2024 Wrap Up

Foreign. I'm just going to run through a quick year in a review. I've been crunching the numbers every way I can think of them and I have really enjoyed some of the insights I found. I hope you all as admins will also find the charts entertaining and interesting. I'm just going to talk through these things for a little bit and then Deanna and I have some questions for you of how we can move forward in 2025, making sure that these. The admin hug is meeting your needs. But just to start here, Hug has been growing really well. In 2023, we grew 3,000 members. And then so far in. In 2024, we've grown almost that much. This is a. This is an end of November number, so I'm sure it's even a little higher here. But that is really steady, constant growth.

You're not on the right side. You're on the title side still.

No, I'm not. Am not.

Yeah, you are.

I don't understand why. All right, well, it's a chart, I promise. And it has cool animations, so I really hope it works.

Try it again.

Try it again.

And welcome Kyle to the admin hug.

Thank you. I should have practiced sharing my screen beforehand. There's anything we have learned.

That's my fault. I. Production broke that. That's. That's my fault.

Okay. Hey. And actually now I can see Debbie also. Okay. Hey, look at that. And animations. Haha. See, isn't that nice?

Beautiful.

So we grew 3,000 last year. We grew almost that much this year. Steady growth. Keep telling your friends, keep inviting folks out. Really love seeing this take off. This really began as just sort of an experiment, an idea I had in 2022. And people keep coming, keep showing up. Our most popular events last year were about workflows, advanced tokens, like not using personalization tokens, but using breaking HubSpot in creative ways to get personalization in places it's not designed to be. And reporting our most popular events this year. Any guesses what we talked about? Not this one. Forms and Clearbit were enormous. And then the marketing operations one with. With Mike Rizzo. Yeah, you got it. Forms. It's funny. Clearbit happened and broke all of our records ever. Forms was literally the next week and broke all those records again. Clearbit did not hold the title for very long. But yeah, you can see we had two events that broke a thousand last year. Much bigger events this year. We'll see if that trend continues and how long Bevy can support it. So across 46 webinars. I crunched the numbers. Unique domains showing up. This was all really interesting to me. About a quarter of the people coming are not customers according to the data I have which is not necessarily super reliable. I would love to hear from you all in the chat. Are some of you not Hubstock customers? Are you here just learning? That would be really interesting to me. Similarly, I'm surprised nearly half of all companies represented here have some sort of enterprise tools going on. That is wild. I thought we were very much a professional group and you can see that's the second biggest chunk. But you all are pretty advanced it seems like. And then this is a breakdown of who has hubs. No surprise, marketing is the most common one. Sales, second service and CMS content and operations are all pretty much tied for third. And yeah that's, that's kind of of a breakdown of the types of people showing up. The most exciting thing I learned I think and here's a really exciting animation to let you know how exciting it is. You all came from 65 countries this year. Assuming the data I'm pulling is accurate, we are very much a worldwide group. Many of these these countries, you know we just have one person coming from this. This is Debbie. Right. We have Daniel over in Romania but lots of, lots of folks all over the place really grateful to to the people signing in in the middle of the night to come to these events. It's, that's a lot of dedication and we hope to find better ways to serve you in the future. Here's of of the these 46 webinars I crunched the numbers for we had 6573 unique individuals, unique email addresses register. We had about 2100 of those people only ever came to one event, never came back. About 1800 came to between two and ten events. And then there were 251 of you who came to more than 11 events. I assume this represents a very large proportion of the 110 of you who are in this room right now. But there were 11 people who came to more than 30 events this year which is, which is a wild level of dedication and I want to shout out each of you individually. So Donnell, I saw you here. Thanks for coming. 32 events I think it's now probably you have liked this year or events you would like to see next year that we didn't do this year. Look through the list as people are putting them in upvote them. We, we want to make sure we are evolving the hug over time and, and meeting Your needs.

I love. Scott says they have a no meeting Tuesday policy and this is the only meeting. Wow, that's amazing. I tell everybody to leave me alone on Tuesdays. I love this. All right, look at those numbers go up, guys. I see you voting over there.

Yeah.

Wonder if we can break a new question record.

Yeah, I crunched a number on Q and A. Also friends, I shared the results with Deanna, but all of the top voted questions were like, how can I get ungated for this? And get. And will this session be recorded? So there wasn't a lot of great insights there.

