The HubHeroes Podcast

George B. Thomas: Yeah, it is. Let's activate those powers.
So here, here's where this, uh, episode comes from. I'm, I'm literally, uh, sitting on the couch, I'm chilling, and all of a sudden my brain starts to run this scenario of like, man, XYZ is just like OP. And by the way, I'm, I'm talking about, I'm talking about, I'm t- I'm talking about HubSpot. I'm, I'm talking about HubSpot here.
And, and then all of a sudden my brain's like, "Well, but is it compared to ABC?" I'm
Max Cohen: Hmm.
George B. Thomas: "Ooh, ABC is OP."
Max Cohen: a lot of letters, George
George B. Thomas: And, uh, and then... Well, hang on. I'm, I'm gonna get to the numbers in a second, Max.
Chad Hohn: what about DEF?
George B. Thomas: I'm, I'm like, I'm like, "But, but actually compared to like one, two, three, ooh man, one, two, three is OP."
Like... And so, so ABC, XYZ, one, two, three, all OP. Clip that, put it on the internet on a loop. Just see what, whose brain we break there. But,
Max Cohen: Just wait till you hear about OF
George B. Thomas: Yeah. And, and so whoop, beep. And so, so my question, I really wanted to come to this episode and ask you guys, um, when you think of overpowered or when you just think of tools, uh, or a tool that is, like, super powerful, like, where does your brain go?
And so the question, I literally put in Slack, I said, "The question of the day for today's episode is: what do you think the most powerful part or thing about HubSpot software..." Notice I put in software. I wanted to exclude the community, which by the way, I love the community. We've said the community 100 times in historical
Max Cohen: Community is OP,
George B. Thomas: but, uh, yeah, the community is
Chad Hohn: more than
George B. Thomas: just, I mean, let's get that out of the way. But what do you
Max Cohen: They're S tier is what we would say. S
George B. Thomas: they're what?
Max Cohen: S
Chad Hohn: S tier.
George B. Thomas: Oh, S tier. See, I've seen those
Chad Hohn: D class,
George B. Thomas: me the old guy in the room, but I don't understand that whole... Anyway, that's a whole
Max Cohen: gonna do a, we were gonna do a, we were gonna do a tier ranking episode of, of HubSpot workflow actions back in the day that we
George B. Thomas: Oh.
Max Cohen: You remember that?
George B. Thomas: Yeah, back
Max Cohen: we might have to do that. Yeah.
George B. Thomas: should
Chad Hohn: Oh, I think we should
George B. Thomas: I should, uh, brush up on the SCD whatever tiers there are
Max Cohen: S is the best than A, B, C, D.
George B. Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. And so why is S the best? Anybody wanna, like, educate me before we actually get into the rest of this?
Chad Hohn: It's just a gaming thing. Super
George B. Thomas: it's just a gaming. Okay. Okay. So it's, so it's... Okay. So what do you think the most powerful part or thing about HubSpot software is, and why?
So who, who wants to go first?
Max Cohen: feel like you, you do this episode with anybody, they're gonna go, "It's workflows. Ugh." You know what I mean? Like, and I think, you know,
Chad Hohn: You stole it right out of my
George B. Thomas: Oh, it's AI. Ooh. Yeah
Max Cohen: yeah, you know what I mean? And I think from a, I guess from like a raw tool perspective, that's sort of like the easy answer, right? 'Cause it's like, you know, it has its fingers in like literally everything, and it can do whatever you want, and yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Um, I think the... But for me, like if you, if you're saying like the most powerful thing about it,
George B. Thomas: Mm-hmm
Max Cohen: I mean, it just has to be how it interconnects all the different parts or departments or units or pieces, like of your business together in a way that like you just can't do with like a standalone, uh, point solution that would be built for like any of those.
You know what I mean? Like, think about how many times you've like interacted with, you know, businesses, and the people that you're talking to are like, "Oh, I can't see that. Uh, support uses its own system," or, "I don't know. I'm just in sales. I can't see what they're doing in marketing," or like whatever, right?
