you sending emails? It's pro or it is to SMS. It's probably Twilio hooked into the platform, baked in. So it's when people start to ob obs KI can never say that word.
[00:27:23] What you're doing, what you're selling, what you're providing. It just matters. Is it great or not? Like you said, like I have, I can log in and I have the stuff and I can do my thing, or it does a lot of the things for me and I can just read. It gives me, things to do. I think it's major man.
[00:27:35] So again, this is, I believe it is the playbook right now in the HBO ecosystem for people that are, if you're coming in, you have, whether you're coming in or you already have a solutions. Partner agency or you have clients, you're gold, you're just hustling. When you find these pains, like they are pretty evident and you gotta learn how to fix, build it.
[00:27:56] Use these tools that you got, use the HubSpot tool set, not just HubSpot for [00:28:00] HubSpot's means A CRM or my contacts and stuff. It's this is this platform. Run with it. Know what you're trying to solve for it, because we've seen it, up and down with what we're doing with. Are asked like, oh, they're using it like this.
[00:28:12] Like this is the platform. 'cause you're building a platform on a platform as well. Like we feel like Event hapily is a platform on a platform where people are using HubSpot, they're using event hapily, but then the way they're using it, we're like, oh. You could totally do that because we have the parts, the data model, the motions, et cetera.
[00:28:28] So I just was like, I'm like, yeah, this is, I smell the playbook and this, it's obvious. There's no question of what to do if you wanna be successful in HubSpot, there is a clear playbook. It's not like I wonder what to do. There is a playbook and you will be successful if you follow this playbook. Solve pain productize the product.
[00:28:45] Or product into product. Product to product. Really met with it. But you, you get it 'cause you're living it and I'm super hyped to have seen it, like seeing the beginnings of it.
[00:28:53] I want to switch some gears to some nerdy stuff here. What, I could imagine a lot of this is like a [00:29:00] hard, 90 degree turn. I can imagine a lot, for your customers and like the type of work you do and the stuff you build. There was probably a lot of excitement around like the recent changes of the level of sensitive data you can store in HubSpot.
[00:29:16] Did that unlock anything for you guys in terms of man, people really wanna do this, but they can't because you can't store this type of data in HubSpot. Right. And then, oh, all of a sudden, you could put someone's X-rays pictures in there. I don't know if you can go that far, but like you can do a lot more sensitive information now.
[00:29:33] Did that unlock oh, we can do X, Y, z and this and stuff that people ask for. In, in regards to the ATS stuff you've built.
[00:29:41] Hundred percent and for one big reason. When you're talking about enterprise corporations across industries, we know that IT and InfoSec teams get involved when you're procuring technology of the size that they need to buy from. From HubSpot, and this was a blocker before. Before those [00:30:00] announcements with data compliance came out, like a lot of these enterprise deals would not happen.
[00:30:05] They weren't allowed, they had to be on Salesforce or Dynamics for security purposes. And 99% of the time, that's Salesforce. So we couldn't even compete in the arena, whenever that was, a year ago. And now we can, and now we're like, even outside of staffing we're working with huge financial corporations and collecting financial data and doing things that again, were unimaginable on HubSpot.
[00:30:28] Prior to those announcements, so it's huge. Like it's so big to move up market.
[00:30:33] Yeah. And so was it more so the additional level of security that came with HubSpot in order to enable it to store the data versus oh, there's certain data points we can now store that help us with a certain function or feature we wish our platform had.
[00:30:51] I think just to simplify it as much as possible, I think it's more the latter. It's more of like, and you pass an InfoSec questionnaire.
[00:30:59] Yeah. [00:31:00] Yeah.
[00:31:00] Are you, do you conform to data security requirements at that enterprise level? And a year ago, the answer had to be no. And now we all get to say yes.
[00:31:09] That's awesome. That's crazy. That's good
[00:31:14] Well, now as we wrap this up, you are in the talent acquisition space ish, right? And technology and how it all moves together, right into a tech stack, like the engine to do. So how are you finding talent for your organization? Because you, that seems awfully meta.