And I shared with Kyle, I just copy and paste that out of Super. So I am not actually typing that every single time.

Okay. So yeah, let's. I'm going to sort this now and just see what we got. So Melissa says I loved the plot. Show and tell. Please do a couple more. I will tell you all. Last week, show and Tell was my favorite event for probably of the year, maybe of ever. I thought it was really fantastic. My big question for show and Tells is how we go about sourcing people to share because it's not much of a show and to tell if we don't have people showing and telling. So just. I would love to hear in the chat in general, would. Would you be comfortable? Do. Do you think if we had some call for submissions or if we had a way to collect your ideas, would you be willing to volunteer? And Joanne, that's interesting. Would themes be helpful? Would that help spur some ideas?

Okay, themes.

So Dan and I have been talking about this. I think rather than committing to doing show and tells on any sort of regular cadence, we're going to do it once or twice a year or whatever it is. I think we are just going to create some way for you to submit your ideas and maybe make that part of the housekeeping I do at the beginning. And when we get a sufficient number of submissions that we have a full session, we'll just schedule it and make it happen. Unless anyone has a better suggestion. But I think we all agree that show and tell is fantastic and so definitely expect more of that in 2025. Would love an updated leads hug as the original session was over a year ago to see where we are at now. That's a great insight. I can make that happen, no problem. Good call. Yeah. By the time we. Well, I was gonna say by the time we have our next meeting, I'll have it on the books, but honestly, everybody's gonna be out of office before January is over. We will have that on the books. I can promise you that. What about a lesson learned from absolutely horrible HubSpot failure session? Jeremy, I love this idea. HubSpot used to internally run a thing called the Failure Forum and people could sign up and present about their failures and it was like simultaneously really cringy and really cathartic. It was one of my favorite meetings. It did not last. It was hard to get people to volunteer for it. I'm curious once again chat tell you. There you go. That's fine. Would you volunteer to share at a Failure for mistakes and things maybe once a year?

Kristen says yeah.

Okay, cool.

I fail all the time, so I'll share all the time.

I think. I think it's really important, particularly for people in admin type roles to hear stories of like. I'm not the first one who did like accidentally sent an enormous email sent to the wrong group of people and caused a disaster of some sort. Hearing these stories that we might otherwise keep a secret lets people know that they're not. Halloween's a great idea. I love that. That's. That's a little far away. But I. We might. It might be worth the wait. Cool. Love that. Let's see. What about. Yeah, okay. I would love a hug on associations once the final piece is rolled out next year. That's a great. That's a great call out too. Yeah, I'll. I can reach out to the Associations team and see when they think that right moment would be. But it does feel like we're very close to finally making all the associations in HubSpot do all the things we always wanted them to do. Maybe like a monthly recap where you can dive into all the new updates that have been released. Keeping up with all the changes is a lot. So this is a question I would love to like. HubSpot updates is kind of my thing. It's what is why people know who I am and I am doing all I can in a LinkedIn context to. To communicate that out. But it's still insufficient and I recognize that. Do we want some of that in the admin hug or is there like a. Is that a separate thing? The. The thing about the admin hug is we meet every week, which seems like it should be a lot, but honestly it feels like sometimes we're scheduling things months in advance and it's a little hard to be timely. I feel like if once a month I was taking up a Tuesday to do updates, we lose out on other valuable stuff. Would a separate event on updates be something you all would be interested in because I could do that for you really easily. Or would you rather, in the context of the admin hug, do it? I would love just. Okay. All right, well, that's pretty clear. Thanks, Rich. Yeah, so every Monday I've been doing a roundup, but I think on a monthly basis I could do something a little. A little clearer. I don't know if you all have seen the last year or two, HubSpot has tried a few different ways of doing this and I've been involved in all of them and. But typically what HubSpot likes to do is call out like, these are the five updates that we think you should be most interested in, which I think is less helpful to an admin audience than like, here's all the stuff that actually changed and what the implications are for you. So I'm happy to do something a little more exhaustive if that is. If that's interesting to you all and it sounds like it is. Would a topic be how to clean and maintain your HubSpot instance? Basic tips and examples could be a show and tell. Melissa. I love that. I would love to see more things on hygiene. I would love to see more events run by community members. I'm curious. You all nine people upvoted this, but even if you didn't upvote it, curious. A prescription for cleaning and maintaining your HubSpot instance. Would you rather get that from HubSpot itself? Like, I don't know if there's a product team, but maybe like the consultant or somebody. Or would you prefer to like, Here is a HubSpot customer out in the world, one of your peers who has cracked the code on it and has just an immaculate HubSpot. What is, is one of those preferable? I will say half and half, a bit of all right.

