The below transcript has been auto-generated for your convenience. Please reference the source video/audio for direct quotes or to clarify any errors.

Speaker 1: (00:06)
Hey, hey, I'm Dax, uh, head of product over at eight eight Labs. So our parents slash sister company of Aptitude eight. And what we love to do is build apps. I like to say we, but it's more like Tyrone. I am the creative. And think of the branding, the concepts, the kind of user experience, uh, for apps. And Tyrone, let you introduce yourself.

Speaker 2: (00:28)
I'm Ty Fo and I have the CTO with Aptitude eight. I like to call myself the biggest nerd on the block. Um, I pretty much head our, uh, application development and just kind of general, um, product development and teams and things of that nature. Um, I'm a black male. My pronouns are, he is. And I am sitting in a room with a lot of my children's art and video games background.

Speaker 1: (00:55)
I repeat that sentiment of video games and what's going on behind me. Cause I just, we'll get to that. So without shorter a do, uh, what, what are we talking about today? Why? I'm, first of all, thank you everyone for taking us 45 minutes to an hour out of your busy day. I'm sure it's busy, uh, to understand what it, what it's like to, number one, build the app, but what happens after that? How do you make something commercialized for the General Republic, right? So we're gonna talk about branding and what that means and the opportunities there to kind of stand up to the, down to the rest of the books that are putting out apps in the ecosystem. We're gonna talk about payments and pricing. So how do payments work with HubSpot apps? Uh, how do you price them? How does the tier kind of work?

Speaker 1: (01:37)
Or how does tiering work? We're gonna talk about, uh, creating and publishing your listing. So what is it like to, how do you, how do you fill out the form? How do you actually get this in the ecosystem? Uh, we'll talk about reviews and support and distribution. So how do you take care of the people that are utilizing your app, your clients that are, you know, putting this as a part of their workflow and distribution? How do you get it out there? Uh, you know, one wants to have nobody use it all that time. And when you spend on building something great, you wanna make sure that that resonates throughout the community. So any questions you have, throw to the chat, Tyrell's gonna be managed in the moderation for this. Um, no questions, dumb questions. Zero questions are dumb questions. So we wanna make sure that we answer everything that you have and everything that we know is for you. We're obviously easily accessible outside of this in afternoons.

Speaker 1: (02:24)
So let's start off with branding. One of my favorite parts, right? So you put on your Sunday's best, and I will not, I promise everyone here that I will not go on a Seth Golden style of ran about marketing. And it's about feeling, and, you know, how do you, you wanna change the world and go and mention Apple and all these things that just blah, we get that right? You understand branding is something, you know, when you see it. And the, the idea here is that this is, it is up to you. You don't have to be fully branded, you don't have to pretty much do anything. You could say your is a Stripe integration. You can call it Stripe integration. Makes sense, right? But, but for us, Tyrone and I started our original company, appt, and now, which they labs. We started it for us.

Speaker 1: (03:10)
We wanted to, we obviously love video games, it's very clear, um, retro video games to be specific. But everything that we've built together in our lives has been about, we are our first audience. If we can't wake up and look at what we do and be excited and over the top about it, then it's gonna be really hard to get a stranger to feel the same way that we do. And what we cared about was we want to make sure that our apps kind of have the, the inspiration of something for a video game. We just, we just love it. And it made, it made it easy to relate to. And the way I want people to feel is I want them to be, have a touch of familiarity, a touch of myalgia. Those are emotions that you can see here. Taste, they're very emotion that then people buy.

Speaker 1: (03:51)
People expend their money, people spend their time at energy on things that they feel connected to. And there's, you know, infinite things that you to be connected to. But for us it was video games. And it makes sense because what is an application? It's pretty much a clicking of a video game. You wanted to do something, there is a winning at the end. Uh, so our apps Tire Man call attack Super g our customer service portal, which is kind of like the, the one that was our first original one, it didn't have a name. So I have the antithesis of branding, which is an app called Customer Service Portal. Uh, which we, you know, I lose sleep at night every day that doesn't have a name, but Associate Real City or upcoming App Zebra, they're all kind of built with this foundation of some sort of game.

Speaker 1: (04:35)
Um, and the naming is important too. You know, we don't want your your app to have a name, namely Custom service portal because there's gonna be more than one customer service portal. So we really kind of took that inspiration from kind of vintage games to really have an easy name and to touch on names. You know, two, there's clearly some sort of, not alliteration, but there's sync page going on here. When I talk about Timer Man, clone, attack, super G Associate Real City. So the, the two to three syllables always is easy. When you think of a name, you want it to be colloquial. You want it to be easy for someone to say in a conversation, or easy to remember. And that's about, that's what we care about with feeling, is that it's easy to remember how someone made you feel. It's pretty hard to remember what they said, maybe even what they look like, but if they made you feel a certain way, that's something that's easily recollected and will easily get your app to kinda be sticky and stickier when you come up with that brand.

Speaker 1: (05:30)
So, payments and pricing. So can you pay my bills, bills, bills, bills. So one real, real first caveat that I will throw out there about payments, and I'm gonna jump right to the last one, is the DIY cash register. So Box does not take any percentage of your app when you list it in the store. I wanna call that out first and foremost. So that's, that's a good thing and a bad thing. The bad thing is that you need to actually build out your payments infrastructure. So when people buy our apps or buy any app they need, they will click out of the install. So not only do you need to build the install process, which you could see how, uh, Tyrone kind of talked about that in the last session. But when it's time to pay, that's all on you. Um, you need to integrate your payment processor, whether it be Stripe, PayPal, authorized, dot net, crypto, whatever you need to do to, to take currency, you, you're responsible for that. And not only are you responsible for that cash register, that payments that you need to build, you're also responsible for the per the we call, uh, uh, to keep me honest here, the, your allocation, your permissions for who can use it, who can't if you're using that tier. So, um, so Tyro, you wanna touch just a quick thing on payments on how payments are built.

