Ep. 22 - A Cut Above the Rest with Chris Conant | Developers:After Dark

It's emerging, you know, it's an emerging sport. I lived in San Diego for a while and started playing out there. It was pretty big. Like the most, the busiest course in the world is out there. Morley Field. Chris.

I think people have been saying it's been an emerging sport for a very, very long time.

I don't know.

I don't know. For about 10 years.

Yeah, you know, I suppose I kind of feel like we'll get.

Hello. Hello and welcome to Developers after dark, episode number 22. We have a really, really awesome guest today. Friend. Friend of the show. Hopefully we'll see. It depends on how. It depends on, like how bad I, I do. But yeah, no, this is going to be one of those ones where we get to talk to somebody who we've known, we've worked with somebody, so it's going to be really special. But before we get into the introductions, so you know, the website that everyone needs to go to should go to bookmark and always check. We just released a new episode, what was it, Dennis, yesterday, with Melinda Green. Right. We put that one up live.

Wednesday.

Wednesday, yeah. So we've got that going. If you haven't seen that one, go check that one out as well. And of course you. Those are watching on YouTube. And you know, we're. We're now streaming live on our YouTube channel with the HubSpot developers. So that's at HubSpot Developers. If you're, if you haven't subscribed yet either, you should definitely do that because there's not just us. Let me just be very clear. Don't just go there for us. I'd love you if you did. But also, too, you've got things dropping from brook bond, John McLaren. Actually, Brooke just dropped a video yesterday, it's only a day old, about how to secure your HubSpot CLI with the new global configuration, which is something that just got announced not too long ago. And I know what you're saying, you're like, how do I keep up with all of this stuff? Right. Because that's one of those things too, where it's like drinking from the fire hose is not just like a clever little analogy that we throw around around here. It really is. There's a lot of information at once, but you can always check stuff out at the Developers changelog. And that's going to be for those on audio developers.HubSpot.com changelog and let me say it twice for Dennis, that's developers.HubSpot.com changeLog. I didn't even know we had one. And you can subscribe to it. And not to mention it also tells you about the upcoming things as well as the things that are happening just now or very recently. So you can do that as well. And then one more shout out that I definitely want to give and that is to the Spring Spotlight developer tools that's going to be developers.HubSpot.com SS2.5 dev tools. If you go on that nice little page you will find our friend Ricky who was also a guest on the show with a nice little video of him describing the developer tools overall when it comes to the Spring Spotlight. And there's also a couple of other guests in that video as well. It's really well put together video. Some video editor around here may have done that and posted that up there and you might see some shining faces that you might recognize from us possibly. So go check that out as well because then that also tells you everything that's going on from the improved app certifications to I mean app cards, which is a big thing right now for everybody. I know a little bit about that myself. So yeah, take a look at that as well. That's something you're definitely going to want to check out if you. That's another, another way to keep up with everything going on. So with that out of the way, the reason why we're here, the reason why everyone is here, listening, watching, going to be talking about sharing after we're all done here is our guest Chris. Chris, why don't you tell everyone who you are and what you do.

Hello, my name is Chris Conant. I am a solutions architect at Jasper AI and I've been here for just about a year in previous roles. Well, I'll just, I'm a HubSpot alum. I was at HubSpot for almost eight years. Yeah, yeah, I started in 2014 and wrapped up in 2021. And then between 2021 and my time at Jasper I went and you know, tried to relearn marketing and worked for a startup and also was marketing director of marketing strategy for an awesome HubSpot agency called Raka. I got to work with them for a while and they were just incredible and yeah, kind of taking all of my learnings. I am certainly a jack of all trades and always trying to kind of find, find cool solutions and ways to solve, solve problems and taking all of like my marketing knowledge, my customer service knowledge, engineering knowledge, product knowledge, trying to bring that all together. I've really found a great fit here at Jasper as a Solutions architect. So yeah, really great to.

Now you mentioned having to relearn marketing. Was that something that, did that come easy to have to kind of re.

No, no. So like right out of school in 2008, 2009, I was working for marketing agency out in San Diego and things are easier than, you know, like keyword stuffing was still a thing. Like it was very easy to rank.

The good old days of SEO.

Right, exactly. And you're just like, hey, I'm doing well. And that's all that really mattered.

The old white text on white background just shoved in the page.

Exactly. Yeah. Like you know, and like that was, that was great but it was, it was very, it was narrow. You know, like the, the whole like digital marketing realm was, was, was quite narrow. And then sort of stepping back into it a decade, 15 years later, it was, it was eye opening at just how many considerations additionally like how much software you just had to be aware of and you know, working, working in marketing for the startup. I, it was great cause I got to sort of choose my stack and work within that. But when I was working with the agency and just working with so many different customers on so many different stacks using so many different tools, I really gained a ton of respect for all of the marketing agencies out there and of course HubSpot partners that are doing this day in and day out and just the wealth of knowledge that is required to just be a marketing strategist these days. It's incredible. So yeah, and here I am at Jasper now taking all of those findings and working with enterprise companies to help implement AI and solve for them.

Can you talk more about that? What does Jasper actually do?

