Ep. 27 - Excellence In E-Commerce with Parag Jagdale | Devs:After Dark

Hello and welcome to Developers After Dark, episode number 27. We are here today with a very awesome guest, but before we get into that, let me first say, if you are watching or you are listening, please make sure to click like and click subscribe and share this with all of your friends. We, you know, we value everybody as listeners, and the more people we can get to listen, obviously the better, because we're here to tell stories. We're here to learn more about not only HubSpotters but others in the ecosystem and even people who are HubSpot adjacent.

So yeah, as well, from grandparents to toddlers, I believe, is the, uh, the range, right?

That's that. I— yeah, that, that's our demographic. That's our key demographic right there. Everyone. So, um, but don't just click subscribe, uh, when you're watching this or you're listening. Don't just click subscribe for us, especially on YouTube. Uh, we want you to also be able to, uh, click subscribe for everybody else that's on the HubSpot Developers YouTube channel. It's not just our show there, but there are plenty of people from Brooke to Hannah to other people in Developer Relations as well, giving not just shows like this, but there's also developer updates. You have monthly updates, you have all kinds of masterclasses and all kinds of courses to learn tons of stuff, not just from us, but other people as well in the developer community. That's going to be a resource that you're going to want to always be there. Again, when you're there, Please click like, subscribe, share everything. We would appreciate it. But that's not the only place that you're going to be able to go to kind of know what's going on in HubSpot. You can also go to the changelog, which is going to be found at developers.hubspot.com/changelog. Now you're going to want to be there because you're going to want to stay current with the latest changes and updates happening that affect HubSpot developers. So again, that's developers. And then finally, if you haven't been there already, you really, really should. And I was just kind of looking at the homepage here just to kind of see what some of the more popular ones are. But you have the HubSpot Academy, right? And that's at academy.hubspot.com. And what you have is you have a globally recognized certification powerhouse essentially. 'Cause I mean, I'm just looking at the homepage now and some of the popular ones that, you know, they change from time to time, but you have social media marketing, You have digital marketing, inbound marketing. I mean, everything, SEO, sales. I mean, there is not a thing you can't find here that you can't learn about. So, and the lessons are great. The format is fantastic. And again, some of these are certified. So you get certifications that again, they're globally recognized. So, and take advantage of that because it doesn't cost anything. I was talking with AJ. I remember we mentioned this probably in another episode, but I was talking with AJ and we were talking with a friend of ours who's also a developer. And they thought that this was something you had to pay for. He's like, oh yeah, I was gonna check that out, but I just, I didn't, it wasn't something I was gonna pay for right now. And we said, well, that's good 'cause you don't have to. So it was one of those things where, yeah, you should check this. It's a resource that, you know, it's hard to pass up when it's free. And it's also hard to pass up when it's really, really relevant and useful.

So—

I mean, if they wanna send a check to me, I'll take it. Not a big deal.

Dennis's Venmo, let me click that. Hold on, let me bring that up. And no, But here today, we have a really, really great episode because we're going to be talking with someone who I know AJ and Dennis know very, very well. I've just gotten to meet, and your story so far that when we've talked about has been a lot of relevancy there. I've kind of learned the same way you have. But without further ado, I'm going to let them introduce themselves. So Parag, why don't you tell everyone who you are and what you do?

Yeah, thanks. Thanks, Nick. So, you know, I've been in the HubSpot ecosystem since 2014. We actually created the first Shopify to HubSpot integration. Of course, we added other shopping carts as well. But what we really found is that you want to enable HubSpot for e-commerce and there's a really big gap there. Not enough people, even though we've got all this amazing data in HubSpot, the gap is that people don't use it, use that data. And how can they personalize the experience of their end customers for CRM. And then for sales, how do we make the job easier for salespeople and using that e-commerce data to sell? And then finally for service, right? How do we make sure that the customers that are coming to us, we're providing as much help as possible? And HubSpot has a big surface area on how to help e-commerce businesses and continues to add more surface area. So as an integrator, we want to like, make it as simple as possible to run e-commerce through HubSpot. So that's what we've been focusing on last 10 years and slowly learning and progressing with HubSpot as HubSpot adds features. So that's what I like about it because it's constantly new features coming out and we get to kind of stay on the cutting edge of everything. So right now it's AI, but—

Yeah, yeah. 2014, we had like what, how many objects were there in 2014? It was like under, Under 6, I feel like it was not many. Now we have limitless.

Yeah, there's only contacts object, uh, yeah, really, and a couple other ones, but the deal object didn't exist, the product object didn't exist, so we had to make do. And, uh, but we've seen a lot of new functionality, new objects being added, and we can do a lot more. Upside Garden is so much more powerful than back then.

For sure.

Now, for those listening and watching, um, you're with Unific. Can you tell us people about a little bit about Unific that people maybe if they haven't heard of it before Yeah, for sure.

So we, like I said, the gap is that most companies don't, most companies that use HubSpot don't really know how to market for e-commerce, how to use HubSpot for CRM. And so what Unific does is personalizes that experience at scale. So for 100 customers, yes, you can call them, you can personalize that experience, make it a great experience over time, but we need to use automation when there are hundreds of thousands of customers and they're constantly sending us new orders, placing new orders. There are customers who are gonna churn, right? We wanna detect who's gonna churn and then try to save them. HubSpot has these amazing tools to reach out to the customer, but doesn't necessarily have the data and the events necessary from the shopping carts. So Unific has focused on that and gone deeper and deeper into that. And, you know, as a team, we are about a team of 10 people. And over the years we've been trying to figure out, well, what are we? Because we are more than integration, but we're not HubSpot directly. We're also less, not quite HubSpot. And so we've kind of come to the idea of like, okay, we're really customer experience management at scale and using HubSpot to deliver the messaging and all the value. But we're enabling our customers, mutual customers to launch and grow their e-commerce business in a sales way as well as through marketing.

Can you be more specific when you say customer experience? Because when I think e-commerce, I'm thinking 2 sets of customers for you, right? You have the users of HubSpot and then you have the purchasers of whatever e-commerce product it might be. Are you talking overall or specifically one of those 2?

I suppose I'm talking about both.

Yeah, yeah.

So customer experience in the sense of end customers, right? So people that buy, you know, they need cultivation. We could cultivate the customer experience, that relationship, right? We need to do it, you know, of course, like I said, for 100 people we can easily do it. We can just call them, right, if something's wrong. But if it's 100,000, we're gonna have to use automation to cultivate the relationship over time. So now if somebody has, you know, spent— the perfect example I use during sales is like if somebody has abandoned a cart, right? And you know, as a CRM, HubSpot CRM has a lot of data about that person, their previous purchase history and all of that, plus what pages did they visit and all that, right?

