Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: [00:00:00] Welcome to UpYourStack Podcast. I am your host, Noah Berk. Every week we feature interviews with some of our favorite app developers. You'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 don't just have one guest. I got two guests from this awesome company called Dedupely I have Hampus and I have Tin with me here today. Gentlemen, welcome to the show.

 

 

Hampus Isaksson, Dedupely: very much.

Tin Castro, Dedupely: Thank you. Thank you so much for having us.

 

 

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: Awesome. Well, thank you for being here and let's start off with one, introduce yourself, your background, what your role is at the company, and then I'll let one of you take it. And what does Dedupely do?

 

 

Hampus Isaksson, Dedupely: All right, well, I run operations at Dedupely and for those who haven't heard about us, I think the name is self explanatory. We we offer an extensibility to the duplication and in HubSpot, right? No, but my job is to make sure that we are, we're on top of everything that's happening, not just in HubSpot,, but everywhere we integrate, [00:01:00] making sure everybody's pulling in the same direction.

And Dedupely started about, I think in and around 2015. 

But back then we didn't integrate with HubSpot at that point. I think we integrated with maybe Nimble.

Something like that, a few others. Back then, all you saw, you integrated with Dedupely and you saw you have 2000 duplicates. You didn't see what they were. You just saw that you had 2000 duplicates. Would you like to merge? And can you imagine that today? I don't think so. But back then people went, hell yeah,

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: merge away.

Hampus Isaksson, Dedupely: Merge them away, and it worked. And since then we've come a long way, but I'll leave it over to Tim now.

 

 

Tin Castro, Dedupely: Yeah, well, yeah my name is Tin.. I am the partner and success manager here at Dedupely.. And yeah, I've been at the company for a bit over a year and a half I believe, and I've had the pleasure of knowing Hampus for a really long time for since 2013 probably a long time. [00:02:00] And we've worked in several projects and what's really great is that Hampus and I have always shared a passion for customer success, customer service, and just making things right.

And I think it was a really good opportunity to work both at a really good place. When I joined the company and I was, I'm always thrilled about working with customer success, especially with a product that's so niche because it is a very unique. Situation or when you have duplicates and it was great jumping into this adventure of knowing that I, that a lot of people have issues with duplicates and how this gap wasn't covered and how Dedupely was

covering everything, which was really great. And I was very surprised at how great things how the tool works, how the things are going, how great, first of all, how great HubSpot is as well. And it was it's been great. I mean, Dedupely, like Hampus said, I mean, I've been here for a year and a half and things have already changed quite a bit and its great to see how HubSpot is growing and its so quick and how people really need to get rid of those duplicates so, time. yeah, Dedupely it's gonna, it'll help out a lot of customers.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: So, how did this come about? Because I mean, duping has been known about for a long, everyone's always wanted to dupe their contact database, and in the old fashioned ways. Let's go ahead. We find one here. We find one here, merge them together and call it a day. So, so. How did this come about?

Like what caused you guys to say, I need to create this solution? Well,

Hampus Isaksson, Dedupely: actually, back, way back when, there, there was snow. Real solution for this. Yeah, there was a problem and there was some nifty homemade home built, but it was just that there was an opportunity. So it wasn't, I mean, I'm not gonna accuse everybody about thinking data is sexy, and not everybody's like us,

 

 

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: of us do,

 

 

Hampus Isaksson, Dedupely: Yeah, some of us do, we, we make data, yeah, this is what we want to do. But we've always been nerding out [00:04:00] about it. And then it was actually a mutual friend of ours. Who said, here is something and that's how it started. So it wasn't this is this brainiac moment that we had, it was someone else that said, by the way, there's a good opportunity here.

 

 

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: so you weren't sitting there as a frustrated salesperson and be like, I have 10 records are all the same. Which one do I put my activities in?

Hampus Isaksson, Dedupely: that's how you're always told to build a business that way, solve for your own problems and, but no, this was someone else's problems that just set it in passing and then, all right, let's build it. And that's how it started. Of just having that screen of you have 2000 duplicates.

 

You want to merge them? Yeah, go ahead.

 

 

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: Sounds great.

 

 

Hampus Isaksson, Dedupely: yeah.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: So over the years, how did you guys gain traction? Was it just word of mouth? I guess, how did that all come about?

