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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.
2411 - built happily Podcast -Darcy Smyth, Steve Claydon
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Steve Claydon: How you play games is how you play life. Here's how the sales game originally started. I want you to imagine Max and Dax. You have 20 poker chips in front of you right now and imagine everyone in team hapily have the same 20 poker chips. Whoever finishes the next 30 minutes of the podcast with the most chips wins a thousand dollar cash prize.
Max Cohen: Oh I'm holding all my HubSpot knowledge hostage until I get the chips.
Dax Miller: On today's episode of the built hapily podcast, we have Steve and Darcy from Outbound.game.
Max Cohen: Steve and Darcy share the story of how they first came together over a chicken focaccia sandwich and how through a long series of events, they ended up building a successful sales training organization and turning that into one of the coolest apps that you've seen on the HubSpot marketplace these days, especially if you're into gamification. All that and more on this episode of the built hapily podcast.
Max Cohen: Everybody welcome to another episode of the built hapily podcast hosted by myself as well as the esteemed Dax Miller, chief care officer here at hapily. We are joined by two of my very good friends who I've had the pleasure.
I'm gonna call it the pleasure of sitting down for a couple of podcasts with you guys on some different stuff where I know we've had a great time. We had some pretty like deep conversations too. I feel like that one we had during the pandemic, like when we first met, that was that was a real fun one.
Got way deeper than I thought it was gonna be. But now we're, the tables have turned if you will and you're in our house now, and we get a whole hour with you guys. Real quick, cause I know this is the first time you guys are meeting Dax and also might be the first time meeting our audience as well.
Before we get into the whole story and everything here, tell the folks listening what is the outbound game? Who are you guys? What do you do? What would be the pitch I guess that you'd give anyone kind of running into you for the first time and we'll start there and then I'm gonna we're gonna tarantino this and unravel the story as we get into it.
Steve Claydon: Yeah. Sounds cool. Yeah. So, Steve and Darcy were the co-founders of the Outbound game. We fell into the world of SaaS during the pandemic. Funnily enough, our backstory our origin story is all been in sales training, consulting. Working with teams all around the world, helping them with their go to market strategies, developing playbooks, coaching teams, working with leadership.
That was our bread and butter. And then COVID hit. Me and Darcy were doing a lot of travel, going on site, visiting clients. COVID
Max Cohen: gonna get into that. We're gonna get into that but you have a hub spot app, right?
Steve Claydon: Oh, 100%, man. We gamified HubSpot. Gamified HubSpot. So then we turned HubSpot into the into the arcade. That's what we do now.
Dax Miller: Never would have thought that I could see that would come.
Max Cohen: Yeah. So
Darcy Smyth: It was a real Tarantino. We actually told the story completely out of the wrong order and now the audience has got to piece it together.
Max Cohen: That's fine i'm gonna i'm gonna keep this on track so you guys build a gamification app, for sale, I guess well Sounds like when we talked recently it might you might be expanding outwards a little bit from sales teams But originally you built that's for sales team So can you tell the folks like what the app does in the context of like hub spot and how the two things like?
Talk together
Steve Claydon: Yeah, for sure. So we gamify activities, deal stage movement, custom outcomes for calls, meetings, financial goals, tasks is a big one. Overdue tasks are the bane of sales teams existence. And, but we'll be continuing to moving into tickets and yeah, we want to turn HubSpot into just the arcade and so eventually moving into different hubs, but sales is our bread and butter.
That's where we started. So.
Max Cohen: Gotcha. And the way that I understand, and please correct me if I'm wrong is you guys are looking at a lot of the data that like sales reps are generating inside a HubSpot when they're working their deals, closing their deals, running all their activities. And then you guys have this like gamification platform that you've built that then ties into this HubSpot data and they're able to like, How does it, like where is it like redeeming gifts based on like credits that they're getting for different stuff that they're doing?
Like what are the mechanics of that thing in the background, just so people can understand like that platform a little bit more.
Steve Claydon: Yeah, for sure. So it's like the arcade, you can do two different reward mechanisms. Like the first one is you're collecting coins, you get coins for every activity that you complete, but the gamification engine, you can incentivize certain activities. More than others, right? So you might get 55 coins for a call, but you might get 155 coins for a decision.
Make a call as a custom outcome. And then you might get, 500 coins for a meeting. So you're getting coins for every single activity. Bit of that mini dopamine every time it's happening. You're getting real time notifications from the whole team so you can see exactly what's going on. But the whole game is really where you get good juicy cash is you've got to beat the clock.
So every game is driven with a timer, a sprint timer, which could be like a month long sprint, a week long sprint, a blitz. And if you can beat a certain KPI activity before the timer runs out, you get big bonus multipliers. And then that's where you really start rocking up the leaderboard. So then just like the arcade, you go collect your 10, 000 coins and you go redeem it for a game boy, or you go redeem it for a guitar or time off, or you can fully customize the reward store as well.
So that's the OG version. And then we've also just launched podium finish. So if
Dax Miller: Come on, man. This shit is dope.
Steve Claydon: Yeah. It's really fun. It's really fun. Cause like
Max Cohen: Yeah. So if I'm a sales manager, sales director, and I'm looking for, a way to either increase the skids or get my sales reps a little bit, something else besides a commission, to be like motivated to close deals or maybe do some of these other activities that aren't like guaranteed to lead to commission, but and, push deals in the right direction, they're able to set up like, like a. You guys have this like marketplace aspect to it where you can let people choose different prizes or whatever it may be that they have available to their reps in a store and then they're able to say Hey, we set up these different games, which I really like because you know the idea of setting up different games is it could be Time based or like whatever it may be, where it's like, Hey, we've got this, like end of quarter push that we're doing, or we want to keep the momentum going into, Q1 or whatever it may be, or do stuff at the beginning of the quarters differently than we do at the end of the quarters and incentivize people a little bit differently, you guys have this platform that you can set up all that stuff, but then the way people are actually like, gaining this digital currency in order to trade it in for different stuff is all dependent on their performance inside a HubSpot.
