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: (00:00)
Welcome. Wonderful to see everybody. I'm Connor, I'm the CEO at Aptitude 8. We are a HubSpot Elite partner that focuses on implementation and integration and optimization of the HubSpot platform. I'm really excited to have Matt here from Squid. I'm in, I'm in New York City. It is

Speaker 2: (00:20)
Kind of cloudy,

Speaker 1: (00:21)
Kind of sunny. Doesn't know if it's spring or or if it's, if we've arrived or not yet, but we're getting, we're getting close. So Matt, I'll pass it to you. Thank you for joining us.

Speaker 2: (00:29)
Awesome. Hey everyone. Yeah, Connor, thanks so much for having me. My name's Matt Brown, I'm near Chattanooga, Tennessee. We are well into the spring season. It's beautiful out here and I'm at Squid. I lead the product marketing team. I've been here for about 10 years. Been in the sales space, did the implementation side for about four years, product for two years, and now I'm, uh, in product marketing and at Squid, uh, we are a platform for making, um, enterprise software more human. Uh, we'll get into more of what that means, but really excited to explore that specifically in the world of HubSpot today.

Speaker 1: (01:01)
Very cool. Well, I'm really excited to have Matt cuz in my old Salesforce life I had bumped around and done some cool stuff with squid and we got randomly reconnected and started talking about HubSpot and all the cool things that are starting to happen in the HubSpot space and where we think that there's a lot of opportunity for, for squid at large. So we're gonna talk through some of those for sure. So this is what we're gonna be going through today. One is sort of where, where HubSpot's focus is and where there's sort of opportunities not just for Squid but other solutions partners and, and people building stuff either for your own HubSpot environment or maybe you're doing things for customers on the services side and sort of how you can leverage, uh, squid in different solutions to solve some of those different problems. We'll get a little of an overview of like what squid is, what that means, how it fits in.

Speaker 1: (01:44)
And then we'll do some real use cases for HubSpot and Squid together and show you guys some of the stuff that Matt and his team and us have been putting together. Sort of uh, proof of concepts and live demo examples of how you can use Squid on top of HubSpot to do really cool and interesting things. And we'll go through some of those custom builds. And then at the tail end here, if we have questions from folks, we would be happy to answer them. We do love to make these as interactive as we can. So if you guys are watching, you're following along, if you have questions on Steph, go ahead and throw them in the chat. Matt and I are are looking at it on the LinkedIn side and we would be happy to answer anything you guys have. We'd love to talk about it.

Speaker 1: (02:17)
Cool. Let's go ahead and jump into it. So what is going on in the HubSpot universe? Right, so HubSpot was for a long time adding, they had their core marketing hub, they added Sales Hub, they sort of added Service Hub. They have kind of this whole CRM platform. They have CMS hub in the mix. And some of the big questions as a HubSpot solutions partner from HubSpot customers has been, what is HubSpot gonna continue to build? Where is HubSpot going? Are they gonna go try to build a hub for everyone under the sun? And what Yamen, HUBOT CEO e has said is that they're really have their core focus, which is on sales, it's on service, and it's on marketing. And these are kind of the three constituencies that they're focused on serving at large and that they are really pushing for kind of this big ecosystem of builders and whether that's on the, the services side or the app side or the product side, people that are building stuff on top of HubSpot to solve for other additional use cases.

Speaker 1: (03:07)
And I think that's where a lot of partners come in for extensibility and creating some of these other arenas to be able to solve for some of these pieces. So HubSpot is not trying to push in to and do every single thing for every single person. It's really focused on these three audiences and these three constituencies. But what that means is there's a bunch of stuff that HubSpot isn't going to do. And as we like to say, uh, today builders are gonna build. And so this opens a lot of doors for different opportunities. So App studios like Happily, which is another business I run in, in the HubSpot space building sort of apps on top, you can really build apps for the overall HubSpot app marketplace, building things that are purpose-built for HubSpot, solving particular problems, solving for particular use cases and building them and launching them into the market at large.

Speaker 1: (03:48)
But then also their solutions partners like Aptitude eight and I'm sure some other folks here that can build custom solutions like C R M cards or c M s pages or tailored reporting and different functions that really extend what HubSpot itself can do outside of the box using a lot of those extensibility type features in order to solve different problems for customers. So this is kind of the primary focus of what APT Two eight does is help companies customize and tailor and build on top of HubSpot to be able to accomplish some of the different needs that they have, whether it's sort of leveraging native functionality, custom functionality or blending those two things together in a whole bunch of different ways. But when we talk about custom solutions, there are a whole bunch of things that you need in order to really deploy these. So we've built lots of really cool stuff native to HubSpot, whether it's pricing calculators or extensibility solutions.

