Ep. 39 - Intro to Introw with Simon Van Den Hende | Devs:After Dark

Hello and welcome back to Developers After Dark, the show that prompt injects happiness into your LLM of life. Today we have a really great episode for you. We're talking with Simon van den Henden of Intro. You're going to love this because this is one of those apps that we've seen. And AJ, if you want to bring up their website, because if you haven't been to the website already, intro.io, there's a demo video on there that you're going to have to watch because it really does blow the doors off of a lot of the demo videos that I've seen for any type of app. And it's truly amazing. So while we're showing that, Simon, why don't you tell everyone who you are and what you do?

Awesome.

Yeah.

Thanks, Nick, for the kind introduction. I'm Simon, co-founder and Head of AI at Intro. To cap it short, Intro is a next-generation partner platform that helps B2B companies turn partnerships into predictable growth channels. We do that by giving teams a personalized partner portal for onboarding, enablement, lead, deal, reg, collaboration, incentives, the whole shebang really. And we do that by syncing everything back and forth between HubSpot to keep that as a system of record. Now, the big shift between partner portals doesn't— is basically that they didn't really work previously when they live in spreadsheets or disconnected tools. Uh, and Intro really shifts that by being CRM first, um, so that it's really fast to launch. It's very easy for RevOps to manage. And it's awesome. Honestly, it's loved by partners because they don't need CRM access to work with you, right? They can just have a great experience and your RevOps can keep every data point clean in HubSpot. And honestly, everybody just wins.

It's amazing. Now, what kind of, uh, can you tell me what kind of verticals and businesses benefit or can benefit from using Intro?

Yeah. Uh, well, well, we have the biggest impact, of course, on, on businesses that rely on external sales for products and services. Uh, typically that's on a distribution level, but also on like a lead gen, like a demand gen channel where you just have a lot of people referring your business and you kind of want to compensate for that, or you want to collaborate on that. You want to keep them in the loop. So whenever someone's like, hey, I talked to this guy over the weekend, he's really interested in your solution. Um, it's just a bit shitty when you don't really keep that guy up to date. Uh, so that's, that's kind of what we solve on the referral side. But also we see like the biggest gains for B2B SaaS and B2B manufacturing. Like so many software products are bought through global distributors like TD Synnex, SoftwareOne, Carahsoft. Um, and orchestrating that multi-tiered attribution at scale is really difficult, especially when you provide transparency, forecastability without letting all of those people into your HubSpot, of course. Um, so yeah, a really good rule of thumb is when partners touch your revenue or operations in any way, um, Entro basically helps you to run that and make it like a first-class channel.

How'd you figure this out? Like what, what, first, I guess, 2 questions. One, how old is the company? And B, When did you discover this gap, this need? Where did that discovery come from?

Yeah, great question. So, so Intro as a company is only 3 years old. Um, and, and basically the realization came from working in partnerships ourselves. So my co-founder Andreas, he was very active in partner sales and it's just these, these old platforms, they're just siloed. There's no communication. It's just, it's really hard to work with external sales. And there's a lot of research on deals being bigger, deals being Uh, it's a lot, you've got a lot less touchpoints. The win rate is a lot higher, but typically the cycle is a lot longer because it's just disconnected. And with Intro, we can actually make sure that the cycle is also improved and you have just the end-to-end gain of your channel.

What is the ideal cycle time?

Well, it depends a lot on your company, of course. Uh, some enterprise deals, they'll take a little bit longer, but typically with partners involved, you can cut your sales cycle in half, like touchpoints. Just got it in half, yeah, yeah.

Amazing. So it's probably safe to say then that Intro is CRM native, right? I think you mentioned before CRM first is another good way of putting it. How has embedding that, or embedding Intro I should say, into the HubSpot ecosystem changed like your internal processes? Like let's say the sales cycle and things like that.

Yeah, like it's 100%. So being CRM native, CRM first, that's really what it comes down to. Like it's been our biggest growth hack ever since the start. Just the time to value is just exponentially lower leveraging the existing data that's already present in HubSpot. So we can literally go live with global partner ecosystems, having like tens of millions of dollars of partner-sourced revenue in seconds, just because we have that CRM-native integration. Like buyers see instant personalized value instead of those vague dummy data promises, fluffy slide decks. It's just, you log in, you connect your HubSpot and you see your entire ecosystem. It's just there and it's activated and You can start engaging with your partners and yeah, that's, that's, that's just, just because we're building this on top of the CRM.

It's gotta be one of those things too, where if it didn't exist, 'cause you're saying in seconds versus I would imagine we're talking, what's a timeframe if this didn't exist?

Months maybe?

