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 of your HubSpot tech stack. And today I have Darius. And Darius, I will let you tell a little bit more about your company. So I'll let you, I'll let you share and you, by the way, you have a very cool name.

Darius Santos, Dubb.com: Yeah. Right on, brother. Appreciate that. Yeah. Guys, so I'm co founder of Dubb.com it's a video communication tool and our relationship with HubSpot goes back basically to near our founding days. Because we saw the power of HubSpot where actually that was our first CRM we ever used.

And so it's still connected on the backend pipes and everything. So it was it was only seemed natural to, to begin that sort of space into the HubSpot ecosystem, to move into that space and work with the users and the leaders and stuff over at HubSpot. We've been blessed to connect with them a few times.

We went to some of their marketing events and got connected with some cool people. So. Overall it's just been an awesome journey over the last several years and HubSpot has been an integral part of that.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: Well, that's fantastic. Let's talk a little bit about Dubb and what you guys do. And like I say, very cool name.

Darius Santos, Dubb.com: Yeah. Yeah.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: I'm curious, just a little more history here.

Darius Santos, Dubb.com: Right. Right. So, so what it was is we realized several years ago that there was this massive increase in video consumption, right? People began to, this was YouTube's like was rising, like TikTok didn't even come out yet. And at that time we realized like there's this massive increase in video demand.

Like people seem to prefer to watch videos than read like long text. And people are learning faster from video. There's, they're learning, more. succinctly, concisely, like you can spend less time, you can get more out of it and you remember it better. So there's all these benefits of video communication.

And this is even before COVID and Zoom took off. And then that whole thing was just nice to see because we had this idea years ago and we're like, okay, video's happening. We need to build a platform. That enables her video communication and then so then it was like, okay, what are we going to call it though?

We need something related to video that is as short as domain as possible there's no three word four word domains. There weren't many available, you know that weren't astronomically priced so dubbbing Dubb, you know is to add your context to add your subtext to a word they're adding English language to a Japanese video or cartoon or something.

So I was like, okay, well that's related to video, but what we're dubbbing is where we're dubbbing the screen or we're dubbbing other things. So it's not a perfect correlation, but it's definitely related.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: Yeah, absolutely. And again, great name and I know trying to find those three letter, four letter names is normally expensive entirely. So, so, why, why try and solve this? And I guess who are you solving this for?

Darius Santos, Dubb.com: Well, well, what actually originated as is I at the time was a real estate agent and so was the founder's wife was also a real estate agent. And as a real estate agent, you have to do sometimes some things that don't feel great, like door knocking or cold calling. And sometimes those things result in some bad happenings, right?

People slam the door on you or say some rude things or whatever. And we're like, right. There's got to be a better way to build trust with people that you can avoid this, right? We want to build trust and say, Hey, I'm a real person. I have a solution. I can help you. This is what I do. I'm an expert at it.

But an ability to do that without having to get face to face and avoid the door slams or avoid the rude, interactions.

those door slams. I you for doing all that. That is a hard part of sales.

yeah. Yeah. That was that door to door was definitely the toughest for me when I was doing real estate and phones are different. You just, you can be on the phone, you can get over it, but someone says something rude to you in person.

It just sits differently. And so we thought that there has to be a way to build trust better than this. And we saw video is a powerful way to do that, right? If we connect on a video, then all of a sudden, like I know you're a real person. I know who you are. It felt like I met you when it's the next best thing to meeting in person in a way.

So we're like, all right, how do we now take that and use this as a like sales tool as a prospecting thing? Like, how do we make these two things work together? And that's really the problem we were trying to solve from day one and ever since.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: So tell me more about the product, like how do people use it and what are the use cases around it?

Darius Santos, Dubb.com: Right. Well, it's actually, I think it's probably mostly around the marketing and the content that we've created. And then the users that have adopted our platform, what they ended up using it mostly for. I would say that the number one use case is. Oh, it's tied actually between prospecting and lead nurturing.

