Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: Welcome to UpYourStack Podcast. I'm your host, Noah Berk. Every week we feature some of our favorite, app developers who've either built their applications on HubSpot or integrated with HubSpot to help you get the most out of your HubSpot tech stack, and today I have a really exciting company who's going to talk more about his application Outfunnel and we're joined by Andrus.

Andrus, welcome to the show.

Andrus Purde, Outfunnel: Hey, Hi Noah.. Good to be here. Thank you for having me.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: Oh, it's my pleasure. and honestly, you guys fill such a critical place in the hotspot ecosystem. We'll call it connecting data, but rather than me giving away all the spoilers about what you guys do and how you do it, maybe we start off with you giving the opportunity to share more information about yourself, your role, and what is Outfunnel do for, clients?

Andrus Purde, Outfunnel: I'm Andrus. I'm a co founder and CEO of Outfunnel you can connect data between sales and marketing apps, like HubSpot and a million of others, we've been doing that since, 2018, we have, about a thousand paying customers. HubSpot is a strong number two in our, collection of CRMs we integrate with.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: And obviously this is a. Big problem people are trying to solve, but you know, there's a lot of companies out there who will integrate, applications like HubSpot to axe. So why you guys like, why start this company in the first place to solve this particular problem organizations have.

Andrus Purde, Outfunnel: So maybe I go back to when the company started. I think that's, that should give an answer. I was actually, working at the Pipedrive another CRM, and the revenue app before starting old funnel. I was doing marketing there. one of the things I was in charge of was customer research, and also integrations marketing side of integrations.

I, realized talking to customers that people loved the sales software, but they're finding it hard to connect marketing tools and workflows. so that's give me an idea of, that sounds like a problem to be solved. then quit Pipedrive and started looking for my next thing to do and then I talked to more than a hundred companies around the world in different verticals, doing different things, using different CRMs, and asked, what the problems were. and And I learned that not only in the Pipedrive ecosystem, but also with some HubSpot customers, it was hard to connect certain marketing tools, together, to really do it deeply and easily. So what we do is we help to, for the kinds of companies that want to use different sales marketing tools, If you are somebody who uses HubSpot's, sales Hub and Marketing Hub, probably have nothing, to offer you. But if you're using, HubSpot as a CRM and let's say FTCampaign or Campaign as a marketing tool, you'll find it that even with your, operations hub, it's hard to get these two tools or three tools, really tightly joined at the hip.

So that's what we do. We help, to. mix your favorite tools, without having to worry about where the data is connected or not. So We do that for you.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: Well, Andrus, you said something really impactful right there. Before starting this, you talked to all of these customers. And it sounds like you've talked to plenty, hundreds, perhaps. How did you start this conversation with them? Like, did you just pick up the phone and say, Hey, listen, I see you have X software and Y software.

What are your problems? Did you have a list of questions you were asking them?

Andrus Purde, Outfunnel: Yeah. I think, I mean, in the very early phases of doing this customer research or customer development, you tend to ask very open ended questions just to understand the problems. But, the more you do these early interviews. The more answers start to repeat and then you want to be mindful of your own time and the time of the people you speak to, and then maybe, you skipped some of the very early, very open ended questions.

They just ask about what are the tools you use? what are the issues that you have in aligning sales and marketing? what are the issues relating to connecting data in particular? And then, didn't have to ask too many questions to see that these problems are solvable.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: Yeah. and a lot of people may refer to this like voice of the customer analysis, which you essentially did up front. Would you say that was one of the reasons you got traction? Did a lot of these conversations turn into your early customers? how did that work?

Andrus Purde, Outfunnel: Yeah. I mean, it turned to a few of the customers for sure, but really, like it, our story wasn't that day we spoke to, I think literally, we spoke to 10 customers who had a very specific need. Close to what we then launched, but only one of them started the paid subscription. So the remaining, 10 first customers, we have to then hustle for it and just do marketing.

Be present at marketplace. It's like HubSpot apps marketplace and just hustle. Basically.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: And where do your customers come from? Like, how are you gaining traction in the marketplace now?

Andrus Purde, Outfunnel: Our favorite, channel. The channel we love is marketplaces. So, HubSpotDev marketplace, as well as, PyTraps marketplace. These are, and then the marketing tools we integrate with, they maybe don't have a marketplaces which are that advanced, but, all. SAAS tools have their integrations kind of pages or hubs or, directories.

It really pays to be present there. and if there are reviews there, then make sure that you have good reviews. make sure that you're really putting your best foot forward, both in terms of your descriptions, your imagery and user, testimonials there.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: Yeah, so it's really leveraging the marketplace taking advantage of that area and making sure you're continually building out that profile, making it good, giving the images, providing the material, the contents that people have to search for it. Who would you suppose is your customer?