Yeah.

I'll ask our competitors, like typically they talk about 10 to 12 months just to get some MVP or POC live. It's like all of this data, it just lives, it's completely sharded and they have to centralize it, but then they centralize it in the wrong system. like in the PRM where it should live. It should be your data source, your source of truth just should not be your PRM. Yeah, it should just work on whatever is there already.

So I'm guessing then it's probably also safe to say too that a lot of PRMs struggle with data silos, right? That's one of the things that probably plagues them the most.

Yeah, it's a classic PRM problem. And that's also coming back to your first point is what made us found the company Intro is it's exactly this, like Um, having all of that data separated, having sales fight against partner sales, it just doesn't work that way. You need to be one collaborative team going for a single, single goal. Um, and we really solved that by making HubSpot the system of record and then using Integromat to automate and make sure that all of that operational overhead, all of that data quality, all of that transparency, forecastability is all there without having to invite your partner into your HubSpot. Because we see that some immature or more immature organizations would typically go for that because it's like, yeah, we don't know how we can share any of this data. We'll just bring them in our HubSpot. But yeah, that doesn't work. Now also making sure that everything is 2-way synced by default is just the real growth hack, making sure that anytime a partner registers a lead or a deal intro, it all goes through to that CRM and making sure that attribution is managed at scale. It's all simple. It's all out of the box available and it's all centralized. I think that's the key.

Is it real time or are you like a daily sync? How's that work?

No, it's all real time. Yeah, it's all real time.

Nice.

Yeah.

And you, uh, so you said 3, oh, I'm sorry. I'd say so 3, 3 years of, uh, in operation, this company, um, which means you came in right as UI extensions was becoming a thing, right? Or right before?

Yeah, we learned about UI extensions. It was, it was early days. I think it was Inbound 2024. Just our CEO went. We didn't quite have the budget to go all yet. So he went, he saw UI extensions, got demoed by Eros and QuotaPad, like these top tier apps that we, we all love and we all look at. So he got major FOMO and he was like, yeah, Inbound 2024, I think 4 of us went and he was like, we need to be, we need to be ready for this. We need app cards. We need app events. We need app objects. We need the whole, the whole shebang. And so we built it all out because there was so much value for it. Also touching back and forth with our customers. It's like you solve so many use cases. Uh, so we built all out and we saw huge, huge love by the community.

I wouldn't say reinventing the wheel, but like going back pretty foundationally and updating how your software works, or is it more of a superficial thing?

Yeah, not necessarily. It's, it's just about keeping everyone where they're comfortable. And I think that also goes hand in hand with the whole data silo thing. It's like, you don't want to force a portal on your partners. You don't want to force a new tool on your, on your internal team. You just kind of want to keep them where they are.

Yeah.

It's Slack, their email being HubSpot, and just making sure that everything's just available there. Uh, there's no need for them to kind of go look into another tool. We just surface whatever's necessary on the deal or on the partner or on the contact, wherever you want it.

Okay. I'm going to ask, I'm sorry, Nick, I'm totally taking over again per usual.

And I apologize.

I want to go just a little bit deeper on the UI extensions. And, um, I guess, uh, I'm gonna ask you from 2 different 2 different perspectives. One, as the developer, what did you like about it? And B, as selling this to partners, et cetera, what component or what thing actually was like, okay, I get it, I need this now?

Yeah, great questions. I think as a developer standpoint, it was just amazing having the Figma component library available. I think we just sent it over to our designer and he just made full, like crazy things. And then we had to hold him back and be like the developer way. But at the end of the day, we built it all anyway. But yeah, it's just the, the, um, the enablement by HubSpot of providing those Figma, providing the whole developer MCP server, making sure that it's all React-based. So our codebase is also React. So it was just, just really easy to kind of build something out and use those native HubSpot UI components.

Yeah.

Um, so I think from a developer standpoint, like, yeah, couldn't be better. From like an organization standpoint, maybe could you repeat that last part of the question? Because I kind of got backtracked.

No, it's okay. It's okay. I just put a lot on you. When you're selling this, I'm assuming there's something like really shiny that you have built that who you're selling it to is like, okay, yes, I need this now. What is it that you're building? What component, what app card are you building that says, okay, Amazing.

Yeah, makes sense. Oh yeah, so, so from an app card perspective, I think there's a lot, a lot more beyond the app cards that really brings that wow effect. But from like a change management perspective, especially in big organizations, they just feel like, okay, our whole team is enabled through this app card and they don't need to have like access credentials or whatever to a new tool. That's just amazing because RevOps can just put the card all the way up on the deals and that makes every salesperson just Interact with partners. Just, I mean, they can't avoid it and they can just see like, okay, this partner is like huge value on this deal. We need to bring them in on this and this level and they can just one-click communicate straight to the partner seller on the other end. And there's no email forwarding, no partnership managers having to be involved. It's just, it's just selling. It's just closing deals. It's velocity. It's, yeah, it's dopamine.

