The HubHeroes Podcast

George B. Thomas: You know, we were all very quiet during that intro.
I was like, actually, like nobody is doing anything, talking about anything.
Max Cohen: We're trying to be respectful to the intro, George. Trying to respect the intro, man
George B. Thomas: W- without a doubt. W-- You gotta, you gotta be respectful of the intro. You know what else you've gotta re- be respectful of? And before you share your screen, uh, Max, because I'm sure that potentially the Hub Heroes, the listeners and viewers might wanna know the, uh, the saga continues, uh, as far as Unbound, and that saga, what I'm talking about is your boy George B.
Thomas is on the page finally.
Chad Hohn: Ooh, my man
George B. Thomas: we, we are on the speakers page. Uh, and if you go over there, you will see that the session that will be happening will be the five-layer marketing system, stop chasing tactics. So again, you can't really do anything with this yet. Uh, they haven't opened up for like registration or whatnot, but just know that I will be, uh, gracing the stage again and super excited to really talk about the five layers, um, which might be shaped nothing like a loop.
Um,
Max Cohen: Guacamole. Guacamole, salsa,
Chad Hohn: that a beefy bean burrito
Max Cohen: there you
George B. Thomas: it. It's a five-layer beefy
Max Cohen: Sponsored by Taco Bell,
George B. Thomas: You know what would be funny is if I, now after this, if I just made all the graphics actually be some sort of like five-layer burrito gra-
Max Cohen: You
Chad Hohn: would be amazing
Max Cohen: Here's the Crunchwrap method of the inbound methodology. Yeah.
George B. Thomas: so here, so, so just, um,
Max Cohen: About to introduce you to Crunchwrap RevOps. Here we go
George B. Thomas: So show up at the talk to see if I'm nacho cheesy enough,
Max Cohen: Oh my God.
George B. Thomas: man, that might, that, that... Wow, that might deserve one of those this morning. I'm just...
Chad Hohn: Where's the groan?
George B. Thomas: it was pretty rough. It was pretty rough. Well, Max, so we're speaking about Unbound, but we're speaking about events. Uh, listen, I wanted to have
Max Cohen: Kinda
George B. Thomas: kinda talk about this. Well, it's, it's, I think it's very related, and let me explain why my brain went to, "Let's have Max talk about events.
Let's talk about events, Chad, me." Um, listen, probably about two months ago, uh, now it's flying by, I relaunched the Sidekick Strategies website, um, doing some vibe coding or whatever you wanna call it, some system building. And one of the things because of this I implemented is I was like, I always wanted to have like a dope events section of the website, and I wanted to do events, and I wanted to do micro events, meaning 30 minutes or less about a topic.
And I've been doing that for two months now, and it's been astronomical, um, getting people in there and, like, teaching them and, and by the way, one of them has blown up. July 17th, I believe it is, we're talking about what Breeze can do that. Uh, Dharmesh himself has registered to actually, um, attend the webinar, which is kinda crazy.
And some other folks too. We've got a, got a guest, a special guest that's gonna join me. I'm trying to get a third special guest. We'll see if I can pull it off. Uh, but we're gonna talk, that one we're gonna talk a little bit longer, 45 minutes about Breeze and all the cool things that you can do with Breeze Assistant inside of HubSpot.
But that being said, like now, in a world filled with AI, uh, and the need to be more human and to have a place where you can show your face that isn't necessarily an avatar, I think virtual and live events is something that just needs to be in the forefront of everybody's cranium when it comes to their sales, their marketing, just their, their general business strategy.
And I think, Max, you know something about events and HubSpot
Max Cohen: it at least how to run 'em on HubSpot. Yeah, true. Yeah. Yeah. I wouldn't, I wouldn't, I wouldn't by any self- b- by any stretch of the imagination call myself a, an event expert in general, right? I don't know, I don't know, uh, uh, I don't know how to prick the, pick the pr-
George B. Thomas: geez.
Chad Hohn: Ooh, what now? Why,
George B. Thomas: That was close.
Max Cohen: I was about to make a joke with this. I, I don't know how to pick the proper foundu- fondue fountain, but that was the worst, that was the worst tongue twister I could've possibly picked. There was no way I was getting through that sen-
Chad Hohn: a peck
Max Cohen: the proper foundue fountain.
George B. Thomas: Yes. Sally had events at the seashore. Anyway, here.
Chad Hohn: Betty bought a bit of butter
Max Cohen: foundue fountain.
Found... See, I can't even say it. Foundue fountain.
George B. Thomas: Phew.
Max Cohen: fondue fountain. Yeah. Anyway, um, awesome. Yeah, dude. Um, so I know we were, we were, yeah, dude, um, I know we were talking about last week what do we wanna do for an episode, and we, um, last week just did our big, um, hoorah-rah sort of, uh, announcement to the world on some of the things we've been cooking up, uh, over here, uh, at Happily now that we are a full-fledged events only, um, operation.
Um, for anyone watching who doesn't know what we do, we basically build, like, an event management platform that's, like, fully built to run on and off of HubSpot, right?
George B. Thomas: Ooh.
Max Cohen: running events on
George B. Thomas: off of HubSpot you just said, which I
Max Cohen: Yeah, run them on HubSpot, run it off HubSpot, run it in HubSpot, however you wanna think about it. Off, in, around, near, close to, afar, whatever you wanna think about it, right?
Um, have you guys ever tried to set up event stuff on HubSpot before? Do you guys have any horror stories?
George B. Thomas: it's, it's, um,
Chad Hohn: Yeah.
Max Cohen: Yeah.
