Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: Welcome to UpYourStack podcast. I'm Noah Berk, the host of the show. Every week we feature interviews and conversations with some of our favorite app developers who've either built their applications on HubSpot or have integrated with HubSpot to help you get the most out of your HubSpot tech stack.

And today, several listeners, you've seen it before. We've had multiple guests on the show. We actually have two great guests on the show today. Joining me we have Yaroslav and we also have Sergiy and they're from Railsware and Railsware develops products. We're actually gonna be talking about a particular product that they developed and I'm all rather than steal the thunder and just share all the information about the product.

I'm gonna let these two gentlemen introduce themselves. And what this product does. So whoever wants to go first feel free to take the mic.

Sergiy Korolov, Railsware: Okay, good. So hi Railsware is the product company, so we build multiple products, but as you mentioned correctly, we'd like to talk about the Coupler. Because it's the most relevant here,

Yaroslav Lazore: our our,

Sergiy Korolov: we have a Coupler application on the marketplace and more than 1, 500 people, not people, but businesses, which are enjoying using it.

A Coupler is the tool for data analytics and automation, and it actually solves problem for the companies to become data driven companies. So that's simple. Okay.

Yaroslav Lazore: Start,

Noah Berk: Awesome. Well, that, that's something that everyone wants. Yeah.

Yaroslav Lazore: start seeing open your eyes, build the eyes if you didn't have them before.

Sergiy Korolov: off and

Noah Berk: let's dive a little bit deeper into it. Everyone generally develops a product for a reason. Generally it's because they're solving something themselves, or maybe they're solving a gap in the ecosystem. Talk to me a little bit more about what actually Coupler does for its users and how they're using the

Yaroslav Lazore: Let me actually tell you a quick story how the coupler came to be. It, it was middle of the night we were Cal recalculating our revenue because we were calculating bonuses for all our team. And then we discovered a problem that the revenue on our CRM system that we sent invoices from compared to the revenue where you multiply our by.

Differs by five, five percent of a yearly annual revenue, which was a big deal. It was 150k back then, which was we were my smaller company. And that basically shocked me mistake was quickly found. It was Excel. Someone just didn't someone added the row, but forgot to include it in the sum formula the sum formula.

And then I think this trick alone cost of all companies around the world, trillions of dollars most likely or their life, the company life, right? Sometimes company bankrupt because. Improper sum. At that time we decided and understood that there's no way that a human being should be a part of this equation, the only thing that is expressing this equation.

There should be another mechanism that is rechecking this, that the revenue actually equals to hours multiplied by rate after that, we went a bit crazy and then we probably did about five to 700 dashboards that cover a huge amount of aspects of everything, right? SEO, marketing, sales people recruiting product metrics engineering P and L of course.

And, we went far from there, and this is how Coupler was born. The Coupler was born as a bash script back at that night, which extracted the data and compared them in a Google spreadsheet, of course. But it was done specifically and differently. And this is the philosophy that is embedded into Coupler.

And, this is how it came to be in a Hotspot element. And so Google will tell more about it. Okay.

Sergiy Korolov: moving into that from the very beginning, our vision on coupler was to build a modular system. So initially it was just a data transfer tool, which took your data from, let's say HubSpot and bring it to spreadsheets, and then you do whatever you want. Building some filters on top of that, any kind of transformation you can apply with that instrument.

But then of course we had the understanding that it's not enough. Some people may not work with Excel proficiently. So we've started to build dashboards and then templates for some very common use cases that companies really need. And so what I can say right now, there are a few popular dashboards for HubSpot that are used heavily.

And those are customer acquisition dashboards which you can find right there on coupler page. Which takes the data actually and help you to understand what is the final, like how do you convert your leads like to from sign up, whatever for different states through different stages into the purchase.

We use HubSpot ourselves and we use Coupler and we are big fans of this concept of eat our own dog food. And yeah, so sales, customer success teams are active users of HubSpot. They take the data from HubSpot, like mostly information about customers, merge it with data from product use, like how features are used, and they use this combination of different factors to understand.