Is this a marketing person? Is this an ops person? Is this a developer? who are you marketing to generally?

Andrus Purde, Outfunnel: Excellent question. I have thought about the question a lot and I've done a lot of research and speaking to customers. So we don't have one specific persona that buys us, but it's usually either the marketing lead, or the sales lead, who then initiates, buying something like Outfunnel.

Usually, businesses have different reasons for wanting to use. different sales and marketing tools. Some do it, because of, cost reasons, because Houseplant is a great tool, but it can get, pricey at some point, if you're gonna cross certain thresholds. in some businesses, money is not an issue, but just, hey, Marketing Lead really likes Clavio as the marketing tool.

And the sales lead really likes HubSpot or Salesforce for that matter. in a very democratic organization, you don't, say that who has the right answer, but you try to then combine these two tools. And this is where, tools like Altfunnel come in.

Not only us, there's many ways to connect. the tools, but, what makes us different, is that, that's the only thing we do. Other app connectors like Zapier, make, they connect lots of different data between lots of different kinds of tools. But we are just custom designed for, uniting your sales data and marketing data, and making it useful in both tools.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: Well, let's expand upon this concept because one of the areas you differentiate is because you really focus a niche on just a particular few set of tools. Why is that an advantage for a client versus something like a Zapier? 

Andrus Purde, Outfunnel: So I love Zapier. we use, Zapier for lots of different things, and it's, really good for, like, let's say you want to get the lead from your lead form. into your CRM, perfect. Does it perfectly. Or if you need your CRM to connect to ChatGPT take something from there and put it back to the CRM, love it.

Very easy to make it happen. But if you want to connect your wholesales database with your whole marketing database. Or maybe a specific segment to a specific, area in the marketing tool and then sync some data back then. This becomes really hard to set up with something like Zapier. and then, we just make it easy.

We just, That's the only thing we do, and we try to make it as easy and as powerful as humanly possible.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: So basically by focus, it's like your entire team is simply thinking, how do we make this particular use case as easy as possible? And essentially your differentiation in the marketplace is it's easier,

Andrus Purde, Outfunnel: Yeah, it's easier, and I think it solves the problem more holistically. We also have a connection where we, let's say, sync, WordPress forms into your CRM.

And there we are just as good as an IT connectors or Zapier. We don't have any value. It was like hard for us to make these integrations happen, but, it turned out that there's no willingness to pay there. And also our solution is just as good as API or some of the native integrations, but where we really are different, better even I should say.

Is connecting your CRM to your marketing data and then, letting people, pick and mix their revenue stack.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: Yeah, absolutely. You got a CRM that's separate from your marketing. You got to be able to have the two integrated well enough so both can do their jobs effectively. If someone says, like, how do you feel? What gap do you feel in the hotspot ecosystem? How would you go ahead and answer that question?

Andrus Purde, Outfunnel: There's many ways to get the tools connected lightly. So let's say for, using HubSpot as your CRM and MailChimp as your marketing tool. HubSpot itself has two different offerings for connecting these two tools. You have the native sync, which connects contacts as a one off and then starts syncing email engagement back.

But it's very hard to control, what data exactly is synced back and how. usually new people added to either of these two tools don't get sucked, so it's a, it solves some use cases, but not all use cases well, the revenue, ops tool, it's again, it's a great two way seeking tool, but if you need to seek engagements, not contacts, then, it doesn't offer that capability yet.

So what we step in is we, we've talked to enough people who want to connect different tools. and then we know what kind of data they want and how they want it connected and what they want customized. so it's really the, the, not just edge cases, but the advanced cases and some of the edge cases, which we make it easy to, to happen,to, yeah, to, we make it easy to make even quite exotic sales marketing, workflows and use cases too.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: And also, I say there's probably a big price differentiation between like, Hotspot Ops Hub versus what you charge, for your capabilities and tools. So it seems like there's probably some cost savings in addition to ease of use.

Andrus Purde, Outfunnel: Yeah, in most cases, yeah, that's true.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: And what's the future of Outfunnel? Like, what are you working on next? And like, how does AI play a part in all of this?

Andrus Purde, Outfunnel: So one thing we want to do for sure is add integrations. So we currently work across four CRMs and maybe six marketing automation tools. we have more integrations,These 10 tools are our bread and butter. We know that we need to add three, four integrations on the CRM site and five to 10 integration, the marketing side, as quickly as we can.