Speaker 2: (06:44)
Yeah. So the one thing about it is that not only will you really have to be, uh, an expert in your app, but you are going to have to quickly get up to speed on payments in general. And not that you'll have to be a master, but you're gonna have to get smart on it really quick because you are, the good side is you are the steer of your own destiny. Uh, the bad part is that you are also the steer of your own destiny. So you kind of have to do it yourself. It's not like there's a, it's not like the app store where the app's like, Hey, if you make the app, we'll take the money. Uh, it's more like you make the app, you make the money, so you are more in control of your feet. But it does require you to kind expand your skill set there.

Speaker 1: (07:23)
Appreciate that backup. So in a high level, we talk about payments of price. You wanna make it a no greater, you don't want people to have to, uh, as they say, you know, make life decisions at the pump, uh, when gas is expensive, right? You don't, you just want it to be like, yes, I need this. It solves our problem. I know it's going to be a, a net positive value for my team. That's where you want to, where you want it to sit. So we talk about scale of value. Some apps, uh, for example, our app associate has a tiered, has a tier of how much you use, right? So if the more you use it, the more expensive it is because it's providing you more value, you'll see other apps that charge based upon the amount of revenue you have. So if it's a payments app or something that facilitates or manages payments, you'll, i'll, you'll, you'll commonly find where if you make 2 million a year, you need to pay this.

Speaker 1: (08:11)
If you make 4 million, 4 million a year, you have to pay that. And it's the same offering, it's the same feature set, but just because the, that the scale of value is higher, cuz you're making more money, you're saving more time, or you're saving more money, that's where you're able to kind of price your price, your app as such. We'll also talk about the left digit effect. Now, if I won't go too deep into psychology, but $9 seems way less than $10, even though it's literally a down, uh, the same goes while you hear 1999, only three easy payments. All of that stuff makes sense because of our brain's adherence to the left most digit to determine value. So a lot of our apps are now on the nine, or we'll do something in the 49 instead of going to two 50. Um, there's a lot of psychologists, so you can feel free to Google, uh, Google and learn more about the left digit effect and other kind of psychological standards of pricing.

Speaker 1: (09:07)
People have written extensive papers on that. But in, in a nutshell, for your app, make sure that you are, you know, conscious of what, what does that price look like when you first your knee jerk reaction to that pricing. I'm gonna talk a little bit about feature tiers. Most of our apps in the HubSpot ecosystem are based upon the amount of features that you have. For example, clack. Uh, the basic cl attack is $19 per month, and you're able to duplicate contacts, tickets, dudes, uh, made click duplicate makes it really easy. The next level you're actually able to use, um, on the pro tier, you're able to use workflows and be able to duplicate things automatically based upon your, your workflow experience. And we'll have a third tier, which will be our enterprise. We'll be able to call custom objects. So there's a lot of different, depends on your app.

Speaker 1: (09:54)
Maybe your app does one thing, but you may not be able to do feature tiers. But a lot of the things that really gauge what you're, what you need to do is going to be based upon those features. And as an entrepreneur, as a business person, as an app developer, when you're talking to the business aspect, you wanna make sure that there is a way, a step, a stair step to glory, right? You wanna make sure that people are utilizing the free, they get their, they get the candy at the checkout, they check it out, you know, they're using the app, they brings a part of their workflow and what's a part of the workflow. As you add more features, they, you could grow along with your clients and breed stairstep up the, the, the tiers of your product to try to get more monthly current revenue out of that.

Speaker 1: (10:32)
So again, when you're thinking about your pricing, and there's a common thing to understand is how long is it going to take me to get my investment back in this app? Um, and that investment is going to be a monthly recurring revenue from your subscription, that app, as well as your churn. And again, these are common terms, you can Google, uh, Google and all day. But understanding that math equation of how many people do I get new per month, how many people leave every month, and how much I invested in my app, you can do that backwards math and kind of find out kind the pricing. If you wanna try to get paid back in a year or two years, then you could set your pricing on how much your, the volume of, uh, your, the volume of your installs and your conversion rate. And we start to get into that map, those mathematics. So there's are really important to understand as you're thinking about your pricing, uh, the value creation, again, making it a no brainer. Like, oh, this is a hundred, a hundred dollars a month, but I get all of this and it saves me x amount of time. It's really good on the marketing front to say, Hey, how much is your time worth? We save you five hours a week, how much is that to you? And you're only paying X amount per month. So it's again, a no brainer.

Speaker 1: (11:42)
So creating and publishing your app. So q the ribbon cutting, it's time to get it. And the good thing is everyone, it's just a four, uh, there's nothing really crazy about it. I will have to walk through going to upload and add your images and add screenshots and talk about your features, but it's just a form. Uh, you'll be able to, once you create the your dev account, uh, as Tyrone talked about in the past couple sessions, there is a place that you can actually list your app. So you go to the app listing page and you build this out, you add your screenshots, you'll add your video, and, um, all of the details. So one of the great things that I wanna talk about real quick is the video, right? So again, we are, we're merged. We care about how it feels to us when we, when we look at our videos and our videos are really low-fi, but they are more than a product demo.

Speaker 1: (12:32)
They are a commercial. We imagine that if you watch art, if you watch this, you should be entertained and you should get the, the gist of what you're doing, what the app does. You don't want to go through every single feature of a app does this, you don't wanna do, and I'm getting, this is my recommendation, but to not just do a click through of here's my app, does this watch me talk over clicking the screen? People don't want that. Uh, people wanna be entertained period at all times, right? So, uh, putting some humor, being yourself, bringing, bringing out your inner, your inner, bringing out who you are, because people buy from people, right? And this is a self-service environment. They're gonna go in the app store looking to solve a problem, and your very first thing they're gonna see is either the first picture from the listing or video, you know, you'd rather them see that video.