Who are the potential users who will be able to purchase the product? Who, what is the biggest, probably who are the most probable

Noah Berk: So, so when you are thinking about this particular product, you were solving it for the initial use case of the numbers that you were reporting on were different than the numbers that you were pulling on the system. And ultimately, in the end, that ended up being user error. It sounds like inside the spreadsheets.

You said there has to be a better way for that content are for that to work and hence coupler came to an existence, but it sounds like you found a lot of different use cases for coupler for people to do a better job actually reporting on this information outside of a system like HubSpot.

And are you seeing traction of your growth around marketing leaders, ops leaders, sales leaders, customer service, all the above?

Yaroslav Lazore: So in addition to that so Basically, your day Data is across multiple SAS apps. There's no way someone will come up with the ultimate SAS app, which or ultimate app, right? That will make it that it works across all the domains, all the functions, and all the factors. People come up with new apps with new usage of AI in their apps.

Which, what we do is extract data from all those apps and you can combine them. We give you an ability to combine and enrich the data, join the data together, transform the data. I'm pretty much sure there's like very little companies on the planet which have a clean CRM system, right? That you can just go into CRM and export the data into Excel and click the sum and you're like, Oh, our ideal pipeline is like 3 trillion because we didn't clean the the CRM

Sergiy Korolov: All those deals.

Yaroslav Lazore: Yeah.

Sergiy Korolov: Yeah. you Silence.

Yaroslav Lazore: and that your data is clean and something that you wanna see, then you can share it to your team.

And you can share it to you can share a slice of data to the proper team members. You can create a dashboard on top of that. You can, so you can create visuals and understanding of the data. You can drill down into the data and you can pull the data from other places, like for example, support, right?

So you have, let's say a dashboard of big critical customers and their support activity, right? Just to look at take all your biggest customers. Put the dashboard in front of you, pull the support activity from them and see how happy they are. How many support tickets are there creating even going up or down with the line charts and stuff, right?

What topics are they creating them from? We have a churn dashboard that pulls our users. It pulls their support activity. It pulls their reasons for their cancellation. And you can see a relevant data instead of like. Jumping into a trash bin, and then trying to find the proper thing and then do repetitive actions you create the funnels of your important data, you enrich them, cross tools.

And you see exactly what you need. And then you work on that on those dashboards. You can add things to them. You can tweak them in a way that there are, they are a perfect answer to your problem. To your understanding to as a CEO or as an office manager, there's a different dashboards. That's why we have 600 of them.

Noah Berk: So essentially, what you're also able to clients to do is not just export that data from hotspot, but also join data from other sources to be able to give you a more accurate view of exactly what information is most relevant for you to either be looking at observing. Figuring out solving with and just a high degree of accuracy.

So there's a lot of, organizations out there who and software companies who will pull data out of HubSpot, who will pull data out of different sources, who will try and give you a view and a dashboard of what that information looks like for you to be able to slice and dice. 

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: Where do you say you guys really differ from the competitors in this space?

Yaroslav Lazore: Yeah. So our pipeline is very powerful. It gives you ability to so first of all, it's best to start with a template. Because if you start from a blank canvas, it's it's very hard to figure out what is it that you want to see, you need to talk to someone, and then you start delaying everything. If you start from a template, it's very powerful to just deliver you a certain set of data, right?

And let's say if you take a simple use case of marketing persona, you want to take all your ads and put them into one dashboard and see how's your ad portfolio is working working out for you. Is it good? Is it bad? What's the general performance of your ad portfolio, right?

So you could pull them from multiple ad accounts and show them on the dashboard. So, but you use a

Sergiy Korolov: Sorry, sorry as well yeah, I guess it's very important to highlight here again that you're as I mentioned before, that it takes time to fine tune the dashboard. So you put a lot of efforts to really represent what is needed because 

Sergiy Korolov, Railsware: it's very easy to fall into 

Sergiy Korolov: the. 