Then AI can come in at least three ways. we are using, different AI related tools, to help us engineer faster and more, efficiently. So things like co pilots and, using chat GPT to help solve specific flows. These are no brainers. we're also looking to add AI into the tool.

So doing things like things that the ops people love, field mappings, Right. if you have lots of fields, and then on the both sides, something says company name. You'd really want it to be automatic. It doesn't need like a three year old, my five year old daughter could do that.

And then, you'd have to do it manually. there's probably the language model that could do that. thirdly, we're now also looking at, putting some AI features or really, exploring How to make sure that the data we have here, the data you want to put in this other place, maybe we can enrich it or make it more useful your outreach efforts or personalizing campaigns.

This is something which is more innovative, harder to do. But, but yeah, I think this is something we're looking at. 

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: Sounds like a fun challenge to solve for. Now, how are you picking what additional technologies to integrate with? Are you going back to your initial playbook of talking to as many customers as possible? or are you, are using some other metrics to say we should have integrations to X?

Andrus Purde, Outfunnel: yeah, talking to customers for sure. So we have enough existing customers that we get the status team of requests from them. we also use, kind of keyword research tools, SEO tools that give us search volumes of specific integration corridors. and then we have hundreds and hundreds of landing pages.

For integrations, which are coming soon. so that if people want, an integration, they probably find us. and then we know how many people land there and then how many people submit. early beta request,

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: That is an excellent strategy. Creating landing pages for

Andrus Purde, Outfunnel: Don't tell others.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: I will not tell anyone. and perhaps you were not meaning to share that. And everyone who's listening, just ignore what we just talked now. I may take that idea, and we're a professional services company, and just start adding that to ourselves.

But no, that's really fascinating. I guess that kind of leads me into my next question. is, what advice do for entrepreneurs in general or leaders of businesses in general that you've learned over these years of running Outfunnel?

Andrus Purde, Outfunnel: So I'm going to give you a round, like take a detour and get to an answer. So I mentioned earlier that for us, really important channel is market basis, and I think we have a bit of playbook there now where we have an edge, how we can bring in a steady stream of customers, cost efficiently, and then even scale it as much as we can.

That said, we also have some found some success with content, some success with paid ads, some, success with just normal affiliate deals.and we could also do things like personal outreach more or. display ads more, but, for the kind of company that we are right now, marketplaces works the best.

But we could also be a content driven company. We could also be a paid driven company. So the advice I would give is to, is to experiment enough to know what works to me, not what works overall, and then what works for you and what you like to do. And then just, do you. There's no one thing which every entrepreneur should do or every, app maker should do.

There's plenty of channels that can work, just should find the best channel, which works for you and which you like to own and manage and then double down on that. So you do, you my, is my answer.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: and that's fantastic advice, and I think a lot of organizations out there, they either try and copycat what other organizations do, and you can't spread yourself that thin across all the different marketing channels. And you really got to say, what's that channel? Is it the partner channel?

Is it the marketplace channel? Is it the organic search channel? There's only so many places you can say, I'm going to win that particular channel and focus on it. In your particular case, it sounds like you identified marketplace is a great way of doing it doesn't mean to ignore all the other potential marketing channels, but if you're going to be putting most of your efforts, most of your people, most of your thought into it.

Marketplace is a place that you're going to do better than anyone else. and to your point, Do what you think is best. I think that's excellent advice. Andrus that you just shared because I think too often people are trying to simply copy what the leaders doing and process out the best strategy because they may have a lot more money than you, to do what they're doing versus what you think is best for your own business. 

Andrus, this was fantastic. If people are interested to learn more about Outfunnel and more about yourself, how do they find out more information about do they connect with you? And then how do they find out more information about Outfunnel as well?

Andrus Purde, Outfunnel: Excellent. So, so yeah, everybody who. who wants to take a peek of what we do? go to apps marketplace and look for Outfunnel or look for MailChimp or look for a Clavio, and then you'll probably see our listing come up there. and I personally, I'm quite active on LinkedIn. So if you type in the exotic word of Andrus, A N D R U S P U R D E, then I'd love to connect with you there.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: It's a name that should come up probably first, I imagine,When you go ahead and look for that in LinkedIn. Well, Andrus, thank you so much for joining today on the podcast. It's been a pleasure having you sharing more information about the company. and listeners, thank you for joining us as well.

And that really wraps it up today. Again, UpYourStack is a weekly podcast that features, app partners, you've either built their apps on HubSpot or integrated with HubSpot. You can find me on LinkedIn,just like Andrus type in Noah Berk,

I think I'll probably come up near the top and it's B E R K. .Again, thank you so much for joining us today. Hope you took something fun away. 

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