Speaker 1: (13:15)
And again, less than two minutes, try to outline your, your formula of here's the problem, here's our solution, here's why it works, here's how much it costs, here's how you can install it, right? So those are super important to have in the video. Um, and as well as your screenshots that you can fully kind of acclimate of what am I getting in this app? So, uh, the knowledge base is gonna be very important too, so that you can deflect people asking silly questions, uh, or common questions is a better way to say it about your app. So within the application process, as you build it, as you fill out your form, there's gonna be a lot of places to put your knowledge base for not only your knowledge base as a company, but for this particular app and the getting started guide. So as you build your app, you need to start thinking of the questions that people may ask and be way ahead of them by creating a knowledge base, either using, using HubSpots knowledge base or any other knowledge base software that you feel, uh, you'll be able to, uh, add those links in this kind of, uh, application process.

Speaker 1: (14:11)
So one thing to keep in mind is that if you're looking to do some, some marketing, and based upon this launch, there is a 10 day SLA for publishing an app. So with the time you submit that app, they're going to get back to you within 10 days. So it's not an instant time. Um, and Ogen will be proud that let that know, let that be known. But 10 days is going to be how much that you can expect to wait before it gets approved because there's lots of different approvals. People, every time you edit your listing, it needs to go through that approval process again. So, uh, 10 days is what you should kind of send out to be prepared for, uh, in the, in the, the nail biting, um, waiting for it to go live. So ecosystem SEO is pretty important because HubSpot has a powerful domain, and we won't go too deep on the SEO chain, but HubSpot has a powerful domain, and the ecosystem sub domain is powerful of wealth.

Speaker 1: (15:01)
And that ranks in, uh, Google search, uh, or duck.gov. However you feel about your price, the more information that you could put on the listing, the better because it will be a powerful tool in getting that organic search, uh, response to not only your app but your company as well. Um, this is a, a bonafide listing that will be, that shines for everyone. So be really, uh, mindful not only the name of your application, but the, uh, the ways in which your, your able to add more and more features, details, et cetera within the listing. Secret tip is, if the super secret tip, if you're able to, when you create your account, ask to update the url. Uh, and now I know that because our old had our old company in the Euro URL by default, but ask, Hey, can we get our comp old company out and put in a labs Euro year row?

Speaker 1: (15:54)
And she said, what? Uh, uh, Gina is one of the people that runs the, uh, the approval process, uh, over at HubSpot. So I appreciate her shout to Gina. Uh, you can ask to get your Euro updated. So that's again, another check that you can do to try to optimize your listing because you don't really get that much information or analytics about your listing. But if you go ahead of time to plan for that optimization, you can get your URL changed or optimized based upon what you'd like. So hopefully this should let everybody do that. Uh, but since you hit, it's the nice tip you can get for, uh, paying for enjoying up on this, uh, session. And, uh, lastly with the listing is certification. So you get this pretty badge, it says HubSpot certified app. Uh, if you go through the certification process, and I don't, I haven't spoken to anyone that's gone through the certification process, uh, except for Tyrone and myself.

Speaker 1: (16:43)
So, and I talk to myself all the time, it is a doozy. So as you build out your app, uh, Tyrone will be able to kind of give us a couple tidbits of what to look out for because, uh, again, shout out to our, our friends of Isaac Capita over at the, uh, the certification program. It is a, they are very good at what they do. I'm surprised they don't have three letters at the end of their, their, their names because it is a very, very rigorous testing process because it is, it is about the quo. No, HubSpot is going really deep on developers as we have this masterclass. And we don't want anything crappy, anything bad, anything broken, anything invalid in the ecosystem, we will get the, we'll get to the problem. Um, we'll get to the problem that Atari had and talk about video game where everybody that mom can make in Atari game is horrible, which led to the, the pseudo demise, the video game industry. Uh, so Ty, if you wanna just give some kind of specs on what we, what we've gone through during the certification process and we're still going through in this process.

Speaker 2: (17:41)
Still going through it. Yeah, so some of the things that they're definitely going to be looking at is at performance. And that's really gotta be gauged by the way you are accessing, uh, the HubSpot api. So some of the things they'll be looking at is, Hey, when we, I looked at your app, it looks like you have these scopes, uh, chosen for your app.

Speaker 1: (18:03)
Does the

Speaker 2: (18:04)
Objects you're giving permission to match what's kind of looking what we see in, in the logs in terms of requests and, and, and alterations and stuff like that? Uh, because if they don't, one of the recommendations, it's going to be like, Hey, it looks like you are requesting data to deals, but you don't really do any deals. You need to remove the deal scope from your app. And it's a good thing because it helps reduce your risk. I mean, the certification team is gonna be really thorough. They're gonna be looking at performance, they're gonna be looking at permissions, they're gonna be looking at the content of your app, and this is all to it, really. It may feel brutal sometimes. Very, yeah. But understand that this, the benefits of the certification are so wildly over the top, it's so worth it. And the team really does genuinely want to make sure that you have a good app that is great for public consumption. So just know that your app needs to be really, uh, doing well in terms of performance. It's gonna be such, such a huge impact, um, because they are really trying to ensure that the user experience is fantastic across the board.