I know this is maybe dumb on my part and I'm not sure why I never thought about this, but like, If you can put everything in HubSpot through app cards, et cetera, does that cut out on having to purchase seats to other software for users?

Yeah.

Yeah.

For us, it's actually a big leverage in pricing is these CRM seats. They're obviously discounted because we want to give adoption to the whole team. Obviously they don't have the full back office capabilities, but also they don't need it. It would just be a distraction for them. Like they just need to work on deals. They need to close deals. They need to see new registrations, they need to see new submissions, they need to get communication, like collaboration between partners is like a very big deal. Making that off portal available is just a huge unique selling point of our company. Just having to make sure that your partners can stay where they are comfortable and your sales team can stay where they're comfortable as well.

Nick, I'm done. Take over. I apologize. Go.

Not to put you on the spot too, Simon, but like how cool was the AppCard review process? Because I mean, I know a guy who might do that here. And I mean, it's just, I hear people say, I don't say it, but people say it, it might be a really cool process. But you know, I've just—

Yeah, it kind of got sprung up on us really. Like we wanted to update our listing. So I think we updated our listing like the day before and it was all fine. Then next time we updated it, it was like, oh, you have to go through the new review process. And it was like, okay, sure. Let me just revert that change and kind of not go through that. Uh, so sorry about that.

I heard there's a real talented HubSpotter that does those, uh, here.

I've not found that person. Whoever the heck that is, I'm still looking.

Just some random guy, I think. Um, but, but no, all kidding aside, I think that's the— I want to— let's pivot from the, the strategic integration of it to like more of the, like, I have some like business improvement or, uh, efficiency questions, if you will. Um, since Launching intro, right? You've— and these numbers might actually be even better now, but you've tripled your workforce and then almost 5x, I think it is now, and it could be even more now, revenue.

No way.

Which is huge, you know what I mean? Like, and you said you've only— this is 3 years. I mean, this is an amazing, like, just exponential growth. So how much of that operational lift can you attribute or do you attribute to HubSpot and its automation?

Yeah, yeah, great point. Yeah, that's, that's 5x year over year. Like it's, it's going crazy. You just feel the need of the market, like get out of those silos, get out of those spreadsheets, get out of those big legacy dinosaur software that they're currently using. Like it's, it's been amazing. Um, and obviously, yeah, big, big chunk of that is because HubSpot's automation, it's basically the operating system that lets small teams run like much larger, larger ones. Um, but it's definitely not the only reason I would say, I think. If I had to quantify the operational lift, I would say roughly a third comes directly from HubSpot automation. And the rest comes obviously from things like product market fit, sharper focus on the right customer profiles, better playbooks, and simply having the right people in the right seats. Like the team, the impact of the team is just insane. You mentioned 3xing, but it's just, it feels still like a very family. Everybody knows each other. Everybody goes out. Everybody goes, has drinks. It's amazing. But I think where HubSpot has been the most impact for us mainly is just removing manual work at every handoff. Um, the moment a partner registers a deal or a lead, it's just automatically routed to the right owner. We can create tasks, trigger follow-ups, update lifecycle stages, notify partners at scale, um, and keep leadership reporting accurate, uh, without someone acting as like the human glue, which is typically like a partnership manager's job, just making sure that everything's being attached. Uh, so we kind of cut that out altogether. Yep.

So let me ask you this then, because you mentioned, and then I also read it too, that like it allows for this sort of, I guess you would call it, and correct me if I'm wrong, like an off-portal collaboration, right? That's what intro helps with and allows for. So how do you use HubSpot to manage those interactions without that manual data entry, right? Because that's what's I mean, you could say that's what plagues partnership managers all the time. So how does that interaction, how does that help reduce that?