Mm-hmm.

But we can, through a HubSpot workflow or automation, we can say, okay, this person has bought this many times before, so they're a high-value customer. And this other person who's also abandoning, they're a low-value customer. So let's give that, we wanna encourage the second order or third order if they're a low value customer, fairly new. So let's provide an automated discount, right? So we send a discount code to them via email. So we actually create it in the store and then our technology will create it in the store and then push it into HubSpot so that you can send it via email or SMS. But the high value customer, they don't need a coupon. Right? They— we know they're gonna buy. They've come back last Mother's Day, they used the discount code. HubSpot can capture that information. So now this year we shouldn't send the discount code because their mom liked the product, right?

Right, right.

So in that sense, we're helping personalize that experience using all the data in HubSpot and all the data in the shopping cart and making it super simple for the HubSpot user. So now I'm talking about the experience of the HubSpot user to launch these campaigns and workflows. Another example of that would be sales, right? So today, if a sales rep says something, you know, right now there's a change happening in e-commerce, right? So because of COVID we had companies who, that are B2B sales, so salespeople couldn't work, you know, face-to-face. So there are companies that are already online and doing a great job online, like Grainger, for example, which is, you know, kind of a plumbing supply company. Or so for them, they were already online, they're already doing a great job, so they actually saw a boost. But those companies that are supply companies that needed a face-to-face conversation didn't do so well, right? And so they realized we're going to have to get online as quickly as possible and try to, you know, not get into that situation again.

Right.

So that's one trend and we're seeing more and more companies do that. But the second trend is all these like B2C e-commerce companies, they hit their TAM during COVID right? They got as big as they could. And so they, to find new business, new prospects, they had to go into wholesale. And so HubSpot really fits well into both of these categories, right? Because they're B2B and they're also, They have the Sales Hub integrated with HubSpot at the CRM, Marketing Hub also there and Service Hub. So if we can make the experience of sales reps to create orders, draft orders or quotes in their shopping cart without having to leave HubSpot, then that's improving the experience. They get to stay and live in HubSpot and avoid having to go to the shopping cart as much as they can.

Mm-hmm.

Sometimes you'll have to, but the shopping cart owner, store owners don't really want salespeople in their shopping cart either. 'Cause like now you can, anybody can give a discount and there's less control. Whereas if you keep them in HubSpot, we control what they see and are able to access.

Interesting.

So some of the tools that Unifix has been building is around that.

How did you get to that point? Like what, how'd you make that discovery? What was your process here? Because I mean, it's a big change, right? It's a huge user change.

Yeah, that's huge.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So during, actually a little bit right after COVID, we saw some companies ask because we already had the Shopify and other shopping carts integration into HubSpot, a strong one that worked really well. But those companies who were already coming to us, they're like, well, we're trying to add a wholesale channel or we're trying to add a B2B channel to our business and we really wanna use HubSpot's quoting tools for that, but it doesn't really work well with the store, so can you help us? So we kind of dug into that and understood like, okay, this is the real scenario here is they kept using the word salespeople wanna live in HubSpot, they don't wanna go to the store.

Mm-hmm.

And so we said, well, how can we achieve that? So we started like just made an MVP, invest as little as possible because we didn't know how big this would be. If we spend thousands of dollars on this thing and launch it, nobody uses, then we've kind of wasted time. So we just took what we had, we built on top, and even though it wasn't like the perfect way to do it, we got it done. And so we're able to get validation over the years for that.

Really cool.

That's awesome. Yeah. Let me ask you this. Now going from— because we— I know there's a couple other people that we've talked to that are kind of from the CEO level, are moving to the CEO level from before. Has there been a big change in— because like a lot of the stuff you're describing, like from the ground floor, right? You're working on some of these things and you're making some of these changes and you're doing a lot of this testing and you're trying to, you know, Come up with the solution. And there's a different— I imagine there's a different kind of perspective or a different way of having to tackle these things when you're at the CEO level versus previous. Like, was there a huge— how hard was it to make that kind of jump?

Yeah, it was challenging because, you know, the way we started the business, it was just me and my business partner. So he was handling the sales and marketing side of things and I was handling the technology. And actually, we never set out to do this thing. What happened is we actually knew each other from college. His name is Dan. Dan and I knew each other from college at Ohio State. And we would work on some entrepreneurial things separately, me and him at Ohio State.

Mm-hmm.

But then after that, my goal is always to have, you know, know, build a business, a SaaS company actually. But I realized that, and my professor gave me this advice, he said, learn on somebody else's dime, right? You don't have to start right away. You know, you don't go from college to your own business.

Right.

At the time I was freelancing, so I was making websites anyway. So I was like, okay, I could just continue that. But he told me that if you, you know, at least for 3 years, you know, work at an actual software company, because you get to know like what to do, what not to do, how to work on a team, right? 'Cause if you're just starting alone, you're alone and you don't know how to work on a team.

Yeah.

So I took that approach. My personality is actually like very conservative. And, you know, we were just, had come from India when I was 9 to Canada. And then I went to high school here in the US, in Ohio, Wooster, Ohio. And so, you know, we didn't have a lot of money. So for me to start a new company, without kind of a, some, at least some savings would've been very risky. So I said, okay, let's, that's a good idea. Let's do, let's, you know, do a job first. And that job really helped me a lot because I got to learn what not to do, what to do, and how to run it like a software company. And not like at the leadership level, but like how to work in a software company.

For sure, for sure. Right.

And so—

How big of a team was it?

So that company was around, 80 people, 80, 90 when I first started there. Uh, the development team was like, uh, 6 or 7 people.

Yeah, that's a— that seems like a good size, uh, to get started. I mean, like, much bigger, it could be overwhelming. Much smaller, like, I know Nick and myself both kind of came from the whole self-taught world where you work alone, you are the entire team, you're the team of 20, right? And there's something up as you go.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's some advantages, but I, I think being able to, um, The— I'm trying to think of the right way to put it, but like the small team environment versus like when you come to HubSpot where there's like concrete sectioned out departments and teams, like there is such a learning curve there that I think being able to have experience in both is obviously beneficial, but it's a different world, you know, going into like something like HubSpot or just a bigger, like even at the 80, 90. person level, there's still like a different mindset and like procedurals that you have to kind of go through.