Speaker 1: (19:08)
Yeah, great. So they, they, they, they are ridiculously great resources to make sure that, you know, the error codes are specifically outlined. Uh, I mean, we, we submitted apps for certification and gotten parchments back for ways to optimize, right? It's not a belittling by any, it's, hey, this is, we need XYZ to be below a certain percentage of errors. Uh, and I mean, they, they're really, really good. They, they surprise us every single time. We're just like, wow, you guys know exactly what's going on, uh, to, to our detriment, but it makes us better if you, um, and that certification process is available for your app, uh, after six months of being listed in the store. Cuz they're gonna look at, uh, your installs, you're gonna look at your uninstalls, potentially reviews, making sure that it's providing value to the HubSpot community, um, if you are part of one of the app accelerators. So, um, you could always ping us to get more information about the app accelerator. You were able to get your app certified in three months. So you get a little bit of an expedited, uh, approach to this. But it all depends on how, how, how good your app performs, uh, on, on a technical look.

Speaker 1: (20:14)
Uh, the next slide, uh, distribution. So your app is listing awesome. You got that approval, pop the champagne. Now how are you going to get people to install? And Facebook, adss won't say at all. Uh, this is a really, really, um, this is a very interesting challenge that even we're going through currently to how do you find someone that uses HubSpot that has a specific potentially tier of HubSpot that has a specific problem that you need to solve. Um, uh, I think there's a good book called Zero to Sold for a lot of the app developers out there that just talks about you need to solve a specific set of problems for a specific set of people and make it a part of, make your application a part of their workflow. And it's really difficult to find those people because, you know, that's how niche it is, right?

Speaker 1: (21:05)
So we have a couple different tips and techniques that we are leveraging that would be probably helpful for everyone to understand and no. So, uh, one thing you can do is do nothing. It's infinitely easier to do nothing than to do something. Uh, so you can just list it and just hope, list it. Pray is what we call it. Uh, because again, you're gonna get, you're gonna get the search volume because it ranks, uh, or you're given depending on how you optimized your listing. And people are want, uh, HubSpot reps, solutions engineers, uh, sales reps are gonna be looking to solve problems that they have for prospects, and they'll be looking in the ecosystem. So you could get some accidental installs organically. That's, that's a, that's an option, right? Very boring as you could say. Uh, but that other one is, is, is understanding HubSpot reps, you know, getting to know some of the reps that are in the industry, reaching out on LinkedIn, um, that someone maybe that isn't your niche during education.

Speaker 1: (21:54)
Look and see who's talking about education on LinkedIn at HubSpot. See if you can reach out and say, Hey, I have a tool that helps people in education do X, Y, and Z. So remember every, and I like to say that your audience, even if you're in the services side, or if you're in the application side, your audience really should be HubSpot, right? The reps, the solutions engineers, uh, people like Dennis, right? They're the ones that are closest to not only HubSpot internally, but closest to the prospects and current and current clients. So understanding and making sure that aware, and again, it goes all the way back to branding. Do they remember that app? When the time comes, when that client asks, Hey, how do you duplicate something? Are they gonna remember CL Tech? Are they gonna remember the app that associates things? Uh, that's really how, again, understanding who your audience is when you talk about distribution.

Speaker 1: (22:46)
So how to content. Um, as we're building the as as we're, as we're building out this content, uh, this masterclass of how to build an app, listing app, there's not a lot of content out there around specific use cases for HubSpot. HubSpot does a great job of putting out, you know, um, let's say from the mountaintops of how should work on their platform, but peer create a peer content creation is kinda light. So there's a huge opportunity for anyone out there right now. That's why we're so excited to have this class because there's a huge opportunity for everyone to start to become thought leaders. Uh, I mean, I will self, I admit to myself and Tyro, it's not like we've been doing this for 10, we haven't, we're here, but we've been, we've banged our head against the wall. We have a lot of stars and dents about how to make this work because we had to learn, we had to learn as we go.

Speaker 1: (23:35)
And as you go through that process of learning in your specific use case, in your specific niche, building that YouTube content building that LinkedIn content, building your blog, all of that is gonna matter because there's, again, this is a small, it's a big world, or is a small world as well. So, uh, really doubling down on your knowledge base, doubling down on the content that you create, saying, if your app does, if your app makes coffee for HubSpot, every time you get a new lead, the coffee maker starts make it, make the video. How to make coffee with HubSpot, right? Oh, you're showing it, but you're showing your app. Okay,

Speaker 2: (24:06)
I just wanna throw it into to be, uh, an evangelist for your own product. Uh, maybe you wanna talk about the Wal that we do and how we are just mega pumped about, you know, how we believe so much in our absence.

Speaker 1: (24:18)
Yeah, that's a huge one, right? So if if you're not talking about it, no one else is gonna talk. And, uh, one of the things that I'd like to do with any brand that I would build is make it tangible. Um, it's always a thing if it's an app in the app store, but can you see it? Can you feel it? Do you, is there something that looks, so in Tyrone, Tyrone has an art piece behind him that's Ty Man or App Power Man. We built Wal Art for everything. So when we're talking to prospects, when we're talking, it's not that we just have this thing, right? Oh, we're just trying to sell a widget. No, this is, you don't have to buy our widget because we use our widget and we love our widget, um, and we're gonna love it if it makes no money, right?

Speaker 1: (24:52)
To have that type of passion for something is what gets people intoxicated on the concept, on the feeling and the belief, right? We, we take this a lot deeper. We take this a lot. We, we take it more than we build to app to sell. We take it to, Hey ohsu, we take it, Hey, we did this and we have it for all of our apps because we care about it. We wanna look at it and wake up every single day. So we, we might sound crazy because we are crazy and again, token app and we are the crazy ones, right? But in, in, in reality it's just about is it real? Does it feel real? Is it memorable? Um, and as you build that content around it, as you touch on this tangibility, it just starts to snow. Um, so with that said, the community forums for the HubSpot community, the HubSpot Feature Forum, the Facebook HubSpot Users group, those are all huge places where you can provide value for people then looking potentially for a problem that your app could solve, right?