Steve Claydon: Bingo. Yeah.
Max Cohen: That is super cool.
Steve Claydon: we can geek out about the mechanics all day because, like the leaders that really get it, like every leader starts with Oh, I want my team to be doing more calls and booking more meetings. And then that's like the, that's the gateway. And then they get into it and they're like, Oh man, we can use this for driving all sorts of behaviors.
This is really interesting. I really want my team to be sending more personalized videos, but they're always afraid to be doing it at scale, man. What if I just dial that up and then have a mini sprint for a week. And then all of a sudden the team does like 150 personalized videos and the leaders like, ah, okay, this is cool.
Instead of hitting them with a stick going come on guys, do it. It's just we can just change the game dynamic and then the behaviors change. And so super
Dax Miller: Yeah, it's the, it's the carrot versus the stick. I mean, like my entire job. I worked my, my first kind of real, real, real job as an adult was running marketing and a part of that marketing, right? When people think about external marketing and how do I get people marketing, know my, know what my business does, know what my business is, make them feel a certain way.
But in reality, a lot of the things that you need to do. You need to market to the people that work at the company, market to the people that are inside the walls. Like getting a new website might be cool for people that aren't, but it may jazz up the sales team. Like, Oh, I can't wait to send people a new website and all this stuff.
But like every month we had a huge theme, like pirates or casino. And we'd have to do is like a hundred, probably a hundred reps together, BDRs and SDRs, or like the AEs and biz dev. And. It was all about like a big calendar or not designed to move the ship over. And if you set three demos a day, you get a token and you get to do all that.
But it was like a lot of work the day before the first of the month. We had to rip down like all the stuff from last month, put it all up this month. And now you have that virtually is bananas and to be able to game it. And I mean. Which you made something dope. I'm going to be straight up. I would use that at a heartbeat.
If I had like a sales team, cause it would just be fun. And I'll probably have more fun than the sales reps, but
Darcy Smyth: Yeah.
Max Cohen: We'll get there one
Darcy Smyth: Appreciate that, Dax.
Max Cohen: we'll
Dax Miller: it's a hundred percent, a hundred percent. I'm getting tokens, cash them chips in like this is super cool, man.
Max Cohen: I just think it's cool to, oh go ahead. Go ahead Darcy.
Darcy Smyth: I was gonna say we, we got that feedback a lot, Dax, in terms of people hearing about the platform, hearing the concept behind it. And immediately with gamification, you get people interested, like just that word gamification, people are naturally intrigued. I think it's a very human thing to be interested in games.
It's just that's cool. And so we had that feedback for years that people like, yep, this is cool. This is a great idea. I see how that would work. And it wasn't until we probably the last, would you say nine months, Steve, that we went like all in on the big orange monster
Max Cohen: Yeah.
Darcy Smyth: HubSpot. That's when things really started to turn Dax.
That's when people were like, this went from being interesting to being like, whoa, this is quite this is quite effective because our team aren't double handling anymore. And now not only are you motivating and driving my team to do more sales behaviors, but you're actually motivating and driving them to use their CRM a whole lot more.
Max Cohen: Yeah.
Darcy Smyth: As Steve said, is the bane of a lot of sales leaders existence
Dax Miller: the adoption,
Darcy Smyth: for, yeah, the adoption. So, we're coming at it from both sides now, which is really cool through specialization.
Max Cohen: yeah.
Dax Miller: Say that they used to say, like, it's funny. Is it in salesforce? Isn't it salesforce? It was back where they use salesforce, the four letter word now, but now it's the same idea, right? I just said three demos. Y'all like, is it a HubSpot? Like, is it marked that it's not like you're on the leaderboard?
You got fat goose egg on the leaderboard and like putting this up on the big TVs, like all over the place where you have like this score. Cause You have the, yeah, the TV set up. Like I get it. I can, I've lived this life pretty heavily. If I would've had this, this would be, would be it. It's just like, okay, new game, change the theme.
Sure. You have options where I can set the background and make a Halloween. And I do my whole Halloween thing, like cool posters on the wall. And there's the
Steve Claydon: freaking nailed it, bro. That's, we got a client down in Melbourne and they're so good at the theme side of things. So like when the Olympics were on, they did like an Olympic ace month and then they did
Dax Miller: give out
Steve Claydon: pirates month. Yeah. Yeah.
Dax Miller: But now it's like, if you just have a system rather than like me designing eight, designed like 20 posters, making like with making fun of people that work there and have the posters and Halloween decorations, skits. You've probably seen some skits.
We used to do skits, Max. The whole like joint, like we do is the whole thing. But like the fact that you have this inside of HubSpot makes my heart giggle.
Max Cohen: Yeah. And I think like the really interesting thing about this too is when you think of a lot of the different things that are involved in sales, like the incentive to close deals is obvious. It's the commission, it's there, right? But is there a lot of incentive to adopt your CRM platform and actually use it. So the data is in there for the people who care about it. And you can drive the automation that you need to, right? But also at the same time, there's no incentive to just like practice the proper behaviors, right? And so I think it's like really interesting in that, gamification is a lot more than Oh, you'll win prizes.
If you close deals, it's well, I really only care about commission. Well, it's no, like you'll be rewarded for good specific behaviors. We're trying to work on as a team, whether it is adopting the CRM. So we actually have a reason to use it beyond just satisfying our overlords that want to keep track of everything that we're doing.
And things like that. So I think the gamification stuff, like oftentimes I think people can hear that word and they really think of it as just one thing. And it's no, there's a lot of mechanics behind like why that really work in terms of. What your goals are with your sales team around different behaviors.