Right. But one of the things I would say, like, there's so many like things that save you, like in a larger company, like pushing to production, like there's so many checks and balances there. In a smaller organization, there aren't, right? Many of them are, even though we have now, we have GitHub and all that, but before it didn't, what it wasn't the case, wasn't part of the culture.

So. Yeah, no, no. Like I always say this, I think I said this before, Nick, Like in my early on my development career, I was doing some freelance work and I was going to work with this other guy. I said, you know, where do you, where are you committing your code? So what, what are you talking about? I had no idea you could even do that. It was like, you know, it's because I've only done it by myself and it was self-taught.

Farag, when I first started working, there was no test servers. I was working live straight on and making changes right to, and it was the most terrifying thing in the world, but it was like, that's what was there. So it was like, Yeah, but it's a different— I like the way that that's phrased, that there's more— like, when you get to that level with more people, there are more— like, those checks and everything really do— it's not just like saves you from making mistakes, but it also kind of teaches you this whole process of— because there's more— like, again, like Denner was saying, when there's one or two people, like, being considerate of the other teams around you and how what you do may affect them doesn't really play into that equation at all versus—

Right.

When you start to get to those bigger and bigger teams and like departments. And now, so yeah, there's definitely something to be said about both. But I think having a little bit of experience in both kind of gives you that mindset of like, remember, it's not always like that. You're gonna have to consider. Yeah. So there's a—

Yeah, like, I mean, I feel like prod, maybe you're a little— it was safer for you to make mistakes and be able to learn from them. Whereas Nick, when you're committing to your production server, You know, there's no, there's no learning there. That's, that's, that's all.

You literally are coding like this the whole time with your fingers crossed, just like, oh, come on.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just rush, rush, rush. Um, I would say, I'll say that if you're too conservative, then it can slow you down too.

So that's a good point.

Very good point. You have to have a balance and know what the balance is, and depending, depending on the company goals too, right? So if you're in a startup, like, so we were a startup when we began, right? Like, just me and Me and Dan, and I, you know, I was coding and he was doing the, you know, selling of it, finding customers. I was continuously asked for a new—

I feel like Parag just— are you getting anything?

Oh, I thought I froze.

Okay, Parag, you froze there, my friend. I'll cut this out later on. We'll start over.

We'll cut it.

Yeah, we'll cut it. So back to like you Dan, I think is the last thing I kind of heard you say.

Okay, yeah, so me and Dan were, you know, working together, just 2 of us, and I was coding and I had a full-time job and he had a full-time job too, so we had to do this nights and weekends. So I was coding and he was trying to find leads and sell, but we would keep learning of like, oh, this customer wants this, this customer wants that. So then you have to actually deliver quickly. If you take too long, that customer's gonna move on.

That's true, that's a good point, right?

So you end up in the beginning, you end up creating not a mess, but you try to do the best you can.

Right, right. No, no, no, totally makes sense. That's 2 questions. One is, how did you get started? Like you said, this was accidental almost, right? Like that you began this company.

So how'd that happen? So my business partner Dan, so Dan wanted to launch an e-commerce store. And he launched, actually what happened is he came to my wedding and my wedding's in India. And so he went there with him and his wife, but they also bought some jewelry back, like, you know, not like gold jewelry, but jewelry you can sell online. So they had a unique set of products, right? 'Cause they stopped in some places to get that. So then it's like, let's sell this online. So then he launched a Magento store. And then his background is marketing. So he's like, well, I can launch a store, but I can't really do email marketing with this. With Magento by itself, you can't do that. And so he had me integrate with Infusionsoft, which is a really popular CRM marketing automation platform back then. And so I initially built that integration for him. And so then he set his Infusionsoft account so well that internal Infusionsoft people said, hey, you should actually be a consultant because you're so good at marketing and you set everything up right. So then he said, yeah, sure, I'll do that. And then so we built the integration for him, but then we realized, oh, there's like thousands of e-commerce companies who also need the exact same thing.

Hmm.

Because e-commerce stores by themselves are not so good at marketing. Just now they're starting to add more email, like any email, but back then you would wouldn't be able to send any emails through the store other than just the order confirmation emails.

Mm-hmm.

So not like abandoned carts and stuff. So we determined, okay, let's partner on this, because initially we were just going to say we're going to have our own company. So Miles had the freelancing company and he was working full-time. So we said, okay, let's just do it on our own. And then we basically, for the first year, we ended up increasing the recurring revenue so much that we could actually go full-time. So we said, like, just combine now, just become partners, and then just keep it going as much as we can.

Yeah. Are your personalities different? I mean, are you— you're the conservative, is he more of the outgoing? I'm just out of curiosity.

Yeah, absolutely. He's more outgoing and more sales-oriented.

I can see that.

He's really good at that, yeah.

So my follow-up question is, like, I feel like I can be somewhat conservative To an extent and sometimes not. But in the sense of like starting my own company, I can— I don't know, it's jumping off that cliff and actually going full-time at it. That's not a conservative thing to do.

That's scary. Yeah, I guess I had— yeah, we had some revenue coming in. We didn't take a full salary for a long time, like 6, 7 years. So like we're almost on the college salary for 6, 7 years, both of us.

What year are we at right now?

That was like 2014.

Gotcha.

And so actually 2013, and then we finally incorporated 2014. So yeah, we ended up adding HubSpot as well in 2014 because we saw that focusing on just a single platform is kind of scary and anything would change, right? And then we liked HubSpot because we saw that there's a future there, it's gonna grow. And make the APIs, for example, APIs were much better even back then. Outside APIs, some of the best out there, uh, whereas like the Infusionsoft, those APIs were not, not too good. So, um, and so then, uh, we, we actually— the same thing happened to Dan. Uh, he has set up HubSpot so well that they said, hey, you guys should be a HubSpot partner.

Interesting.

That's awesome.

We became a partner. So we were one of the first 20 apps in the HubSpot App Store.

What? Wow, I didn't know that.

That's really cool.

May I ask, I'm sorry, Nick, I'm going to stop talking because once again, per usual, I—

Honestly, Dennis, one of the questions I had was like, what was the thing that sparked deciding that? Like, what is always— because the question I always like to ask people, like, especially when they're, you know, a CEO or co-founder, is like, there has to have been a moment where you were like, I see problem. I have solution. Oh, how do I— let's do this. And I think that's— I think the way it worked for you, Parag, is that, that is like the— I don't think you could ask for it to happen any better way, right? Because it's like you— and plus you also had the knowledge and you also had the experience to say, well, I have a thing that can— I already know what to do, you know?

Yeah.