 

 

Hampus Isaksson, Dedupely: It's a question of, a question we still ask ourselves every day almost. Do you go wide or do you go deep? Do you go into a CRM or do [00:05:00] you spread it over across several CRMs? But I think above all, it was about integration, right? It's the closer you are integrated into a certain product. Sales is a lot about removing resistance.

 

And by integrating closer and closer, you remove more and more assistance for someone to go. Yeah let's get Dedupely or another app, right? But it was really when. When we integrated with HubSpot and HubSpot has been amazing to us over the years, and they still are. And what we believe is if you, can we build an app where, the sales reps at HubSpot and the solution teams for the, for their bigger clients, can they, can we build an app where they can just go, Oh, this client has a problem, let's throw an app at it. that's how we think about our own product development. How can we make it easier for the reps? Because we believe, although that's not technical integration, it is integration into that [00:06:00] organization. But HubSpot has been remarkable to us. We integrated in a few others, but none has been as good to us as HubSpot.

 

 

Tin Castro, Dedupely: Yeah. And one, one of the, a great thing to add there is that even for us for attraction is happiness and like I mentioned before, it Hampus and I have a good passion with customer success and customer service that we build everything and everything that has been. As we're pushing out new ideas and new projects is always with the, it sounds a bit cliche, but with the customer in mind, but it's always about making it a bit easier and make and removing that resistance.

 

So, we've pushed our customers service or chats, emails and zooms to be extremely easy and just get an answer really quickly. And it's surprising. 

 

 

Hampus Isaksson, Dedupely: We're quite relentless in 

 

 

Tin Castro, Dedupely: Yeah. Yeah. We're very, yeah. And that has helped us a lot. And in the sense that, we know that helps a lot. And even for me in my even personal life, I always say that customer success or a great customer service is going to get my business, right away.

So, [00:07:00] just based on that, we have a lot of reviews where they we have a 148 reviews, 4. 8 star. And that just shows that we really want to do things very simple, very fast, and very efficient. And that's a formula that just can't go wrong with when acquiring an app or any product. If it works and it saves you time why not purchase it?

 

 

Hampus Isaksson, Dedupely: I think 70 percent of those reviews, by the way, I think they mentioned customer service.

 

 

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: that's great.

 

 

Hampus Isaksson, Dedupely: And it's by design. It's, it doesn't happen by happenstance. We are relentless and it's not enough to tell the customer. You have to tell the customer until the customer understands you can't, it's a cop out right in customer service where I can just send it somewhere else.

Now I, I answered their question. No. Did they understand?

 

 

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: There was a really great case study, I think it's on Rackspace, who they built the entire business on customer service and if you guys ever get a chance, [00:08:00] feel free to check out that story. And really, it was a mind blowing switch for them, because before their principle is how do we talk to people as least as possible?

 

And, you have to route through 10 people. You have to send a ticket, it gets here, two weeks later, someone goes back to et cetera. And the CEO is what is going on? He's if someone calls in, you got to pick up the phone. I don't want an answering machine. I want someone picking up the phone and taking that call every single time.

 

And it really ended up being the differentiation. In the entire, in their entire space, what was a commodity became the product itself as a people. So, I mean, I completely applaud what you guys are doing and maybe that leads me to my my next question here is, and there are different ways when you first entered the market.

 

As you point out earlier, there weren't really a lot of de duping tools. There was that merge button. I remember in Salesforce back in the day don't touch it. If you don't mean it, be careful. Have you asked someone twice for touching it? Do you even have permission to touch it?

It's like a sacred button. That you'd have to touch, merge a thousand different times. But [00:09:00] how do you differentiate yourself in the marketplace these days?

 

 

Tin Castro, Dedupely: So I'll take on that. So one of the things that, and this kind of covered a little bit as well, is that we make it as very simple. There are no upsells and cross sells. We're very straightforward with pricing, with customer success and with merging. So one with customer success, customer services, that we don't have AI implemented well yet in our chat system.

And that's for a very good reason, because a lot of people find the appeal of just sending a message to us and having an answer within seconds from a real person and having it solved there. That's probably one of the biggest differentials just on the customer service side that you have access to someone within business hours right away.

 

And that's very hard to find. And and I've come across this, everywhere. So that's one of the biggest ones there. The other one is that our pricing and the solution is very simple. There are no upsells and cross sells. We, there's, once you buy a subscription with us you'll [00:10:00] be, you have access to everything.

 

And during the trial which is, we don't even ask a credit card for that. You can jump in, get in a Zoom and have everything set up. So we're with you every step of the way. We help you set it up. We go as far as setting up the whole tool with no commitment and that you feel comfortable using the tool and making sure that it works.