George B. Thomas: S- so it's a, it, it's a little brutal historically. Um, I will tell you that when you have the ability to, uh, vibe code around what has built, it gets a little bit easier. But before two months ago, Max, if you asked me that question, I probably would've just started pulling my hair out right here on the show, like, "Blah!"
Like,
Max Cohen: What do you think are, what do you think are the biggest reasons of why it's, like, so brutal? Like, what makes it brutal?
George B. Thomas: Well, I think, uh, and again, uh, send hate mail to somebody other than me, but I think, uh, the fact that Markie De events is not a, uh, grown-up object, and I think that, um, the way that it was built, it's hard for most mere mortal humans to understand what they're trying to look at and why it's not there, but it is somewhere else that happens to be attached to it anyway.
Soon as you gotta explain it like that, you got-- you're explaining it weird. And so I just, I just think too, uh, if, if I'm being honest, um, it, it wasn't built with
Max Cohen: Mm-hmm. Yeah
George B. Thomas: the right outcome in mind, right? You almost, you almost have to build an events thing as like an events person, not a marketer, and then just make it work for the marketer. Y- you know what I mean?
Max Cohen: Yeah. And like h- the, so I'm like pretty charitable to HubSpot in, in this, um, topic because the, the, the, the truth of the matter is, is like HubSpot was built to be like a marketing and CRM and sales system. It was never, ever built to be an events tool. But the unfortunate tr- I, I don't wanna call it unfortunate truth.
The reality is, um, HubSpot has all of the tools in the tool set that event marketers need, and so they go, "Wow, 90% of it besides registration and check-in is here.
George B. Thomas: Yeah
Max Cohen: can't I use it for that?" And you would naturally think that you'd be able to use your marketing tools to run your event a little bit, because again, event marketers like to use the, the tools that they have generally, or like to at least attempt to, right?
And so like I, I, you know, I remember, you know, back when I was onboarding people in 2015, we had people that were like, "Oh, I wanted to use this HubSpot form to register people for this event, but..." And I'm sure you guys have hit this
Chad Hohn: Oh yeah.
Max Cohen: sna- I think you probably know what I'm gonna say. Chad, you wanna finish my sentence there?
Chad Hohn: yeah.
Max Cohen: I wanna see if we're on the same page
Chad Hohn: well yeah, it's just like you gotta get the, uh, you know, ID into the system to register for a webinar or whatever, and then, you know, you have to, uh, like depending on what platform it is, you gotta use the, the Zoom ID and register for a thing, and then you gotta then send an email properly, and that's a whole thing to make sure that like they're getting all the event and calendar notifications.
And then, you know, I mean, I... it's, it's just a chore, so you have to use either workflows or
Max Cohen: Yeah, and I think you're, you're hitting on the fact that, like, all the integrations with, like, the other, uh, of, like, event management point solutions are very much box-checking exercises, right? Like, they go, "Oh, we take name of event, we put it in contact property, we have integration."
Like, and that's, like, how it was for, like, so long, you know what I mean? But I think the other even, uh, even if you think about not using, like, an integration, uh, I'm sure you guys have run into, like, "Oh, hey, we used this HubSpot form for an event, but, uh, someone just overwrote a contact property seven times," and 'cause they invited them and their friends, right?
Yeah, right? And, like, it, that, that, I, I use that example all the time just to kind of, like, illustrate that, like, HubSpot forms are amazing. They're not built for event registration because, like, it's not, like, event registration forms are general- or can be 20 times more complicated than, like, a basic lead capture form.
Chad Hohn: Like even with the new form builder and all the custom stuff, right, that it can do, like, I mean, it, it does have access to custom objects, but it's like such a workaround
Max Cohen: It really
Chad Hohn: and get that done,
Max Cohen: Yeah. And then there's also just, like, the thing that, like, trips most people up is that, like, the data structure just doesn't properly exist, right? Like, we're, we're so coded to kinda think in the terms of, like, contact properties and, like, that's where you put data and yada, yada, yada. But, like, w- data structures around, like, your event are, like, way more, uh, nuanced, uh, than they seem, right?
Like, for example, how do you represent, you know, an instance of what is a registration? When someone registers for something, that's like its own thing. It's, it's like a thing that happened that you did, just like a lead object is its own thing and a deal object is its own thing, right? Like, imagine if we represented every deal someone ever closed on in contact properties and just overridden every single time.
Like, you'd think that's crazy, right? But the same thing goes for when people register for events, right? So, like, that's something that trips people up, uh, a whole ton. So, like, Happly came out, I don't know, uh, two or three-ish... No, two-ish years ago, I think. Um, and, you know, that's kind of, like, one of the big problems we set out to solve at the beginning is, like, how do we make, like, data structure kind of, like, make a lot more sense for, like, events people, right?
But we were kind of forever stricken by this, um, this, this, the, the limitations, if you will, of, like, HubSpot forms, right? Um, especially when it came to the world of paid events,
George B. Thomas: see, that's a whole nother layer of stuff.
Max Cohen: Talk to me, George. Talk to me, George.
George B. Thomas: I mean, 'cause, 'cause like, then you're, then you gotta get like payment links involved. If, if you're running with HubSpot Commerce, you've gotta get payment links involved and, and then, you know, understand how to actually either modify the stuff that you're pulling in during that payment link, or have a form sitting before it to then get...
Uh, or it be like... Anyway, it's just flip a switch on
Chad Hohn: it is cool, like, HubSpot did launch payment link API endpoints where you can do things with that, so that's actually a really awesome step in the right direction. But it's still...
Max Cohen: done that earlier, we probably wouldn't have gone the direction that we... Well, I'm, uh, we
George B. Thomas: that just happened, like, recently.