'Cause there's people that think like in perspective of, okay, well, there's a problem there. I think I can create a solution for this. Where you were like, I have the solution for this. I know what it is. Let's— all we have to do is combine forces, you know, because— and I think it's great too to be able to find that kind of co-founder that, you know, we're like, especially, you know, like Dennis said, like you said, Dennis, you're more on the— I would be someone who would just jump and be like, let's just do this. Like, all right, let's find— without, you know, like— where Dennis is more of like, well, do we have— we plan these things. And then it's like, once you bring those 2 people together, it's like, we have something here. Okay.

Yeah.

So it's like, no, I completely respect that. But no, that was definitely gonna be one of the questions I wanted to ask. But no, I think that—

It wasn't a sudden change either. So I was working full-time. Like I said, my goal was like in 3 years to do my own business. So I was actually freelancing that entire 3 years. So learning how to, you know, do business, how to do sales, how to do invoicing, all that stuff. And then once I said, okay, 3 years have passed and now I'm gonna go full-time freelance. So I already had a, you know, gig lined up for that. Gotcha. Yeah, yeah. So then I was already freelancing and kind of taking, surviving basically. And I was always looking for a product to build and kind of it happened. So kind of, I didn't plan it, but I did. So it wasn't such a big leap to then take the risk and go full-time with the product.

I was wondering from the beginning to now, how has your mission statement changed? Are you trying to do the same thing or is it, I mean, has it augmented? I'm sure it's changed, evolved over time.

I think the overall theme has been the same, but we've had to figure out what we're doing because initially it was integrations. Then we realized there's a gap in the market that there's no e-commerce specific marketing automation platform that is a winner, right? HubSpot is general, Infusionsoft, that's general. So we're like, there's a gap here. Let's capitalize on that. So then we, in 2016, we raised money, some money from investors to actually build an e-commerce marketing automation platform. And so we had a lot of ideas there already from our experience doing it for HubSpot and Infusionsoft and what people, what companies needed. Unfortunately, during that, it took us like almost 18 months to raise enough capital. We won several prizes too, like business plan competition. So it took some time. In Ohio, it's a little bit harder to get there. Well, in that time, other companies had already raised and actually gone much faster and were bigger then. So in hindsight though, hindsight is always 20/20.

For sure.

We should have just continued, but we said, let's go back to what we are doing. We have a core customer base here in HubSpot and Infusionsoft. keep trying to serve them. And so we changed direction. We used the money to build what Unifix is today. So we actually had to rebuild the entire thing from scratch. So remember we discussed earlier, we had to, like, to move quickly, we had to kind of take some risks and do it quickly. But what happened is over time, each release would get harder and harder to do because, like, you know, so many people are relying on your integration and it's a live sync, which means that Even down for a few hours, people are unhappy.

Right.

So you can't risk that. So I had to— at that point in time, I was the CTO, right? So, like, but I should have been the manager and not doing any coding, but I was doing all the code, a lot of the coding. And I was also in charge of releases. So I'd be doing the merge conflicts and, like, we're doing branching at the time. So managing all of that and each release would take, like, you know, 2 days, then 3 days, then 5 days. Like, it just became worse and worse and worse. And so then what I learned there is, like, if we raise the money, we're going to have to re-architect this entire thing because we needed to be able to scale. We were scaling pretty good with what we had. And again, hindsight 20/20, we should have actually— if we'd made a few tweaks, we could have kept doing that. But we just had to rewrite it from scratch. Now I'm thankful we did that. It's still like what could have been, right?

Yeah, of course, of course. How did you pull the bandaid? Like, when did you say, okay, from scratch, let's do it? Like, how did you—

Yeah, after we raised the money, we're like, well, we need to build a strong foundation for what our vision is. So let's start there because like, so we just said, okay, we're gonna keep Revenue Conduit. So our previous company was Revenue Conduit. That was the app we built. And then we said, we're gonna, actually write it in PHP because that's what experience I had most. And PHP at that time wasn't so good at TDD and classes, and it wasn't that well an object-oriented platform or language. So we said, let's do Java for what we raised the money for. So we're going to rewrite all in Java. So we rewrote all of it. And this time I was like, okay. At that point in time, I had to trust the team anyway. I wasn't doing that much coding at RevenueConduit. So I said, for this, I'm going to be only the product manager and the CTO. I'm not going to be coding anything. And that was good because we could move faster then.

Right. You stopped coding because— oh yeah, I'm sorry.

No, I was going to say, was it hard to break away from that? Because I know like, you know, building it, you know, being the coder, building a lot of it. Yeah, that should be— it's hard to say like, okay, I'm just going to step away and trust Whoever it is with what I've built, and it should all just be fine. And I'm just gonna walk, you know, I'm gonna turn and do this over here. And that, you know, how hard was that? Because I know—

Well, I have to admit to myself, like, look, we're hiring really smart people, right? So we raised the money and we tried to find the best people we absolutely could in the, in this Akron area where we are. And finding them is, can be difficult. You gotta trust these new people coming in. Luckily, one of them was Brett, actually my friend from high school who I had brought on for the previous company where I worked for 3 years. So I brought him on in that company and he did really well. And he was, by the time we started Unific or ready to raise the money, it was already 6 or 7 years since he's been there. So I said, hey Brett, you wanna come work with me? So I already knew like he could be trusted and do a great job. And then another, we hired a lead architect as well. He had like 12, 15 years of, I think at the time, 15 years of experience. So I said, there's no way I'm going to be better than these guys.

Mm-hmm.

And at that point in time, my passion is also design and product management, so user experience design as well. So I was doing that part of it because we couldn't just hire— we knew the vision we wanted to create, so I built that myself. I designed it myself. And then that kept me too busy to be able to do the coding as well. So I was already busy and it wasn't such a big change.

So basically you were forced, you were forced to make this change, right?

Yeah, I still miss it though. So what I do is like weekends I'll play and build my own small like prototypes of like, hey team, this is where we wanna go. So let's build, I'll like pre-build it, some of it so that you have some code to work from and I don't have to do a lot less work. to explain it. But explaining things verbally to developers is not always the easiest thing because I say one thing and they understand something different. Now with the new AI coding tools like Cursor and all of that, Visual Studio Copilot, it's much easier. I can actually create a prototype much faster. Typically, I'm using Figma right now to actually design the user experience. But some things can't be explained through that. It has to be like, oh, the backend, because I'm a developer, so I know how in the backend we should design it so that it's scalable and also that the newer developers can understand my logic.

Yeah, for sure.