 

That's already a lot of people from my experience in the other services. It's very rare to find. So getting that assurance that it's going to work, that it's going to merge and do what it needs to do before you purchase. That's already a big big difference from what other companies are doing.

 

And obviously the fact that the the app is very fast, we, once you've bulk merge, which is the biggest thing that, that currently, unfortunately you can't do, well, partially can't do with enough spot, but that if you have, let's say half a million records and that you need to bulk merge 50, thousand duplicates, you can do that within a couple of, within a couple of hours.

Which in [00:11:00] your business, it will take you hundreds of hours or days to go through one by one within HubSpot or the other CRMs. Yeah. But that's the big difference. Bulk merging, fast customer service, the tool works. And yeah.

 

 

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: I think one of the big things you just said there, especially if you're a listener and you're listening to the story was you help set up this, set this all up before they paid you a time. And that is rare in itself, and

 

 

Hampus Isaksson, Dedupely: We call that pre preemptive customer service. We call that right. What you said before about Rackspace. We believe the customer service is an engine for sales. It is not a cost that we eat, right? How can we turn this into an engine for sales? And one of those ways is you have to look at yeah, your pricing, how do you prepare them, but it's by, try it before you buy it, set it up properly, test it to make sure that it works for your use case. And then you can pay us some money.

 

 

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: That part at the end, pay me money once I prove pay me money when, once you know [00:12:00] it

I got to keep the roof over the head and keep those guys to work with you. So, 

Tin Castro, Dedupely: to be honest, for us, that's also really great assurance for us as well, because we don't try to sell you something that you don't need. So I actually need to find out if this tool will also work for you, for what you're looking for. There's no point of me selling. Anything to anyone an app or a tool that's not going to work for them.

 

And that's how you get bad reviews. So it's also a journey for us to make sure that yes, this is what the customer is looking for. This is what they're trying to solve. They proved it. I proved it. There's a win here. And then they can, take that leap of jumping in a subscription.

 

And at that point, to be honest, it's, there's no brainer. There's no brainer when you see that happening in real time.

 

 

Hampus Isaksson, Dedupely: I remember in customer service, a story about that a few weeks ago, where in our customer service, there was someone in HubSpot who wanted to dedupe because they had an extraordinary amount of duplicates, but our customer [00:13:00] service noticed that, oh, I don't think this person has fully understand the difference between objects, properties, and values.

 

And actually already an import and setting up the API and collecting the information. If we start to dooping now, that will make it worse. So this person in our customer service spent 30 minutes explaining the difference between the different, objects and properties and custom objects, custom properties, values, and how they interact, where are their associations, how they interact with one another.

 

And so we knew after two minutes that this person will not purchase from us. But it still helps the customer until the customer understands that it's not just about Dedupely.

 

 

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: That customer may purchase from you in the future now. and they're going to share information about Dedupely and it's going to get more popular. I hope they wrote an awesome review, by the way, because still write a review

 

 

Hampus Isaksson, Dedupely: they can still write on But to talk, to answer your question on a more [00:14:00] technical, HubSpot has their internal duplication, right? And it's good. They have a decent model for finding duplicates. But apps is about extensibility, right? It's about for power users of HubSpot. That may not be enough.

 

And they, there is bulk merge capability in the ops in the ops pro of HubSpot, but we have plenty of ops pro customers. So the reason for that is the extensibility in. There's certain things you just can't do because HubSpot is not a deduplication company, nor should they be, right? So, a few things is that in HubSpot you'll dedupe two at a time, two records at a time, but there are plenty of times, depending on how you collect data.

 

You might have 15 incomplete records of Jane Smith or a company record, or you do a wrong import and all of a sudden you have data scattered with different completeness level on each record, and you need to put that [00:15:00] together. So, first of all, you find all of them, you find all 15 Jane Smith or 240 company and you put those together in one go.

 

We regard that as one match, as one duplicate, not 15 different and the fact that you can decide how you put them together, and that's an important piece. Because you need to select where do I want them in the deal stage? Is it the latest? This is the oldest. Do I have some kind of philosophies internally about data quality?

 

What constitutes the original record? And this is the one that I want to maintain as primary. if they have

 

 

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: more. Granular in terms of 

 

 

Hampus Isaksson, Dedupely: Yeah. 