[00:31:34] Are you using it yourself? What are you doing to get the right people? Because again, this is. I feel like the people that are in the HubSpot ecosystem now are visionaries. They see it because it's not clear as day, but the signs are there. The footprints are there. So where are you? Where are you looking to find talent?
[00:31:51] Yeah, so we've historically used staffing company. In fact my wife is in the staffing space, so it's been her company that has helped us [00:32:00] place really great talented folks. But we have been testing our own auto sourcing tool for the last six months. We've been testing it with paying customers, testing it with non-paying customers, collecting feedback, and we've got it to the point where now we're gonna be using this for our own talent acquisition.
[00:32:20] So our next slate of hires will all be sourced by Matador.
[00:32:23] There you go. we just started using quote, hapily
[00:32:29] Yeah, it was a.
[00:32:29] it. It always takes a while to eat your own dog food. You know what I mean? Well, Blake, I think the other thing interesting, are you guys listed in the app store or No,
[00:32:39] Not yet. We're in process There.
[00:32:42] got it. So the plan ultimately is have it in the app store because like I was in, I was like, it's an interesting dynamic 'cause is it something that's installed from the app marketplace or is it more something that like your team rolls out as part of a service?
[00:32:54] Like it, it's like a complex thing to sell. So like. How do you go to [00:33:00] market like with it and present it as its own product when it's not necessarily something you just hit it install in the app store. What are the challenges with that?
[00:33:09] So to simplify that whole process and make it easy to position and frame, we sell it exactly like we would sell HubSpot Enterprise Suite. Right? We're just positioning it as an ATS with the capabilities of an ATS. That will change once it can be listed on the app store and if someone knows they're just paying a licensing fee that they're.
[00:33:31] There's no like upcharge on that license. Right now I'm just buying HubSpot and then I'm paying this company to implement it and configure it as their version of ATS. And we have add-on products like the auto pipeline, auto sourcing, candidate archetypes, and DNA. That stuff is all extra. I. And so they'll pay a subscription for those.
[00:33:49] But when we're talking about implementing ATS, we try to simplify it. Nobody wants a complicated sale, especially maybe if HubSpot's bringing us in to, to help them close a big enterprise, ATS deal. [00:34:00] We don't wanna muddy the water by complicating the pricing. Like where A CPQ tool, quote, hapily might fall in, right.
[00:34:06] Yeah, for sure.
[00:34:08] is this. We wanna be able to add. That's again, a big vision, right? Imagine HubSpot was just like, yeah, here's Enterprise Suite. Line item. Line item. Here's Matador. Line item. Line item. Here's the quote app. They got a quote, right line item, and then they give it to 'em. That makes it one piece of paper.
[00:34:22] Very easy, and being able to add that and then letting HubSpot. Take a cut. Take a cut please. All by all means, take a big cut. That's the whole point in how every most app marketplaces work, they sell on their paper. Take a cut. We are all, everybody's happy and the client has a seamless experience, meaning they're doing one thing, they're not going jumping around.
[00:34:43] To get all these vendors and dealing with nine invoices in you can't get that up the chain.
[00:34:47] Exactly. You. You nailed it.
[00:34:49] Yeah. All right, Blake, I got a question for you and feel free to share as much as you want or nothing at all. It's totally up to you. What's like the next big thing you guys are building for Matador that [00:35:00] like you are really excited about, that no one else knows about?
[00:35:04] I think I already spoiled that one. It's looking at fit differently. Any. Any good recruiter like here's the future of recruiting. You have really high quality, talented, experienced recruiters, and that human touch never goes away, but there's a whole. Collection of more transactionally focused roles like sourcing, for instance, like that initial screening call for instance, and especially right now where there's an overpopulation of qualified candidates.