Speaker 1: (04:37)
And what you need in order to have those solutions in order to build those products is you really need to have a place to host them. So most of the things that we're building, whether it's sort of living on AWS or whether it's living on Azure, you need sort of a place to hold what, what HubSpot calls sort of a private app, which is like an app and a uh, an extensibility application that is on top of HubSpot lives outside of HubSpot, but it ultimately has to run somewhere. So you need a place to actually host it and build it. The other component is, is managing it. So what that means is you need to have a place that you can go to add functionality, add features, change the way it works and behaves. Usually that's sort of on that hosting side, but you also need to have the, the capabilities internally to maintain and manage that over time.

Speaker 1: (05:18)
Usually these sort of solutions have you build them, you create them, you deploy them, business rules change, business needs change, requirements change, and you have to sort of continue to manage those over time. And what that means is you need in-house development or you need a full-time contract with support teams in order to host and build and manage these applications over time. And so what we find with customers is, while we like to build a lot of this kind of stuff, we're very hesitant to build a fully custom private application for a customer that maybe doesn't already have a technology team, doesn't have an in-house team to sort of take over and manage it because it's not something that an administrator can perform. It's something that they need a HubSpot developer to build and manage for them. And so what this does is it sort of makes it that you can build lots of cool extensibility stuff, but you really have to be a technology team in order to build and maintain and manage that, that functionality over time. Which is why we're really excited about tools like Squid that can help us solve some of these problems without doing that. So I will hand it to Matt to give a little bit of overview on that front.

Speaker 2: (06:14)
Awesome, thanks Connor. I've really enjoyed reading y'all's thoughts as you digging into some of these concepts on the Aptitude Date blog. Uh, this idea of the cost of ownership being a really, really important concept for teams to think about maybe when they haven't had to think about it before, you know, that might have been, you might have thought of that as kind of an IT thing, IT thing, but n now you know, folks that are are leading rev op teams, sales op teams, they have to be thinking about their technology in those terms. So, so what do we do at Squid? All right, we, for the past 10 years, we've offered a platform and products for uh, what we call G S D leaders Get stuff done, leaders, um, who want to get stuff done with the technology they've already invested in our low-code no-code platform is great for delivering solutions like these.

Speaker 2: (06:57)
So custom rev op tools and widgets for, uh, platforms like Salesforce, HubSpot, and others composite apps and dashboards with multiple data sources. And then lastly, one of the things that makes Squid different, I think in the low-code no-code space is that, you know, we've got these deep data connection capabilities, but we've also gotta a focus on human-centered design. That's part of our dna. And what that means is that we're able to handle complex requirements around things like interaction design and highly branded and styled apps. And so that makes portals and sites a really great use case. Cause when you're building for customers, partners, employees, the kind of folks that don't necessarily have to use the app, the design threshold is a lot higher. So those are some of the kinds of things that you can build with Squid and where it's gonna be useful. So let's move to the next slide here.

Speaker 2: (07:43)
Okay, so what does it actually look like to, to build with Squid? I don't wanna get too deep into the details, but I did want to talk about what it looks like in part because Connor, in talking with you about Aptitude eight, your model with your clients is not to create this kind of deep dependency. Uh, it's much more cooperative, it's much more collaborative. It's about empowering customers for, for ownership. And so that's what makes this a really great partnership for Squid to work with Aptitude eight here, because that's very much what we care about as well. So Squid, the product is built with that in mind. It's built for developers and business process owners who aren't coders. And the point is, if you know the business problem that you wanna solve, you can do it with no code or very little code in Squid.

Speaker 2: (08:26)
So Aptitude eight, y'all are gonna be able to, to build this out quickly for clients and customers to deliver it quickly. But then long term, you know, a customers and clients can be empowered to own that technology and add value from within the organization. So in Squid, you're gonna have your apps and your pages. Let's go back one slide really quick, if that's okay. Yep. So over on the left, you know, you talked about having that place to kind of, to run things. So Squid is hosted on aws. So when you spin up Squid, it's, it's all on aws, but you don't have to worry about any of that stuff. You just get started and you've got the Squid app to manage your apps, manage your pages, that's point and click over there on the left. And then we have a composer there on the right.

Speaker 2: (09:07)
Again, we're not gonna get deep into that today, but if you're interested more in that, we can definitely get into it with you. But that's where you're gonna go connect to your data. And then we have the ability to connect to whatever APIs you need. And then we have a pre-built component library. So you can drag in different components like uh, tables, forms, calendars, so on and so forth into that canvas to build out your layout of the page. And we also have a, a logic layer as well called the action framework where you can say, when the user clicks here, then this happens. And if, if this kind of a, of an action is taken, then then these sorts of things happen. So building in that logic is really important for dynamic applications. So we can go back to that next, that next slide there.