Speaker 1: (25:45)
And no one's going to flame New Ford actually giving them a solution, right? Um, if there is a solution, hey, it may cost money, get over it. Things do cost money, but solutions are priceless. And the peace of mind, having something el less to worry about is huge. So I highly recommend creating your, uh, your community HubSpot account. Um, looking at the feature, the feature forms, which are also really, or the feature request form, which are also really good phishing fishing spots for, for ideas, for, you know, problems to solve with the app. So those are all great places to hang out. Uh, we always are trying to provide value to get value first, and that's where you'll, you'll start to see people tricking into the app, asking questions, doing demos. Hey, can I demo your software? Can we, can you do an ab Of course, things like that are gonna be really big.

Speaker 1: (26:31)
And last but not least, is service clients. So, uh, I don't know the, I don't know who all is, uh, around in this class, but if you do have a service or a consulting aspect, uh, a lot of those people are gonna have problems to solve. Or allowing your current service clients as you build something new, could retroactively benefit from their app. Uh, all of our original ideas for apps, which were the customer service portal, before HubSpot had their own portal and Timer Man, which was about three years ago, we came out with Timer Man just for a couple different clients that I had. Uh, those were the, those were the, that's where everything started. The genesis of, of our apps. Uh, there was a, a service client that we were doing migration for, or we were doing something else for Neat, had a need. We found that that need was widespread. We built something to solve, right? So whether you have existing service clients that can help find, bubble up those ideas or our users of the app, that's gonna be a, a big, big deal.

Speaker 1: (27:29)
So reviews and support, well, you wanna aim the publicly please. Once your app is out, once your app is, is being downloaded, uh, you done some distribution, you've done some content, you've done some videos, you've done a little bit of, uh, you've done a little bit of bloggings to get some content around it. What happens when people are using it? So the biggest thing I like to do, and we as a company like to do, is just to reach out. You install the app. That's a reason to talk to you. Why do you, why outta everything you could have done today? Did you install this app? I would love to know and I would love to make sure that you get the best value of it. So doing demos, performing those walkthroughs, handholding, you know, that isn't be beautiful, beautiful thing to make people feel comfortable, right?

Speaker 1: (28:13)
Make people feel like they belong. Make people feel like they're being taken care of. Cause everybody just wants to be taken care of. So having that no support, no, just send an email to us that's not, that does not this ist scale, but, and in the beginning when you first launch, and you gotta be things that don't scale, you gotta just touch everybody as much as possible, right? So pro proactively reaching out is one of our core kind of concepts and core missions and pieces that we, that we stand by with all of our apps. We wanna make sure that you know exactly what you got, you know how to use it and you know if it's a fit for your order. So then we talk about reviews and review links. So within your listing, once you have it published, there is a place where you just go into your listing info and you can get a review link.

Speaker 1: (28:54)
So reviews are everything. I'm sure somebody's shopped in Amazon or someone's been on Yelp, uh, you know, you're not gonna pay attention to anything that has a one star and you're gonna morelock to something that has spot stars. Uh, same thing, same psychology goes in the ecosystem. There's a rating system where people actually can leave reviews and they're really thoughtful and it really helps to see if it's a fit, because people talk about their use case. People talk about, um, you know, maybe the support. We will show you some love now that's super important, and you're able to facilitate that with an easy, hey, leave a review link. That's pretty much the only way, it's the the quickest way for a, a user, a supporter to leave a routine for your app. Also, we really focus on in-app touchpoints. So using HubSpot live chat within our portal, uh, where people do administration for the apps, if they have one or more of our apps, you're able to do a hit us on live chat.

Speaker 1: (29:43)
Obviously there is the tool tips that we put in within the app and our actual videos knowledge base are all accessible from within our apps. So we wanna make sure that there's no, there's no mystery clicking around when you're, uh, when you're looking for, when you're looking for what to do next. Also, when there's uninstalled surveys, so this is something that HubSpot provides when people uninstall your app, I believe it's like three or four days later, they get an email that says, Hey, would you like to review or leave a survey of why you install uninstalled the app? And it could, this is gonna be a huge, huge feedback loop for why was or wasn't a fit. Maybe it's like, Hey, we didn't need it anymore. Hey, it wasn't what we expected. But again, that's a way for you to understand and iterate on your app to make it better for the people that are using it or find a bug or something that people weren't trying to be public about. They're like, Hey, it didn't work because of X, Y, and Z. You'll get that information to be able to, uh, run that right run, run that right around. Um, and then again, pushing updates from feedback. You, you can't talk to your clients enough. It's really, really important to understand that loop of updates. And Tyrone, I wanted you to touch on building the app in a modular fashion so that it is easier to, uh, update because again, updates with apps are their own thing. So you always wanna touch on that for a couple minutes.

Speaker 2: (31:04)
Yeah, so for sure, and this is really more of a principle of software development in general, but you should never think that the app you are going to build is it like, once it's out into the wild, that that's it, you should always be thinking about extensibility of my app. What version two, what's version three? What's version four look like? Because HubSpot capabilities, if you don't know HubSpot work, it, it, it, from a developer's standpoint, it feels like a startup with a billion dollars and these guys are cranking out new capabilities every month, every month. There's nothing something new. And so you are going to want be able to capture a lot of those new functionalities that they release to you, which is gonna benefit your app, which is gonna benefit your customers. So you want to really, you know, you always wanna approach things in a very oop or very NBC like way, you should always be thinking like, how can I extend this? How can I add functionality to this now and not break everything, you know, down the line? How can I add more data from the accounting API and where will that go? How can I add more data from new functionality in the contact API and where will that go? So always think that something newer and greater and bigger and better is around the corner when it comes to HubSpot capabilities.