So if you have a lead that has come in, you did a webinar, you have an online advertisement some SDRs are setting appointments or something, whatever that, that opportunity is. And then nurturing those leads, like you get their information. And instead of the generic plain text autoresponder template thing that gets sent to everybody, it's often opportunity to say, Hey, I got your information.

I did some homework on you and I found out our solutions perfect for you for these reasons. And it just makes a much more powerful type of message than the generic stock thing that's being sent through automation by everybody else. So that's probably the number one use case is just differentiating from all the noise that's out there.

A lot of text based we're going to talk about AI, the rise of that automations. So in a world of text based noise. A video message can really jump through a cut, cut through the noise there. So that's the main use cases, breaking through the noise, building trust and accelerating sales cycles.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: That's awesome. So, so really for those, essentially it solved your problem of knocking on doors

Darius Santos, Dubb.com: Yeah. Right.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: Picking up the phone and dialing for dollars. So, so what are some of the key reasons you've gained traction over the years? Where has that been coming from?

Darius Santos, Dubb.com: Yeah, I know. I think it's several things. One is some partner marketing, like what we've done with HubSpot, right? We connected to some platforms like HubSpot there's a Salesforce, platforms like that, that have an ecosystem, if you will. And you create the marketplace, the listing, and then you go drive traffic to that.

You go do a good job servicing those clients to leave some reviews on spots and hope for the best in their experience, that they have some good result. That, that was an integral part of our growth and our traction is getting some of those integrations and partnerships built early on.

Another thing was our competitive approach where we'll talk about this later too. There's obviously some competitors in the space and what we did is we created a lot of compelling content and advertisements and stuff to differentiate and show, Hey, you guys might know this thing, but you should check out this thing because it's better for X, Y, Z reasons.

So that, that competitor strategy, our partner strategy, we never actually turned on a full outbound sales strategy in our original growth story. We got all our traction and stuff from content creation, from inbound marketing, just like HubSpot. They're big on we, we did a lot of inbound marketing through those partnership and a sort of competitive strategies.

That was our earliest days.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: let's go down this path for a second. So how do you differentiate yourself from competitors? There's obviously a lot of people who do video or enable you to do video in the space. So why guys versus them?

Darius Santos, Dubb.com: no, I love this question and actually this is one of the things that I've personally as a co founder spent a lot of time building and researching and they call it a moat right where your product or service has a moat to protect you from other things and so that's what we've done is we went and did a deep analysis on what our competitors can do, right?

What their capabilities and functionalities and service and all that stuff looks like. Talk to customers that had come from them and switch to us. So through interviews, finding out like, why did you leave them? What did you like about them? So we deep dive analysis on our competitors, built those similar core functionalities that are really important for people.

So make sure all the main stuff that people love about the favorites competitors, we have that, but then we built some really unique functions and features that. Our competitors don't have, and it's all based on that user feedback. I wish that this tool did that. And Oh, that's it. Let's build that.

And so that's really, what's been our differentiators. Some of our key functionalities like full functioning, auto voice recognition, teleprompters, and some really cool built in editing functions where you can like automatically edit videos together. And some really cool features that are streamlined this whole

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: you said something really, you said something really important. And we've heard on some of the other episodes that we've recorded and is voice of the customer. So it's actually sitting now with your customers and figuring out what they want. And then you start finding patterns like All these customers want acts.

Okay. We should be building two acts and that's what is going to attract them. But it's not just following the leader. It's also identifying what someone else may not be doing that can be providing. So have you, is there like a niche market? Is real estate your niche or are you pretty much across the board?

Darius Santos, Dubb.com: Yeah, no that's a great question as well. One of our competitors was mostly focused in real estate. And so when we created that competitor content, that was where our whole beginning of our customers came from was from their main, their thing. That's where a lot of our real estate came from. And since we've especially since COVID, right, everyone became open to this concept of, oh yeah, video like zoom, but they're like, but wait, but I want to.