[00:35:38] How can you possibly get through screening, ranking, assessing and identifying. Cultural fit and potential and all of these things that are really important, how do you do that in a matter of minutes? Instead of spending four or five weeks having your team qualify and screen them? What I'm talking about from [00:36:00] a auto sourcing perspective, the next wave of that think about either AI powered human led interviews or AI powered.
[00:36:08] AI led interviews where you have dynamic interview scripts that work to build out the candidate DNA and match that with benchmarks and thresholds that we know are good fits for the companies that, that are hiring for those jobs. And then within the matter of minutes following those interviews, you have a full on assessment and you know this will be a good fit and they'll be successful and they're most likely to stay on for 12 months, 18 months plus.
[00:36:36] Yeah. Interesting. That is really cool.
[00:36:39] because when you're dealing, I think, we'll, we will cut it at this. When you
[00:36:44] now I have more questions.
[00:36:45] you can't have more questions,
[00:36:47] dude, I have so many questions for
[00:36:49] it your
[00:36:49] go ahead.
[00:36:50] No, I'm just saying that the tying, when you're dealing with humans are, again, shout out to George B when you're dealing with humans are.
[00:36:56] Predictable. Humans are irrational and we can't [00:37:00] live without them. We can't live without each other, our tribe, et cetera, and be, and it takes, it's almost a rabbit hole when you look at a person, when you look at Blake, girl, dad, you see he's rocking plain tea. Doesn't make a lot of decisions in the morning.
[00:37:12] Just put the tea on, put the chain on. Let's go. Right? It can be an indefinite, just infinite rabbit hole. Is this person gonna work? And it's a huge investment. That's why I think this industry is super interesting because when you invest in people and you bring people into your house, like interviewing, like a babysitter, if you need to go have a parent night out or something like that, or just having someone in your house to wash your dog, wash your cats, you can't ask enough questions.
[00:37:35] Because you and you don't even know what questions to ask, which are going to, what are the questions to ask that will elicit the response? That will give me the answer to another question that I have. Like the real question, right? Are you a murderer? Do you wash your hands after you go to the bathroom?
[00:37:49] Like you can't ask that. You have to ask something else so that you get a feeling, right? And AI does a good job because only because it can compute faster than we can in our brain of all these like pieces. Like they said [00:38:00] this too many times. Like they might be on the list somewhere. I, that's all I wanted to say because it just is really interesting when you bring that piece up.
[00:38:07] 'cause I haven't thought of this process and how it can be expedited with ai, with just quick feedback and signals. Right. It's all signals.
[00:38:15] Yeah.
[00:38:16] Absolutely.
[00:38:17] it, Blake, so I think something that's like really interesting is I. There's a lot of things that have been built to make HubSpot do something that it wasn't meant to do out of the box. Right. And the I have this the thing that I try to get people to understand, like about event•hapily right?
[00:38:34] Where we we basically turn HubSpot into an event management platform, right? Whereas you guys turn HubSpot into an ATS, oftentimes the question people ask is like, why would I, but like why run events on HubSpot? What's the point of going through the process of turning this thing in from something that it's not into whatever it's not right.
[00:38:53] And for me, the big thing that I've kinda realized, like in the events context is [00:39:00] everyone runs their events differently. Which is why it makes sense to run around HubSpot because you sprinkle in a couple of little things that HubSpot's missing that are fundamental to event management, but then you can lean on its infinite customization and customizability because everyone does it differently.
[00:39:17] Everyone has their own process. Everyone's events is its own special snowflake. Is that kind of the same for the way people use ATSs? Is it a problem that. If you use a point solution, you get very stuck into the way that tool works. Whereas is the elevator pitch that if you run it on HubSpot, you get everything that you need out of a traditional ATS.
[00:39:42] But the other kind of added benefit is you can hyper customize it for whatever sort of nuanced way you guys like to run things. Is that when people ask you like, what's the benefit of running ATS on HubSpot? Is that part of that? Equation part of that [00:40:00] calculation, or does everyone pretty much do things the same way?
[00:40:02] No you're dead on. So.
[00:40:04] Okay.