Max Cohen: very recently. Yeah.
Chad Hohn: Very recently, yeah
George B. Thomas: my Cloud Code, uh, agent thanks them very much 'cause we've already used it
Max Cohen: Yeah. So the, the big, the big sort of like announcement here and like the big thing we just launched is, um, is kind of like two... There's like two steps, right? Um, one, we've built this thing called registration flows, which is like Happily's first sort of step in the direction of, um, like breaking our-- the, the chokehold that like HubSpot forms had on us, right?
And, and being very limited to only being able to run registration through HubSpot forms, right? Because as much like crazy magic as we've been able to do to them over the past couple of years, right? Like we have CMS modules that like let you do multi-guest registration and let you do session selection and like all this crazy fancy stuff, and like we really kind of push them, the HubSpot forms really kind of like to their limit of what they can really do and what they're built to do.
Um, we kinda knew that like for us to like be able to support much more complex, um, like registration needs and like configuration, we'd have to, you know, be playing like on our own playing field that we're actually like building and have full control over, right? Instead of having to bend HubSpot forms backwards into a different dimension they were never i-i-intended to exist in, right?
Um, and payment links is the same story, right? Um, so, um, let me go ahead and I'll, I'll share my screen and I can kinda give you an idea.
Chad Hohn: doing it the way that you're doing it now, I mean, what it, you know, feels like to me, right, is that you're now truly able to compete with some of the other competitors in the event space. However, you'll have by far the deepest HubSpot integration. Everybody else never used HubSpot. They're like,
Max Cohen: Yes
Chad Hohn: HubSpot integrations are poo-poo, right?
I mean, they just,
Max Cohen: yeah, besides maybe supporting the marketing events object,
Chad Hohn: Mm-hmm
Max Cohen: the, the, the integrations with most third-party point solutions for event stuff has, have gone changed. It's like you've got-- everyone's got a crappy contact sync where it's like most recent event registered for, most recent event checked in for, most, like last event.
And like if you're lucky, you'll get last event and the event before, right? Um, but it's all contact properties, right? And that data just turns into a black hole as soon as someone registers for something else, blah, blah, blah. Some of them have adopted the marketing events object. The problem is the marketing events object was really underbaked until right now it's finally coming along, which is good.
So like we, we'd love to use it at some point one day. Um, or maybe not. No, we're probably gonna go the app object route, we're gonna, we're gonna see. Um, and then you've-- and then, um, what was the other... The other piece, sometimes they'll do like timeline events. You haven't seen a lot of them like adopt apt event, app events yet, which is pretty unfortunate 'cause app events are really, really, really cool.
Um, not to use 12 different m-m-meanings for the word events. It's like, dude, events is like the second worst word in HubSpot besides campaigns.
George B. Thomas: That's the first. I was, I was hoping you were gonna use
Max Cohen: Yeah. Yeah, you guys
George B. Thomas: the bane of my
Chad Hohn: you gotta tie into that, and now it's Marketing Studio if you have that on, but if you don't, it's not. I mean, that's a whole thing.
Max Cohen: Yeah. And then it gets even like more complicated when you think of like, you know, all the different ways people can do registration, right?
So it's like, all right, um, you know, I want people to be able to register, uh, you know, themselves and somebody else. I want someone to be able to register, but they're actually not registering themselves, they're registering two other people, and you sometimes they have an email address, sometimes they don't.
Oh, oh, I want people to register, and we sell a mix of like free and paid tickets, and I want them to be able to choose quantities of each one, blah, blah, blah. And oh, yeah, and I want them to be able to do sessions, and blah, blah. And it's just you, you, it... You can go one or two degrees before HubSpot forms can still kinda handle it, but then anything past that, you're just like totally cooked, right?
Um, so I'll kinda show you what we did here, um, and kinda how we're handling it in some pretty exciting ways. We're, we're passing a lot of that data into HubSpot in the ways that, you know, it, it should be done, which is, which is cool. So, um, I'm gonna pop into here. First off, I don't know if you-- last time either one of you guys have been in Happly, but, uh, our UI, it's been a hot minute.
Yep. Our UI just got a nice little fresh coat of paint on it, so it's a little, uh, it's a little, uh, a little prettier, a little easier to navigate, a little less stuff kinda going on, right? Um, but it all starts with creating, uh, an event here, right? So I'm gonna-- Let's go ahead and create an event here.
We'll, right, we'll call this a Hub Heroes, uh, Listener Conference 2026. This is a, a little side event. We'll do it, we'll do it unbound.
Chad Hohn: check and make sure that this isn't taken by any other events like Bluebeam or anything like
that
George B. Thomas: Oh man, are you,
is it, is that gonna be happening the whole, like the whole show?
Chad Hohn: sorry. Oopsie-poopsie.
Max Cohen: at least inside your own HubSpot portal, yes, we can, we can confirm you haven't named, you haven't stolen the event na- not stolen, you haven't used a different event name that's already been used by another one of
Chad Hohn: it's all
Max Cohen: right? There you go.
George B. Thomas: by the way, I'm reaching out to Bluebeam so they can pay us for every time we mention their
brand during the,
Max Cohen: true.
Chad Hohn: Dude, you gotta get those, I mean, yeah, brought to you by Carl's Jr
Max Cohen: Yeah. Um, this is a, uh, this is an official Hub Heroes, uh, event. Very cool. Um, so next, uh, kinda like how you'd expect here, um, you can choose when your event starts. I do wanna, like, nerd out on this for a second with you guys 'cause I think you'll appreciate it. Um, so we all know, like, start date and end date fields inside of HubSpot can get a little bit goofy, especially if you wanna use those as, like, personalization tokens and stuff like that, uh, inside of HubSpot.