Yeah. Yeah. Great point. Actually, um, it's been, it's been huge. Like portal fatigue is, I think the biggest issue that traditional PRMs have basically created for themselves, I would say. Um, like I mentioned before, like partners are expected to log into yet another system, uh, making sure that updates go stale. Partnership managers have to end up like chasing everything manually, copying notes back into the CRM. They take months to implement. They're not used. It's just, yeah, it's trash. It's money in the drain. It's huge amounts of revenue lost. But with Intro, we flipped that basically. And we did that in 2 layers. So first, of course, on the HubSpot side, the reps, they have that Intro collaboration app card on the deal record. Anytime a deal benefits from a partner, the rep can just see it and activate it in seconds. Then second, outside the portal, of course, partners can engage without logging in, like new deals, deal updates, sleepy deals, all of these signals are pushed to the right people and the right channels at the right time. And they can just reply on these nudges. Like they don't have to go into the portal whenever they get an email and go through that whole cycle, finding that deal, making sure they have something to say about it. They can just one click from their mailbox, answer. It goes all the way through the funnel. and ends up in HubSpot. Uh, and then that's really the big, the big change between that human glue partnership manager and actually being able to activate and enable and scale up your channel.

That's got to kill any skepticism. Like when you're talking with a potential customer, that, that right there, that whole, it's not hands-off, but like that streamlined approach. That's, do you, do you get any kind of like skepticism when you're explaining that to people or does it really, it must really click with them at a certain point because If they do go through that process without it and that whole manual data entry, that's got to be a relief, right?

Yeah. Like it resonates like crazy, just not having to chase everything. It's just a relief. And that's with salespeople as well. Like typically they have to chase their prospects till infinity, but imagine you're a partner, like external people. So you're chasing the people that are chasing the leads. So it's just insane. Any action that happens in the CRM is just It's out there. And of course, our buyers, they can determine what to share and when to share. And there's a whole granularity and safety in place. But imagine you have a strategic collaboration. There is just an open playground and everybody can enjoy and win together.

Let's shift to, I wanted to ask some questions about product-led growth, right? So now as the co-founder of Intro, has the HubSpot Marketplace influenced the way you're like influenced your go-to-market strategy?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. The Marketplace is like a huge Uh, high-intent acquisition channel for us. People are, people who are browsing the marketplace, typically they already have HubSpot, which makes them very qualified for what we do. Uh, they believe in CRM-first way of working, like having the CRM being the, the source of truth. And they're actively looking to solve a specific problem, which is we're still in a very niche space. Um, so instead of trying to educate the market from scratch, we meet the buyers exactly at the moment they're searching for a partner portal or like a partner relationship management Uh, solution. Now, next to that, the marketplace creates like compound social proof. Today, our listing shows 400+ installs, so 4.9 rating across 50 reviews, which makes the decision a lot easier for customers because they can see real-world adoption before they ever talk to sales. And this is like an undeniable public proof that we're the market leader in the PRM space. There's no one that's above that. Um, so it really did shape our channel motion.

Did that shift your approach to customer acquisition or was that always kind of how you had planned it and just as you met HubSpot, it just kind of, it was just like peanut butter and jelly, right? It was like, oh, this is already how we do it, so this is perfect.

Yeah, honestly, like it creates such an easier way to collaborate with the wider HubSpot ecosystem, especially solution partners, 'cause they can confidently recommend an integration and it's just really easily discoverable and It just fits right in.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We didn't actually expect it to work so well.

That's— no, that's great. I'm glad it does. Now, you talked about a little bit earlier, we talked about launching in minutes versus launching in months, which is obviously huge no matter how you look at it, no matter, you know, whatever way you look at it. But the question I had for you is like, how does— can you talk a little bit about how HubSpot's flexibility allows you to deliver on that promise? Because that's a big promise, right? Because that's, you know, it's different if you're saying like, oh, you know what, we can cut it down by a week or two.

Don't you worry?

Like, no problem. But you're talking like Like, that's a significant gap in time, right?

Yeah, it's crazy. And that's the thing, because earlier you mentioned, like, do you ever get challenged on the off portal? We get challenged on our time to value a lot, but it's so good because we can just confidently say, like, okay, just connect your HubSpot. You'll see. Uh, and that's, that's what it is. Like, even I think the last day at Inbound 25, we, we met up with a, with like a potential buyer and he was like, yeah, sure. I heard from, from QuotaPath, uh, you, you might be a good solution. So we sat at a table, we were like, okay, sure, you can connect your HubSpot. They did. And the whole portal was just there. They were just ready to buy on the spot. So it was, that was literally minutes. Like it's crazy. And obviously HubSpot is a very big reason that we can say that. Uh, it basically lets us plug into the way teams already work instead of forcing them to wield everything, uh, to rebuild everything. Sorry, in a separate PRM. So that means that the platform is just full of relevant data seconds after connecting HubSpot. And we then use, of course, like an AI layer to customize multiple partner experiences for all kinds of partner programs. And we apply that to your partners, which we've already extracted from HubSpot. So it just allows you to provide full value to a global partner ecosystem in literally minutes.

Yeah.

What were you doing prior to App Objects?

Uh, well, we, we typically, partners are typically just companies in HubSpot.