You know, that is like a, that is like a fundamental, uh, friction that like just makes it difficult not only for people to do their jobs internally, but also like to even communicate with other folks about other parts of the business that aren't them. You know what I mean? And HubSpot is uniquely built in a way where it kind of like unifies all those different operations and gives people, you know, the, the visibility into like what's happening everywhere else in the business, you know, given that they have the permission to look at it, right?
George B. Thomas: so Max, you're, you're basically saying that the most powerful part or thing about HubSpot software is the way that it can align, uh, people or humans, uh, to the processes they do in the organizations that they work for. That's, that's
Max Cohen: I, it, the, the, uh, I, I think the way I would frame it up is I still think to this day there isn't another piece of software that gives a really, really, really, really good experience to all three parts of that, of like a generally, like, you know, I would say three parts of a business: marketing, sales, and support.
Everyone has their own, or service. Everyone has their own, like, versions of what that is, right? But I don't think there's another piece of software out there that gives a better experience for all three of those people or three of those teams to, like, work inside of it and have it not feel just like a tacked on, like, y- add-on, you know what I mean?
Uh, like, a, a, not gimmicky, right? Like real usage. Like you could use it for just one of those things if you wanted to,
George B. Thomas: So let's, let's drill down into that for a second. 'Cause by the way,
Max Cohen: right? And you'd be fine. Yeah
George B. Thomas: it feels very umbrella-ish to me right now what you're saying. Although true as all get out. Ch- like, yes, it does this. But like how does it do it? Is it like this tool, this tool, this tool? Like one tool, three tools? Like how-- What, what's happening under the umbrella, under the hood, Max, that makes you say, "Yes, because these things are happening," that like...
Or, "Because these tools are in place," now your teams, uh, get better alignment?
Max Cohen: Yeah. I mean, I think the, the, the, the base level is, is records,
George B. Thomas: Y- okay.
Max Cohen: Like that, like that's the thing. Like I, you know, I can be, um, you know, uh, a service or support person dealing with an angry customer, and I can go back and actually look at everything recorded from the sales process on a deal record, for example, and, you know, go and, and, and figure out where expectations were, you know, set incorrectly, right?
But at the same time, I could be a salesperson, um, you know, maybe someone's going through like a trial and they're having a problem or something, and I can go and look and see how they interacted with the support team and, and actually understand what's going on there. I could be a marketer who captured a whole bunch of, you know, leads at a, at a trade show or through some other campaign that I did or, or some, you know, uh, email campaign and actually see down the line that that person interacted with that stuff, and then they're getting sold to, and then, oh, they're getting onboarded.
And I can see all of that the same system without jumping into a bunch of different products. And like, yeah, a lot of that is like the record infrastructure and how easy it is to adapt it to different teams and how they do their job and the visibility that it gives other people. You know what I mean?
Like that is a huge, huge piece, even though it seems like to us one of the simplest parts of HubSpot. I think you gotta understand, like for other people, like it's... The, the visibility just isn't there,
George B. Thomas: So, so you said that word three times, by the way. Because, because at first umbrella, Max, it was like, well, it helps the people align with the processes. But then when I dug a little bit deeper, and, and again, you said this word three times, visibility. And I would ask, like, "Do you have visibility in your organization?
Can you see across the things that Max is talking about?" Uh, you know, maybe, m-maybe not. Uh, Chad, I wanna flip to you, and Max, don't worry, I'm gonna come back because I do have a, a sneaky trick question for both of you, uh, after, after we get past this, uh, thing. But Chad, what, w-what do you think the most... But 'cause by the way, when I was sitting on the couch, um, I was battling with, well, is it revenue hub?
Because, I mean, that brings all the money into the business. Is it... And anyway, anyway, and
Chad Hohn: it. That's what orchestrates the organization of it. But
George B. Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. So Chad,
Chad Hohn: the money in?
George B. Thomas: uh, w-what, mm, ex-exactly. Exactly. We'll, we'll get there. So Chad, what do you think the most powerful part or thing about HubSpot software is, and, and why do you think that?