You're trying to drive different adoption of different tools that like you want to show them there's value in using it. But then you can give them that extra incentive to Hey, just at least try it out because if you do, maybe you can go home with a new iPhone or something along those
Dax Miller: Dude. Oh my gosh.
Max Cohen: cause sometimes you need a little bit of extra, you need a little bit of extra, motivation to actually use these tools that are meant to make your life easier. Because a lot of salespeople don't like change. So it's like, what else can you give me to at least get me in there and start using it and working it?
And I think you guys offer like a really cool solution that has a lot of the mechanics of that really drive those things that are generally like pretty tough to do when there's no other incentive behind I already know how to close deals. Like, why do I need this thing to do that?
It's a HubSpot app today, along with the platform that you guys have built, but it wasn't always that it wasn't even software at one point. And I know you guys, you told me the story that I want you to tell me it again, just because I feel like my details on it are a bit fuzzy, but I remember you told me about this this training that you did a lot of stuff onsite with people before the pandemic happened, where it was like you gave, I don't know, they spent like a weekend at a hotel and you gave them these like tokens.
And it was like, whoever had the most at the end one, and then you, they'd have to learn bartering and sales and things like that, as they go through it before you tell me that I want to go even back for, how did you guys even meet? Tell me the story of Darcy and Steve and how you guys like cross paths in this universe And then what led it to you guys doing that training and then tell me about what that old version of this was before it was software
Darcy Smyth: the chicken focaccia story. The
Dax Miller: Chicken focaccia.
Max Cohen: chicken focaccia story tell us this sounds
Dax Miller: Steve spilled it all over Darcy. And he's
Darcy Smyth: there we go. Yeah, hey yeah.
Dax Miller: Hey man. You ever play the
Max Cohen: put your hands on the same chicken focaccia sandwich at the same time
Steve Claydon: then the like the gods opened up and yeah, Sean and yeah, that was it.
Max Cohen: Yep.
Darcy Smyth: So Steve, I was, Steve was running a lot of sales trainings with larger companies, larger sales teams, particularly in that project centric construction manufacturing teams. I was doing a lot of training with like solopreneurs small business owners, helping them, understand sales and learn how to sell the first time.
A lot of them have a lot of passion but don't know how to sell anything. So I was working with a lot of those. And there was a mutual friend we had called, a guy called Glenn Azar. His daughter Alyssa is actually the, is she the youngest female ever to scale Everest? Is that right, Steve? Anyway, Glenn's a beast.
Glenn's done like a hundred Kokoda track trails and like, all this sort of stuff. He's a beast. He's an
Steve Claydon: Legend of a guy.
Darcy Smyth: A legend of a guy. He run an adventure tour company, right? And he asked me to come along and do two days with their team in Brisbane, in Australia. And Glenn had recently attended an event that Steve had run.
And so he knew Steve through that. Anyway, he gets onto Steve and says, Hey I know we don't know each other super well at the moment, but there's a guy that I'm bringing my team in to do training with in Brisbane. Why don't you come along? You're not part of our team specifically. Come along, watch this guy train.
I think you guys would get on well. so I did, and then at half halfway through, we the whole group goes out for lunch, there was about 10 of us or whatever. Steve and I both grabbed the same chicken focaccia, and we're we're both we're sitting there, eating,
Max Cohen: I need more details. How did you guys randomly grab Are you mean you
Darcy Smyth: Oh no, two separate
Max Cohen: do you mean? Okay,
Steve Claydon: We ordered
Darcy Smyth: We ordered the same thing But the running joke is, mate, like we're that good of friends, we're that alike, that we, like, whenever we go out for dinner, we've been on, how many times we've been on site around the world, Steve?
100, 200 times on site. We'll always order the same thing for dinner. We'll always get the same thing for lunch. The only thing we split is like a coffee order. We're a little bit different there, but we're always getting the same it's just
Max Cohen: You guys are
Dax Miller: and the lady and the tramp lady. I don't know if you, if you know about that,
Max Cohen: no spaghetti
Dax Miller: Oh,
Darcy Smyth: So, so yeah, we're at halftime, we're eating our focaccias and I turned to Steve, I was like, mate, so what do you do? I didn't know Steve at this stage. I was like, what's your story? And he goes, Oh, I do sales training. I was like, Oh, like today, like what I'm doing. He's yeah no, exactly like that.
It's exactly what I do. It's Oh, awesome. How old are you, bro? He's I'm 25. How old are you? I'm 25. Oh, why are we? Oh, okay. Interesting. And we were just like, so we're competitors, but you're a good dude. Like we should hang out more often. Anyway. So then a little while later, about six months later, I was flying.
I lived in Melbourne at the time I was flying to Brisbane. I said, mate, let's catch up for a beer. It was good to meet you six months ago. And from there we just had this really great conversation over the same dinner in Brisbane and and just had this, pretty full on chat about business and life and where we wanted to go and we were both able to give each other so much quality advice right there in that moment over that one or two hour dinner.
That from that moment on, we were just bloody good friends. Like just, remained in each other's circles, did a little bit of business stuff here and there together over the next two years or so. But then when COVID hit was when we went all in. Now, just before that, one thing that we had in common was we both got to the point where we were pretty burned out.
It's a pretty long winding story, but Steve had gone through his own mental health challenges, his own burnout challenges, the first time he'd ever burned out. My mum had unfortunately passed away around about 12 months prior. So I was going through a whole grief journey and, self reflection journey through all of that.
And we both caught a kind of reached each other at the bottom of the pit, would you say Steve? We're like, man, it's, it sucks down here. It's dark. Anyway, it's it's the worst place to be. I turned to my right and there's Steve there also, I was like, man, Meant to be. Yeah. Hey bro. How much does this suck?
Yeah. So anyway we're like, mate let's do something different. Like one problem that we had, the thing that made us so frustrated with sales training and it still sits at the core of even outbound today as well. And Dax, you'll know this. We had worked with so many teams. We trained so many teams, we'd led so many teams and you would always get the same response from people, which was, they loved it.