Yeah, I knew that was going to happen.

The thing that's. I will say I think this is an incredibly important topic. The thing that is tricky is sourcing a good, a good person or set of people to lead this. Because I think we all probably know in a theoretical sense what it takes to keep HubSpot clean. But to actually do it is hard. I mean, just before this started, I was complaining to Deanna that HubSpot's own instance of HubSpot has lots of duplicate properties and I never know which one to use and I would expect HubSpot to be world class at this point. But I mean, we're an international 8000 person company and messes happen, right? So it's hard, legitimately difficult. If you know someone who is really excellent at this, or if you yourself are, please let me Indiana know, because I do think it's important and valuable, but I want to make sure whoever. Whoever's leading the discussion on this. Did I freeze again? Is. Is a true expert. Someone who is practicing what they're preaching. I'm still here.

You're here. You're just a little visually frozen.

Okay.

Melissa says she wants a session where someone forces her to do it. Like the bootcamp, but like mini boot camp.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Actually, a CRM hygiene boot camp would be really cool. I wonder if the Academy folks are still taking suggestions for new, new boot camps. That's really interesting. Okay, maybe like a month later. The beta sneak peeks are great. Yes. So I will say that will probably continue to be the backbone of. Of the hug. I feel like one of the things I am uniquely positioned to offer you is Insider looks into HubSpot's product team. And HubSpot product team is getting really excited about you guys. One thing I will ask, I would love to hear in the chat from as many of you as have a perspective on this. We. We sort of had a change this year and we started getting two flavors of presentations from HubSpot's product team. One, the standard one that we've been doing forever is here's a product manager talking about what they've built, what they've launched was in beta. Here's their roadmap. Here's what's coming next. Very much just like a presentation with a Q and A at the end. What has been happening more and more recently is product teams and researchers come and just ask you all for your input and feedback on ideas they have or ways they can make the product better. Are both of those valuable to you? I really love that the product team is starting to value your input enough to have these kind of sessions. I don't ever want you to feel like you're coming to the admin hug and being interrogated and not getting anything of value out of it yourself. So both. Both presentations.

I mean, both, both, both, both, both.

Yeah, yeah. Occasionally. Yes.

See, the roadmap is headed and offering the opportunity to give feedback.

Yeah. All right, cool. I will continue to try to. To make a balance between those two. And I suspect that the presentation will continue to be the default one because that's. I think PMs. I can go to, like, any. When you're like, tell us the status of leads. The reason I can cope so confidently say, yeah, I can get that for you. Is because I know pretty much any product manager in HubSpot. If I show up to them and say, hey, I can pull together a couple of hundred HubSpot power users who would love to know more about the product you're building. Are you interested in that? It's an easy sell. Every time they're like, yes, the other style. Do you want to give us a sneak into what you're thinking about? Even if it's really early stages and get feedback that's scarier, that's not a, that's not emotion a lot of product teams have in place, so I expect that will continue to be less common. But the product teams have been delighted with the feedback you've given them. Word is spreading that you guys have interesting insights into what it's like to use HubSpot and so I expect interest in that will continue to grow and I want to make sure I'm managing that this is a good experience for you and not, not just them taking advantage of us. Let's see. I would love to hear more about what I, as an admin, not dev can do with opsa. That's oh, and second, right after that Ops Hub hug. Yeah. And then after that, custom coded workflows, which is an Ops Hub feature. I'm hearing loud and clear that we need to do more with Ops Hub. But I think the operations Hub team will be delighted to hear that you are the audience they are building for and so I think, I think they would, it would just be lovely. Yeah, we'll make that happen. We'd love more deep dives into business unit environments. Yeah. Sound off in the chat. If business units are interesting to you, we did do a business unit event once. It's been a while ago, maybe like a year and a half ago. And I feel like business units for the people who need them are confusing and need more product input and for everyone else it's just like a magical mystery that they don't really care about.