Chad Hohn: I think it depends on who you are, and it depends on what your needs are. Um, but for me, it definitely has to be, you know, previously the, the hub formerly known as operations, now known as data. Uh, and I think that in and of itself with Data Studio, it-- this goes to exactly what Max is talking about on the front end, but where I'm talking about it on the back end, right?
So the front end meaning, uh, in software language z-zone, front end is the user interface, the UI, UX, u-user interface, user experience. And then the data architect side is, okay, I have with Data Hub, especially Enterprise, but even without, you can still create custom data sets, meaning you can create curated data for people who you wanna teach reporting to at a light level. " Hey, these are the properties that we use for sales reporting. Use your sales reporting data set for that." That can include custom formulas, some level formulas. But you know what else you can do with data set is get data ingestion from an external source. You can now take and put your data in Snowflake or AWS S3 if you have an enterprise with some sort of a product and you're on AWS.
You can actually put it into S3 buckets, which are just data bucket containers where enterprises can aggregate their data from many other data sources and bring it into HubSpot and use it as BI, like as a, a data tool. But you don't even have to only use it as a data tool. You can actually sync that data to objects through Data Hub.
You can fire workflows off that external data, which I mean, again, it, it gives you the ability to put in front of your team exactly what Max was talking about at the data level. It allows you to do the thing that Max was describing, right? Because, yes, there's standard integrations, but when there's not and you have like, you know, some NetSuite baggage add-on on Apache, PHP from
George B. Thomas: Whoopsie.
Chad Hohn: 1995 or like an ASPX or something and you have, you have access to the data, you could get it into HubSpot, right?
That's amazing. Get it either in there or at least visible in HubSpot. Between that, and I mean, I could go to other things too, but man, it's so configurable at the data level for slicing and dicing, ingestion and export
George B. Thomas: Yeah. So it, so it's interesting. Okay. Um, Chad, you went with the data or data side of this. Uh, Max, you-- we drilled down into records. Um, and my
Max Cohen: that also kind of data though? Like, it is, it, like
Chad Hohn: the front end of
George B. Thomas: the showing of the data, right? So here's the thing, like, do you even need records if you don't have data?
Chad Hohn: Yeah, exactly
George B. Thomas: You, you, you see what I'm saying?
So
Max Cohen: yeah, yeah
George B. Thomas: so, so let, let me, let me, let me ask the, the trick question, or kind of. Um, one, Max, how long do you think it would take you to vibe code the record system that HubSpot gives you?
Chad Hohn: Depends on what
Max Cohen: does the record system end?
George B. Thomas: Hmm. Yep.
Max Cohen: a lot of it's the customization,
George B. Thomas: Uh, oh, okay
Max Cohen: code a, a simple like record page probably pretty easily, right? But like if you think of all the work that they've put in over like the past like 15 years on like how much that stuff can be customized, right?
Because along with that comes things like custom UI extensions and like yeah, the viewing permissions and
Chad Hohn: Oh, that's
Max Cohen: all these other different, you know, uh, UI extensions that are even like native to records. You know what I mean? And then like nevermind all the customization layers on top of it. Uh,
Chad Hohn: Yeah, it
Max Cohen: a long time is the answer, George.
George B. Thomas: so you're
Max Cohen: about parity.
George B. Thomas: a weekend? It's not a weekend or a week, and all of a sudden, Max, you're
Chad Hohn: hear people say stuff like that
George B. Thomas: system?
Max Cohen: No, it's a weekend of, it's a weekend of pain, and then it's another month going back and buying it again. That's, that's what it is.
George B. Thomas: Okay, s- interesting. So, um, Chad, how long would it take you to vibe code the data structure and data side of what you just said was one of the most powerful parts of HubSpot?
Chad Hohn: Well, data is just data, right? I mean, it just lives in data tables and whatever. But the engine that allows for the ingestion and... I mean, really it all comes down to public-facing knowledge documents and the ability to use the system. I mean, like people are all the time like, "Oh, I'm just gonna code this thing up and brp, brp, brp, and it'll be, I'll just brp, put it in Base44, wrap it, and bler, and I'm done," or Lovable, you know?