I don't want to sit in the zoom. I want to send the zoom over an email. And so that kind of opened every industry's concept to opened up everybody's mind to this concept of video in an email video, in a LinkedIn message video, in a text message, and it's trackable and it can integrate a HubSpot and all this information and now make it.

Really like an effective sales tool where you can measure ROI and stuff like that, instead of something that's ephemeral, like a post to social media where you get some views and then what happens with it? It became a vehicle for sales because now it's fully integrated into CRM and technology and all that.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: What are companies seeing when it comes to results from, and it brings me back to the story, like early on, before COVID hit, we were telling all of our employees, you got to be on video when you're on your Google meet, you got to be on zoom. They're like, why their clients 

What are you talking about?

Why have to be on video? Well, I to be saying stuff like, well, I have to get ready. I have to be put together. I'm like. Yes, your Yes, you

Right. You should be anyways. Yeah.

And it was really COVID that everyone started hopping on video. It took a, sadly, a pandemic for it to come to reality.

But are you seeing, was really COVID in that period of time when video started taking off and then all of a sudden it became a common medium for 

Darius Santos, Dubb.com: Right. Correct. And I'd say prior to COVID. Video email or video messaging. No not video communication, but like asynchronous video communication like video messages, that was a very niche thing. Like it was only people that were really thinking outside of the box that were looking for something like that.

And so after COVID during COVID everyone quickly realized, well, if zoom is great, but it's very time consuming. How can we I want to send 10, 000 of these to people and then know who's watching them. And so that demand surge during COVID because people realize the efficacy and the power of video to build trust and educate people.

And then it became a technical hurdle of like, how do we make all these things work and track and look at it? So, and during that time, it became, we had people from every industry, every vertical. Every different type of use case, even sales, marketing, recruiting, everybody doing anything that wanted to do any type of business development was like, Hey, yeah, we can put videos and messages.

We want to do that.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: And what's been the impact to these sales organizations like before Dubb and after Dubb, what's been their call conversion rates or rates? They send out 100 communication points. They were hitting, they were getting five.

Darius Santos, Dubb.com: Right. No, exactly.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: the uptake?

Darius Santos, Dubb.com: That's one of my favorite things. Like we have a lot of small business. Some of our bigger business, we have case studies, really documented case studies. One of our teams has a like 300 SDRs. Right. And their SDRs actually operate across a bunch of different industries. Like they're on on demand SDRs, right?

Like I'm going to pay you for your SDR. So I don't have to go hire my own. It's a more cost solution. So they have these Paid SDR services. And so they're working for like a hundred different industries and companies. And the results that they had, cause they're paid on per bookings.

And so their booking rate nearly doubled, almost doubled. Like it was like 40 percent anywhere to 80 percent from the amount of same volume of messages they were sending out. And their booking appointment rates skyrocketed in that case study. And that was across, that was one of my favorite because it's such a large team of, 300 SDRs across many different industries and verticals.

The other one we see a huge, just not a very easy boost is. Simply putting video in the subject line. Like I made a video for you, a little emoji or something that will boost your open rates, like on your bulk emails, your campaigns and stuff, 10 percent or more measure it. If in fact there's a free trial, I always tell everyone, go measure it, measure your last hundred plain text things, and then now go measure a hundred of the videos we're going to tell you to create and measure the difference in that response and click through rate every single time we ever measure it.

It's noticeably improved.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: Well, let's talk about your integration with HubSpot and, tell me a little bit more about that integration and what do you see are gaps you're filling in the ecosystem via Dubb.

Darius Santos, Dubb.com: Yeah, no, that, that's a, that's an awesome question as well. So historically there were just tremendous gaps with video in like, how do we measure this? How do we know if it's working? So who's watching this thing? How much of it, how often is it being watched? And then YouTube provides some sort of metrics where you say you can see watch rates or, average watch time and stuff like that.

But when it comes to, business, you want to know who is watching the video because I want to follow up with the person that actually watched. And. Clicked or something. And so that became the part to actually measure. And with the solution, you can track that. Like I can send a video to a thousand people through HubSpots, automations or bulk, bulk options and be able to identify specifically who's watching the video.