Speaker 2: (09:45)
And then here you can see that you've got the, what we call our design system studio. This is gonna let you essentially take your style guide and turn it into a foundation for all of your apps and pages so that anything you build is automatically integrated into your visual language. So there you've got colors, but you can set up variants for all the different components, so on and so forth. That's how we build really beautiful portals, sites, more kind of public facing type applications there. So all this is point and click, it's declarative, it is extensible. So the composer is Wiziwig. It's what you see is what you get. It's low code, no code, but if you are, you know, an experienced, uh, web developer, you can add your own custom components, you can add your own HTML and css, you can add JavaScript snippets, you can take it above and beyond.

Speaker 2: (10:29)
So not trying to to to limit what's possible there. And then, you know, lastly, uh, we make it so you can connect to whatever APIs you need to mask that complexity for the end user. Cuz the end user, you don't want them thinking about where the data's coming from. You know, which object if it's in HubSpot or Salesforce or ServiceNow. They just wanna get their work done. And so that's what we're trying to enable here. Alright, so that's just a quick overview of kind of how we do it and what the technology is in that, in that platform there. Let's go ahead and move to the next stage. Who is Squid four? Well, it's for anyone. That's kind of the point. So some of the popular industries that are taking advantage of Squid right now are gonna be tech, finser, healthcare, media and telecom. A lot of public sector customers.

Speaker 2: (11:12)
We just put out a, a case study earlier this year with our United States Air Force, which was really exciting, but I put our own company on there, squid cuz we use Squid with HubSpot. So we drink our own champagne and one of the things that we've done is we've built some really beautiful kind of, uh, self-assessment quiz quizzes as part of, uh, some of some of our marketing campaigns. And that's using the HubSpot API and squid pages to kind of drive that experience layer. So those are some examples of, of who's gonna be able to get value out of that. Uh, let's go to the next, next slide here. Let's talk about some of the use cases. So these, these are all stories that you can actually find on the website if you wanna find out more. But you know, we have a lot of customers that are using Squid to build custom sales apps and custom rev op apps.

Speaker 2: (11:56)
So T-Mobile, they're doing, you know, quick and easy sales data entry, you know, dramatically improve improving the number of sales reps that are able to, to get to quota. Things like custom C P Q apps in the biotech space there, uh, a M D is using squid for kind of revenue forecasting dashboards and lists. So single pane of glass, but interactive where you can actually get to a record, you can actually do some data entry in there. Air Force is using it more in a kind of an employee experience context. So hire to retire kind of employee portal type things, mobile friendly. And then like I said before, you know, at Squid we've used Squid, the the platform to build, uh, build out some HubSpot web forms that look great, uh, using our style guide and everything. So those are some of the use cases. Hopefully that sends some inspiration through. You might have an idea for something that you can do, but hopefully that gives a a, a good good sense of what's possible there.

Speaker 1: (12:49)
Amazing. So what we're gonna go through, right, cause I think that we sort of talked about this on where we see a lot of opportunity of the HubSpot and Squid is we've been working with Matt and his team to build a couple of different solutions that we see a lot of our customers need. We see sort of common use cases come up for these. And what's interesting I think about each one of these solutions is sometimes there are fully dedicated sort of large scale applications. So we're gonna go through each one of these examples, right? But like CPQ is a good one where you could buy a big CPQ tool, you could buy sort of a dedicated app for the specific thing. But I think the thing that makes Squid so amazingly powerful in our opinion is maybe you wanna build sort of a bunch of these little sort of extensibility or customization aspects and you don't really want to go and, and purchase sort of this whole other platform.

Speaker 1: (13:31)
Maybe you either don't need that level of in-depth functionality or it just sort of isn't the core problem you're trying to solve. And so we often find those conversations that we either have to say, Hey, sorry, th this is really gonna struggle with on the HubSpot front, uh, and here are the reasons why, or we could build you something custom, but that's gonna be expensive. You have to maintain it, you have to manage it. And these are just a couple of examples that I think as, as we talk through these, not only do they sort of solve a concrete problem that we see for some of these customers, but they're also highly flexible. So they're really something that Matt and his team built based on these parameters that we went through. And they're not just sort of like a here's a solution we have that solves this problem, but you can use squid's tools to build these types of solutions.