Cool training, plenty of head nods, plenty of ideas, but the implementation would fall over completely. Totally. Nothing actually gets implemented. Nothing actually gets done. I said to Steve, there needs to be a better way to do this. So we decided to put on an event, and I had recently attended an event that was all run through games, and your learning was all done through games.
And because of that, the implementation of that learning just almost happened immediately. You had real life examples of how you're playing this game is how you're playing real life. And it was extraordinary. Changed my life personally. I said, Steve, there's something to this game stuff. Let's run an event, two day event full of games. The best game that came out of that was an event
Steve Claydon: Don't tell them Duff We'll get them to play right now, you guys up for it?
Darcy Smyth: oh yeah good.
Dax Miller: I'm on a computer.
Steve Claydon: So here's what Darcy is very humble about. He's a freak at psychology, right? Like he studied psychology. He's obsessed with psychology. Like I'm obsessed with like strategy and game mechanics and geeking out on that stuff. Darcy is a freak when it comes to the brain. So like those two parts coming together is a lot of fun.
So here's how the sales game originally started. I want you to imagine Max and Dax. You just now have 20 poker chips in front of you right now, right? There's a stack of 20 poker chips and imagine everyone in, in, in team, hapily have the same 20 poker chips. Whoever finishes the next 30 minutes or whoever finishes the next, 30 minutes of the podcast with the most chips wins a thousand dollar cash prize
Max Cohen: Oh Yep.
Dax Miller: People
Steve Claydon: point in time. At this point in time, there's no rules. You can do whatever you like to try and collect more chips. Just understand that everyone else is trying to do the same thing as you
Max Cohen: Yeah.
Steve Claydon: go. All
Max Cohen: i'm telling joe and brian i'm never getting on a demo again until they give me their chips
Dax Miller: man. I'm giving up my trips and telling me to split. Let's keep it moving.
Darcy Smyth: What'd you say, Dax? What sorry, I
Dax Miller: be like, I live in abundance. I'd be like, who wants my chips?
Darcy Smyth: Yeah,
Dax Miller: And I'm going to get something outside of the thousand bucks. I don't want thousand bucks, but I'll be like, I'll give you my chips, but one day I'm gonna ask you for a favor
Darcy Smyth: Yeah. Yeah,
Dax Miller: don't have to worry about it. I like, I like zero brain real estate, so I'm like, who has my chips? And I'm gonna sit back on the side and
Max Cohen: Yeah I'm holding all my HubSpot knowledge hostage until I get the chips.
Dax Miller: you, you chose vengeance. I
Steve Claydon: Got it. Got it. So you're selling knowledge and Dax, you're playing the the one plus one equals three game. You're playing the team game on that sort of thing.
Dax Miller: Like, let me get something later.
Steve Claydon: Yeah.
Dax Miller: be
Darcy Smyth: Yeah.
Steve Claydon: as the game progresses, We introduced things like tax. So now imagine, Max you're really rich cause you've held onto all your chips, Dax, you've got no chips cause you gave them all away.
We rich, we taxed the rich and give it to the poor. That changes the dynamic.
Max Cohen: Interesting.
Dax Miller: now. I'm like, dude
Steve Claydon: we introduce a bunch of other mechanics that, we don't want to give it all away. But the big aha moment is, however you went to try and decide, that's how I'd go about collecting more chips. We have this saying, how you play games is how you play life.
It's a massive mirror to how you probably operate. In some level in the real world, Max, you probably value knowledge and the sharing of knowledge and understand that there's value in that. Dax, you're probably a big collaborator and let's figure out how we can all win out of this together. And so what it does is in this little like microcosm of an event, people realize Oh, shit, that's me.
Oh, wow. That's max. Oh, and it's just this huge, for Darcy, it's a, it's like this psychology on a platter human behavior experiment.
Dax Miller: it's the, the, what's it called? I forgot what the, the kid, the, the, the book with the kids, the pigs
Darcy Smyth: Oh, yeah, Lord of the Flies.
Dax Miller: the Flies. That's all it is. It's just another Lord of the Flies, like, puppeteer game. You guys are like, yes. I mean, it's Hunger Games. It's Hunger Games. It's the whole, the whole thing has been rewritten and you
Darcy Smyth: there you go. That's it.
Dax Miller: that's really easy to digest and swallow and make.
That's what you want people to have, right? You want that ah ha moment. Because it's a self realization. Everything about ah ha is not like, somebody told me something and then I was like, oh, no, it's somebody told me something. I digested it. Then it made me change the way I look at everything. It's like, Oh, because realization, self realization comes from self, not from somebody telling you anything.
So as you guys are putting people into the arena, they're starting to see what, Oh man, I didn't know they were like that. Oh dude. I was like, Max, you're bogus. Like, why are you going to try to like hold people hostage? Hold the ransom? Like, what are you doing?
Max Cohen: A thousand bucks, man. I got, I need.
Dax Miller: I'm like, yo, forget the thousand.
I bet you I get a thousand dollars worth of value by being broke. And then getting something else. Like that's, again, it's mindset. You, I just learned something about this dude
Darcy Smyth: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Max Cohen: So, so you guys are running these games. You're doing this stuff in person and then the pandemic comes out of nowhere. What? First off, tell me about that moment where you guys were just like, Oh, we can't do this in person anymore. And like, how did that evolve to going to You have this Sass platform now, or Tell me about the decision you guys were making that got you there.
Steve Claydon: Yeah. I'll never forget it, Darcy. Cause literally just before the pandemic, me and Darcy did a tour in the US. We're running the sales game with, organizations and the communities in the U S and you guys loved it. It's really interesting because how Australians play the game is very different to how the U S plays the game as well.