Yeah.

Um, so we use, we use App Objects for for different reasons, like our LMS and certifications, that kind of stuff. Um, but, but purely for servicing partners, it's typically companies to deals, uh, or custom objects, which were already present.

Now we know about the past, we know exactly what the present is now. So let me ask you a couple of questions about the future and future scaling, right? How, I guess the way I want to position this is like, how are you leveraging HubSpot's AI tools along with your own? Like AI agents and things of that nature to kind of provide more of a, what I would like to call like a seamless experience for your partner network?

Yeah, it makes sense. I think firstly what we really emphasize on is making sure that the data quality is good. That's a common issue, especially with partners as like external people. Also your CRM typically isn't so good. There's like duplicate companies, duplicate records, all that kind of stuff. Uh, so we have full AI channel conflict detection that makes sure that every lead that comes in is just 360 scanned against your HubSpot. No duplicates are made. We make sure that the data is good and that the attribution is good. I think that's like the next level is making sure that whenever a lead comes in, that they are attributed to the right partner. It can be multiple partners with distributors, all that stuff to make sure that you can defend your deals and you can actually report on your deals and on your revenue as well. Um, so typically with AI, they typically say like, okay, shit in is shit out. We make sure that the input is really good so that the HubSpot AI agents can produce a better output. We're also increasingly extending the Breeze agents with custom tooling, and we're very closely working together with the HubSpot team to connect our MCP server in private betas and that kind of stuff. So I think I won't steal your thunder, but there should be a cool update coming end of Q1, maybe Q2. And also what's really interesting with HubSpot is I had a demo of the Data agent. Uh, which like the Data Studio is like able to fill in like all of these AI-generated columns. And because we're so deeply integrated with HubSpot, we can make sure that those properties, those custom properties that are fed by AI, you can also share them with your partners, which is unlocking exponential visibility of your AI improvements, uh, that you're already doing. And then of course on the, on the partner side, um, Intro AI Agent is sitting directly in the partner portal, giving partners real-time 24/7 answers. Um, so everything from how to register a deal to what their tier is, what their commission plan looks like, uh, where they can find enablement material, all that stuff is just surfaced ad hoc, uh, by our AI agent 24/7, uh, in any language. So that's, that's also a very big help when I was talking about those partnership managers having to be like the manual glue and stitching everything together. A lot of that is, is just repetitive questions and enablement.

When you, when you do that, you're, I'm assuming you're Making API calls to an LLM somewhere out there, right? How are you— each one has different price points for your API calls. How are you deciding what goes where and making sure that you're not coming back with a $3.7 trillion bill from wherever?

Yeah, good question. Good question. Honestly, we have a lot of things in place before we actually go to the LLM. So we have a very sophisticated RAG system. We have very sophisticated tooling that we can make sure that we can keep our context as low as possible. So as you know, you pay per token. So we keep that token usage as small as possible, as relevant as possible to make sure that anything that goes to the LLM is actually required. And that's also helped increasing our accuracy like crazy. And beyond that, we use Vercel's AI Gateway. I don't know if you're familiar, but that allows you to really easily switch between providers.

Mm-hmm.

So you can just spin up a Gemini Flash 2.5 Lite, where you just want to summarize something. And then you can go to like a 5.2 GPT when you really want to reason. So we have like full course and partner program generative AI that kind of just goes off for 5, 10 minutes and does some work for you. That's typically on those higher range models. So they will literally create a full course for you that your partners can take to get certified. But then simple questions like, how do I register a lead? That will typically go through like a little easier model.

Yeah, that gateway, that's pretty new, right? Vercel just came out with that like last 3, 4 months.

Yeah, yeah, we're quite quick adopters of that kind of stuff. We're on V6 of the AI SDK on Vercel. Yeah, it's, but you have to, like, you have to be right on top of that. And also you want to give the best AI experience to your users and you want to make sure that they're as productive as possible. And you can only do that by Being on the new tech.

Well, this leads me to another question about, A, well, my God, several questions. One, how do you keep up? That seems like almost an impossible task. And 2, how do you experiment? Do you have beta testers out there on different LLMs? Or are you, how are you going about this?

Yeah, cool question. About staying on top is just, you have to love it. I think you have to be passionate about it. It just has to come intrinsically. It shouldn't be a task to follow up. It should just be like, you see something in your feed, like now Opus 4.6 launches. They have this whole article about creating a C compiler with $20K budget and just a whole bunch of agents. And that's just some things that trigger me and I just love to go deep into that. I think it comes more from like an intrinsic passion. Yeah, I think more than anything, it's that. Yeah.