Speaker 1: (32:24)
Appreciate that. So that's a big, that's a big part of, um, number one. It's a big part of just iterating on the app, but number two, it's also a big opportunity for service, uh, service opportunities. So if you have the infrastructure to, uh, if you have the infrastructure to provide an extra consulting on maybe even app customization for an extra cost, that's a big, uh, big driver of revenue. Uh, that was a big driver for us early on in our APS days where we would have an app and because of what the app does, they're like, Hey, can you do this? Uh, or can you add that? Or Hey, something completely unrelated. Yeah, I know you, you fixed my toilet, but can you jump on the roof in and see what my skylights are gonna be? All of that happens more than you would imagine.

Speaker 1: (33:05)
And having the infrastructure to potentially either have a partner that can help fulfill on those needs or just being able to add a customization to your app, that's a really, really big deal in a lot of value because every business needs customization. I mean, I could write that from nata every time we came out with a a, an app that a larger company wanted to use. It's the first question is like, Hey, can you make it do this because we need X, Y, and Z? Um, and that's a, again, we were really, really fortunate to be able to have that opportunity to be able to support that thanks to time room, but we, we that you have to be ready for that type of support. And one thing I did actually skip over with support is I, time I tapping you again, is understanding and delineating who is going to support your app, right? Um, whether is a developer going to be the support that's not gonna work. Uh, do you have a first line of defense against the worst gun with the universe? Not to call client gun, but you know, you get the, you get the gist of, um, of the, the minute black. But Tyrone, talk about a little bit about what it's like to support an application.

Speaker 2: (34:09)
Yeah, so the things you're gonna come across around support are going to be a handful of things that are genuinely wrong with your app that you just simply did not foresee. And the smaller the team, the more this is gonna happen. And also the more complexity your app, the more this is gonna happen. Uh, and then there are going to be, um, a lot of, Hey, your app is broken because there's a difference in expectations versus how the app actually works. This is going to happen no matter what. There's literally no escaping it. And so what you need to really be able to do is to differentiate like what is a bad user experience from something programmatically that probably just kind of slipped through the cracks. I would say as your app gains momentum in terms of installs, you will be, you will notice a few things.

Speaker 2: (35:01)
One, most smaller apps start off where the developers are the support team. And what you're going to happen is there's going to be enough of those two strange things that I'm telling you about where your developers will begin to get bogged down in doing support. And that is going to affect your development cycle for feature releases and bug releases and things of that nature. So at some point you will have to consider, how do I protect my developers? A lot of that partners may know, hey, there's an app that I like, it's really cool. I go to ask these guys if they'll do do something, they said it's gonna take two, three months. This is why, uh, because those developers are usually, they've got a month or two of work ahead of them, and then here you come, uh, with your support and desires. Nothing wrong with that. Just understanding that your developers are probably going to need someone in front of them who can speak the language of the client and also speak the language of the developer. And it's gonna help protect your development team. It's gonna help you keep your pacing of new releasing stuff.

Speaker 1: (36:08)
Thanks so much for that. So we're, we're really, we're really big on support. We, we pride ourselves on service as the, the genie said for, I've got so many references all's going on right now, but, um, it, that's what, that's what matters. Like, how do you take care of people? Because we've broken many things. I've called Tyrone at three in the morning over, Hey, someone is upset, we have to do something now, uh, because I'm since it, and it it, it shys them and that's what makes people wanna stick around and wanna be a part of what you're building. Um, and it's, it's just something that we really, I I, I suggest and I recommend to people that are in this position that they're gonna provide value, they're gonna build, some people are gonna build a business around. What we do is just to be there when it breaks. Admit it, bro, things break. I'm sorry, how can I make it work? Right? It's, it's the, it's the, the silence that kills people. They don't get response, right? So that's a big one for us. Uh, so I'll go to the next slide, which should be the big finale questions. So I want to jump real quick into the QA cause I know there's a couple questions. I've been dying to say something, Tyrone, you got some of these.

Speaker 2: (37:14)
So we've got a few questions in here. Number one from, uh, Peter Nicholas, uh, your recommendation for engaging in motivating partners to sell your app to their clients,

Speaker 1: (37:25)
I got something to say for that one. So we've always thought about how do you, how do we get other, how do you get a pseudo affiliate program, right? Or something of the, like to get other people promoting your app. And the key here is, number one, if you did some sort of rep share, I don't think anybody's care, right? Our apps are, especially if our apps are $20, $50, a hundred dollars, getting $10 uh, a month is not as attractive as one we imagine. I mean, for me, I'm okay with it, but the idea here is when you open up that, open up that line of communication, right? Um, the partners, it's not hard to find out who are HubSpot partners. It's not hard to find out who are high level HubSpot partners and just saying, Hey, I have this solution. If there's a client that you have that might have this solution, let me know.

Speaker 1: (38:10)
Right? That just opening up the relationships within the, the partner community, cuz again, we are, we are all about that and we are partners. I have no problem talking to another partner, a competitor, which is not even true about, hey, we have this solution. We do have a lot of partners that utilize our apps that they, their clients just buy them. But again, it's a part of a bigger offering for those partners. Those partners are doing tons of stuff. They're doing RevUps, they're doing marketing setups, doing all this stuff, and they have this one pinch. And if there's an app that solves it, that's another partner has built, I mean, I would do the same thing that somebody else, I mean, and most of the apps that are built by other, the partners that we've had to use, we use them. You know, I want a shout out to, uh, a big shout out to impulse creative for a lot of thing that they're building, uh, is a trailblazer.