Um, you know, here we do some really, really smart stuff where, like, you tell us the date of your event. You can also tell us if it's, like, a multi-day event and stuff like that. But you can tell us your time zone that the event's actually gonna be in, right? So you're not locked into whatever your portal time zone is.
Um, you can choose your locale formatting or your formatting locale for, like, how you actually write the dates and stuff, uh, as well as a date format and a time format, right? And so what's cool about this is that, like, the personalization tokens you would use, um, are text fields where the date is translated into whatever version of that you wanna do it, and we break it down into date and time, right?
So instead of it just being the way, like, timestamps render, right, we actually let you kinda say like, "Oh, I don't want it to say, you know, number/number/number/number/, you know, uh, time zone of my portal," right? I want it to say, you know, "Tuesday, August 25th, 2027," like with commas and full words and, like, all this kinda stuff.
And you can choose how it goes from event to event to event. You're not locked into one way of using it, which is pretty cool. Um, and we can come in, we can just go ahead and give it a... I'll give it, like, a quick little vendor, uh, venue here. We'll go to the Funk Shop, uh, in Bilerica. Why not, right? In the country of Azeroth.
Uh, 12345 for the postal code. You can also have, like, other custom properties you have from your event object in here. There's no, like, mapping of anything, right? 'Cause we're using your HubSpot data here. So, like, a lot of the other, you know, third-party tools out there, like, you need to, like, set up complex mappings, like, between your field and data and all that kinda stuff.
Like, you don't need to do any of that stuff 'cause we're simply just using properties that you have in your HubSpot account for, like, your different events and stuff like that. Um, we can also upload a featured image. I'm gonna skip that for now just 'cause, um, I wanna show you the cool stuff. Now, this is the new part, okay?
So traditionally, when you've been building events, the only option that you've had here is to use a HubSpot form for your event. And what we would do in this case is we would go take a HubSpot form from your account, we would clone it, and we would inject a whole bunch of hidden stuff in the background that if you filled that form out, they'd automatically get registered for the event.
We're using contact webhooks and stuff. It worked really well. It still works really good. Um, we, we, we love this method. But this brand new thing where we're taking HubSpot forms out of the equation are these Happily registration flows, right? And this is sort of like the V1 of us completely containing the entire registration experience in our own Um, in our own
Chad Hohn: Super form builder. Yeah.
George B. Thomas: Nice. Nice
Max Cohen: Uh, think of it as like a registration experience builder type thing, and this is sort of like the platform that we've kinda built the foundation, if you will, um, to be able to handle super complex registrations today, and even more complex stuff in the future. We've got some wild plans for this, right?
But it all starts by just giving your registration flow a name, right? So we can just say, um, General Public Registration Flow, and then I can give it a description. I'm just gonna put test. And then we can turn, turn it-- we can choose to turn it on immediately, right? So like after I build this, like we'll have a link ready to go where people can just start registering immediately.
Like we don't have to set up a HubSpot page. We don't have to do anything here. You could put it onto a HubSpot page if you want to, um, or really any website. Like we give you the ability to like embed it and stuff like that, right? And then we're building a bunch of really cool HubSpot CMS modules that will get people to these registration flows in like a lot of different creative ways, right?
But in order to build a registration flow, you have to build what's called a registration type, right? So like these are the different types of registrations people can get, and this is where it kinda leads into, um, the fact that like we can now very easily do paid registrations for your events, right? So George, if you're selling
George B. Thomas: Yeah. Yeah
Max Cohen: If you're selling courses with a bunch of like sessions people need to sign up for, maybe some of them are, are, um, required and they get automatically registered. Um, some of them are, are, are optional, right? You'll be able to do that kind of stuff. Um, but let's go ahead and build our first registration type here.
So I'm gonna go ahead and build a type. You start by giving it a name, right? So let's start by having like a free pass to the event, right? Something that anyone can get. Um, so what I'll go, I'll just say, uh, Free Hero, uh, Free Hero, uh, Journey Human Pass, right? 'Cause I know George would love this. Um, so you can give it a description if you wanted to, and then you can start to get into, uh, how many are actually available, right?
Because not only do you wanna sell tickets, you may only wanna sell a certain amount of them, right? So here you can either have your registration types be unlimited, or you can flip it to a limited amount of registrations. So let's say we only wanna give away, um- 50 free passes, right? I'm gonna not turn on any of this pricing or quantity stuff.
I'm gonna make the pa- the, the, the, the pass free, right? And then we can hit Next, and then here you can set up what questions get asked additionally. Um, actually, wait, no, this is, uh... Yeah, what questions get asked when someone chooses this registration, right? So have you ever had someone say, like, "Oh, if someone registers for, like, a VIP or someone is, like, a, a partner or something like that, right?
We wanna ask specific questions, but only if..." Right? So that's where, that's where this is, right? So, um, here what you can do, uh, is you can choose what additional information, um, they'll have to put in only if they select this ticket, right? So I can say, all right, first name, last name, email, uh, and then we can say, "For these free passes, we at least want your company name."
Right? So anyone who gets this, um, is going to have to provide company name. Now, you'll notice over here some of these are required, some of them are not. We give you full control over whether this information is required, including email address, okay? So if you un-require email address, what's gonna happen is we have this function to create guest registrations, right?
So oftentimes when you're registering people for an event, you wanna go and, like, get a ticket, but, like, you might not know everyone's email, but you gotta at least be able to reserve the ticket, right? So if customers wanna allow people to do that when registering, they can un-require email, and we'll create guest registrations for them that they can then transfer to somebody later, and all that information gets automatically updated in HubSpot when it happens, right?