Gotcha. I mean, the second question being, how are you actually testing these things? Did you have—

Oh yeah, sorry. I got distracted again. No, we have full eval pipelines. We integrate with the best-in-class instrumentation for LLM transparency. So oftentimes people say LLMs are black boxes and we kind of flip that. So everything that goes in goes out. Any tool call that's being processed, any result that comes back, anything that happens within this LLM's memory is just kind of traced Back to us and we can get full debugging on that. We also have automated like helpfulness checks and just evals running on every conversation that our ecosystem has, just so we know like what's going on, what's going well, what's going bad. Anytime a question that gets answered poorly gets surfaced and we kind of can go through the traces and see like, okay, this tool call, these parameters weren't resolved correctly. We might need to improve this or that system prompt. Um, so yeah, we're very closely following that up.

How often are you rejiggering, you know, the prompting that's going into it? I imagine frequently, I'm assuming, right? It seems like something that's not changing, or it's changing often, I mean.

Yeah, it changes very often. I think the system prompts themselves, not necessarily too often, but more so the RAG system and the whole technology beyond making sure that those, I mean, making sure that whatever goes into the LLM is as optimized as possible. By making sure that the tools and the skills that the LLM has available to itself is as optimized as possible as well, making sure that all of those data points are available, making sure that they're secure, right? There's so many security reels, especially with external sales. You have to make sure that it doesn't surface anything that they shouldn't have access to. So yeah, those things are very important to us.

This question is going to, this is definitely a future question, but this is more for like the future of partnership leaders. Is there a particular HubSpot feature that you think that partnership leaders are currently underutilizing?

Yeah, great question, actually. I think honestly, it's, it's not necessarily like a native HubSpot, it's, it's the app events thing that, that's something that really triggered a big shift for us specifically, because it's tied into every workflow, report, and dashboard that you have. So a lot of teams, they will still measure partnership success with a single metric like partner source revenue, while everything else just still lives in Slack, email threads, spreadsheets. And thanks to Integromat, HubSpot can actually capture the real partner motion in events. Things like a partner viewed a deal, engagement with enablement content, marketing collateral being viewed, sharing a lead, submitting an update, replying to a request. Everything that a partner does, any signal that they have will be pushed into HubSpot under that app event. And then you can actually trigger workflows and build reporting of these events.

Mm-hmm.

So instead of chasing updates, you really let the tools do the operational work. And notify the right rep when the partner takes an action, nudge the partner when the deal goes quiet, uh, score partner engagement, build dashboards that just go way beyond, uh, source partner revenue and really, um, I mean, really exposes partnerships for what they are. Yeah.

How would you, okay, this is something I struggle with sometimes. If you were to actually explain events to a layperson, how would you go about explaining it to them?

Um, yeah, an event is basically just anything that a, that a partner does. So whenever they go into your portal, that's an event. Whenever they're watching an asset, that's an event. Whenever they submit a lead, that's an event. Whenever they register a deal or make an update to a deal, that's an event. Whenever a deal goes silent for 10, 20, 30 days, that can trigger an event. So it's really that signal-based, intent-based data that's, that's been really, uh, opening up a lot of doors.

Thank you.

This is one of my favorite parts of the episodes is when we get to know a little bit more about you, Simon. This is where we get to ask you questions and put you under the microscope, if you will. But now one of the first ones that we like to ask this of everybody too, because I think the answers, they differ so greatly, but they're all very influential and they're very meaningful. And that's the mentorship advice question. I always love asking, like, is there a piece of mentorship advice that you've gotten in your career or into life that's really been kind of like a cornerstone for you?

Yeah, honestly, for me, that's been enjoying the process. It's a very simple one, but it's often overlooked. Like, people go from goal to goal, they chase dreams. It's like, oh, we need the next thing, the bigger thing. Um, but, but I've heard it so often that you really need to enjoy the process. Um, live in that moment, really celebrate those wins. And even if you're failing, celebrate that you're failing because oftentimes you're still winning because you're doing, right? It's so much better than not doing anything and just kind of sitting there. Um, but it's really hard to enjoy the process. It's really hard not to keep chasing that next level, uh, especially when you're doing good. Um, so yeah, I think if I had to say one thing—

Is that something you have to work at? Because it's like, I, I have all the hardest time enjoying the process. If there's something not going right in the process, that's one of those things where it's like, I'm not having a good time. Right, right, right.

And what, what is your success rate?