Sergiy Korolov, Railsware: Just the visual aspect of the dashboard, people used to like all those charts and, pie charts and bar charts and many different tables, but then they scroll it and they actually do not understand what to do with this.

So every dashboard must be organized in a way that you actually know what is your next step once you see certain data. 

Sergiy Korolov: So that, that is, yeah, be an action.  So we help to actually build actionable analytics on top of those dashboards.

Noah Berk: Gotcha. That's really fascinating. And, some people may say, well, doesn't HubSpot have a lot of this reporting dashboarding analytics capabilities? And yeah, I know the answer is what you guys do is different, but can you describe like how you fill in the gaps in the HubSpot ecosystem? Why someone would say, Hey, I need what you guys have plus HubSpot.

Sergiy Korolov: But you don't, you should have all the other services as well. So the average amount of SaaS services that companies use more than 100 products. So all around data. 170. So the

Noah Berk: Just a few.

Sergiy Korolov: yeah, just a few and all this data all around. And you have this butterfly effect, right? That something happened in one application, like in one side of the business and influenced the other part of the business.

And how can you understand the trends? So sometimes it's just, fake trends, some. The aspects that you see on the dashboards actually haven't led to the problem, but something else that happened in the other system. So your carousel mentioned different stories can happen with support, right?

And when you match your customer. Profiles with the support cases they have when you observe the spikes of the support cases, and then you see that you start to have more churns and all those different combinations of different services actually gives you much clear answer what's going on in your business.

So gives the clarity and the answer is that. Possibility to merge all those different services into one dashboard and highlight only the most important aspects to the team and to the proper people in the team. Because not everyone should see all those dashboards, like it's funny to look around at the dashboard, but if it's not, if it's, if you're not the person who should act upon that dashboard, then it's just, the dashboard is useless.

Okay.

Yaroslav Lazore: going through the wrong data or not, they're not even going through the data. They're just. Deciding on something, 

right? And even if you look at HubSpot itself has the data enrichment engine that enriches like, Oh, this company is like this size and this company is that size.

It's not working that well. It's generically better than not to have it. But often you have a channel specific information which holds a data about how big the company is. So if a big company is using your product you want to have a slight notification. You want to support them. You want to do something.

You want to do important things to your business and coupler has its pipes exposed. They're not in the walls. They're not hard coded. You do not get what everyone gets. It's just cannot work that there's a solution like, for example, HubSpot, which is specifically tailored for managing of the context and generic CRM management of concept, right?

It cannot be great at everything and you need your own customization. Customization. Have to be done almost at the Excel level. And this is what we provide. We give you ability to tweak your data and to tweak the most important elements of your business that will go right into your face and you'll have your answers, right?

And then when you say, Oh, maybe we're not doing this. For example, I was bugging Sergio all the time. Like, why don't we hire enough people? And our hiring 0. 65 percent out of the external

Sergiy Korolov: Initial applicants, yeah, initial applicants.

Yaroslav Lazore: but we get 11, 500 applicants per 18 months. And then I started talking with other business founders so how do you guys handle them?

How do you handle your pipeline? What do you look at? What tools do you use? And they're like, how many applicants do you have? Like 11, 400, like, how did you get them? Wait. I'm the one asking questions here. Tell me, and they're like no. We had 600 applicants and we're like a 500 people company.

We're going to get a thousand applicants. How do you get them? Show me. How do you like, and then it turned because we had our answers, right? If I would be asking abstract questions, like how do you guys handle them? What's, why do you hire so many people? If we wouldn't. Discuss the exact numbers and the pipe itself and how does the the transition look like we wouldn't be talking about abstract things and there would be no way to understand one each other and expose the proper elements of truth.