And then like, but they never once have tested user permissions. You don't want everybody seeing everything. Like, it's crazy how much work goes into that. But people see what AI can do, and it's so impressive. It is so impressive. But at the same time, it just cannot get to the point where, like, it could autonomously, really in an efficient way, and as fast as it can stub something out that's really impressive, actually get working a fully permissioned data hub backend that plugs into your, you know, Lovable frontend or whatever, or your, your, your Replit frontend.
I mean, they're good, don't get me wrong. But like, I mean, it'd be, it would, g- you, you basically would get stuck at a point where you would take your prototype that it's stubbed out and then try and add permission layers on top of it, and it'd probably just completely blow chunks immediately. Yeah
George B. Thomas: so, so think about this. Uh, because I, I started this, by the way, with, like, asking you guys, um, if you played video games, right? And, and I've, I'm-- Listen, I can give an example of, like, I used to love to play Frogger, which, yes, I know I'm dating myself, but Frogger was, was the bomb. And I would have times where I would try to solve one of the screens, I guess I would call it, and I would always go a certain way, go a certain way, go a certain way.
And then it wasn't until I realized I had to go a cert- a different way that I'd beat that screen. And I know you guys play more complex games, but have you, have you ever been, like, on a quest and then you decide to do a side quest, but you realize that that side quest wasn't actually the thing that you should've been focused on, you should've just been focused on the main q- Talk to me about the side quest versus the main quest, and because of this idea of data and structure and this idea of, uh, records and visibility, what is the main quest that the players of HubSpot, the HubSpot users, should be focused on right now in 2026 and beyond? I think a lot of them are on side quests. They're dicking around with trying to build their own stuff over here.
Max Cohen: Yeah
George B. Thomas: about this over here because it's the easy way out. Like, right? W- we, we
Max Cohen: what you gotta do,
George B. Thomas: jokingly said, "Workflows, AI." Like, they're, they're focused on these buzzword side quests.
Max Cohen: Yeah, this is ADHD. This is what I have. Yeah. Um, which is like,
George B. Thomas: the quest?
Max Cohen: I'm sorry, HubSpot is the worst place to be if you have ADHD. It is, like, so easy to go off and just build some dumb, dumb stuff, uh,
Chad Hohn: fun. It builds your skills, but yeah.
Max Cohen: Yeah. Cloud design is even worse, I'll tell you that.
That is like, that is, that is not... I, I'll, I'll go down into like, I'll lose hours a day sometimes just, like, building some shit we'll never build. Um, but you know, I think everyone's, if we wanna use video games analogy, uh, everyone's storyline is a bit different, and the big difference between playing a video game and using HubSpot is that that storyline is defined differently for everybody, right?
Uh, kinda like Fable. Fable's a, Fable's a game where you, uh, you know, your actions dictate the way the, the story goes, right? Um, or some more open-ended games like, uh, you know, there's, there's a lot of games that-- I play, like, a lot of simulator games, and there's a, there's a lot of, uh, you know, games where, like, you, there is no defined storyline.
You have to kind of figure it out what you wanna do on your own, right? And I think the same thing goes for every single business is gonna have different goals and, and challenges and things that they're trying to accomplish with HubSpot, and you gotta figure out what that main storyline is, right? Uh, before you, you know, figure out what your quest line may be, right?
'Cause that's gonna define it.
George B. Thomas: And
Max Cohen: of storyline, I gotta go do a, a dad side quest here. Give me one second. I'm gonna let you guys chat. Yep
George B. Thomas: so Chad, it's interesting because Max just said something about you have to find out what your story quest is. You've worked for, like, different organizations. H- how do you, how do you think an organization figures out their storyline around HubSpot? Because I think for a lot of years it was just like, you get HubSpot and you do these things, and everybody does those things.
But I don't think we live in that world anymore. So how, like, uh, talk, talk me through where your brain goes kind of thinking about that.
Chad Hohn: Yeah. Well, I mean, every time I'm working with a new organization, it, it always ends up being, uh, discovering what they're currently doing, what stuff needs brought out of an external process into HubSpot, what stuff is too much work to bring in because there's lower hanging fruit, and prioritizing, you know, what, what you can focus on that's gonna be the, the lowest effort, highest reward when it comes to actually producing something really useful for the team, right?