Speaker 1: (14:11)
So I'll hand it to Matt to go through some of these and I'll just sort of add color for some of the other ones that we run into, but I think I forgot that I actually had to set this, which is important. Talked about this a little bit already. Gaps that we find right where, where HubSpot has areas that we often run into customers who need additional functionality for. So one is front end UI customization. So in HubSpot record pages or record pages, layouts or layouts, you can change fields, you can change sections, but what we find a lot of customers want to be able to do, uh, a great example of this is like offshore support teams, right? They need a very dedicated micro app. They only want to have a couple of buttons, they only want to have a couple of tabs. And being able to provide that type of really custom UI experience is something you, you really struggle with in HubSpot because you just can't pull everything out.

Speaker 1: (14:54)
Similarly, doing really custom data reporting, especially on data that might come out of HubSpot and you're sort of combining them together, being able to build c PQ functionality. HubSpot actually has amazing out of the box like product and line item adding and being able to configure a lot of these pieces. But we see customers that have maybe really complex pricing needs with, we have a customer right now who has something where they have sort of a bunch of different tiers, they have a bunch of different volumes, there's tables to reference, and they sort of have these complex pricing calculator type of requirements. And being able to build a lot of this kind of like data storage that's coming from somewhere else, you only wanna reference it in one little sort of experience. And I think one of the things that makes Squid in our opinion really powerful for this is some of those pre-built data connectors to go grab information from an E R P or something like a NetSuite.

Speaker 1: (15:38)
And you don't need to custom code something in order to do that because Squid kind of has those out of the box connectors that power it. And so where we get really excited about some of the things that Squid does is patching some of these common gaps that we run into. So we're gonna go through a handful of these use cases here and we're gonna have Matt sort of actually live demo each one of these and, and how you guys can start to build stuff on top of Squid that works with HubSpot. So we have three examples for you if we go forward just like two here probably is totally fine. We have three examples here. So one is events, something we run into all of the time is, and Hub sort of has, you can have date time fields, but you have to set them up via API and do these other pieces.

Speaker 1: (16:17)
And being able to view things on a calendar, being able to control and adjust and schedule in different components is something we run into all of the time. So much so that Happily kinda has a forthcoming full event management app for this use case. But what, what Squid will run through is sort of like if you have any event booking in your flow, super, super valuable. We'll go through sort of their spiced example of sort of different sales frameworks and how you can customize there. And then a CPQ example as well, sort of how you can do product adding and calculators and rural libraries and how all of that gets managed. So I'll let Matt sort of open it up and and show everybody, but these are just some examples of some of the things you can build on top of Squid platform. Awesome.

Speaker 2: (16:53)
All right, I'm actually gonna gonna flip the order for a second. I want to talk about Spice for a second. You know, one of the things that Squid is gonna be really helpful for is custom rev ops, sales ops, uh, tools, widgets and apps. Um, and one of the places that we are seeing a lot of need in the past year or so is for sales teams that have a methodology, a qualification methodology is selling methodology and they might have the training and everyone got the pdf, but how do you actually go from having that methodology and, and actually, you know, making it a part of your processes. Sometimes folks will do an integration where they'll, you know, they'll add those as tech fields either in HubSpot CRM or Salesforce or where, wherever they're going. But that's very hard to report on. So actually how do you take that methodology and make it part of your processes in a way that's reportable?

Speaker 2: (17:43)
You can, you can track your progress, you can use it to coach your teams. And so we worked with a group called Winning by Design that has a methodology called spiced. And we built it out, and this is kind of what you typically would see in a Squid app. You know, we're going and we're connecting to whatever data you want. You get kind of a dashboard type experience. In this case we're connecting to some HubSpot data. We we're all, we've also got our own database that we're using for some related data there. But what we wanted to be able to do was take, take this idea of, of spiced qualification and bring it into the HubSpot deal itself. So that's where the users are spending their time. So how do they actually get there? And so, uh, this is where we had some fun working with Aptitude eight on how do you, you know, deploy the right way, uh, based on your, your company's strategy.

Speaker 2: (18:29)
And so if your users are in HubSpot and you want them to stay in there, while the way that that HubSpot can do this is with CRM cards, we can launch some widgets from here. And so we can pull in that spiced scoring methodology straight into our crm and I can see what are the scores for each of those kind of qualification points. It's data driven, it's not just text. I can go and I can actually edit these if I need to, and that's gonna save that, save that back and it'll save, you know, any records back to HubSpot as well as, you know, whatever, whatever else we're pulling from, uh, from other APIs there. So, you know, again, we're here, we're doing, you know, spiced this particular qualification framework. You may have other methodologies that you're using, and maybe it's not even a methodology, maybe it's just enforcing a process when a user could be a support user is on the phone, how can you guide them through that process in a, in a way that's intuitive and easy? And so that's, that's kind of the first place I