Kristin says solutions, like customer stories, some, some case studies would probably be helpful.

Oh, that's interesting. That's not a direction we've gone before, but yeah, once again, if I could find like a model citizen of the business units community to say like, here's how we organize it, here are the limitations, how we overcome them, that would be interesting. Yeah. Joanne, they are pricey. I, I, I think they're very pricey, but I guess for the people they sell for, they are worth it. I don't know. I'm not, I'm not that person. So hard to say. Okay, let's see more about operations planning thinking. So you built a workaround and then a beta dropped how and when to shift. Yeah, Shell, I like this. Operations planning. That's a good name for it. I do feel like workarounds and what to do about them, like deciding whether or not to implement a workaround when you know something's in beta but it's not here quite yet and you have an immediate need. There is. I think there's something unique about being a HubSpot admin in terms of these product updates and implementing them and working around limitations and managing all of that. Again, I don't know the right person or type of person to speak on that. Does anyone have advice?

Thomas just shared a business use case study in the chat.

Oh, nice. Cool.

Sometimes the betas don't drop soon enough.

Yeah, no, that's a very real thing and I imagine that's the most painful place to be as an admin when you are building a workaround for something that you know HubSpot is building and you know this workaround you're building you will have to undo at some point. But you cannot wait the three or four months for HubSpot to launch this thing because you have an immediate need that is. That is layers of. Of pain and tension in your soul and I'm sorry.

Roadmaps. Roadmaps.

Yeah.

Yeah, I. Yeah.

Okay. So I am going to like I do for our other presenters. I'm going to download the Q and A and chat for this session. I'm going to dig through all of these, all of your suggestions that have been committed to text inside of Bevy today. Deanna and I will be discussing. But is there anyone want to sound off in the chat with an idea? They were really excited about that. They feel like didn't get the attention it deserves. Today's date, Michelle, that's coming. That's. That's in January. We are. We're gonna talk about that.

So close yet so far away on.

Best practices for industry. So thank you for bringing that up. I think the biggest learning, certainly for me, the biggest learning. I don't know if this was your biggest learning from Inbound. Deanna, you had a lot of things going on in Inbound, but my biggest learning for the hug was the people who were there are really interested in connecting with others admins in their same industries. Yeah. I did not realize how much that means to all of you. And as soon as I saw it in action, I was like, this is a beautiful thing. And we should make this happen more often. Deanna and I have talked for as long as we've been together about how we could do networking and how we can make it work. And we haven't really had a clear vision until now. We're wondering if it would be helpful if we had some sort of networking session where you show up and we all start as a group and then we break off into, like, here's the manufacturing room, here is the software room, here's the health care room. Whatever those industries are. Is that a thing you would all be into?

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. I'll keep reading them all. Yes, yes.

I'll be honest, organizing it logistically will be a little tricky. Bevy does not give us a great breakout room feature. The only option it supports is random assignments. So I think what we would probably do is we'll, like, send a survey to everyone in the hug asking what industries you're in or interested in. And then we'll take like the top five or ten or however many there are, and then we will find people to host and. Yeah, anyway, we'll make it. We'll make it happen. But it's going to take several steps. Just knowing that you're all into it makes it worthwhile. I didn't want to jump into making this happen if people were going to be sort of lukewarm about it, but I think, yeah. Public sector work. Yeah, I think, yeah, yeah. Michelle, we're definitely going to have to figure out, like, the umbrella industries. Yeah. But I think. I think it'll be good. And I'm hoping we can do this in a better way through Bevy than we could at inbound, because at inbound there's a much smaller group. And so the poor person, whoever it was, it was like, I want to connect with other HubSpot admins who work in the transportation sector. It was like, I don't. N is too small. Right. But maybe in the context of the actual hug, where we have thousands of members worldwide, that is a thing we could do. So, yeah, be on the lookout early in the new year for some sort of survey from us, and we're going to work toward making that happen. AI. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We should. We should have an AI session. That feels inevitable. And I have talked about is like, it's tricky to choose a software outside of HubSpot that is relevant to a large enough group to be worth having an event. But I suspect that these kinds of. I see admins posting cool stuff they made with makeup on A pretty regular basis on LinkedIn. Zapier is like almost, you know, probably as common as Google Suite and Outlook for businesses. So that might be. And Rich is volunteering. Okay, Rich, we'll just make it happen. Trey. Yeah, that's another one. All these iPass middleware. I don't know what the term is, but yeah, cool. I can show what not to do and make. Hey, you know, we wanted show and tell. We wanted failure form and we wanted make. We could just have you do all three in one. We are most highly rated session of all time. So that's great. I am the person who says what to make. I've never used it, but it's incredible what people are able to accomplish with it. All right, so I think this is a good handle on the sorts of events we want to have in 2025. Are there any types of events we had in 2024 that you all are like, pass, please don't do any more of those. I. I suppose to make this question easier, I could show the events we had this year. Yeah, I didn't attend. Okay, I'll just search that.