Yeah, I mean, it's just, you have to, you have to really, um, realize when you're, when you're winning. And you can't just let it pass by. It's like sometimes you set your goals and you're already thinking about the next goal. It's really whenever you achieve something, you have to kind of maybe take a half day or something and just kind of reason about that and just kind of be thinking about that like, holy shit, like 6 months ago I was thinking if I would ever even get remotely close to obtaining this, I would be so happy. And at the moment you do, you're not even happy. You're not even thinking about it anymore. It's like it becomes obvious.

Mm-hmm.

Especially because you kind of work towards something, you know, it's gonna happen, but still just taking that evening and, and, and that's, yeah, Nick, what you mentioned, it's completely true. You really have to actively think about that and work about that is to bring yourself back to 6 months ago and be like, holy shit, yeah, we did it.

Now you've, in, in 3 short years, like with the amount of success and the work that's gone into this, has there been With work-life, like a work-life balance? Has there been a struggle there with that? Because that growth rate, there's got to be— there's, let's put it this way, there's some hours that have to be put in in order to achieve, right? So has it been hard to try to balance that?

Yeah, 100%. You have to put in the work. But honestly, it's a stupid cliché, but people say when you love what you do, you don't really work. I feel really attracted to that in the sense that what I mentioned before is staying ahead of the AI game is just loving it intrinsically. And same with our team. I love every single person that's working at Intreau and I love enabling them. I love being there for them. I love making sure that they can sell the very best product there is and that they are confident in this. And for sales, it's just amazing to make, to know that you're the best solution. And for customer success, it's just a whole workaround. And of course it takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of effort. But as I mentioned, like when you enjoy the process, it's just, it's, it's every day is filled with dopamine and, and joy and yeah, it's, it's a no-brainer to, to just keep going.

It's fantastic to hear because yeah, no, it's, I was gonna say it's a, it's a hard process to, especially when you're in kind of, I would say like the rough patches, right? Where you're trying to work at something and something's not quite working the right way, or you're trying to build something, expand on something and it's just, it's not coming out the way you want it to, to keep that positive, I guess you'd call it positive mental attitude. Uh, is that something that like you are constantly instilling around with everyone at Intro and trying to keep that as sort of like a, like a culture type of thing?

Yeah. Yeah. Across the board. I think the culture is, is, is so important when people start to get toxic or negative. That's just, yeah, it's just a no-go. You always, we always try to flip it and everyone has to be positive. Everybody believes in it. Also, everybody knows that we're just getting started. Like we already have achieved so much. We're already the market leader on top of HubSpot, but everybody knows that we're only getting started. And that this is going to be such a great, great story.

How do you, okay, so, um, you're scaling quickly, right? And how do you, how do you know when to balance that culturally, so to speak? Like, what is, what is that threshold? When do you say, all right, it's time to add more, you know, seats here? Let's get some more people in on this. How do you say, let's hold back, hold up for, you know, 5 minutes. Let's think about this.

Yeah. I mean, I mean, honestly, we get such good signals from the market that we need to scale up. But we're very, very, I mean, we scale up very fast, but we also scale up very slowly, if that makes sense. Like for every new role that we'd like to hire, we see at least 40 to 50 candidates. Just, it's a very difficult process to get hired here. Like we take it very seriously because of course our culture is so good and we want to keep it that way. So everybody has to go through like the full scanning. What do you do in the weekends? Just, are you a chill person? And then can you do the work? It's like a 3-hour workshop where they have to present stuff and they have to prove that they know what they're doing. And then there's always, always, always a full company lunch. So everybody lunches together with the potential new hire. And that's also a really good check with like, is this person going to vibe with the team? Is this going to be a fit? Are they going to say weird stuff during lunch? Like it just kind of pulls them out of their comfort zone, puts them in this big group of just motivated young people. And I just kind of just see how they, how they react to that. And typically when they get to that phase, we already know that they're a good fit. And typically that's just amazing. You see people bonding and you see them talking to random people there. And like, as a person that's hiring, that's hiring that person, you don't really want to be too close, but you kind of want to see how they're working with the group. And that dynamic is typically so, so good.

Now, is there, will there be, are there going to be any places that people are going to be able to see Intro coming up? Are there any conferences or any things that you plan on attending?

Oh yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

We're attending a lot of things, especially in the US. A lot of cybersecurity events. Obviously Inbound 26 is going to be our big highlight. It's going to be the event of the year where we're going to be with so many people enjoying Boston. So yeah, honestly, we're around like everywhere. Events, online, LinkedIn, any place.

Excellent. So what kind of things do you do to unplug from, since this is like, again, this is one of those things where Tons of work are put in.

I don't think he does, man.

Intensity.

I don't think he does. There's no unplugging here.

What's that?