Speaker 1: (19:30)
Think before you move on, Matt, the thing I think is yeah, yeah, the thing I think is really interesting here. So another example that we run into, and I sort of talked about this earlier for that sort of like, support type of user journey, but where we talk about HubSpot versus sort of like a Salesforce or our Dynamics or some of these other things. I think if you're a HubSpot partner, a HubSpot seller or a HubSpot customer, right? We run into lots of these pieces where it's like, I really want to have this guided user flow with discrete numbers of inputs and I want to sort of dynamically adjust the next input based on the previous input. And that's really challenging in HubSpot today. And I think what's so exciting about that example is it's, it's a, it's a basic one, right? Like how do we manage the sort of spice to journey?

Speaker 1: (20:06)
But you can take that concept and really expand it to any number of, of controlled inputs or dependent fields. And I think even this additional examples we'll touch on actually expand upon that is some of the really custom stuff you can do. But we run into lots of examples in hubot where I, I really want someone to go through these specific screens, this specific field have this specific data entry, and if we miss a field, it's really detrimental to our business process and squid coming in in front of that layer and solving for that problem is, is I think huge.

Speaker 2: (20:35)
That's great. And, and I think that that highlights one of the things that we focused on, uh, from the beginning, which is you don't, you really don't want your users to have to think in terms of navigating a database. You know, like, wait, which object do I go to in order to make sure that I've got the right, you know, the compliant way of doing things so that the data doesn't, doesn't end up being bad. And the the point is, you can kind of not have to worry about any of that. You can really focus on, well, let's build it the right way and not have to worry about whether or not we can get that data in the right context on the right screen. And, and you're gonna have all the controls too. So you talked about like making sure like users are, are entering the data the right way at the right time. And that's another thing is that Squid has this layer of logic at the UI side, so you can say, well, in, in this scenario, we want this field to be required to guide them through that, that process. So that's a good segue. Can

Speaker 1: (21:30)
I make one more comment that I just realized? Yeah. Which is this is, this is on the deal record, but because these are launched from CRM cards, you can do the exact same thing from deals, contacts, tickets, custom objects, anywhere in HubSpot that you can sort of launch that user journey and contextualize it. That's one of my favorite HubSpot features of like, when you open CRM cards, it tells the application you're opening, like what record is this? What object is this? What should show up here? But you can really build these for all sorts of different user journeys. You're not limited by any particular object, which I think is super cool.

Speaker 2: (21:58)
No, that's huge. And, and, and it, it actually, it's a repeatable process, right? Because you're doing it the same way every time. You've got this way that that custom widgets are deployed in HubSpot with CRM cards, with the actions that, that open up that popup. And so what you can do is, you know, for some of that you might need, uh, you know, someone who's a developer to wire that up. But once you've done it a few times, someone who's more of a business analyst and they know what the, the buyer journey should be or whatever, they're gonna be empowered to go build whatever they need. And then that deployment is just super easy and super fast. I think there's, there's a lot of implications for what you can do across the different objects, custom standard and HubSpot. All right, let's, let's move to the next one.

Speaker 2: (22:37)
One of the things that we talked about was this idea of an event scheduler, which was really exciting for me when I was on the product side at Squid as a product manager. One of the big projects that I got to work on was our calendar component, which lets you pull in data from multiple sources into a single calendar view that is customizable. So you can build in kind of different popups and processes that you can actually do data entry through that. So if you want kind of a time-based view of data, uh, you can do that with squid. So let's go take a look at that. Here we've got essentially a custom object called bookings that lets us, uh, relate events to a deal and we'll go through some of the different views. These are all default views that are available with the calendar.

Speaker 2: (23:19)
There's a weak view, there's a month view, there's a day view. We do some interesting things with groupings, can do a list view, which is great for mobile. And then you can set up interactions so that when the user taps on something or clicks on something, whether it's an empty cell, it's gonna create a new record and they can kind of go through the process of creating a new event or they can click on an existing one and get information that's, that's editable in line if the user has those permissions. And so this is, this can be kind of our central, you know, hub for managing events related to this, uh, this particular deal. And then let's go over here. This is something that we've added some, uh, improved support for recently is this ability to do groupings. And so we can group by resource or by, in this case it's gonna be room, um, so we can, we can look and see what, what rooms are available based on this.