So it's we were having a ball. We're like, man, this is going to take off next year. It's going to be huge. Well,
Darcy Smyth: like a couple of young Aussie lads doing it big in America. Like to us, to you guys, that's normal. To us, that
Dax Miller: is America cool to
Darcy Smyth: Oh yeah. To do business in America,
Steve Claydon: you have more business, you have more businesses in the U S than humans in Australia.
Max Cohen: That's wild. Yeah.
Dax Miller: that, I mean, we're not even
Max Cohen: We that capitalism hard.
Steve Claydon: Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, it was going off and we had we were getting requests to, run this in a mini way with like big sales conferences and all this stuff this is it, like all this work we're putting in, this is it.
And then me and Darce were literally about to fly out to New Zealand. Boom, airports shut, game over. And all of our clients got spooked. So our revenue literally went to zero overnight. So going from like good reoccurring revenue, good contracts, zero, zero dollars, and me and Darce were just like, whoa, man, what are we going to do? And I remember that moment, me and Darce were like, we just knew that this thing wasn't going to be like a six week. In and out and done kind of thing. We were just like, this thing is going to hang around for a long time. We just could sense it. So we made a decision at that point of two things.
Number one, we were going to give as much as we possibly could. So we ran a daily webinar for 150 episodes that we still even run today on a weekly basis, just given heaps of value. And then the second decision we made is if there's an opportunity for us to do things differently, we're going to play offense here and we're not going to play defense.
So with the very little money that we had, we always thought the sales game was impossible to play online. Like, how are you going to facilitate chips getting handed around? And like, how do you do that? How do you facilitate the tax? How do you facilitate the shark tank? It's impossible to do online, but when your back's against the wall, all of a sudden you go, well, I wonder if we could turn the sales game event into an online event.
Wonder if we could build an app. So we did, we burnt through a lot of money. We built the app. We ended up running a couple of events with some of the biggest U S cloud based banking companies. And we had 150 reps on a sales kickoff, playing the sales game, virtually walking around in this virtual world and handing chips to each other.
And it was nuts. We were just like completely winging it. Yeah. And then in the sales game, there's this unlock called the shark tank. I'm sure you've seen the TV show where you pitch real world ideas for the exchange of chips. That's one of the big unlocks in the
Max Cohen: Oh, okay.
Steve Claydon: So people love that. But three people at this event said exactly the same thing.
They said, this game and events pretty cool, but it'd be awesome. If you guys could make a game, we could play all day, every day.
Dax Miller: Job.
Darcy Smyth: Yeah. Yeah.
Max Cohen: Yeah,
Dax Miller: That's what I would have been like, you're right back, Tyrone.
Steve Claydon: And so, so then we just Frankenstein the app and started building it in a way of I wonder if we could use this for like sales activities. I wonder if we could use this for like real world. So instead of just like having tokens and chips that you pass to each other, how can we make it so you collect chips in the platform and what would that look like?
And then we just Frankenstein it, man. And just kept developing and developing.
Max Cohen: So, did you like, you immediately go Oh, we've gotta tie this into a CRM somehow? Was that like the initial thought or was it like a different dude, tell me about it?
Darcy Smyth: they
Steve Claydon: We were more like, let's we called it the outbound Royal Rumble. It wasn't even called outbound. It's called the outbound Royal Rumble. It was a four hour online event that we would facilitate with clients. They would go and
Dax Miller: I got it.
Steve Claydon: they would go and do a blitz and do, we would gamify their activities for a four hour event.
And me and Darce had to manually update the platform in the background as they were doing activities. Like
Dax Miller: Holding it all together and
Steve Claydon: We were Frankenstein in this thing, man. We were just like hacking it. And then people were getting like huge activity lifts in those four hours. And they're like, that was really fun.
Like that outbound was fun for a sec. And then it just developed and developed. And then we made it into a platform that was self service so they could design their own games. And then the whole issue was like, no, this needs to be integrated with the CRM. Like we can't have this as a separate platform.
Cause like what you're saying before DAX, I just booked 17 meetings. Oh, it's not in the CRM. It doesn't exist. And they're like, screw you, man. I just did all that effort. So. So that's when we had this thought. Built in integrations that go like, how does this be a bolt on? How does, how do we make this into a, like a CRM turbo?
Darcy Smyth: And sales leaders were torn a bit, Steve, at that time, in a good way, because we get feedback from a lot of sales leaders and they'd say, Hey, we love it. Our team are doing a whole lot more activity. Only one problem. They love your platform and using your platform way more than they love using our CRM.
So all the information's going into outbound.
Max Cohen: made a CRM by accident.
Darcy Smyth: Yeah.
Max Cohen: Yup. And then they started asking you for more features. And
Dax Miller: Can you do email? How about calling? Can you duplicate stuff? Do you have a portal?
Steve Claydon: Oh, we had to learn so much about tech. Like you're in that world as well, man. Like it's the coolest thing because anything's possible, but the worst thing about it is anything's possible. And you gotta you gotta learn how to be really like disciplined and saying no and be like, cool idea, but no, it doesn't match with where we actually wanted to take this thing,
Max Cohen: So what, was there a point in time where it's it wasn't hooked up to a CRM, but people were like quite literally like logging calls and tasks in this platform separate
Dax Miller: Yeah. They're playing the game.
Steve Claydon: Legit the rewards mechanism and the leaderboard and the way we've visually designed, it was so attractive to people for a good while that people were happy in somewhat to log it in their CRM and then go and log it in outbound so that they could get their
Dax Miller: like, Oh yeah, hold on. I got two calls.
Steve Claydon: Yeah.
Dax Miller: Good. That's it. It makes so much sense, man. It's just like the psychology behind it, of course, is I'm playing a game. Am I? It takes, it separates my activity from a. I made you do it versus I want to do it. And that simple push pull mechanism of man, if you told me to dial a hundred times, Oh, I'm going to dial a hundred times because I'm going to get, I want that iPhone.