Let me ask you this. I want to go into a little bit more about you personally, like on how you got started with all of this. Can you tell us what sparked your interest in technology just at the very onset of everything?

Yeah, so, um, initially I, uh, had moved from India to Canada when I was 9, so it was a huge change. It was like it was moving from Pune, which is where we're from, or just near Mumbai, the really hot region, to Newfoundland, Canada.

So—

Did you get new clothes?

Yeah, new clothes, new everything. And so, um, my dad was doing his PhD in, uh, Newfoundland. So that's why it was like a really random place. So yeah, that's where he got in. So, um, it was a great city, uh, and, uh, but I had to go every weekend with him. Uh, not had to go, like I just chose to go because like there's nothing else. I didn't really have any friends because I was new. So he worked in, um, uh, he had to do research for his PhD, um, and he's not in technology at all. He's entomologist. He's an entomologist. So I got there because they had computers there. I think Windows 3.1 was there. So they had a computer lab and I was able to go in and like just try to find free games to play. I couldn't find any at the time. So then the next thing, best thing was like learning how to make paper airplanes. So there's like websites back then, it was a couple websites on how to make paper airplanes. So I still do that. And so that became my hobby. But that was like the first like touch of technology because in India we didn't really have any opportunity like that. And so fast forward, like, to my— I got my first computer was in high school, so when I was in grade 10. So then that's where I started tinkering. I was playing a couple of video games and, you know, the clans, if you join a video game clan, right, they have, like, websites. And I thought, oh, that'd be cool if I could make one. So I started designing it. I got a cracked version of Photoshop, but also Flash, like Media Flash.

Dennis can put the legal disclaimer.

We did.

No, I did the same thing too.

So it's not. Yeah, we all did. Also, you said Flash just makes me laugh.

It's well, it's like they got. I think those companies grew because like we were ready with like with those skills, and when you got to an organization, like hey, I have these skills.

Yeah, for sure, for sure.

So it's their free version.

Go ahead and justify it, buddy. You justify it all day long. Yeah, I was looking at your, your response to Nick's question about that, and I saw Windows 3.1, and I had a— my heart like sunk a little bit. That's— I haven't heard that in a long time. That's a dark time for me.

Right.

Yeah, it's fun. Yeah.

So was that— was, was trying to do the websites for 'Cause actually I did that. That's why when I was telling you earlier, reading some of this, it was like some of the same things. Like, I think probably one of my first kind of dives into just HTML in general was like, I think it was like Call of Duty or something like that. Or yeah, I think it might've been that, like one of the older versions of it, like way back, like building a website for like a gaming clan essentially. Like, was that your first kind of dive into HTML at that time?

Yeah.

Yeah, on that side, like, you know, gaming websites back then, like, just filled with Flash. There are always animations and things like that.

Right.

So I thought, okay, that would be cool. So let's see if I can do that. Um, so I started building it and I actually got through. There's like a lot of tutorials back then. So I got through and made it, but then what happened is like, okay, you have to actually load this thing. You know, it's a dialogue. We're on dialogue here. We have to load, load these, uh, intros. So then I said, okay, and I had to figure— I had to make a preloader now because that was the next tutorial on the list. So let's build a preloader. And so that's my first, like, kind of real coding ActionScript and try to figure that out on my own, just, you know, tutorials online. And then, yeah, basically. But then using this experience, I then got a job in high school at a computer store because, like, my dad was like, hey, you know, you have— you doing this kind of stuff, it's kind of cool. Like, why don't you see if there's a job you can do?

Yeah.

And one of our family friends, their son worked at a computer store in the previous year. So they took me to that one because there's a connection there. So then I interviewed with the owner of that store. His name was Thad. And he really, you know, saw what I could do with Flash. And then he's like, yeah, let's do this. So summer job, nice. I had like— I was the webmaster.

Wow.

Because yeah, there's like local stores that he did this website.

Did you get any experience in like hardware and computer hardware and any type of like building stuff within that?

Yeah, I did build my— actually, because of that, it was a computer repair store really, and they had a webmaster division. I was the first webmaster. And so then, you know, he's like, oh, you should build a computer. And so he helped me build my first computer. So I got it.

Does that happen anymore? I feel like that's like, that's an age that has gone away. I, I could be totally wrong and like, I don't know, but I don't know. Do you all— does this happen still? Do people, kids go out there and do this stuff?

I, I mean, I did. I'm trying to teach my son to do as well as to build his own stuff and get out there and get hands-on with it. Yeah, like I, I built one for him and I made him watch and I had to explain everything and made him like—

Good on you.

I was like, I was like, yeah, we'll put this together, but you got to answer the questions right. And I was like, okay, what is this part? What is this piece? What is that? So yeah, I've try. But I mean, it's hard. Like nowadays, it's very— everything's very out of the box. Like, hey, buy this. Uh, you know, it's like for my— like especially like for my daughter, like when we were looking, because I did the same thing for her, but it was like, it's hard to like, oh well, this one already is pink with, you know, kitty ears and all this stuff. And it's like, you don't have to do anything, it's just buy. And I'm like, yeah, I really want you to know what goes into this, not just buy it and use it, you know.

Right.

So it's, uh, Yeah, I think it's slipping away, like that sort of, that knowledge transfer, but I'm trying to keep it alive.

Yeah, keep on going.

Yeah, I was gonna ask you too, actually, during the— when you were talking about building the websites in Flash and, you know, the complications just in that in general, and I picked this up in your story when you answered one of the questions, you also learned— and because I love SEO, you also learned an SEO lesson in there too as well, right?

Yeah, so, you know, I started working at this computer store, but Thad was like my boss. He's like, well, you know, people need to be able to find these websites we're making, right? So it's not just you're making a website for design, they need to actually get value from this, marketing value from this. So, um, we had, we had a computer, a vacuum store as a, as a customer. We also had like a, um, a real estate builder as a customer, so they need— they needed an actual HTML website. So I started, I kind of knew HTML before that because I actually mentioned in the same questions I read a book on HTML on our— we had a family trip to DC. And so didn't have devices at that time, right? So you got— you had books.

That's right, you did.

So luckily, I had picked up an HTML book from the library. I don't know why I just picked that one. So then I read that book the entire way to Washington, DC and back. It's like a pretty thick book too. It's like, now I know like HTML is not all that, but It's pretty cool.

Oh man, come on.