And this is what's happening in business on a daily basis, right? People are just

Noah Berk: yeah, so what a really neat, so really with this tool, all of a sudden you're able to start taking, as you guys said earlier, actionable. This is becomes actionable data. It's not just data for the sake of data, but you've joined it together with other sources. You've made it more accurate. You're able to be, have a certain degree of confidence in what you're sharing.

So what is the future of this product look like? And how does AI play a part in it?

Sergiy Korolov: Let me just add one more thing on top of of those dashboards for HubSpot. So there is one important thing also. So not always you won't give a seat, like a purchase a seat for every team member in your company, but it doesn't mean that you do not want to show data to your team members. And this is something that is very powerful, actually, and many customers of ours use it.

Let's say you want to show the special segment of the data. That do not break any privacy or something, and you can put it on the screen in your, I don't know, lobby, let's say, right?

Yaroslav Lazore: Or 

Sergiy Korolov: do this.

Yaroslav Lazore: a simple use case. We have a team that sends gifts to some of our clients and the team, if we would just give seats in all the hub spots and tell them, Go, and figure it out, create filters or something like that. That would be very cumbersome, but as we are able to pull all the hotspots, because every company we have three products and three products you use their own hotspots.

And then we slice the proper layer of data, and then we union it together using coupler and just create like a gift list that works. by itself and on itself, right? And then and then we give it to the team and that team has this actionable data. It's just an example why we have six times the difference.

Noah Berk: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It seems really cool what you guys have built the ability to again, like I mentioned earlier, to have actionable data, accurate data as well on top of all of it. And then you have a mechanism to disseminate that data to your entire team, whether they're in HubSpot or not in HubSpot what.

Yaroslav Lazore: a simple example, a simpler, fun use case. So if imagine you would be driving your car, you sit behind the wheel and instead of seeing where you are, you see a map zoomed out at the top level, right? Which is the typical HubSpot dashboard with a list of tables and so go ahead and have fun driving your particular role, your particular direction through this generic set of tables.

This is what's happening in the business in

Noah Berk: Correct. Yeah. And that's definitely a challenge for a lot of organizations. So what does the future look like for you guys?

Yaroslav Lazore: The future looks really great. So we, we want to give this driving tool to every role within the

Sergiy Korolov: Self sell, self-driving tool,

Yaroslav Lazore: Self driving tool. Actually, 

Sergiy Korolov: robo roboto tool. Let's

Noah Berk: Maybe good or bad when it's full self driving.

Sergiy Korolov: Robo

Yaroslav Lazore: So,

Noah Berk: Robo charts. There you go. That's your new

Yaroslav Lazore: Yeah, RoboCharts. So, yeah, but the funny thing is that we have our payroll through us. There's 32 countries that our people are distributed across.

Our payroll looks to look not simple, you could say that, right? And then it took us 15 days to finish it. 10 to 15 days to finish it. And our C4 was like dead every time after she was finishing it. And she was taking a week vacation. So technically we didn't have a C4, just a payroll specialist. And we turned it through Coupler into a set of dashboards and set of activity tables that are monitoring all, everything that's happening within the payroll and saying, Hey, this guy doesn't have.

A contract signed and that guy didn't submit this ticket and this guy didn't give us a name. And this is, this was happening and it's giving you the dashboard of all the problems that you have. So you can go through them. And then when people activate them, we have a 15 minutes update.

So you have an auto, you have a payroll specialist. Who's a set of dashboards that works for you and tells you the generic situations, what's happening, how this is red, this is yellow, this is green. And as you make it more proficient, as you configure it through coupler proficiently like every month at some time, you have at some point, you have a very sophisticated.

Robo chart that works for you because it generally tells you what's happening because sometimes you need to keep an eye on stuff. So we have a dashboard of the state of, let's say an office, right? That the office is doing well, or the state of procurement. Are we like buying things on time?

Like what's happening, why? And then you have a dashboards on the state of the state. That the offices are generally yellow or green, or so, and then the, the future of that is that you have all your data combined using templated approaches in a smart manner, combining the tools that you're combining or combining your custom tool, because a coupler gives you the ability to combine custom source into a template because you have to transform it.