We used to, and I remember where I used to work, they had like a trip to Japan and stuff. People were like tripping knife fights in the parking lot. Like most sales organizations are like, no, he didn't get, then I got accused of cheating. Like I was helping some, I'm like, dude, I get no prizes. You guys get to do all this stuff.
I just set it all up and you guys are mad. Like I, the, like you said, the, the, the Lord of the flies happens so good. And I think it's crazy that you had people doing. People have problems having folks logging stuff in the CRM. You had people double logging for the love of the game,
Darcy Smyth: Yep.
Max Cohen: Yeah, tell us about that first crm integration, I know you guys are all hubspot today, but like I'm assuming you started on like a salesforce or something else or no
Steve Claydon: Yeah we picked we originally betted on three horses. We were like Salesforce, Pipedrive, Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive. And we figured out pretty damn quickly that Salesforce is an absolute nightmare to work with. Oh my goodness. Oh, which version of it are you
Dax Miller: You're not going to hack together something on
Steve Claydon: And the dropdown menu is like longer than my arm.
I'm just like, this is dumb. Okay. So we're pretty quickly ruled that one out. Pipe drive was like pretty easy to work with and HubSpot we were using ourselves, like we were actually, that was our CRM of choice anyway. And the original,
Max Cohen: hubspot customers during all this
Steve Claydon: Yeah. We started using HubSpot. Yeah. And the original integration was.
Cause we're like, okay, people already love using that platform. What if we made it that they logged it in outbound and it pushed into HubSpot against the contact company or deal. That was the original, like basic version of yeah, you can log in and outbound and it just gets pushed in.
And people
Darcy Smyth: when we saw that, Steve, we were blown away. We were like, oh, this is the game changer.
Max Cohen: Yep.
Steve Claydon: And then and then we built Zapier and Zapier was interesting. Cause then we were starting to pull in from like everything and we'll pull in, like people were running like fitness games and like pulling in from Strava logged activities and we'll pull it in from Vidyard and we'll pull it in from Proposify and we're like, that's when I started to get the whole big vision of Oh, hang on a sec.
This thing could one day be this crazy, gamify the world type thing. And then I. Went off venturing down the not recommended path of anything as possible and
Wasted a gazillion dollars exploring ideas that weren't it. And then when I realized, I know, hang on a sec, HubSpot is the game. That is, I could just see what they were doing.
We met a lot of the HubSpot folk and we're like, these people are cool. Man, we met some of the executives at Salesforce as well. You guys are very different human beings, man. Like just the way you, just the way you see the world is very different. Like we're more HubSpot people, like in terms of, we like to have fun and like you see what's up and share and being generous and all this stuff.
And then when we started to figure out, and a lot of it was actually learned through Zapier integrations, like what could we actually pull out of HubSpot? That's when we're like, okay, let's build the very best native integrations, pulling direct and make it. So it's like dumb easy. Like you just click a couple of buttons and bam, like it's got exactly what you want, but because it was a very long journey, max and a lot of feedback from clients that we had at the time, about 150 companies using the platform, we could get like direct feedback of like, how do you really, what do you really want to be pulling out of your HubSpot?
And people were saying like. Well, we don't want to just integrate with calls. We want to be able to incentivize a certain type of call more than another call. And then someone else is we also want to gamify how potentially how long they're on the phone. Can you gamify on call duration?
Yeah, done. So we started to build it specifically for the sales leaders and the teams of what they wanted to announce.
Max Cohen: Nice. You guys are tuned into those activity APIs and deal
Steve Claydon: Oh man, we live and breathe it. I never thought I'd be a guy that like gets excited about API docs, but I
Max Cohen: either but now I get very excited about them and I don't even know how to code. Do you tell us that so you, in the grand scheme of things we're still like, if we look at the whole history of the app marketplace and the ecosystem you guys are still like a relatively like new entry to it.
Tell us like, what was that like going from okay, we know we want to build something on HubSpot to we've got our app listed, what was that journey? What did you guys learn during that process?
Steve Claydon: Yeah we still learning a lot, man. Like we're actively connecting with a lot of HubSpot partners and we're learning, this is what I love about the HubSpot community is you guys are sharers, like at its core, it's a sharing community. Like we're on a call the other day with a guy and he's Hey man, I worked at HubSpot for eight years.
Here's what you should be focusing on. It's not just about the app itself. It's a, it's about the services around the app and what you can do to support people around that and what you can do to build leverage for the other people. Like we're learning a heap around it, but the main thing that I'm excited about is we've done a heap of work on our platform side, bringing in activities into the platform.
What we're focused on now is. How do we also then build cards and stuff back in the other way? Like, how do we start playing in the HubSpot playground itself? And so we've got a few ideas that are a little percolating in the background at the moment,
Max Cohen: Oh.
Dax Miller: where now you can, you can really start to do some fun stuff. I mean, if you've already seen doom has been done. I think one of the homies did Drug Cartel, like from TI, TI85 in, so you're getting,
Max Cohen: Someone just did Pokemon cards on CRM records.
Dax Miller: been done, so your game is, is, it's ripe,
Max Cohen: Funny enough, not to switch gears into something totally like technical, but when I saw public app UI extensions, right? And for anyone listening or watching at home that doesn't know what that is, right? It's basically HubSpot granting the ability for third party public apps like all of ours to be able to augment the interface of records and, much deeper ways than wherever possible beyond like doing a little.
CRM sidebar card that maybe popped out a modal or, doing, stuffing some information and properties or whatever. I immediately thought of you guys when they started talking about the UI extension stuff. Cause I was like, damn, there's probably a lot of cool stuff that you guys can bring in on that.
Yeah. Is there anything that you can tell us about that maybe you're thinking about, like, how are you going to, show some stuff or what ideas, have you had about, how you guys can leverage that with your integration?