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: the duping capabilities. So for, and I know what you're talking about inside the system, it's like record a record B, but which ones, which one makes sense? You got to do a little bit digging and you got to be able to figure it out, so what this does, it gives people more of a granular view and I'm assuming it helps speed them up.

So it's faster to use your tool than it's used the built in tool.[00:16:00] 

 

 

Hampus Isaksson, Dedupely: You can automate a lot of these things, so you don't have to go in one by one, especially when it comes to the obvious scenarios that, okay when this scenario happens, I want this to happen all of the time. All right, that'll take care of 70 to 95 percent of your duplicates, and you don't have to set another foot.

Like I said earlier. I think data is sexy, right? But I'm not

 

 

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: I hope you do. You're in the business of it. Okay. If you're like, I don't like data. Well, well, excuse

 

 

Hampus Isaksson, Dedupely: right, but I'm not gonna expect that of a salesperson or a marketing person or a CRM manager. Well, maybe I'll expect it from a CRM manager, but everybody else I'm not gonna expect everybody to think about data and data quality and the duplication the way we do, right? So we're creating a product for them so they can spend as little time as possible.

 

There is again and again, we see customers that do in minutes or hours something that they have already spent months mapping out months. HubSpot at [00:17:00] Inbound earlier this year, HubSpot was talking about in one of their own talks about data quality, and they talked about what is the actual cost of mainly duplicates, because that is the monster when it comes to data quality. they were talking about 20, up to 20 percent of annual revenue loss, which is an insane number, right? And it's revenue loss and opportunity costs. And so for any big company that has, anything from five to 200 employees working inside of of HubSpot you're gonna create a lot of bad data, a lot of duplicates 

 

 

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: What does the future of this product look like for you guys? I mean, obviously it's progressed considerably from that day one. It's Hey, you got 2000 matches. Congratulations to where you are today. But where does it head from where you are today? And then, how does AI potentially play a part in it?

 

 

Hampus Isaksson, Dedupely: Actually,

it's so funny that you say it because when you explained it that way, [00:18:00] I want to revert to that for, Hey, you have 2000 duplicates. I think this is the building out of this product is to get to a roundabout way even easier. Hey, these are the duplicates. If you want to look at them, here they are.

If you want to keep searching, here is some really advanced search ability for you to set up your different scenarios of how your duplicates happen. Because duplicates will. Will happen in all kinds of way, right. But for each individual user, those duplicates will happen the same way all of the time, because you're collecting data the

 

 

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: You're looking at different types of duplicates, like here's enabling the segment, how you want to maybe treat each of these duplicates in different ways. And maybe one segment is treated this way. Another segment is treated this way.

 

 

Tin Castro, Dedupely: yeah. And one of the things that I've. How Dedupely is going and where our vision is also going is that a lot of the times we see a lot of companies say, you know what, here's a marketing guy, [00:19:00] take care of the duplicates because you need to take care of this. Most of the marketing guys are scared to merge, or, a person, any of the marketing people scared to to do anything.

 

And the only way for us to, or at least, not the only way, there's probably some other ways, but, one of the ways that we do it is, how Hampus mentioned, is removing resistance. If you know there are obvious duplicates. There's no going to be any headache of you merging. The problem when people have when merging is that you don't want to mess your data up.

You don't want to mess with the wrong one. So by making it a lot easier for saying, yeah, this is an obvious duplicate. You don't have to worry about it. One, we tackle that through customer service by saying, hey, we do this with you. We make sure you find first the duplicates that are obvious. But as Dedupely is growing, we want to make it so that you can just see it.

 

You can just see it and say, Oh yeah, that's, these are the duplicates. You don't have to really think about messing it up because our tool has made it so [00:20:00] your algorithm has gotten so good that these are obvious duplicates. And it goes back again to what Hampus said. It's just going back to just very simple of saying, these are your duplicates.

 

But the biggest barrier is always going to be how to determine what a duplicate is. So through our, as we're growing, through our algorithm, as AI is coming in, we are able to identify patterns data where they overlap for us to really determine saying this is an obvious duplicate. Obviously AI as going into HubSpot, which is amazing what they're doing.

 

It was going to the inbound was so it's an eye opening to see how much they're doing with AI, how everything is headed towards AI. And for us, it was like, yeah, we need to have, reinforce the idea of AI needs to be everywhere internally in my life and, everywhere just needs

 

 

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: Hanging out with you 24 7, listening to your conversations, filling in what you're about to say and be like, wait, I haven't said that.