Yeah. So then, yeah, so then applied those skills at the computer store, like, okay, let's learn this thing. And initially I was using FrontPage. You remember Microsoft FrontPage? Build a website. So yeah, like my career would've probably ended if I had to keep using that. So found Dreamweaver, Macromedia Dreamweaver. So I already know Macromedia Flash, so Dreamweaver I picked up and then I showed that, hey, we should use this because, you know, so much faster and better. It's not still amazing because it doesn't use standards-based HTML/CSS. But back then, like, what were web standards, right? So, you know, for you to— there's like div CSS wasn't as useful or good. So, you know, to make layouts, we used tables.

HTML tables.

Yes, you did. Different tricks, right? Like if you wanted to have a border for a table, you'd basically have to create the images, slice the images in Photoshop just right so that some of them repeat, and then you get around the corners. So, so all of that was—

Brings back memories and nightmares at the same time.

So many. So many.

Exactly. It was cool after you finished it, but the process was like— I found it fun. So yeah.

No, absolutely. No, I, I really, I really admire that type of like— again, a random book pick, but still a good pick. Like, it just— to be able to like, you know, go back and forth and just read Read that and be able to just apply. I think that's fantastic. I mean, I really— between being able to do that and then just being able to learn by breaking is one of those things where it's like, that's hard for some people to do. But I, you know, like I was telling you earlier before we started recording, it's that for me there, I would have chose— looking back, obviously hindsight being 20/20— would have chose no better way to do it. So, but so I admire that a lot.

Yeah.

Yeah, you get to go deep, right? You get to understand the thing behind the thing. So it's, I think, very useful even for in the future career, right? Like you have a solid foundation then. Because if you try to skip, well, I guess now with AI you can skip, but if you try to skip, you kind of at the other end don't know what you're doing, or it's more difficult to like explain what you're doing to—

You know, I'm, I'm on the side that says you still can't skip with AI. I mean, because you can definitely get some stuff out there, but it's going to be janky and not working if you don't know what's going on and able to direct AI in the correct direction.

Yeah, you almost have to work a little bit backwards then to make sure that you understand what just happened. Do you know what I mean? In order to like— it's all great when it's— when it comes out at the other end and you're like, yeah, this is kind of what I thought, this is what I needed. But then someone asks you, how does this all work? And then you kind of just shrug your shoulders and go, it just does it.

So the way I've been playing with it, so what I found works best, and I haven't actually launched anything production ready with that code, so this disclaimer. So, but we want to get results, right? And I want enough results that I can show our development team, here's what I'm looking for. So what I do is I would still follow the rule of test first, right? So in software development, if you write the test first, then usually those tests save you. They're like scaffolding. So you can always come back and rerun anytime you're refactoring, right? If you have a good test base, you can always know where you are. Listen to that, people.

That's huge.

Yeah. And there's a Y Combinator video somebody posted on how people are doing it there. And they suggested test first, that rule still applies. And so, first you write a document like, okay, here are the requirements that I want as a summary. Then you can say write the tests necessary for this particular feature first. I was trying to write some React stuff, so I actually did a component. I write a component here and then write the test for the component as well. So, doing that test first and then have the AI modify the code and then Have they also modified the test to then match? Has gotten me better results than if you're just vibe coding.

Yeah, I totally agree with you. I make sure that when I'm writing out the structure, every component has its own test. Every time a component is complete, you do a build again to make sure you don't have any typescript errors or anything like that going with it, and then a commit.

I do have a question for you about this. Now, you are a CEO, so it would be safe to say that there are things that now you have to do as far as, let's say, events, conferences, things like that. Because I remember one of the questions we did ask you was about, you know, recent events, and you said that now that you're the CEO, there's— outside of just, you know, running things efficiently, there are other things now that you get to do and you get to go to. Any of them events, workshops, or things like that that you've done recently that have stood out to you?

Yeah, so we obviously inbound, always, we're always there. So I don't think I've missed out except for the COVID ones. I haven't missed any since 2016, I think. I actually have a funny story about, I think 2017 or 2018. So that was back when we had Revenue Conduit. So the older code base, And back then there was like, I don't think there was a deals object. Um, so if somebody bought something, uh, from the online store, we would have to put which products did they buy into the contact record on dropdowns.

Hmm.

And dropdowns because, um, it was harder to select, you know, if you want to say like, I want to create a workflow based on what they bought. you'd have to select the exact text of that product if it was a single line text. But if it's a dropdown, you could select the dropdown, like item.

Mm-hmm.

So, so that's why we use dropdowns. Well, we were actually migrating a customer from Infusionsoft to HubSpot, and the customer is like a high volume customer, so they have thousands of products. Well, when you're adding products to that dropdown, right, you had to have a list of options. Well, if you— and if you're doing anything at scale, you got to use multiple servers, right? You got to think about this. Well, if you have 2 servers trying to add the same product option to the product, like that dropdown, then you're gonna have race conditions. So you're gonna have retry, retry, retry.

Mm-hmm.

And if you're adding thousands of products at once, that could also have race conditions and tons of retries. And since product spot is only a single field, right, that could happen. Well, we were at Inbound, we actually had a booth, and we were migrating this large customer from Infusionsoft to HubSpot, and we're importing all this data. We got a call from HubSpot. They're like, hey, whatever you're doing, stop, because Dharmesh is about to go on stage and he's probably presenting HubSpot live and you're affecting this.

Shut off.

So we turn it all off.

Wow, that's like a ransom note. He's like, no, give me some, give me a little something something and I'll stop it. Right.

Wow. Literally like a main stage announcement. Parag broke inbound just so you know.

Yeah, exactly.

Oh wow, that's amazing.

Yeah, so then that's when like the conversation, I believe, okay, I'm not gonna take, I don't know what happened internally, HubSpot, but we had a meeting with Nancy Riley and said like, this is what we're trying to do. Like, here's mass data we're trying to put in here. Here's why customers need it in a dropdown field. So the idea that was born at least a few months after that was eCommerce Bridge. So I can't take credit, but I had some part of it.

Rest in peace though, right? Yeah. I mean, how do you, I guess, how's your experience been with influencing the product since you started? I know you're an active voice and you're listened to. Do you feel like we respond to you in an appropriate way? Are we doing what you need?

Yeah, that's my favorite thing about HubSpot because we are being listened to, right? There are other platforms out there that we integrate with that they don't care. They wouldn't give us the time of day. Whereas with HubSpot, we always get a good answer, even if it's like, no, it's just a polite no and here's why. So every person I've interacted with HubSpot Has been really great, like Isaac Takushi.

Isaac's amazing.