Um, so it's discovery. It really is like making sure that at least from like a, a RevOps or a go-to-market perspective, like really understanding who the key players are, who like ... But also not just the, what the people who are kind of in charge of those areas want. You really also need to understand truly, um, what the users are currently doing and making sure that you're aligning with that too.
Because like, you know, the actual end users in HubSpot can end up on all kinds of, you know, side- spreadsheet side quests, and they're like always reluctant to give up their spreadsheet side quests even though more than ever before, the HubSpot record editor is column filterable like a spreadsheet, and is even cooler because you can drop in associated object with co- like data table information, uh, in the dropdown.
That's really awesome. I mean, so there's so many really amazing things that we can do now that we've never really been able to do, right?
George B. Thomas: Yeah, so it's, so it's interesting you use this word discovery. And by the way, I positioned this on purpose of like when you work with a new organization or you've worked with organizations. Chad, like Max, I still remember, again, dating myself, when, when Mario came out and I was playing Mario, and I would discover like, "Ooh, you can go down this pipe, but you can't go down that one."
Or, "Ooh, if I hit this block, like I get a super power
Chad Hohn: gotta flip all the switches first, you
George B. Thomas: Yeah, y- that's the thing. Here's my question to you. I understand that there's a discovery session when you first start working with an organization, but how many organizations do you think have a continual discovery process where each month or each quarter or something, they're trying to discover the newest things that they need to know about what they should be doing in their storyline or their quest?
Max Cohen: Where they should go to discover the new stuff
George B. Thomas: Well, well, but that, so see, here's...
Chad Hohn: you don't know what you
George B. Thomas: guys got real quiet. You guys got real quiet, and I want everybody to understand what just happened because what I'm saying or what I think I believe is that people will do discovery at the beginning of their quest, and then they'll just walk aimlessly along for the rest of the quest, bouncing into things, hoping that it's gonna be the way that they make it through door number three to get to level 13, and they don't actually stop and try to rediscover the things
Chad Hohn: constantly changing. The priority list in the backlog is constantly changing due to external circumstances. You know, a lot of times it's like, you know, so and so wants a thing or whatever, like this is a, you know, dumpster fire that needs dealt with right now. Like that happens a lot. Like, oh, wow, we got rid of the revenue.
We don't calculate revenue like HubSpot calculates revenue or whatever. You know, like, so you gotta figure out how to get something by a certain time period because it's just what whoever needs, right? Um, and you don't wanna just have people doing it in spreadsheets, so you need to align the data model with that, or you need to align the user interface, so the users can put in the information or, you know, whatever.
The marketing data needs to get back for reporting purposes, blah, blah, blah, right? Um, it's constantly changing. I mean, I think... So discovering what's, uh, like your, your-- just like Max was saying with Fable, you know, your main quest is never the same, never the same. It's always changing, um, because it's unique to your portal.
Each portal has its own storyline, right? Um, you should do good due diligence, like this was our roadmap, but be able to like, you know what? That whole feature tree just got dumped. Like, we actually don't need it anymore, right?
Max Cohen: Yeah. I think also too is like sometimes what I've found is like you get to this point where you build up your portal and it's kind of like where it was supposed to be after implementation, and like you're kind of riding it out and people are using it and everything. But, you know, I'm not saying as a HubSpot admin you need to constantly be looking for stuff to fix, right?
Even if it's not broken. But like you should be checking in with people and like asking if they're having any problems with the way it currently works, and if they can't do any important parts of the job that they thought they'd be able to do or they should be able to do. Um, because sometimes people will just be like, "Oh, that's the system," 'cause they're used to like other tools where like it works the way it works and you can't fix it, so like oftentimes they're not gonna say anything, right?
And so I think like as an admin, you know, you could just build it and be like, "All right, people are using it, like my job is done here." It's like no, sometimes you, you do have to go like sniff out where the, you know, inefficiencies are or like could we do this a little bit better, or like what do you think is painful about doing your job day to day?