So that's the first part of the integration. And the second part is. All the activities, so who watched, who clicked, who opened, that gets synced back directly to the HubSpot records, as well as the salesperson activity. So if I send a video to one person, that's, that shows up in the contact record as well.

So it's really a full integration where if you're in HubSpot, you don't technically need to leave HubSpot to do any of those things. You can. Click on the extension to record or access the video, share the video, track the results, all right, and set a HubSpot and that, that took some time to really understand that the ecosystem, all the different, but luckily we were HubSpot users, so it was more, it easier to define where those things went.

But it was, it's several different components. It's the integration of the video, the tracking piece, and then the API sort of webhook components to keep all the contacts and stuff in sync as well.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: So there are a lot of cool things with video, especially coming out with AI. And yeah it's crazy. Who knows? Maybe we're not even here right now and we're

Darius Santos, Dubb.com: Right, right. This is all fake. Yeah.

Noah Berk: Don't know. I had to put out, we are not fake. I am really me today.

Darius Santos, Dubb.com: actually real. Yeah.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: we're actually real at this point in time.

But what's the future roadmap of Dubb? What look like? And how does AI fit into it?

Darius Santos, Dubb.com: I love this. There's a couple sections too. So, so one, like you just mentioned the sort of, Hey Jen, or the the artificial type of video things that's already six months old, right? Like we can take these really cool AI videos and we can send and track them through the Dubb platform. So we have a nice relationship and integration with those other sort of AI generated videos.

We of course have some little avatar type videos as well. They're not full like clone It's more like a an obvious ai avatar that speaks on your behalf. So that's part of it now the other part of this thing is we actually developed something proprietary where if you're familiar with chat GPT it's like chat GPT except for it sits on your video.

So your videos here, say I sent you a video message where I said, Hey Noah, thanks so much for having me on the show. I wanted to share some opportunities with you. Let me know if you have questions. And then below my video or next to the video is my chat GPT. That is my sales assistant. So you can ask it questions like FAQs.

It can qualify leads. It can capture information like your email, first name, last name, and present calls to action, like book a time in my calendar or download this attachment or whatever. So it's a. Chat GPT for sales that now is your customer facing asset. And that's incorporated into every video you share.

So share a video through an email, through a text, through LinkedIn, it's midnight and they get your message. Then they can go conversate with your AI. That's trained on all your stuff. It's not chat GPT in that it's just open to the random internet stuff. It's a specific AI trained for your business.

So it's like on, you go to some modern websites and they have an AI trained for all their stuff. It's like that, except for. It's on your video to communicate on your behalf. So that's our direct it. Yeah.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: Yeah. I just see this whole space. And I don't necessarily know if this is the place to get into the ethics of doing AI videos that are yourself. We're how do you guys think of it? 

Darius Santos, Dubb.com: No,

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: if you're sending out aI video and it's not really you it's but you're dubbbing in.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: like, Hey client, how are you doing industry?

Darius Santos, Dubb.com: We're at a shift right now. We're at a time, we're at a point where, Younger generations, like our age and younger, will be able to likely see the difference still in the generation of AI video. There's just some subtleties where the mouth movement's not perfect, the audio's not perfect, something was grainy or strange.

Whereas somebody that's maybe not super hip to AI video generated content, It might just fall for it and they might just say, Oh, wow, it looks like a personal video. But I will say at this time it will have the opposite effect where if you're the idea of sending a personal video to somewhere, you say, Hey, client name, I made this thing for you.

Then that has a personal effect, right? That you heard somebody else say your name, know that they took the time to do something special for you. It creates that sort of. Reciprocity where they're like, okay, you did your homework. You took the time. You did something special for me, unique. And I heard my name versus if they can tell that it's AI immediately has the opposite effect.

It's you tried to trick me. We have this several times too. Like we have some AI calling that's happening too. It's all opted in and everything. But the moment the person realizes or knows that it's an AI, everything shifts that trust is just instantly tanked because they're like, You tried trick me.