I mean, that's fair. I did put the ideas form in the chat for you guys. So if you have additional ideas that you didn't get in the chat or we didn't talk about or in the Q A, make sure you put them in there because we do look at every single one of them. So know that wasn't enamored with. Yeah, you're not going to hurt our feelings. So like, now's the time to let us know. So we don't do that.

Yeah, no, I think it's just hard to remember all however many events we've had this year. So I'm going to share my screen real quick and if you see one that you were like, yeah, that one. Not a fan. Drop it in the chat. So let's see, here's our upcoming events. So we did show and tell. We did access management. We had no meetup that day. Email marketing, Rev ops, lead generation service, Hub state of hiring. So this was Hub Search. Hub Search is one I suspect we want more of. People seem to really like that one, but let me know if I'm wrong. LinkedIn ads was a fun session. HubSpot. It's okay if you didn't like it though. I should not bias you. All right, feedback surveys. We met up. We had a couple of inbound rebound sections recapping things that launched at Inbound. We had some in person meetups at inbound. We had super important and type form we had making HubSpot work for admins and rev ops that was one of the Product Listening Sessions HubSpot admins 100th meetup with Dharmesh Shah Custom cards mops playbook content Hub overview prospecting and AI was another listening session Sensitive data importing segmentation was a listening session Lead scoring We had coefficient come we talked about custom cards calling adoption for teams and for sales and service teams that one we got feedback that the the name was a bit misleading it was. It was about it was asking you how to drive adoption not telling you how to drive adoption that was a mismatch and I apologize for that CRM setup revenue observability moving to help desk Help desk who, when and why Python scripts for HubSpot risk management was our very first listening session that was the one that changed everything Had a networking session did a HubSpot 101 for sales hub users solving common issues in HubSpot we had support team come share some of their techniques and explain when to call support and when to fix things yourself Forms and Clearbit were the two big ones I highlighted we tried to do an event in APAC and that that well you know it's a thing we'd still like to make happen Integrations so this one was specifically about webflow I'd be curious whether topics like this are helpful Poor webflow they weren't even from poor Ridge Rev folks that were demoing Webflow HubSpot had a pretty serious critical situation during the midst of that one Gmail and Yahoo email updates and HubSpot so there's big industry change on email stuff and our product team talked about how we were adapting to that data model objects and associations in HubSpot HubSpot SEO recommendations demystified this is George B. Thomas in a conversation with a product manager over SEO tools talking about how to understand and implement the recommendations CRM cards We had three different sessions on CRM cards in one way or another this year in varying levels of this this year was the year we introduced the sponge emoji is like I'm just listening and trying to keep up Commerce Hub goes international that was a big deal. That's the only time I think we've ever done a Commerce Hub thing. We'd be curious to know whether that's something you're into Social ads proactive post sale order management this was Chris Carolyn's session on how to build that thing he built sales enablement and then this is we're now I Think into last year. There's no dates on these but yeah, this is end of year networking. So that, that was our year.

Yeah, we had some good feedback in here. Like the sessions that ended half past so we have plenty of time for questions. So like formatting wise, I think that's important. We always end up too much room or not enough.

Can I tell you all when, when I invite someone to come present, they say how long should I prepare? And I say it's an hour long session. But the more time you can leave for questions the better. Honestly, if you want to just talk for half the time and have 20 or 30 minutes for questions, that'll go great. Nobody believes me. They're all afraid to leave that much time because they've never seen a Q and A session at the HubSpot admin tug where 30 minutes is usually actually not enough time. So I'll keep telling them but people, people don't believe me when they tell me how many questions you guys have and I tell them. That's the value of coming here. You get asked a lot of really great questions.