 

 

Hampus Isaksson, Dedupely: That's exact. Oh, that sounds so amazing. That's exactly what I No,

 

 

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: we're all [00:21:00] real here?

 

 

Hampus Isaksson, Dedupely: No, and looking further ahead. I do believe that we will make it simpler to find find duplicates. We will find a lot for you. We make it more easy to sync your data with us. Applying more features and more functionality for data quality, because we're about to solve deduplication It's a matter of time before we do that, right? Where that becomes a more obvious, okay this, these are your duplicates. You have some advanced functionality, but for the 95th, 97th percentile we got you covered.

Let's add some functionality. And that will, a lot of that will be AI driven.

 

 

Tin Castro, Dedupely: Yeah.

 

 

Hampus Isaksson, Dedupely: So, thats where we're going. 

 

 

Noah Berk: So you guys have had a lot of experience. You've been doing this for a while. 

 

 

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: What advice as leaders in your business do you have for other entrepreneurs or business leaders 

Noah Berk: and, something you could part with, in terms of something that may help one of these listeners get more out of whatever they're working on and doing?

 

 

Tin Castro, Dedupely: Well, Hampus and I have always been entrepreneurs. And I think when we jumped in, well, at [00:22:00] least when I was at the right time to jump into the degree, I've always had several projects of my own either businesses as well as my own. And one of the things that I've learned the most is always leaning on people who are great.

At what they do and don't be afraid for them to come in and do what they're good at and saying "I don't know" it's a huge part of it and saying I don't know let's find the solution together or get someone that can tell us how to do it properly It's one of the things that a lot of people in the entrepreneur world they try to tackle everything on their own because they have the idea and it's okay, you have the vision, you know where it's going, but a business is not grown by one person.

You need to lean on the people that know what they're doing, you need to be part of that leadership and letting them give you the advice of. An expert on a specific I don't say topic, but on a specific matter. Yeah, that's the, my main advice. 

 

 

Hampus Isaksson, Dedupely: Yeah, maybe. Yeah. So maybe I'll go more HubSpot specific. Because that was [00:23:00] great. And I think we've talked about it. Well, I talked about integration earlier. So if there are other solution partners or app partners listening to this is how can I integrate more? HubSpot, right? Do I have an app that's a bi directional sync?

Am I removing resistance? Do I have certifications? ISO certifications, or AI ISO certification, or SOC2, or GDPR, HIPAA? Are these things in place for me to remove resistance from anyone who is a target customer in HubSpot that they can just install? And then now with app cards coming in. Is to ask that question.

What should that look like? Is this an extension of our existing app outside of HubSpot? Just like a website and a mobile website are different, and the mobile app is different from the mobile website. And how do we position this so we get the most extensibility and integration [00:24:00] within the app and outside the app?

That's how I would think. And that involves customer service, it involves sales, not just technology. So 

 

 

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: It's building that moat is building that sense of confidence. So anyone who's dealing with data or data governance, it's a really important something to have because, as you say, it's reducing friction, making it easier for the customer to say I can work with this organization.

They've done needs to get done. I think that's brilliant advice. Hampus, Tin. Thank you so much. This has been a fantastic conversation. Loved having you guys on the show today. If people are interested to learn more about you and you and Dedupely, how did they go about doing that?

 

 

Hampus Isaksson, Dedupely: Well, you go to Dedupely that's what you do. Are you maybe you search Dedupely in the app marketplace and you'll find us there but no, you can contact us through chat, email in our customer service and we can drop our email addresses here too, we would love to talk to anybody about customer service, de-duplicaton of course. And thank you so much Noah for having us

 

 

Tin Castro, Dedupely: Yeah. Yeah. And thank you. It was great. Yeah. It, they go to the dedupe.ly. On the chat, they can talk to me directly. [00:25:00] Like we mentioned, we're very, between 9 a. m. to 5 p. m. So just that they can send us a message and learn anything that they need with their deduping process.

But thank you again. That was great to have. Yeah. Thank

 

 

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: This was a fantastic conversation. So much valuable insights and tidbits that you two have shared that is above and beyond just Dedupely, but just in business itself. So thank you so much. And listeners, thank you for joining us today. That wraps it up again, UpYourStack, is a weekly podcast. Where we feature interviews with some of our favorite developers.

If you ever built their apps on HubSpot or integrated with HubSpot to help you get the most out of your tech stack.

Thank you so much for joining us. Enjoy the rest of your day.

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