There is. It's very important. No, that's true. It's hard to keep a balance, but honestly, I think unplugging, and that's the way we typically do so, it's just having like some sporty events after the hours. It's going to grab a drink with friends and also really connecting with people that are not in your space. I'm so blessed having friends that have nothing to do with software or B2B SaaS or anything of that nature. They're just regular people and like having drinks with them and having dinner with them and they talk about their lives. It's just, it's so amazing. And it takes a while to kind of get out of your super niche microorganism world, but then like going back into the real world and talking about random stuff is just, yeah, it's amazing.

Well, unfortunately, after it's, it's known that you're on probably the top podcast in the world, you might have to change your social circles. I don't, I don't know. Things might change.

Yeah, I think so. I might have to upgrade. I might have to wear it. Yeah. I don't know if I'm gonna be able to go to bars anymore.

I know.

I know.

Exactly.

At least top in the Midwest in the US. That's, I mean, we could guarantee that. I don't know beyond that, maybe not, but I was gonna ask you, do you, I know me and, me and AJ who's listening in here, We, like, when we're talking about, when we start talking shop, because you mentioned having friends that are outside of that circle, right? Which is great to have. And I have something similar where the conversation isn't, because when me and AJ are in a room together, when we start talking shop, like family members leave the room because they're like, I can't listen to this. This is too much.

It's too in the weeds, ones and zeros.

Do you get like that with other people, especially like around in the intro office?

Yeah, yeah, I do. I do. And especially with new hires, like sometimes we can kind of just go off and like, because of course my co-founder Lawrence, he's also very technical. And sometimes a question comes up and we're just already just knees deep in there. And we just kind of try to figure out the solution. And then you kind of just see the light go out of like the other people, but typically they don't dare to say it, but you feel it. And then you're like, oh yeah, are you still following? They're like, yeah, I lost you like 20 minutes ago. But it's really good to kind of go back and kind of get them through and it usually works. But yeah, typically when you talk to like-minded people about like complicated stuff, you're just at another level.

Now, is he the one that's in the demo video?

No, I think that's Andreas. Lawrence is really our behind-the-scenes technical wizard making sure that everything's smooth and compliant.

Huge shout out to Andreas because that, like I said, that That demo video, when you, when anyone who's listening, when you go to the website and you watch that, that demo video is, uh, it's actually pretty popular too as well amongst HubSpotters because the, uh, quick story, the reason I found that was because on LinkedIn, shout out to, I believe it was Russell, another HubSpotter here. He had posted, uh, that it was a game changer. And if you're not, if you're not, if you're not doing demos like that, then you're not, you're basically not doing demos at all. But, uh, I saw him post about that and that's where I, cuz I think it was before we even spoke and I, and I saw that and I was watching and I was like, Yeah, this is pretty good, to say the least. It was like really good. So it was, yeah, no, no, shout out to him because that was a really great demo and everybody's talking about it, not just us here in the room, but, you know, HubSpotters outside of our teams and outside of our department.

So yeah, Andreas, like the way he's able to kind of formulate our story and like way, way better than I am doing right now. I'm probably butchering it like every way possible, but like Yeah, Andreas, he just exactly knows what we're doing. He's so much on top of it. When you think I don't deep plug, you should look at that guy. Like, he's still working right there. It's crazy. Yeah, he goes all in. He's the best.

Amazing. That is amazing. Well, I wanted to thank you for coming on, Simon. This was fantastic. I can't say enough about the story and the success and the short time in which you've achieved this. And like I said, everything you and Intro has put out so far has been really fantastic. And it's a, I recommend it, especially anybody that has never heard of you before. Now they know, and now they'll be able to go to the site, watch the demo. Um, is there any place else aside from, uh, intro.io that people can find you?

Um, yeah, honestly, LinkedIn is a great way to communicate. I'm very open to just kind of chat around or, um, you can just send me a message and I just love to talk about people who are interested in just the market in general, just partnerships. Like, what are we doing in partnerships? Like, how can we improve this? It's a very, I know like the sales, everything about sales is very overhyped. It's very active. It's, it's everybody's talking about it, but then partnerships is basically sales as well. It's indirect sales. It's external sales. It's, it's so important and it's so often overlooked that yeah, it's a real shame. So I really love to talk about people who have experience with partnerships and And how they typically scale up big networks.

Excellent. No. All right. Sounds good. Well, thank you for coming on again. And to everyone listening and watching, thank you. And don't forget, if you're watching this on YouTube, to like and subscribe to the HubSpot Developers YouTube channel. And if you're on Apple or Spotify, give a like and a good review if you possibly can. And we will talk to you next time. Thanks.

Love it.

Awesome. Yeah. Thanks for having me, man. Appreciate it.

Take care. Awesome.