Speaker 2: (24:10)
And so we can go and set up a new call here. Let's do an this one here. We'll try and keep it to an hour. And so you can see it's related to the deal that we're on. We'll call this a meeting. We'll just say stake holders sync. Okay. And it carried that context through from where I clicked, uh, to define that. I can choose to make it an all day event if I want. We can, we can see the room that we've picked, but we can also change the room here if we want and then we can save that booking and that's gonna save it back to this record as well. And so if I come back here, if I hit refresh, we should be able to go to our booking section and see if it's here. Yep. Stakeholders sync up there at the top. And so we we're gonna look at a couple different ways that we're connecting to data here and that could be another api or we can use the HubSpot API that we're connecting directly to, to save that back to this deal. So

Speaker 1: (25:16)
Something I wanna highlight that that like I get really excited about and what you just showed and then when we'll talk about some of the data source type stuff as well, is that that's a custom UI that you guys sort of built on top of squid. It's injecting data back into HubSpot and linking and associating it to those records we started it with. But I think the other thing that's really interesting is one of the things we run into a lot is, okay, I wanna have this in HubSpot. And so the first problem is I have to figure out how to get any data that's gonna be relevant for this user journey back into HubSpot also, but maybe I have like a mind body system and that has all of my locations and what availability they have, and now I need to go and sync that back to HubSpot and I add a bunch of complexity just to solve for this particular use case. I, I think when you were talking about this is like that availability or where that comes from doesn't have to come from Hoda, it can come from a bunch of different other sources. Absolutely,

Speaker 2: (26:08)
Yes. And in fact, yeah, that's, so one of the things that's part of Squid is we actually have our own database, you know, and we, we would recommend using it for kind of supplemental contextual data. So we actually use that here to have our list of rooms. And so you can see we set up fairly simple table max occupancy, what's the name of the room, what's the type of the room? You can also use it for some quick data so you can actually set up a database that you can use alongside others. It's also great for prototyping, but yeah, you could be pulling resources and times from Google Calendar or anything else that's got an API that we could, that we could pull from. And the other thing that was exciting to talk through with this is that, you know, HubSpot, you can, you can create DATETIME fields through the api, which is great if you are API savvy, you're a developer.

Speaker 2: (26:56)
But if you are just, if you're not that and you want, you want to maybe do something a little bit simpler, you know, one of the things that we realized we could do is create text fields in HubSpot. And, and what we did was, let's see if I can find the right, uh, the right, the right field here. Yeah. So we created, uh, we created a text field for start date time and end date time. Yeah. And, and what we can do in Squid is actually convert that to a date time type. So we're, we're kind of a, we're a metadata transformer here. And what that means then is that the squid calendar component is gonna be able to treat that like a date time field and work with that. So we give you this kind of extra layer of flexibility than metadata HubSpot, and that's getting pretty technical and honestly a little bit beyond me.

Speaker 2: (27:45)
So hopefully there's not, not too many deep questions that go with that, but a really exciting use case to dig into with, uh, with scheduling. Alright, let's get to the last one here. Let's talk about C P Q. So we've talked about being able to connect to other APIs, other data services, and side note, one of the places I think this is gonna be really important as of these past few months is the ability to connect to AI services as well. So if, uh, if you are investing in an AI data service, uh, for your company, you know, something that's, that's trained on your data, that's, that's secure, something like a scale AI or you know, a, a AWS just announced bedrock and you wanna be able to go, you know, query for some of that data, pull that in, squid is set up for that so that you can go connect to whatever kind of data service you need and pull that into your squid pages.

Speaker 2: (28:38)
And so here, what we're doing, and this, this came from us talking with Connor and the folks at, um, aptitude eight about a use case that would be helpful. And it was this idea of A C P Q and you might have your product list in HubSpot or maybe it's somewhere else, maybe it's in an a ER E R P. Now we had a, a ServiceNow service set up and so we pulled in the ServiceNow API to get our list of products. So we've got a deal here, I'm gonna launch our C PQ widget here and, uh, her name,

Speaker 1: (29:06)
I'm gonna get excited and then we'll go through this, right? But I think the thing that yeah, yeah, yeah. We get really hyped about when you show this is, so often we have conversations with customers and the problem they come to us with is like, I need to integrate ServiceNow in HubSpot. And you're like, what do you actually need to do? And they're like, what I need to do is I have to get all the ServiceNow data in here so that I can like show the right products cuz all of those happen in ServiceNow and I'm trying to like get them in the right order. And that could be like insert e r p billing system, anything under the sun here, right? It's all kind of the same problem in the same use case. And so this like bypasses, in my opinion, that whole integration component of like, I don't need to go through all of the headache of really firmly integrating ServiceNow and HubSpot because I can query ServiceNow's dataset Yes. In here and I'm solving for the actual core problem, which isn't an integration problem. It's like a unification and, and usability problem.