Noah Berk: yeah, that's really awesome. Well guys, I want to switch it.

Sergiy Korolov: it's impossible to ignore AI right now and definitely there is a

Yaroslav Lazore: It'll play a nice role,

Sergiy Korolov: our roadmap.

Yaroslav Lazore: to be a nice stealth release that we're working on.

Sergiy Korolov: Sales release.

Noah Berk: Nice. I like that. So, you guys have built a really successful business. 

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: What advice do you have for other people building a business? 

Noah Berk: Entrepreneurs, business leaders could be sales leaders, any advice you'd like to share and pass along.

Sergiy Korolov, Railsware: Drive your business with data. It's important. Like really what we see around this very popular statement that, Hey, we love data driven decisions and so on. But in fact, majority of the businesses from small to big are completely blind about what's going on in the, in their P&L in pipelines. 

Sergiy Korolov: So yeah, they're completely blind 

Sergiy Korolov, Railsware: and 

Sergiy Korolov: there are a lot of mistakes are done just like wrong decisions are made just because. Kind of wrong data was in the wrong hands. So run your data correctly.

Noah Berk: 100%. I think every organization out there can take that advice and honestly bank it bank because it will yield a lot of return. And hence why you guys created the product that you created was because obviously without accurate data or human error, that can be very costly. And also it means that you don't get to identify the patterns or trends that are actually driving your organization.

And how do you scale efficiently and how do you scale profitably? And also what do your customers want? That's excellent. Anything else you guys want to add to that?

Yaroslav Lazore: know we're like a very conscience driven organization. And Culture driven, conscience driven, mission driven. So we're not the best organization to ask for simple simple outcomes and simple returns. We're like, we're, we create a lot of sciences around our approaches and principles.

And then we deepen them, right? For example, this application applicants pipeline, the HR pipeline that we're talking about processing 11, 000 people just to hire a hundred of them is pretty ridiculous for a lot of the businesses. 

Noah Berk: I would

Yaroslav Lazore: Yeah but at the same time, what, when we see the, we hire our rate of people that stay in the company and our success of the company is very high.

So we definitely urge people to understand their business and to work through every role within the company for the managers of the company to work through every role of the company, to have conscious understanding of what's happening within their particular space of the company. How do their people work that they manage?

How does it feel when you do this work and what is the adequate speed for that work? And that will drive a better recruiting approaches. It will also drive a better better approaches to run the company and to keep your...

Noah Berk: Excellent advice. By the way, having your people understand the different roles in the organization, work those roles, it's imagine you're working in a kitchen, you're doing all washing the dishes, making the food, sous chef, main chef, like all of the above. That's fantastic.

Yaroslav, Sergey, this was absolutely fantastic. Thanks for coming on the show and really sharing more about this application you built and what it can do for organizations. If they're interested in learning more about the two of you, how did they find out information about you? How do they connect with you guys?

How did they find out more information about?

Sergiy Korolov: Railsware. com, couple of Third. io and our LinkedIn's I don't know, do you have some comments? Will you have some comments under no.

Noah Berk: Yeah. Yeah. We'll be sure to get it out there. We'll be linking you guys as part of the show out there as well. So we'll be having you on and guys again, thank you so much for joining us on the show today. It was excellent to hear about the product. If you guys, if listeners, you need analytics, you want to slice and dice it, you have it from multiple different sources, check out coupler great product to be able to use, to be able to bring data into whether it's a spreadsheet or someplace else that you're.

Leveraging this data in a big way check out their product and what it can do for you. And that wraps it up today for our show. Again, UpYourStack is that weekly podcast where we feature app partners who've either built their apps on HubSpot or integrated with HubSpot to help you get the most out of your HubSpot tech stack.

Again, thanks for joining and hope you enjoyed listening.