Steve Claydon: Yeah. So like the center cards are really interesting to us. Like a big part of the game that people really love is this timer effect and like exactly seeing in real time, which you can't really do in HubSpot. Of how many calls are you behind or ahead of as a team or individually in real time, literally this second.
In a really simple view. And so we want to start building in like our thermometers, which are sexy around those KPI goal attainments, and then the coin payouts on the end of it. And what those bonus coins could really look like leaderboards, a low hanging fruit to be able to have, visibility on how the team's actually tracking on the leaderboard point of view.
But we're also playing around with a lot of AI stuff at the moment, which is pretty interesting. Cause we're. Cause we've got really defined metrics and really defined scope around what does your KPI plan look like for this month where we're very much exploring what is this?
What is the most streamlined path to get there
Dax Miller: Exactly. It's like, Hey, you're X amount of calls behind. And based upon your teammates, success, time calls at about 10 minutes. It's time to dial that type of totally. That's like the it's like the pops up and it's like, Hey, you know what you should do genie, man, and hit it up.
Steve Claydon: Yeah.
Dax Miller: That is, I'm super hyped for you guys.
This is like, this is the time for this, right? This is hardly possible. T minus like three years. But now is the time where you can really fully leverage and it's only going to get better and better and better. I know we're all still early as you, you've probably found out Mr. Steve, Mr. Darcy, that the native app
table is kind of small of people that are like, I just built apps for HubSpot. And it's just us. This is a large percentage of the people that do it are on this call. So when, when you talk about the future and what you can do to shape, remember that you are a bridge builder, like you talk about sharing, you talk about being generous with your information, let information being Akashic record, like where everyone can get it, make it sure everyone can access it.
This is the time to do that because we are bridge builders and we're building these bridges for everyone that's going to come in the future. It's like, man, I saw that game thing. Like, I want to do something like that, but I just want to do X part and you're like, yeah, please make our platform like make have do something right?
Because the more people doing stuff, the more. Bubbles everything up and that rising tide raises all the ships. So I think that you guys are on the, on the right mission. I'm super excited. I'm so happy to like, further know your love story. The bromance is real as hell, which is dope as hell as well. Like real humans, like there's not a lot of real humans and stuff.
He's super games, no sales demo. You know what I mean? Like that stuff, that stuff is the super word, man. So we're mega glad to have you mega glad for you to be able to share your story. One of the things we like to do when we sign off. Is. Do a fast three see what's up questions you weren't ready for but you guys said you traveled a bunch, favorite place to travel outside of Australia?
Darcy Smyth: Austin, Texas.
Dax Miller: Austin, Texas.
Darcy Smyth: Yeah, either that or either that or Berlin, Germany.
Dax Miller: Jeremy Steve, what would you say? That's
Steve Claydon: Well, I, like I said, at the start, I recently got back from Japan. I would love to spend a lot more time in Japan. I've been twice, but the last trip we got into we got out of the main parts, and got into some of the little like dope little villages and towns where you're the only kind of non Japanese person there.
And I frothed it. I loved it. My favorite city though, is Hamburg, Germany. Me and Darce spent a bit of time in Germany and I love, that place just does something to me. I feel so at home there.
Max Cohen: Darcy, I gotta know why you like Austin. Are you a stand up comedy guy?
Darcy Smyth: Yeah, I feel like I I traveled to Austin before it was cool, but I feel like everyone in Austin probably would say that they were like, I was here before it was cool.
Max Cohen: Yeah.
Darcy Smyth: Steve and I spent a bit of time in Austin as well. I've just, every time I've been there, I've just had a bloody brilliant time. Just had a grand old time.
Yeah.
Max Cohen: Love it.
Dax Miller: Texas dope. I live in Texas. So
Darcy Smyth: Yeah. Sick. Where are you? Where are you Dax?
Dax Miller: I'm in north of Dallas
Darcy Smyth: Yep. Sweet.
Dax Miller: I live in north of Dallas suburbs, but I've been living in Texas for like It's like two years now, but my wife's already got the tattoo. I'm getting the tattoo. It's a thing. I love me. Shout out to everybody. Second question. Can't talk about video games without giving me your favorites.
Steve Claydon: grew up I'm an OG so I'm the youngest of two older brothers, so I was like the young kid that was always trying to get the, get my hands on the controller. I'm a, I'm an OG Nez boy. Like literally I spent the most time playing the original super Nintendo on the Nez, on the NES.
I've still got our family console, still got the family
Dax Miller: The fact that you're calling it Nez is like, Oh, you're definitely not from here, sir.
Steve Claydon: Yeah. NES you guys call it?
Dax Miller: But I know people call it the Nez all the time.
Steve Claydon: But don't you call the snares?
Dax Miller: Some people call it the SNES, I don't talk to those people.
Steve Claydon: Yeah, okay. Well, I love the NES. OG and then Nintendo 64 Pokemon Stadium, man.
Dax Miller: Pokemon Stadium, there it is. This is, this is, this is an NES cartridge, not a NES, it's so funny. But I've never heard anybody say it in person, that's why I'm like so fascinated, but can't hate a gamer, man, can't, only can hate the game. Darcy, what is your favorite video game?
Darcy Smyth: I can't split two in terms of, and this is the, in terms of amount of time spent playing. I spent countless hours playing Call of Duty Modern Warfare, the original so much. Like I, if you stuck me in the middle of one of those maps, I'd know exactly where to go still.
Max Cohen: Dude, we gotta play. I'm still a demon. Yeah. Yeah.
Darcy Smyth: yeah. And then of course it's, this one's.
It's like saying that your favorite movie is the Shawshank Redemption, which it also is. But Super Mario Smash Bros.
Max Cohen: Yeah
Darcy Smyth: Falco man. Yeah.