Speaker 2: (29:56)
You, you nailed it. I mean, and this is something that we've been working through for the past decade at Squid, is don't put everything in an integration or an automation box because a lot of the time what you're talking about is simply needing to be able to see data integration, which uses server side power. If you're hosts on aws, it could potentially use, you know, transactions. So you need to be mindful of that. And, and so there are gonna be times when you want it to be on the server side when you want that deep integration, but a lot of the time you just need the user to be able to see the data and be able to see it in context. So I think that's a great distinction. It's, I'm gonna steal that Connor and we'll use it for conversations. The difference between integration and what you called unification.

Speaker 2: (30:38)
I think that's, that's a really helpful distinction there. So let's look at this here. So yeah, we're, we're bringing in products from ServiceNow and the use case that y'all had talked about was, you know, you, you might actually have a a a deeper list of products somewhere else and you only wanna create one kind of in HubSpot or you only wanna create a line item if it doesn't exist already. And so that's kind of what we're doing here. So we've got our list of products and I am, I'm connecting directly to that api, I'm using the user's permission and I can, I've got this in a squid table. We're, we're combining a couple of different squid components here. So the table component lets us take a list of records and iterate over those rows. We can put buttons to make it actionable, we can search on it as well.

Speaker 2: (31:21)
So if I wanna add from our rug uh, products to this, I can do that. So let's go ahead and quickly, let's add these rugs to this quote. I can also create a new product and save back to ServiceNow. So if I have the right permissions, depending on what I'm doing, maybe if I want to create a new product bundle or something like that, I can save back to that API because I have those user permissions in here. So I'm adding these rugs to our quote. We can also get a different view if we want. So the table view is really, really powerful, but we also have something called a deck component. So if you want more of this kind of grid view with cards like this, you can get contextual information in there, images, buttons, so on and so forth that can be useful in a lot of different applications.

Speaker 2: (32:12)
But we're still interacting with the same data. So without getting too technical, the point is is that we've got the same data layer underneath. We've got a list of products and here we're showing it in a table and here we're showing it in some cards in a deck, then I'm gonna hit the next button and that next button that's part of what we call a wizard component that lets you move the user, uh, through a step-by-step process. So we talked about kind of guiding users so that they do things in the right order and they, they feel helped in that process and we're, we're able to see that that progress there up at the top of the wizard. Then over here we've got an option for add-ons. And so you had talked about having logic and rules as part of a c pq and Squid has a lot of different places that we can add that logic.

Speaker 2: (32:55)
And here what we're doing is we can go look to see add-ons and we're using the data that exists in ServiceNow to see do any of these have a parent product. And so Rug Pad has a parent product of zigzag rug. And so we can see here that that shows up as, uh, as a child product that we can add to our quote here. So we are, we're building in that logic into the CBQ itself. And this one doesn't actually have any child products as well. So we can be very smart about what data we're bringing in and have it, you know, correspond to the, to the business logic, to the rules that you, that you want to have in place. So we're adding these products, let's go ahead and move on through to the next step. This is a good UX practice here, is to have that summary page at the end so the user understands what they're actually pushing through here and you know, they can then go back if they want.

Speaker 2: (33:49)
They can make changes here if they want. We can can change the quantity for some of these. And then we have this final action to save the line items to HubSpot. This is basically gonna take that data that we're getting from ServiceNow and now it's gonna go and create line items on the HubSpot deal here. So let's go ahead and do that. It's saving those and even that there, that uses the action framework to let the user know, hey, here's what's happening. You know, you don't have to click save multiple times and then we can go ahead and hit save or, or exit out of that. We'll hit refresh. And now when we go we should be able to go see the line items. There they are. They've been added to this detail in, in HubSpot crm. So I'll stop there. But that was, I know that was a really fun one for us to work on with y'all. And I do wanna, actually, before I forget, I do wanna give a shout out to we York, uh, who is on my team. She built out all of these demos and she's not on with us today, but uh, I'm taking all the credit for all work that she exclusively did and, uh, and she's absolutely awesome. So I'll stop there.

Speaker 1: (34:53)
Amazing. Thank you so much, Matt. These are awesome. I mean, I think the thing that gets me most excited about when we see these pieces is being able to have a lot of control and com composability on the front end to build kind of those micro applications. But then I think the extension of that is not needing to solve that data integration problem. Like just frees up so much capability for what you can do with these products. I think that it just like, it, it reduces the scale of complexity. It reduces the burden of, of technical requirements in order to get those pieces to sync and being able to access some of those applications. One thing you mentioned, some of these like out-of-the-box data connectors that you guys have, is that like a, you you just say, Hey, I wanna do products from NetSuite and and now you have them? Or what has to happen in order to make that possible?