Um, I'm gonna require it for now. Um, and then what we can do here is we can, uh, move on to the next, uh, part, which is availability, right? So it's like, when are these tickets actually available for someone to buy, right? So it can either be immediately, which is what it defaults to, or we can say, hey, these tickets will go on sale on a specific date or time, and that's when they'll become available on the registration flow that they set on.
And then you can choose when they're no longer available to be sold, right? Or, or, or registered for, right? So it could be on a specific date. It could be right when the event starts. It could be when the event ends. Maybe you sell tickets throughout the actual event themselves, and someone could buy it on day three of four, for example, and still get into the event.
Um, or When you sell a certain amount of them, right? They'll, they'll stop when-- Actually, when-- That's the default, right? When you run out of, of however many you're, you're selling, right? You could also choose whether or not the tickets can be transferable. You may or may not want people to be able to transfer registrations to other folks, and we, we give ticket holders a, um, or registration holders, like, their, their own way of self-serve doing this, so you don't have to deal with it, right?
I'm gonna leave it on for now. I'm gonna change this to immediately, and we'll kinda move on to the next piece. And this is the confirmation, right? So this is just information that's gonna be sent to them, uh, in an email when they register for the event. Um, but then you can add custom information, right?
So, like, let's say this was, like, a VIP ticket, for example, and you want, like, a little message to go here to say, like, "Hey, just so you know, VIP parking is, like, on the second floor of the parking lot." I, I don't know. Whatever, whatever, whatever it might be, right? You can add custom messages that'll go into the confirmation email and the confirmation page when someone gets a registration of this type, right?
So I'll go ahead and create that. Uh, and then I can just go ahead and add a new one. So let's go do a paid pass. So we'll just call this, like, VIP, uh, paid, uh... I don't know. Paid, paid that. No. VIP pass. What am I, what am I doing here? I'm
Chad Hohn: no, we have to have, like, paid human,
Max Cohen: Yeah. P- VIP... Uh, wait, no. VIH. Very important human pass.
There we go.
George B. Thomas: oh, geez. We
Max Cohen: VIH pass.
Chad Hohn: VIPASS
Max Cohen: VIH pass, and we'll just say with, with AI, right? This one has AI on it, right? Um, so, so
George B. Thomas: for the bots to register
Max Cohen: it's for the bots, right? Yeah. So I can come in here and I can make this a paid ticket, right? So I can come in here and I'll say, like, oh, it's 100 bucks. We can collect sales tax. We have a whole boring way through our settings for you to set up sales tax.
Um, there is a processing fee, right? Uh, and you can choose to either absorb that on your own or pass it on to the, on to the purchaser, right? Uh, and we'll kinda do that intelligently and give you some information about your revenue per registration,
Chad Hohn: you know what you should do? Is you should, um, like, be able to choose the sale price you want
Max Cohen: We're, we're doing a whole... Yeah, we're doing, like, a whole pass on, um, uh, like, coupons and discount codes and, like, a whole bunch of other stuff coming up soon. So, like, that kind of stuff will, will be in there.
Chad Hohn: 'Cause it's like, hey, what if I want my ticket to be 500 bucks, but then I gotta do the weird math, you
Max Cohen: Yeah, yeah.
Chad Hohn: my absorb fee or
Max Cohen: That's actually good feedback, right? Yeah, it's like what-- It's almost, almost like choose what you want your revenue to be and like we'll automatically price the ticket for you. Yeah, I can see that. Yeah, yeah. Yep. No, for
Chad Hohn: the- some people like to go at it both directions, but that's cool that you have the, the feature in
Max Cohen: yeah, you could, yeah, 'cause right now you gotta do, like, some math to get there, but I like that.
Um, all right, cool. So you go ahead and we'll select this. I'm gonna make this a email first and last just because we make them fill out less information 'cause they got the paid ticket. I don't know. Whatever, it's my story and I'm sticking to it, right? So we'll go ahead and hit Next, uh, and we'll let these be transferable, and we'll create the registration type.
Cool. So you've got your, your different tickets and passes set up. One is unlimited, the other one is 50, right? We're not dealing with a HubSpot form. Um, and we're gonna go ahead and hit Next. Uh, and then this is setting up the first registration flow, okay? Now, you might be looking at this and being like, "Hey, I just filled out form stuff," right?
This is the very first form someone sees when they hit a registration flow before they've selected any tickets. And the reason this one is separate, like all this stuff writes to contact properties, whereas the previous forms you saw write to registrant properties because it's information about that registration.
This is the form that people fill out if they're, like, the person doing the registration, right? So, like, a big piece of feedback we got from people is, like, they go, "Hey, we often have folks, like, register people for this, like, conference or whatever," but, like, it's a, you know, office manager signing up the team and they're not actually attending or something like that, right?
So this gets the information of the person who's, like, the registrar or the purchaser or, like, whatever it may be of, of this registration. It could be one of the attendees, right? Uh, but we're flexible enough to make it so, like, it could just be someone buying tickets on behalf of someone else. So you can come in here and just say, like, "Hey, what information do we need to collect about the person actually doing the registration?"
And sometimes that might be the same, sometimes it's not. To avoid you having to fill this information out twice, you're gonna see a little later kinda, like, how we handle it so it's, it, it doesn't feel like you're filling forms out multiple times. Um, so here I can go add a featured image. Let's see what I have.