Ramon Henry, right? Those people like that. And also people back then, I forget their names now, but, well, I can't forget John McLaren, of course, and AJ. So yeah, it's been really helpful. I think we give the feedback and, you know, we explain why, like, hey, we're experiencing this because we're kind of unique in that We have lots of apps. We have like 12 different apps. And we also have a lot of installs across them. So we kind of run into situations that other companies don't run into. So, you know, one time we had some issue with the OAuth credentials. Like for some reason, cloud— what's the— I forget the name of the—

OAuth 2.0. Cloudflare, sorry.

Cloudflare, yeah, sure. There's like blocking our requests to refresh the tokens, like what's happening? So Isaac really helped quickly.

That's amazing.

That's great. We got to refresh them every half hour, right? So, yeah. Sorry, Nick, you had a question. I forgot the question you had and I went into this whole thing about inbound. Oh, the events. Sorry.

Oh, sorry.

I interrupted the whole thing.

Sorry. Will you be— are you going to be attending this year's?

Out in San Francisco? Yeah, we will be, of course.

You know, you know, there's 3 people on this, on this call right now, and, uh, one of them is not gonna be there.

Oh no.

Yeah, yeah. Come on, Nick. Come on, Nick.

I've been asked, but like, I don't know, flying— it's not that I don't fly, I just, I don't like to fly.

It's just trains, planes, and automobiles, man.

Yeah, I know. Dennis keeps saying he's gonna rent a Winnebago or something and we're all gonna drive down there.

Again, ride Melinda's horse.

Yeah, yes, yes, nice call back. I love that, I love that. Oh my God, yeah, that would be— no, it would be something. I think it would be cool to do like a live spot from there, uh, you know, so that would be, um, yeah, it would be cool. We'll see, we'll see. I, I— we gotta just— I gotta look at some things first, you know, like fear of heights and other things as well. Um, but, uh, let me ask you this though, uh, you know On that same thread of, you know, being the CEO, is there a common myth about your job that you just, that you hear a lot and that you're just kind of like, yeah, that's not, no, sorry, not like that at all?

It's a difficult thing. So like, you know, everybody thinks you know exactly what you're doing, you know, all the time. But us being in this kind of technology environment, things are changing all the time. Like, you have things coming at you and you have to adjust, constantly adjust. And I think, like, I learned from the agile methodology, right? That's, that's really all it's about, being agile, right? Some, some particular card comes at you and then you have to adjust. So we always want to build, we want to build so that always make in the future. So But that's what I've taken from development technology to the CEO job. Because I wasn't always a CEO. I became CEO in 2021. My business partner unfortunately left. So then COVID and all of that, so it was just too much. So I took over and then had to kind of learn the CEO job on my own. And it's like constant imposter syndrome, right? Sure. Even though you might be doing good, you kind of don't know what's up and down.

Right?

Yeah. Where are you swimming? And if I take this particular strategy in action, then what are the implications of that? And there's too many to count. You're gonna get, you know, doom scrolling.

Yeah.

I always think about the negative, but I have to constantly remind myself, like, you have to think positive. And if you are providing value to a customer and that value is communicated and they know about it, then you always survive. So, so I have to kind of fight against that imposter syndrome and say like, we've survived this far, we've survived, we've taken a lot of hits, and if we still haven't gone down, then I think we're doing great.

And you say you're 4 years in as CEO now, is that where you're at?

Yeah, almost 4 years.

Yeah. And so as I asked earlier, Dan was the the yin to your yang, you know, like, yeah, do you think you've accomplished like the merge? Are you both now? Are you, you know, the super CEO?

Yeah, I don't know about super CEO. He did a great job, you know, he got us through like really some difficult points in time. And so I learned from that, that was helpful to me as well, because we were, you know, had to make the decisions together. So it was like I was included in everything. So also now, you know, I've learned more about Like I said, as long as you're providing a valuable service, people will buy.

Yeah.

And you can make— give satisfaction to customers. And that's my— really, that's my goal. Like, can I satisfy their need? And if I do, then, you know, I can sleep well at night. If we are doing a bad job, of course, like when you have thousands of customers, like that's possible and constantly possible, right? So we had to put the systems in place So both mine and Dan's style has been to just jump in and try to solve the problem. But now I had to learn to lean more on the team. So just like the transition I made from developer to CTO, where I had to say, okay, team, I trust you. You guys need to do this. I had to do the same thing as the CEO too.

So I had to— Yeah.

Who I hire, I want to make sure we trust them to do their job.

So was there like— I know when I went from my last job where I went from developer to management position, there was a moment where it just kind of like clicked, you know what I mean? Like, you know, it's like, oh, this is different, you know, I need to think about this in a different way. Did you have that kind of experience or is that unique to me?

Um, yeah, when I initiated that developer to CTO role, like It had to click that way because the decisions I'm making, I'm trying to make for the team. Before that, I only had to make it for the app because it's just the two of us and we added a couple of people since then. But we were basically, you want to leave, what's the Boy Scouts saying? Leave things better than the way you found them.

Yeah.

It's the same thing in management and leadership, right? just that person before, they came from a different place, they had a different style. You welcome them in and then you also, you know, make sure that they're better when they leave you, right? That you can't keep some people forever. So as a leader, I have to make sure that everybody's getting better.

Yeah, for sure.

Challenging themselves, you know, I challenge them too, but making sure that they're motivated enough to survive on their own and be able to be independent. And if I can nurture them to do that and solve their own problem instead of me solving every time, then only then can they grow, right? Otherwise I'm a crutch, you know?

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

I love that phrase. Yeah, that's a really good— is there, you know, I was gonna ask you too, is there any other types of— because now I imagine maybe this is a 2-part question, but The first part would be, is there any like pieces of advice like that, like mentorship advice like that that you've been given that has kind of stuck with you and helped kind of shape the way you are? And then I guess the second part to that would be, do you, if you have one, is that something that you've passed down to others? 'Cause now as the CEO, I imagine that there's a lot of people that look to you for that type of mentorship as well. Is there a piece of advice then that you, it might be the same thing, but is there a piece of advice that then that you give to your team and others that kind of help inspire them?

Yeah, I would say the same advice, right? Like, we're hiring smart people and, you know, if you're hiring smart people, they need to be able to make decisions. And we can make some kind of decision. It's not always the right decision. If they're in the frontline, they're trying to do this, code something specific. opinions are, you know, just opinions though. They're, you know, there's strong opinions but weakly held. I think Jason Fried said that.

Yep.