Yeah. So that's where we're at now. Very soon here. I imagine the AI is going to increase to the quality of the point where we really can't differentiate.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: you're not going to be able to tell the

Darius Santos, Dubb.com: Yeah. And at that point I would say it's just a matter of leveraging those tools to then increase the amount of production you can do, because yes, you could clone yourself and make 10, 000 copies.

Yeah.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: We, we can probably spend the next hour talking about the ethics and morality and whether it's the right way of doing it or not, we'll leave that for another podcast. One question I like to ask all entrepreneurs and co founders and leaders is, what advice you have for other entrepreneurs and other business leaders, and maybe a cool learning lesson along the way.

Darius Santos, Dubb.com: I would say. Actually I coined something early on in our early days, I call it the blueprint method. I'm sure it's someone else has said it or whatever, but the idea it's definitely not original here, but success leaves a trail, right? And the idea is to go look at what your business is and try to be unique, right?

In this day, you can't just come up with something generic. It's gotta be niche or it's gotta be focused. But when you go and develop this project, this entrepreneurial endeavor you're trying to accomplish. There is a trail of success, right? And so you want to go find the people that have done something similar to what you've done in the past and look at the blueprint and find what you like about it best and reinvest in that for yourself, redevelop the own, your own version of it because but I recommend the talking to the customer piece.

Don't live in a bubble doing this. Don't live in a vacuum thinking you have all the answers of saying, oh, well, I know this and this. So let me go now blueprint my own thing. Talk to people about what you're building as you're building it using the methods of that trail leads to success.

So find the people that you're, trying to emulate essentially, doesn't have to be an exact match, but find the parts of that business, their marketing, their sales strategies, whatever those are. And then take the blueprint and, make it your own that I will say would save you so much trial and error because you're going to go learn from the industry experts or from the people that have already walked the path before you.

And then sometimes you may need to invest in like a coach or a consultant or someone that has really truly done this and then can go give you the direct keys to the kingdom. If you're unwilling or unable to go do all that research and build everything yourself. So give yourself fast track. Yeah that's my

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: I love that. I tend to find it's easier to learn from others mistakes or other successes than trying to figure this all out on your own. I'm a huge fan of reading, absorbing, learning and learning from others as well at the same time coursing your own learning. Your own destiny your own path in this world.

So I, but why not learn from people who've already been there, done it. So, excellent advice. Darius, this is a fantastic discussion. Kudos to you and what you've built over at Dubbb really. And by the way, one of the coolest names of all companies

Darius Santos, Dubb.com: Right, right.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: And Darius, people are interested to learn more about you, more about the company.

How did they go about doing that?

Darius Santos, Dubb.com: I would say if you go to Dubb.com, there's a completely free account, free for life account. You can try if you want to try sending video email. But more importantly, we actually do a live training session. I myself make my, I'm available every single weekday at 10 a. m. Pacific, and I connect with, whatever, 20 people a day in that live zoom session, depending on busier day, sometimes more, sometimes less, but we demonstrate everything.

We talk to people. We say what's your business? What are you trying to accomplish? And we provide this sort of open strategy session where we teach people exactly. How to leverage video in their business with based on what they're doing, what their technology is, their goals are. So that live training session, you can come chat with me every single weekday and get a download on how to implement video in your business.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: I love that. I'm about to steal that for just come talk to me for an hour, once a week,

Darius Santos, Dubb.com: I love it,

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: I'm going to download and answer all your questions. 

Darius Santos, Dubb.com: I was telling you about talking to the customers. I was like, now it's every day I get to talk to them. Oh, it's amazing.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: Exactly. Well, Well, Darius, again, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. It was excellent.

And thank you listeners for joining us on this episode. That really wraps it up again. UpYourStack is a weekly podcast where we interview some of our favorite developers who've either built their apps on HubSpot or integrated with HubSpot. Of course you can check me out on LinkedIn. Happy to answer any questions you may have. Again, thank you for joining us. 

​