Uh, I got a lot of weird, funny stuff in here. Um, there's just so much crazy crap. We'll do this Happily logo. Sure, why not? Um, so we can upload a featured image, um, and I picked the worst image to use here. And then you can add some info. This is just information that will show up, like, on the actual registration flow itself.
So I'll say this, uh, "This event is great." Uh, George is going to say, uh, "HUMANS" in all caps. Exactly. You're gonna get it
Chad Hohn: prophecy foretold.
Max Cohen: the prophecy is, is foretold for
Chad Hohn: fulfilled.
George B. Thomas: Wee!
Max Cohen: so you gotta hit Next. And then this is where you kinda get into, like, our classic, um, uh, event- Uh, builder, uh, and, and you kind of fill in the blanks of the rest of the stuff you need.
So like we'll build a bunch of lists for you inside of HubSpot, or if you only want a couple, you can like delete a few. We don't need to do a registration confirmation email in this case because we're gonna take care of sending the email, uh, automatically for you, so you don't have to worry about it.
Like you don't have to set it up inside of HubSpot. And the reason we do that is because like, you know, you're-- people are buying tickets from you, so like you gotta make sure receipts get sent and like we don't want people to have to buy transactional email and all this kind of stuff. So like we take care of sending that on our own, and we got a whole bunch of cool like customization options and things like that come into it.
Um, and then you can choose an event landing page. Now, this is not required, but what'll happen is if you choose one of these landing pages, we'll actually embed this on a landing page. I haven't set any of that up for this, this thing, so I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna select one. I'm just gonna use what we kinda give you.
Um, you can also choose if you wanna do mobile lead capture. We don't need to do that 'cause this isn't like a trade show we're going to. It's an event we're hosting. Um, if you have Zoom set up, you can automatically create the Zoom meeting or the Zoom webinar for it. I don't have it set up, so I'm not gonna do it.
And we'll also create a HubSpot campaign for you. Cool little update here. We now can associate literally everything we make to the HubSpot campaigns because their API opened up to allow you to use the API to associate any asset now instead of just like lists and external website pages or
Chad Hohn: It's so much better. I mean, just about anything can get associated to a campaign for reporting purposes. It's, it's a huge quality of life
Max Cohen: Yep. Um, so from here, we have this Communications tab, right? Now, what's neat about this is this will actually build emails for you in HubSpot that are automatically just set up to go at a specific time. We'll write you some basic boilerplate AI copy that you can go and change if you want to later, but we use the context of the event to like put it in there.
Uh, but you can come in and edit this, and you'll see that there's this audience thing built in where it's automatically sending it to the right like types of people. So like everyone who's registered, anyone who attended, anyone who did not attend. And you can queue up a lot of these emails. You can also add them later if you don't really know kinda what you want.
But this is just using those lists. So it builds the email, it automatically schedules it for the right time, and then it attaches the list as the audience, so you don't even have to like wire any of that stuff up,
Chad Hohn: Man, you know what'd be cool is if you could invoke Remix because Remix understands if you've set up your AI data sources a little bit more about your specific business, right? Um, that'd be super cool, but I don't think that's, there's even any remote way to invoke Remix
Max Cohen: not yet. One day.
Chad Hohn: I'm sure it will be, be a thing that-
Max Cohen: So in, in the, the four or five seconds that was running, we just built landing pages, lists, all those emails, queued them up, built a campaign, connected everything, donezo. All that stuff for you is sitting inside of HubSpot, which is cool. Um, but I'm not here to show you the inside of HubSpot stuff.
Uh, I'm here to show you the, uh, actual, uh, uh, registration flow that we built,
George B. Thomas: Which by the way, can we just pause for a second to say that most mere mortal humans up until this point, if they're watching this probably were like, "Wait, I thought we were in HubSpot." Because the, the, the,
Chad Hohn: Feels very
George B. Thomas: made it look like HubSpot, feel like HubSpot is pretty amazing. Um, but if they rewind and look at the URL that you've been on, it is not, uh, a @hubspot, you know, .hubspot.
Uh, so kudos to the team for that, by the
Max Cohen: And that's extremely intentional. We want this to feel like an extremely familiar experience. We don't want you to feel like you're learning a new tool. We want you to navigate it and feel like you're navigating it and find stuff, like, in the same way that you're used to, right? I mean, we even moved the little gearbox icon on the top right-hand corner to get to settings, just like you have inside of HubSpot, right?
George B. Thomas: you guys love it when HubSpot changes their theme then? Like, you're big fans of that?
Max Cohen: Uh, I, we actually do because our theme is more in line with the old one that people actually love. So people like to spend time back here 'cause they're like, "Oh, it brings me back to the good old days, not when everything looked like a black and white piece of paper."
George B. Thomas: may have, I may have opened that hornet's nest on purpose,
Max Cohen: yeah. Yeah, yeah. True, true, true. Um, so when you go into registration, this is where there's a whole bunch of new stuff, right?
So all those registration types already built are here. Um, a really cool thing is that we have this timeline view. So if you have any tickets that start getting sold because other tickets get sold out, you can queue them up to kind of work and play off of each other in sort of a visual way here, right?
So, like, I could come into here, uh, and I could say, um, let's go check out this, the VIH pass that we had here, and let's actually make it so this is available when another registration becomes unavailable, and it's this one, right? So I'm gonna hit save, and now what you see here is that this ticket will go on sale when these free passes sell out, right?
So, like, you can automatically queue up, like, when these tickets, like, start to become available. I'm gonna change it back for now just so we can do, uh, like I can show you how you can add, like, multiple tickets and stuff like that, right? But we have our tickets ready to go. Uh, you can also see how many registrations you sold, your revenue, all that kind of stuff.