Uh, and like find solutions to fix that stuff. You know what I mean? Because again, like I, I think a lot of people don't know that it can be fixed because people are still very used to the system works the way it works, right? And that's how it is and it's not worth me complaining about it, right? Um,
Chad Hohn: the time, especially when there's new people, I try to like say, "Hey, look, this is here. You can add these things. The world's your oyster. You just gotta talk to us. Let
Max Cohen: it's also like a balancing act. It's also a balancing act because you don't wanna be changing shit every day because one person says they're having a problem, right? So it's like, I would try to seek out issues, go confirm those issues that, like, say like, "Hey, you know, uh, Jane said she was having this problem doing XYZ.
Uh, Jim, is that also something, like, you're experiencing?" "Oh, it is?" "Cool. Is everyone else experiencing it?" "Yeah." "Okay, cool. Maybe we should come up with a plan to fix it," and then, like, communicate that to everybody, right? You know, like, I think as a HubSpot admin, you have a duty to be like where, like once it's built the way it was, like, originally meant to be built, you should be looking for ways to make it better, and you should be seeking out the feedback that you need to do that in a smart way versus going on a bunch of side quests on your own and just doing things 'cause you think it's cool and you know HubSpot can do it and da, da, da.
That's, like, a very easy trap to fall into, right? Like, you have the power, you've got the super admin, you can go build this, like, new stuff that no one ever asked for, and then people get confused, and things are changing every day. You can't do that, right? But you can seek out problems because oftentimes those problems can just kind of remain silently without you knowing, right?
'Cause unless you ask, you know? So seek out that extra dialogue tree, if you will.
George B. Thomas: it's, so it's interesting, a couple things. One, it took us about minute 28 of the podcast for somebody to actually use the word reporting, which when I asked the question, "What do you think the most powerful part or thing about HubSpot software is?" Nobody jumped up and said, "Reporting."
Max Cohen: Yeah
George B. Thomas: AI, we said workflows.
At 28 minutes later, Chad, like just suddenly like, "If it's your reporting or something," like the numbers. And what's interesting is when you're playing a game, usually there's some type of like h- hit points or whatever. Like there's, you know, there's a timer, there's a stats, and, and that's all part of the game that we have to pay attention to.
Like I'm, I'm literally, again, aging myself, but I decided that I wanted to play a little game on my phone the last trip that I took, and so I downloaded, uh, the infamous Tetris, uh, game. And when you get to like level, I don't know, 33 or something, all of a sudden there's a timer and it like, I ran out of time and I was mad because no, my job was to put the blocks into place, not pay attention to the time.
But then all of a sudden I had to pay attention to time because it changed. Business is changing every day. Here, here's the thing. What I find very fascinating about this conversation is that a lot of HubSpot is OP, and what I hear you guys saying is the part that is most OP in an organization depends upon the player who picks up the thing to actually use it.
So are we coming back full circle to say actually the most powerful thing about the HubSpot software is the humans?
Chad Hohn: Ooh
George B. Thomas: Are we saying the most powerful thing about the HubSpot software is the people who pick it up, that apply it to the processes and the other people in their organizations, and they are paying attention, listening, because they have vision and visibility that they need?
Is that what we're saying the most powerful part of HubSpot software is? I don't know. Gentlemen,
Max Cohen: time. Wow
George B. Thomas: what, gentlemen, what i- what is your, uh, final thoughts for this episode before we send people back to their regular scheduled day?
Max Cohen: You can do it.
George B. Thomas: Yeah, water boy,
Max Cohen: You can do it.
George B. Thomas: I love it. We should just end it there. Chad, what's your final thoughts?
Chad Hohn: Uh, it's flexible enough to let you turn your thoughts into reality inside of an organized system. That's the, that's the superpower really, if you boil it down
Max Cohen: For true
George B. Thomas: Rewind and listen to that five times. And while you're doing that, don't forget to be a happy, helpful, humble human. And of course, do some happy Hubspotting along the way. We'll see you next week, ladies and gentlemen.