There's just so many mentors now we can get online. But, um, yeah, strong opinions, weakly held. I think that that's helped us a lot because I'm a developer, so I could tell them exactly what to do and exactly, you know, how to fix this problem. But that's not the point. Like, I need them to learn how to fix the problem and then find the way. I think Nicholas Holland actually gave me some good, great advice. I've met him a couple of times. And it's always the question like, where's HubSpot going? We want to know because as integrators, if you're going to do something, we don't want to do the same thing because we're just stepping on each other's toes for no reason. And we want to make things better for our mutual customers. not build the exact same thing? So he said, well, here's how I think. Like, I want to give you a way of how we think or how I think, uh, so that you can answer these questions yourself rather than having to ask a HubSpotter each time, uh, because they're, they're not— because they're not gonna know. Another person I met was, I think, Andrew Lindsay, who used to be at HubSpot, isn't anymore. But, um, you know, he also said like there's so many things changing within HubSpot that I can't tell you the direction that we're going. There's no one person that can tell you the direction and things are moving so quickly. So how do we apply that to our company, right? So I have to kind of give the team my model of thinking and I have to get better at that. I'm not very good at that yet. And so if I make assumptions just like anybody, right, that they understood. So instead of that, we need a culture code. We need to like our model of thinking of how we should work with our clients and how do we make them successful consistently? Because that's like HubSpot, like no matter who I talk to, the experience is consistent, you know, no matter which individual I'm talking to. So I really need to learn how to do that. And I know that Ramesh has shared some of this himself with the Culture Code and the book, you know, and the binder you guys had. So we kind of need to, as we scale, we have to do those kinds of things too. When we were smaller, like 3 or 4 people, we didn't really need that as much because like we could just communicate. But now as we're growing and hiring new people, it's gonna be challenging for me to do that for every single person.

Indeed, indeed.

Excellent. Yeah, no, that's fantastic. Yeah, it's, I don't know, it's always, I've always been of the like opinion, like the philosophies, especially the stuff that you've explained, it's like that feels real to me. Right? That's real. I can relate to that. It doesn't feel forced. It doesn't feel fake, I guess maybe is the word I'm looking for. Like, it's not that at all. Like, the imposter— like, hearing people be able to say like, yeah, sometimes it feels like imposter syndrome, sometimes it feels— because it's like, I don't know, people can get— you get caught sometimes really in this thing where you listen to everybody else talk and you think like, wow, I know nothing. Like, everybody seems to just have everything, their head on straight, and everybody seems to like just have it there. Like, they seem to have— they seem to know what everything's going on and everywhere, but it's not always that way. And I think, like, being able— like you said, that the whole being able to be agile and being able to—

Yeah.

I don't want to say, like, shift on the fly, but there's, there's just something to be said about, you know, having that as part of the philosophy that, you know, if you don't do that, it's very, very obvious.

Do you know what I mean?

It starts to become— so, no, I, I really do appreciate Especially coming on and talking to us about this. And yeah, it does mean a lot. It really does.

Another piece of advice, actually, Dharmesh gave me this. I met him, luckily I had some time with him like last inbound. And I asked him like, here's the situation in the company. And I've kind of met him every single inbound, had the opportunity to ask him questions. So I told him like, here's where I wanna take the company because my business partner is no longer with me and so we've kind of parted ways. So how do we, how do I, who do I check with to know where to go? Like, I had to convince my board of certain things and, but they have input too. So how would I know who's right? And he's like, well, nobody knows in terms of market and sales and product market fit. Nobody really knows. I thought somebody would have like a some answer or some kind of better answer than me, but nobody actually knows. And he said that clearly. He's like, they wouldn't know. And so you had to just take the information you have and do the best you can with it and create the strategy necessary.

So yeah, and having a good foundation allows you to make those steps. Like, you have something to actually have some traction against, and you can pivot and move and whatnot. If you don't have a solid foundation, a code so to speak, You are, you know, anchorless, I guess. You're, you know, you don't know where to go. Also, when you said that, it made me think it's not just good for your team, it's good for you, because when you put things on paper and start thinking things through, you're actually challenging your own ideas to an extent and making it more real and more defined. So kudos to you for all that.

Yeah, thanks. Now the putting down on paper is the next step.

All right, get on it. You have one week.

We'll be checking in with you.

Your marketplace listings are on the line if we don't get—

Yeah, exactly.

We'll call it a bug, but something might, you know. No, no, we're running up on time. But I did want to thank you for coming on and talking with us because again, this was fantastic. I mean, and for those, I'm gonna put the website up here for those that haven't visited, who haven't checked it out, please go check it out. Um, the, the philosophies that you have and the approaches that you've taken and just the way you've gotten to where you are is just, it's just one of those things that people, they should hear this. I, I believe they should because really there's, we've been lucky. Uh, let me put it to you this way. We've been lucky. We've talked with, you know, 20-something people already and every, everybody's story, it's very impactful. It's very, and this, this continues that trend, but for every one of those that we talk to that, like yourself, that have this really good problem-solving philosophy, that really, you want to do good, you want to solve problems for the customer, you want to do best for the company and your employees. There's probably hundreds that are either not doing that or struggling to do that, that just don't know how. And to be able to speak, you know, to people like yourself, Parag, it's just— I think it's instrumental for not just us. I mean, me and Dennis get the benefit of it regardless, but everybody that listens and everybody that watches gets to take a little piece of that back with them and be able to try to implement those same type of things. I think that's priceless. And I just want to thank you for coming on because it's truly amazing.

Thank you.

Seriously. Yeah. Thank you.

Yeah.

And if anybody wants to, you know, ask any questions or like have— need advice like that, whatever I can provide, I can. So I'm on HubSpot Developer Slack as well. So if you're stuck with anything, just let me know. Awesome.

Thank you. And thank you for being a part of that community as well, because that's another piece of the puzzle there where it's like people give their time and they don't expect anything in return, but it's just like that kind of community. And to have voices like yours as a part of that as well just makes it that much better. So thank you for that.

Appreciate it.

Awesome. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for the opportunity.

Oh, sorry, go ahead.

I said thanks for the opportunity. It's been great. Dennis, I've known for a long time and AJ as well, and I've met them through the community, the local community. So always good to see you guys at Inbound and need to do it more often than that.

I know, right?

Seriously.

Absolutely. Okay. Thank you for coming on and yeah, hopefully catch us. We try to do it weekly, right? So you'll catch us in the next episode, but yeah, until then, Yeah, big thanks to everybody that helps put this together, and a big thanks to guests like Parag who make this absolutely worth doing.

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you very much.

Ta-ta.