Yeah, we got a majority of thumbs down for more integrations so our is on point for that.

Yeah, I suspected integration. It sounds like maybe really broadly generally applicable things like make that has a uniquely admin point of view and, and, and I don't know value prop is, is good. But yeah, just like pulling random integration out of the house ecosystem and telling you all about it is not, not, not the best way forward.

Yeah, I think that makes sense. Less talky talk. Oh, lots of time for talky talk.

Jeremy would never say less talky talk.

True, true. Yeah. Taking less time for presenting and more time for questions. That's pretty, pretty solid across the board. I love this. You guys are the best.

Yeah.

You're for you. So if you don't tell us, we don't know.

Yeah. But honestly, the reason I'm back here week after week now more than two years into it is like you all are awesome. This is a group I want to be a part of. You're all people I want to be connected with and, and, and, and help any way I can. And so thank you for being here week after week, month after month and now year after year. And we will keep, keep doing this.

See, I'm glad you put your sweater on. Christine now wants one.

You can't mine.

We'll have to get hug sweaters next year.

Yeah, nobody, nobody said the thing we're lacking is swag but haven't had swag.

Swag is fine. I love this. I pinned the form again. Just let us know as you're thinking of something if you're like, hey, would it be great if we had a hug on that? Go to that form, fill it out, or, oh, I never want to talk about that again. Go to that form and fill it out.

Yeah. Honestly, one thing I. One piece of feedback I have for you all is you never give us negative feedback. Deanna and I send out share a survey at the end of every session, and it's. It's always like three people respond and they all say it was great. So I see. Jeremy, I get it. That make that. That tracks. But, yeah, definitely reporting bias. But if I. I think we have had some events this year that were not super stellar, but it's mostly just me and Deanna trusting our intuitions on that. Not really any data we're getting, so. All right. Was there anything else we wanted to cover, Deanna?

No, we hit it all. We got some crowdsourced ideas so we know what we're going for. Next year, I will send out a survey about the industry. So keep an eye on your email making sure we get the show and tell submissions in, because that will determine whether we're doing those. So if you don't send them in, we're not gonna do them.

Yeah. And I'm thinking, oh, one. One last thing we want to ask. So again, we're with the show and tell submissions. We'll just try to make that a standard part of the housekeeping I do at the beginning. And. Come on. And so, you know, every week that you come, you'll get a little nudge reminding you to. To submit some stuff. We did want to ask is how do you feel about the housekeeping beginning of every session? I cover the exact same tabs every week. Are there things I should be covering that I'm not? Are there things you're tired of hearing about that I should take out of there? I will tell you we're going to keep housekeeping no matter what, just to give people time to arrive. That seems to be the window when most people come and I want to. To give a buffer to for our presenters so they actually have a full audience when we begin. But if there's a. Yeah, try to.

Share that link each time and put the links in the chat. So if there's anything you want added to that or if you. Whatever, you let me know.

Ben, is that a. Is that a Billy Joel reference just for me? I really appreciate that. All right, Easter. That would actually be really fun. I don't know exactly how I would do that, but that would be cool. Okay.

I like it.

Any other feedback or suggestions or ideas or things you guys want to share before we call it a year? And. And don't reconvene until January?

What's everyone getting for Christmas?

I got this sweater. What more could I want?

Not relevant, but are you looking for ways to help folks connect at inbound little stickers or dots?

That's a great idea.

I like that. I'm gonna screenshot that one. That's how much I like it.

I heard that.

You heard it. I try to mute when I screenshot. This is awesome. Are we gonna take off the sweaters? I don't know. It's kind of growing on me at this point.

All right, well, thanks, everyone for being here. Angie, thank you. I will treasure that comment. I thank you all for being here. Thanks for being a part of this. Excited to keep it going in the new year, and I hope you all have an excellent end to your year. If you're celebrating things with people you love, that's great. If not, I hope you still find ways to relax and rejuvenate and reflect before the new year starts. And we'll. We'll be back.

See you guys in 2025.

By.

It.