Um, and then you have your registration flows. Now, here's the thing. I can create multiple registration flows, and these registration flows are ways that people can actually go register for the event, right? So I've turned this on. I have my general public one. But, like, let's say for example, you're, like, an association, and you have, like, special member pricing for different tickets, right?
What you could do... Yep
George B. Thomas: or
Max Cohen: Yep. You could create a separate registration flow, and give- only give people that link the ability that should get there. We're gonna, we're gonna build in a whole bunch of, um, registration flow routing features that like... You know, imagine you get to a page, you give some information, and it, it then sends you to a different registration flow for you to register for an event, right?
Um, so we're gonna be building some other stuff that helps you get there. But let me go and actually click on the registration flow. Actually, no, I don't wanna do this. I wanna open the registration flow, and this is what a registration flow looks like. Of course, I picked the worst image of all time to use as my listing image up here, but that's fine.
We're gonna, we're gonna ignore that for now. Um, and I'm gonna start filling this out. So I'm gonna say, "Hey, I'm Max." Next. Um, I could... I, I don't wanna pay money right now, so I'm just gonna get us three, uh, journey human passes here. So I'm gonna go one, two, three, and then... But I could easily mix additional passes here if I want to.
Actually, I'm gonna do this just so I can kinda show you what happens. I'm not gonna actually pay for it, though. I'm gonna back out at the last second. So I'm gonna hit Next. Now, this is where you actually put in the information for all the different registrants, right? So we can say... Oh, uh, actually, sorry.
I just showed you the wrong way to do it, right? So I just started filling the information out again, right? If one of these passes is for me, I can just hit This registration is for me. It'll pull it over. If I picked the wrong one, I can click, and it'll remove it and flip me over to the new one, right?
What we're doing is we're just matching on internal name and label name instead of doing any sort of weird, like, mapping or anything like that. So if any of the internal names of the registrant properties, which are what these are, match the contact ones, right, um, or the label on the form is the same, we'll automatically bring that stuff over so you don't have to do it.
Now, if you don't have everyone's information, you can also hit Let guests add their own info later, and I can just put in their email address, and you guys would get an email saying, "Hey, you registered," and you'd be able to pop your own info in there, right? But I'm gonna, I'm gonna fill this out happily.
Actually, well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna actually go and, and just do free passes real quick, right? Um, so this is me. Uh, this is George Amess. Do George@sidekickstrategy. Wait, what is it? Oh, george@georgebamess.com. Look at that. We'll call it Sidekick Strategies, and we'll do Chad Hahn. Now, let's say
George B. Thomas: No. georgebthomas.com. Georgebthomas.com. Yeah. Oof, geez, that was close Yeah
Max Cohen: I don't know Chad's email address
George B. Thomas: Hmm.
Max Cohen: I could put mine in and that's okay, right? Um, and then
Chad Hohn: of the same
Max Cohen: yes, that is, that is fine, and it's all because of the way we handle the registered stuff in the background, right? So I'm gonna go hit next. I'm gonna hit confirm. Mm-hmm.
George B. Thomas: It's almost like you and the team or the team and whoever sat down and said, "What are all the things that could go wrong or are wrong with like events today in this modern world? And let's fix those."
Max Cohen: it's almost as if we've been getting yelled at by events people for the past two and a half years, and I have a whole bunch of, uh, past trauma from dealing with it with customers for the past 10, yeah. And so cool thing here is we have this thing called the registered portal. Now, if you got registered, you received an email for these, right?
And you can actually access this. This lets you come in and go ahead and, like, edit and even transfer your registrations to other people, right? Uh, but you can see this registration's under Chad, but it's under my email address, right? Um, and then if you-- I don't-- I think you guys probably... We still have the old emails going, but you have some nice fancy emails that get sent,
George B. Thomas: Oh yeah, I
Max Cohen: here.
You got an email? You got a nice email?
George B. Thomas: nice email. It's got an add to calendar. It's got a QR code. It's got a manage my registration
Max Cohen: Is it blue or is it orange?
George B. Thomas: blue.
Max Cohen: Oh, good. All right, you got the new ones then. Yeah, absolutely. Um, so yeah, you got the nice new emails. Now what's cool is I can come here and I can actually change any of the other events I've registered for for your company. So if I'm registered for more than one event, I can come in here and I can change it and go to, like, a different event if I want to, right?
Um, so, like, you can come in here and, and change around your registrations. You can see all your registrations, all that fun stuff. You can add a calendar, edit transfer, all these things, right? Um, real quick, I'm gonna speed run this 'cause I know we're over time here right now, but if I come back into here, I can see registrants, and then if I click the View in HubSpot button, I can see my registrants.
And you can see here, even though this is a registration for Chad,
George B. Thomas: Yeah
Max Cohen: it to me, Max, in the background, right? Um, because I'm the person that actually did the registration for you. If I were to go and actually transfer this into your email, Chad, it would change it, right? So, um, which I'm not gonna do right now 'cause we don't have enough time.
Um, the other thing I wanted to show you that's also brand new is that we now have a badge
George B. Thomas: Oh, look at that
Chad Hohn: Oh.
Max Cohen: that will use HubSpot registrant information, right? So, like, I can come into here, I can go build a badge. I'm just gonna go grab, like, a random background that I had here. I don't even know where... No, actually, I'm gonna do the most boring badge
Chad Hohn: know what I know you have is a cardboard box texture
Max Cohen: I definitely do have cardboard box texture, right?