[00:40:05] First of all, this is an industry recruiting, whether it's staffing or it's talent acquisition, that they've been forced to collect point solutions over time. And all of those point solutions, for the most part have been rigid. And it's taught them to believe that when they're buying something, that it is what on the screen during a demo.
[00:40:25] And the question we get asked every single demo multiple times is, can I update the candidate object to match the. Data that we want to collect. Can the jobs pipeline reflect our process, or is it just what we see here? It's like this is just conceptual, this is just showing you a little bit of what's possible.
[00:40:45] The beauty of this is. We implement the baseline, what we know to be 60% accurate, and then the 40% gets to be configured exactly to how you need it. And that is truly the beauty of building this on HubSpot. And what [00:41:00] I would say, and at least 50% of the deals, it's what gets this across the finish line.
[00:41:04] It's the fact that it's not one size fits all. That this can truly be customized without the huge total cost of ownership that comes with customizing Salesforce, for instance.
[00:41:14] Yeah. So is that the main reason why you would if someone were to say, why run my ATS on HubSpot? Is it that, or is it something else?
[00:41:24] I think that is a core reason. Yes, because it is a platform that will grow with them. They don't have to bite off everything at one time. We preach now near and far, let's lay the foundation today. And we don't need to do everything. Let's prioritize what does need to be done, and then we'll build your plan out so that 18 months you get where you're trying to go, but you're not forced to do it all right now.
[00:41:48] yeah. But then it's just oh, your ATS could also be one of the greatest marketing tools ever conceived. Do you ever think of that? That's a weird place to live in. First of all, that's a [00:42:00] wild thing to think about. Dude, like we're, that's what I love about the ecosystem is like we're constantly redefining what the ~fuck~ HubSpot actually is, and it could be anything and it could be really good at being anything. That's the crazy part, right? Like it, like sure it's a CRM, but it's hard to just call it a CRM anymore, given what. Yeah, totally.
[00:42:22] We've been in the solution partner space for forever and now it feels like we're getting an invitation to the Cool Kids Club over on the app partner side.
[00:42:30] you go. Yeah. One of us, dude. One
[00:42:33] what I'm talking about. Well, Blake, it's been a pleasure, man. We always kick it out with three questions. I see the rock, the girl dad hat. What's the funniest thing that happened? What's the funniest thing your daughter has told you in the past two days?
[00:42:45] So this morning actually I came into her room. I, wake up, wake 'em up nicely every morning. And this morning she told me to go away.
[00:42:57] Go away. You like, who'd you who? Who says that at [00:43:00] school? They always, who
[00:43:00] are you?
[00:43:01] right. Somebody's teaching her.
[00:43:03] Got it. Well keep it on the Girl Dad mantra. What is the one toy she can't go without?
[00:43:10] She is obsessed with her babies.
[00:43:12] Oh, yep. Yeah.
[00:43:13] Any baby, any store could be hers, might not be hers. She loves her babies.
[00:43:18] Yep. That's my Audrey. She's a million of them. Yep.
[00:43:21] that's hilarious. Last piece for you. Favorite sneaker. 'cause you do a lot of walking.
[00:43:30] So my closet is filled to the ceiling with Jordan's I don't wear, but the best piece of that, I have two. I have two in that collection that are my prized possessions. One oh, the old orange, blue and white Reebok pumps.
[00:43:46] Yeah.
[00:43:48] And the other is the fresh Prince. I think they're the fours. It. It looks like Jazzy Jeff jumped out of of Phil's mansion in these shoes. They're awesome. [00:44:00] I've gotta open them up every now and then just to make sure they're still there.
[00:44:04] I, random question. I guess you resonated sneakerhead. Didn't think that, but it it marked out. But Blake, appreciate it man. Thanks for coming on and we're excited to see what you built
[00:44:13] Guys. Thank you. And likewise really looking forward to what
[00:44:16] That was a great chat.
[00:44:17] Right on, man. Appreciate it.
[00:44:19]