Speaker 1: (38:52)
Shout to Remington, like just ridiculous amount of knowledge and experience in building things and always tap him. And I'm thankful that he answers the phone because of the amount of experience. Thus the, the few people that are in this realm, there's no, there's no am there's no animosity or anything with the partner. So everybody's been super nice as far as our experience of, hey, we have, you have something that we need one of our clients needs, we're gonna buy that. No questions to ask, uh, any questions. It's same for us. So, um, that's actually a really good question, so I appreciate it, Peter, because again, who is your audience? It's the people that are serving, the people that use HubSpot, that's HubSpot reps, HubSpot, uh, internal employees and HubSpot partners. The layer, the layer above clients and prospects. So, great, great question. I should have said something about that during it, so it's a great question,

Speaker 2: (39:39)
Right? Yeah. Another question, uh, from Peter Nicholas. Um, how do you guide people wanting support when they should be going to HubSpot support versus escalating with your own app support? Like how do you help delineate that?

Speaker 1: (39:53)
Oh, Peter's got great questions right now, so shout out to Peter. Um, so this is a very, very challenging thing because as, and we're going through, we go through it, I wouldn't say all the time, but we're currently going through a couple different issues because for example, if you set up one of our apps, you do it, you set it up, it does exactly what it's supposed to do, but it messes up your HubSpot or you just have a couple of questions and the first thing you wanna do is hit that chat button, the lower right of HubSpot a kind, HubSpot rep's gonna show up and they're be like, I have no idea what you're talking about, Nam Hoer. Um, you have to reach out to the developer support. So the main thing that we do is we pre-emp that by reaching out. Hey, thanks for installing.

Speaker 1: (40:36)
Here's a couple quick guides, you know, utilizing the marketing automation, uh, which is one thing I'm actually gonna probably touch on about integrating your app into HubSpot, which is a pretty good thing to talk about. But having that automation, when someone installs your app, we send out, you know, welcome email flow and be pre uh, be proactive and preemptive on support. If you have any questions, hit us up. Um, we don't explicitly say HubSpot can't help you cuz they can, and a lot of things because your question may be HubSpot specific, just a little sprinkling of an application on top. But it is important to be, to reach out first to say, we are the ones to support because people are going to go to HubSpot. HubSpot's going to say, we have no idea what you're talking about and it's gonna end up being a bad experience for.

Speaker 1: (41:14)
So no one wants that. Uh, we make sure that, again, in our, in our app, we have access to say questions, email us questions, email us in the footer of every type of thing in the CRM card, in the model that pops up. We make sure that you can reach out, that there are the touch points to reach out to us if there are any challenges. But you will, in your app, you will have people, people that will reach out to HubSpot support. And as we've kind of mentioned a lot in these sessions, that when you're building a HubSpot app, you're not really building a HubSpot app, you're building an app that connects to HubSpot. Um, so understanding that separation is gonna be key in everything that you do to speak to your, uh, your clients.

Speaker 2: (41:54)
All right. Uh, last question here again from Peter. Um, kind of maybe a little, little removed from this. Any recommendations on using a billing provider instead of do it yourself slash stripe or a charge B?

Speaker 1: (42:13)
Yeah, that one is at the toughie, right? So you pretty much, you're pretty much limited to anything that you kind of know. Uh, we knew, we originally started off with PayPal because we knew PayPal really easily. We could get up and running really quickly. Um, obviously most, you know, when you go upstream up to mid-market, most people don't really wanna use PayPal. Um, you wanna get something like a Stripe, so they could just enter in a credit card, uh, and call it a day. So I would just recommend anything that you can code up that works and allows you to take money. So there's, I mean, charge B works, uh, essence, it's a pay process. Stripe works if you have relationships, even lower the level or on lower level of payments, you might get something cheaper, uh, with less percentage, anything pretty much works. But the key here is that you have to build all of that.

Speaker 1: (42:57)
You have to build that within your app. You have to build that, um, that onboarding flow to, to install your app, you have to build all of that stuff. Um, again, so you're building your own application that just happens to link to HubSpot and payments are no different. Uh, so managing subscriptions, recurring payments, cancellations, upgrades, downgrades, all of that you have to build. Um, HubSpot's not at the point where they manage that billing because you're gonna have to do invoicing and you will get the question of, Hey, how does this work? Do I just install the app and I get a bill at HubSpot and it's gonna be on my bill? How does that work? And you have to, uh, explain that that's not how it works yet. So

Speaker 2: (43:34)
Yeah, like you have to be more than just a developer. You gotta be a developer, a networker, and know a little bit about payments as well. So, um, it's kinda the nature of the beast.

Speaker 1: (43:44)
Yeah, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a difficult gig. That's why there's only a few of us here. And you guys have kind of the, the first, first mover advantage of it's still early. This is all still very, very, very early in what's what HubSpot's looking to do. So having the kind of the, the tools to know what it takes now and once it gets easier, you're already gonna have a leg up of understanding the ecosystem, understanding the, the connections, all the stuff that Tyrone talked about in the past two sessions about the architecture of an app, what it takes, uh, you're gonna be well ahead that, and one of the things I wanted to to touch on was that, uh, was how your marketing and your branding and how you reach out to customers is gonna be tied into HubSpot. So all of our apps are integrated with, uh, are integrated with our HubSpot.

Speaker 1: (44:29)
So that's almost like your first, that's another app within an app, like how do you build your external app, but you want to build in the management and the support tier within HubSpot. So for example, when someone wants to upgrade, upgrade their, their, uh, their subscription tool, a given app, in our, uh, since we have this integration with all of our apps, our, our support team can go into HubSpot, click on that person, see their subscriptions, upgrade, downgrade, resend an invoice, all of that is within HubSpot. So I highly recommend, uh, integrating that to make your life easier to see who's installing, how long they've had it, their total mrr. All of that is something that is really powerful because again, you are the, the leader of HubSpot, you are gonna be the thought leader. So your apps will definitely be connected into HubSpot as well as, uh, it does something net new or integrates with HubSpot for commercialized people.