Uh, but what I'm gonna do here is, uh, I'm just gonna go ahead and publish this. This is the worst badge I've ever made, right? But we publish this, and now when I go run check-in at the event, I have a Print Badge button. I also get it in the actual registration flow, right? So I can come into here, uh, and I can go check in.
I can confirm the check-in. We're actually redoing this, like, whole page 'cause it could be a lot more, uh, streamlined.
Chad Hohn: He gave me a beer too
Max Cohen: print the badge, and there you go right there. Yeah. Yeah, we can do four-by-six. We can do four-by-three. We can do, like, a sticker sheet of badges, for example. So, like, you could do, like, a situation like this if you wanna pre-print a bunch of, like, name badges and just print 'em out with, like, an inkjet printer.
You can do all that kind of stuff. Uh, but yeah, I mean, we've got registration flows now. Uh, and all this stuff, again, all this data is inside of HubSpot. Now, if someone buys a paid registration, I just wanna show you what this looks like real quick. So I'm gonna go to one of my demo events here, this user conference, right?
What's really cool is that you'd be able to easily report on your paid registration revenue, your abandoned registrations, how many registrations you actually sold, any refunds you did. You'll see the registrations as deals getting associated to the event itself. You can do reports to break it down by ticket type, uh, registration, uh, registrations by different types.
So you got free pass, guest pass, all this kind of stuff. But what we do here, um, let me go look at one that's not abandoned. Uh, here we go. So I can go in and look at a deal. I can see the registrations that were created from this. I can see who the person that actually bought the tickets was. Um, we, we were moving stuff around here, so it doesn't match anymore.
I can see which event it's for, and we automatically write line items for all the different tickets that were purchased, and we even associate their company to it. So you can go and see when companies are buying, like, paid tickets to your events and stuff like that, right? And it all automatically goes into HubSpot.
We have, like, deal stages that have abandoned, completed, and pending because we also let people do offline payments as well. So, like, if you just wanna say, like, "Don't actually put your credit card information in when you do a paid, uh, transaction," you can flip the registration flow to being in offline mode, um, and just send it to, like, your vendors and stuff that you might just send an invoice to after they register, and you're good to go.
All right? So it's, it's pretty crazy stuff. Um, so right now we're working on, um Coupons and discount codes. We just finished all the designs for, um, session registration, which is gonna break your brain when you see how sick it is. Um, like, you're gonna be able to build, like, blocks that will show you, like, your agenda, the different sessions you can pick from, have controls over, like, what, how many sessions people can choose.
Um, have blocks of sessions that get automatically assigned to people, but they can see it during the entire checkout process, but also do it for multiple people at once, which is really crazy. So, like, you could go build your schedule of sessions for, like, you and the three people that, like, you're signing up.
Yeah. It's pretty, uh, it's pretty wild stuff. It's very cool. Um, but yeah, guys, that's what we've been,
George B. Thomas: good. Chad,
Max Cohen: what we've been whipping up in the kitchen.
George B. Thomas: where does your brain go after seeing all of this?
Chad Hohn: Yeah, I mean, uh, it's, it's, uh, really, really well architected, I think, for the, the purposes of, of handling an event, managing an event. I mean, it's, uh, it's well thought out. 'Cause I've been looking at event products recently in general. Now partially, we have like, we're doing trade shows, and we need to handle meeting scheduling at our trade show.
And, uh
George B. Thomas: Yep
Max Cohen: Ooh,
George B. Thomas: Uh-oh. Uh-oh. Uh-oh. Uh-oh
Max Cohen: there's so much I wanna tell you.
Chad Hohn: I know, but unfortunately, yeah, we had to go somewhere else 'cause you weren't quite ready
Max Cohen: No, we're not ready yet. We're not ready yet, but man, when we are, oh my God, I can't wait to show you. Yeah, it's,
George B. Thomas: that,
Chad Hohn: please, please get there because I'm tired of using other stupid things that are dumb and don't integrate with HubSpot
George B. Thomas: Ooh.
Max Cohen: yeah. All I have to say is if you thought that was cool, the... Yeah. Yeah, dude, that's, I,
Chad Hohn: Very
Max Cohen: can't get in trouble. Yeah
George B. Thomas: So, so here's, here's-- I love that you said it's architected well because obvi- obviously this conversation was us seeing under the hood. Um, the thing that I love is I was connecting the dots to the things that you're showing under the hood, Max, to the experience that the other person would be getting.
And so ladies and gentlemen, my hopes for this episode, and honestly, we'll do another episode once there's more to show along the way, but, um, my hopes for this is that you aren't stuck in, uh, event, uh, uh, H-E double hockey stick, uh, because you know that there is an option that you can now plug into, have been able to for a while, but it's super dope, uh, plug into HubSpot and get all your measurement and use all the other tools and have a layer that just makes your life easier where you don't have to be Albert Einstein and, you know, pi divided by 72 equals one registrant divided...
Anyway, I'll
Max Cohen: Yeah. Also, what I showed you is about 20% of the actual product. Like, there's so much more behind this thing. It's crazy. Like, the lead capture app just got a huge update. Um, it's running super, super well now. There's... It's, it's just, it's so cool. So yeah, we'll,
George B. Thomas: it. If you're not
Max Cohen: do a million other
George B. Thomas: events, if you're not focused on humans and giving them an experience that they need, you should be. And until next time, remember to be a happy, helpful, humble human, and we'll see you in the next episode of the "Hub years" podcast. And you know what? Go ahead and do some happy, help spotting along the way.
Max Cohen: I love you.
George B. Thomas: Y- yeah. Ooh, love you too.
Max Cohen: forget, we love you. We love
George B. Thomas: you.
Max Cohen: We love you.
George B. Thomas: Oh, that