Steve Claydon: a fair bit of FIFA in our day,
Darcy Smyth: Oh, yeah, but I'm no good at it. I know my way around a Super Smash Bros map. FIFA, I can hardly find the back of the goal, but,
Max Cohen: Dax, can I share two very embarrassing video game things real
Dax Miller: I need it! You said, the first, first name is video game, I'm
Max Cohen: I always feel so left out a lot of conversations that we're having around video game stuff because the very first console my parents let me get was a freaking playstation one, dude. So like I missed out on oh, dude, I put hours up on crash bandicoot.
Right now though.
Steve Claydon: Yeah, nailed
Max Cohen: now
Dax Miller: I got, I got references of it. We're
Max Cohen: is like a double nerd layer here because i'm only bringing up because we talked about pokemon cards because I was like big into collecting like the cars and stuff and it happened again during the pandemic i've been playing this game lately that I am hooked on and it's literally just called trading card game shop simulator where basically
Steve Claydon: now.
Max Cohen: You run it's on pc.
You literally run a pokemon card shop, but it's like a fake they call it like tetramon or something Dude, you rip open packs. You can sell individual cards. You can sell booster boxes, you sell the accessories with it you build out the store, dude. It's addicting and I have no idea why it is like so low budget and crappily put together by this like one developer.
I'm obsessed with it. It's just
Steve Claydon: my productivity, bro. That is
Max Cohen: if you got a pc you're screwed. It's
Dax Miller: like the game Goose where you're just like, I'm a goose. I just like cause trouble. You're just like, oh, all right.
Max Cohen: Goat simulator. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway had to put that out in the world, but yeah
Dax Miller: Well, now I know. So last question. So you guys are from the down under. We love Bluey over here. That's, isn't that sad? It's like, you know, it used to be Crocodile Dundee got all the credit.
It's like,
Darcy Smyth: Yeah.
Dax Miller: Now, Bluey gets all the credit. So, what I'm going to ask is your favorite cartoon, U. S. or Australia based.
Steve Claydon: Dragon Ball Z for me, man, like
Max Cohen: There it
Steve Claydon: that is
Dax Miller: that in a heartbeat.
Steve Claydon: There was this thing in Australia and only Australian audience will know this, but it was a real problem. Hey, Dars, like Cheese TV, Dragon Ball Z was on like 7. 30am to 8am every morning. And it would literal riots in like Australian households.
Cause no one would want to go to school until they watched like that 30 minute episode. Everyone was late. As soon as you get to school, everyone would just be talking about Dragon Ball Z episodes, man. It's the greatest
Darcy Smyth: You'd be like heading out the door, like watching the last four seconds before you'd have to slam the door and run,
Steve Claydon: Your mom's get in the car. No, mom.
Darcy Smyth: They're still building the spirit bomb, Mum!
Dax Miller: alright. Darcy, what you got? That's funny.
Darcy Smyth: Man, I'm a Simpsons guy. There isn't a Simpsons line I couldn't quote. Yeah, I just
Dax Miller: man. Excellent.
Darcy Smyth: Yeah,
Dax Miller: It's like, yeah, they used to, man, that's so funny. Simpsons. I did all the Simpsons from one till, like I was in college. Like all of them all the time. Always had like the lines, you know, it's just a little airborne. It's still good.
All the, all the random
Darcy Smyth: is a Simpsons quote for every single moment in life. There really is. Just brilliant.
Dax Miller: And they also predict a lot
Max Cohen: yeah, also like a prediction for every major or wacky event that we've lived through too, which is really scary
Dax Miller: it's wrapped in. It's going to, you can pretty much predict it, man. So guys, thank you so much. I know it's early in the morning for you. We appreciate jumping in. Appreciate you in the car. You're about to take something to go, but we know where to find you on LinkedIn outbound game.
I probably, probably my favorite app. Outside of outside, outside of ours, you have won my favorite app because it is
Darcy Smyth: awesome, man.
Dax Miller: That is a put that on record. So now I get to use it with my, you know, our two people selling good art head
Max Cohen: Marcus. Yeah, that's what I'm saying
Darcy Smyth: Yeah. That'd be sick. Yeah.
Max Cohen: I mean there's a lot of crossover between what we're doing with quote hapily in terms of you know applying like a good layer of guardrails and guidance and making the quoting process easier in HubSpot But I think we've got a really interesting angle bringing you guys in to be able to say like, cool and then how do you put that light at the end of the tunnel, if you will, for your salespeople to actually do their fricking job and want to do it and have a little bit more motivation to do so other than, your manager wants to see your activity data, and things like that.
So, I think there's a lot of really, and this is, I think this is just a good message for any other app builders out there. It's there's so much room for us to work together to create these one plus equal three moments when you combine HubSpot with HubSpot apps, that enhance and elevate your experience of not only your admins, but your reps and everyone else that touches it.
And hopefully we'll be collaborating on some stuff soon that I'll show the world that so guys, thank you so much, man. This is awesome. It's always such a pleasure seeing you and talking with you. And I'm glad that you guys came on to tell the story, man. Like we want to celebrate your stuff, show people the story behind what you built, and it's always way more than features, like there's a big thing to celebrate behind every single cool app out there, and we really appreciate you guys coming and sharing that story, so,
Steve Claydon: straight back at you guys. And hats off to you guys. I really do feel like this is day one of that, of the app world and HubSpot.
Darcy Smyth: Is a chicken focaccia moment.
Max Cohen: It
Steve Claydon: You guys are legit leading the way. When I was exploring on those cards and then I saw quote hapily in there, like there's no, there's no apps in there and you guys are in there, like you guys are literally like the first to market sort of thing.
So hats off to you guys. You guys are leading the way and we look up to you guys and keen to continue collaborating and looking forward to seeing what we build together. It's going to be a, lot of fun.
Dax Miller: That's it guys. Well, peace out. Appreciate
Darcy Smyth: Thank you.
Steve Claydon: Thanks for having us.