Speaker 1: (45:23)
So, uh, but that's all I had for everyone. Um, I, I don't know if there's any other questions we wanna pop into the chat, but I've been very, very thankful. I'm so thankful and grateful for everyone that showed up today out their busy day. Just talk about what is a, what is a, what does an app do to get people to install? How does it make one feel? What do you, what does the branding look like? How do you get out there? How do you even install it? How do you, how do you certify it? All those things we love talking about. We could talk about all day. So you can find this anywhere you want. We we're not hard to find. We're sitting in our rooms all day, so we're just thankful for everyone.

Speaker 3: (45:58)
You know, an unfortunate thing about being at most is that I can't ask questions in the qa and I have questions for you, if you don't mind me asking.

Speaker 1: (46:06)
Oh, please.

Speaker 3: (46:07)
Right. Question one, what is an acceptable churn rate?

Speaker 1: (46:13)
That is a great question. So people usually want to churn below, like one to 2%, almost like a regular e-commerce conversion rate. Um, again, that is something that's gonna go business to business to business, but, uh, I don't have ours off the top, but it's less than that. So we're, we're really thankful for, um, the, the products that we have. But if you're at one to 2%, I would kinda start to worry, um, once it gets a little bit higher, because you're, the people are, are not, it's not a part of their workflow is what that smells like, right? That means they're just kind of using it and they may not need it or they may need it a little bit, but they found a better solution. So it's always about understanding when people feel like they're churning. And that's, again, the integration into HubSpot, for example, or associate. We can tell how many people or how many associations people are making and we could set alerts to say, this person does 2000, 2000 102 3. That's a risk, right? They must have found either they, there's no use for the app and we're gladly say, Hey, we don't need it. I'm glad it helps you out while I did. But be able to predict that churn and do something about it is again, a, a benefit of integrating into HubSpot and knowing that, knowing your metrics.

Speaker 3: (47:21)
And another question is, um, how often or do you evaluate the actual cost of your app? I mean, do you, do you think sometimes like maybe I'm charging too much or too little or,

Speaker 1: (47:33)
Uh, so we, we look at that, uh, frequently just to understand. Uh, we spend a lot of time before we make that pricing of knowing our models since we have other apps. But we do like to revisit pricing as, as new tiers come out and new products are available. For example, with Clone Tech, now that we have the quotes API that's coming out, we'll be able to clone quotes and it's about is that gonna be extra? Is that just, uh, what tiers that fit in? Or if we didn't have a third tier, which some apps didn't have, uh, three tiers, we may add a tier with this enterprise type of feature. Uh, so, uh, I think it's more along the lines of when features and new extensibility comes from HubSpot, uh, are we able to add that in and, uh, potentially for a, a larger value for the, the client?

Speaker 3: (48:16)
And I'll ask one last question. I, and I promise I'll stop, um, tiers, did you always do that or that something like one day, you know what, we're gonna get some new features, so let's start doing a tiered system. And on top of that, do you find tiered systems more successful than Nont tiered systems?

Speaker 1: (48:35)
I would say that we find it success, we build it as such. So everything that we, while we came out with originally was we want to have tiers because that's just kinda how Sass products work. And it's been really successful to make sure that people were getting exactly what they need and that our further investment into the product is going to be matched by a higher MRR for, uh, that thing, uh, for everything has been, uh, mostly like I would say we, we started with a lot of things having a free tier. Um, if they, and then just so that people can use it, roll the dice. Uh, so associate our customer portals still have a free tier, but again, this is a moving, this is liquid. HubSpot came out with their portal, so we have no need for a free tier of our portal because HubSpot's portal is the free tier now.

Speaker 1: (49:16)
And unfortunately we have those two further tiers based upon the needs of the, the needs of the client. A real good example for this is, uh, tire Man. So tire man out of the box. It has a cost for the basic, but there is more things that you can time, uh, the amount of things that you can time on. The pro tier, which is the middle tier, uh, is different than what you could do on the enterprise tier. In an enterprise tier. You could time deals and tickets. So we kind of build our products in the beginning with the feature sets built for tiers.

Speaker 3: (49:44)
Cool. All right. I promise I'm, I'm done. You can send the bill mail. No,

Speaker 1: (49:49)
I, Peter had a question. So, uh, integrated HubSpot app billing, I don't know when that's coming. I know that we want it to happen because we want HubSpot to take some of our money so that they can also use some of the resource you use. We can use some of their infrastructure cause Right, again, our apps are our service. We have to do all this architecture. You have to be an expert in architecture and cloud computing, all this stuff and reality. We would like to say, Hey HubSpot, here's the app running on, on your platform. We got all the, the tools and stuff to run it. And we'll take, yeah, go ahead and take a cut. That's totally fine. Cause that will just speed up the way that we can iterate on the product that speeds up the amount of new people that can come in because it's all around HubSpot infrastructure. And I'm sure that as soon as that happens, as soon as HubSpot sees that they can make money, this is a line item on the revenue, on the balance sheet that they will then, um, they will really take that in. But I don't have a date, but I hopefully soon than later. Again, that should be for everyone should bring out if they start taking a percentage, uh, or even, you know, up to a certain amount is free. And then you got, we, we gotta take our cut. Be happy for them to do so.

Speaker 3: (50:56)
Cool. Thanks guys. Once again, great content. Uh, anyone here who has not seen the, uh, first two sessions, please, uh, go ahead and get onto our developer YouTube channel. Uh, links out there somewhere. And uh, join us next week on Wednesday, same time, uh, where we'll do a last session. Um, again, thanks guys. Have a great day. Okay,

Speaker 1: (51:17)
Take care everyone. Thanks

Speaker 3: (51:19)
Everyone.