Speaker 2: (35:39)
Yeah, that, that's a great question. It, uh, a lot of it depends on what you're pulling from. And so there are gonna be some data sources that are very easy to connect to. Like I said, we've been in the Salesforce space for a long time, so we've got a really good Salesforce connector. Um, if you use O Data, we can connect to o data o l in a way that's, that's very easy to work with. And then basically if there's a REST API out there and it's, it is um, it's well fleshed out, it's got all the methods, everything you need to be able to do with it, it's well documented. We can connect to that very, very easily. That one's a little bit more complex cuz there's a lot of power there and there's a lot of, lot of flexibility there. And that's where I would say Aptitude Day is gonna be a great partner to get you started on this, but once that's wired up, it's very easy to support, it's very stable and it's, it's constantly growing with the, with the capabilities there. Does that answer your question? Yeah,

Speaker 1: (36:31)
Absolutely. I What about modification? So one of the things we run into, I think especially with C pq, right? So like an example right now where we've built this really sophisticated big custom quote template and HubSpot that uses custom coded actions and, and coded logic and all these things are sort of like rearranged this template and, and power rules. And what we've noticed is as it's starting to get there, which is exciting actually about the HubSpot space generally, is historically we didn't have these problems cause you just couldn't build yourself into too much of a corner. Mm-hmm. And now we're seeing that start to happen. Yeah. So it's, it's a new, new mindsets for our team. But I think, uh, yeah, in that example, the thing that made us nervous is as we started building it, we're like, man, maintaining this thing is a huge pain. If, if I added a new pricing skew or I changed pricing, like I have to know how this code works. I have to go modify all these tables. Like it gets in this really robust, difficult to manage mess. I, how easy is it for somebody to modify kind of how something works or add a new room to your example or add a new product to your, your CPQ engine?

Speaker 2: (37:29)
Yeah, very easy. Again, you know, I it's the, it's the, it's the most frustrating answer in the world. There is a little bit of, it depends on that, but the, a lot of it depends on like, are you building it for, you know, robust applications and I'll, I'll just give an example, right? You can build, you can set up your data model in such a way that you can, it's set up for more dynamic growth. And, and what I mean by that is we, we have what we call models in the squid page that go and they get data and you can have a, a condition on that model that says only bring in records where x, y, and Z are true. And, you know, you can hard code that to say where, you know, product family is this value or you can make that a dynamic value so that it actually pulls from something else that is, is more robust for that.

Speaker 2: (38:24)
So there are ways to set it up and configure so that you, you know, you're set up for the future when you do add a new product family, when you do add a new product line, it's already, it's gonna cascade down and you're gonna, it's gonna automatically be included wherever it needs to be included. So a lot of that's gonna be a kind of an architecture discussion where, you know, y'all will bring your expertise to bear, we will work with you and work with the customer and say here's how you can get what you need now. But here's just a few things that if you think about these, you're gonna be set up, you know, for two or three years down the line.

Speaker 1: (38:58)
Yeah, I think, I think like most building of stuff, right, if you build it well at the front end , it's, it's a lot easier at the back end as well. Awesome. Well Matt, thank you so, so much for coming and, and sharing sort of all of your insights on, on Squid and everything else under the sun with us. If people are interested in Squid, what's the best way to, to get in touch with you guys?

Speaker 2: (39:16)
Yeah, you can go to the squid website. It's just squid.com, that is S K U I d.com and that is an acronym by the way, it stands for Scalable Kit for User Interface Design. You don't need to know that, that's not on the quiz . Uh, but if you go to the website, uh, you can check it out. If you're a builder and you wanna try it out, you can get started there. Um, but you can also, uh, get a demo and I would also encourage you to, to reach out to Aptitude eight as well cuz we we're, uh, we're gonna work together on these things. So yeah.

Speaker 1: (39:41)
Amazing. Well thank you so, so much. Uh, we're really excited about all of the functions with Squid. If, uh, you were, if you either came late or you had to leave early, it's totally okay. We'll have recordings and other stuff sent out to people. Uh, it's all good. Everyone loves to like watch. I'll watch on my lunch break at two and a half speed and it's totally cool, right? So if we're talking really, really fast on the recording right now, thank you for joining us after the fact. But Matt, thank you so much for joining us and for everyone who is able to attend, please reach out. We'd love to help you guys out and the Squid team is, is excited to get some users over into some of these functions and we'd love to work with you guys.

Speaker 2: (40:14)
Awesome. Thanks Connor. Thanks so

Speaker 1: (40:15)
Much. Thanks everybody.