Yeah, so Jasper is a marketing focused AI tool and it really helps learn and discover as much about your brand, your tone, sort of what your initiatives are and then it takes that and uses that as a knowledge IQ layer to then just build better marketing content. And what I do here is help build custom solutions for a lot of our customers by understanding their needs and where they're like hyper specific nuance is and really working with them to not only build the instructions for Jasper's AI, but also to actually build solutions and integrate into their stacks and start to tie all of those marketing tools together so that we're pulling the best context we can to create the best outputs we can, whether that's strategic outputs or if it's actually marketing content that they're publishing.

Is it bespoke marketing content? Is it geared specifically to a specific company or would it be more broad?

It's pretty broad. Yeah, it's very broad. What you can do within Jasper is it's really tailored towards enterprise companies, so it has an understanding that there's going to be different brands or business units within your organization and it allows you to sort of tailor or sort of define those brands and those voices right within Jasper. And then basically to your initial question, like the bespoke piece, like those little vectors towards each of those brands and solve at scale, you know, at once. So to add that logic and have it understand really the, the overall brand and what your initiative is, you know, dare I say, sort of like getting into that agentic mindset, being able to sort of interpret and predict and not be so reactive.

Right.

But yeah, great question.

You mentioned building solutions to solve that scale. Now I wanted to bring this up.

Because.

There'S history here. We have history. It's a good history. I don't want to make it sound like I got a beef and I'm about to bring this up, but. No, but at a certain point here at HubSpot, when I joined, I joined under what I. What I would consider a really good manager at the time. Right. And that would happen to have been you.

Oh, interesting.

Like how I brought that in there at the time.

There was.

And it was, I mean, I would say for me it felt like it was in its infancy at the time, but the template marketplace, right. As a helping, building out a solution like that for people. Can you speak a little bit about to that, to that mindset as well? Because that was, I mean, that's huge.

Yeah. I'll even back it up a little further, if you don't mind, to actually that. That marketing agency, that digital agency I was at before I joined HubSpot, I think, you know, I was, I was young in my career and I really wanted to make an impact selfishly. And what I wanted to do was just like, I really had a dream of like, I want to build something that hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people are using. What a great, ambitious goal. Right? And then what I realized pretty quickly is like, holy cow. When you build something like that, you have to account for how every one of those users will use that product. Maybe I don't want that many people in this event, but no. So like, that was always a dream. And when I got to HubSpot, I was originally on their migrations team from the old like orange boxes of the original CMS to the COS that they introduced in, I think 2013 and we were migrating every website off the old CMS to the COS, which is now dubbed again CMS. But you know, I was doing that and it was like so much fun. And I was working in the Portsmouth office of HubSpot at the time was small, I think there was like seven or eight of us and we just were this little, almost like an agency within HubSpot that were turning and burning these migrated websites. And one of the gentlemen there, Sean Bristow, who is I believe still at HubSpot and doing his thing, doing his thing and he was sort of managing all of the template marketplace submissions. And I want to say when I took it over there was something like 80 templates in the marketplace and like the back end was clearly an afterthought. I think even like the marketplace itself from a sort of GTM perspective and like how customers interpret it, they often didn't know about it. It was sort of like hidden deep in the product. It wasn't very easy to get to. And the products that were in it were okay, but they weren't necessarily built for scale, you know, they were, they're sort of like very narrow minded in a sense of like, I'm trying to solve this exact thing and I'm not thinking about how other people might use this. So Sean moved on to product management at HubSpot and there was sort of a gap left to who was going to, to run and sort of take over his, his review process. And at the time Chris Battis, who was the director of technical services, sort of tapped me on the shoulder. I was like, hey, is this something you'd want to handle? And I was like, yeah, sure. So I started to look at it and Chris and I were riffing one day and we put together these like requirements. We're like, hey, you know what, we should probably build our requirements around what these templates need to adhere to.

Wait, wait, so prior to this you could just upload a template without any type of requirement whatsoever?

I'm going to say I don't know, but I don't believe there were requirements. They weren't like two things. If there were, they were pretty lightweight and second piece is there was no validation within the product that would look at any of those nuances or those requirements. So fast forward a bit. We started to build these requirements and we actually, since there was such a light number of submissions at the time, we made everyone resubmit their assets so that they would be up to par with those requirements. Some people didn't like it, some people didn't do it, but what we got out of that were we were able to sort of publicize this and send out emails to development partners and say like, hey, we have this thing, we have new requirements, you know, if you want to submit, they'll now have to follow these guidelines. And that was sort of like the, I'll call that V1, you know, moving on from VCR to V1. And it worked really well. And then Sean and team realized that the, the, the template Marketplace product itself behind the scenes was, was very antiquated, outdated and there's just a lot of room for improvement. So they, they built an entirely new sort of back end to the marketplace and that allowed us to actually have like a proper, you know, management channel where we had like a dashboard that we could manage submissions out of and approve templates and all those things. And at the time we're working with Jeffrey Boselle who was in production product marketing management and he helped sort of like pull the developer side together. At the time that was much in its infancy, the marketplace and all of this into a single space which is now, you know, has evolved into what the developers HubSpot is. And that was where the marketplace requirements were and all of that. And that worked like really, really well until we had our next opportunity, which was when we introduced custom modules V2, along with transitioning the design manager from the drag and drop blocks that we all hated to actually having a proper IDE within the platform. With that we were able to support so much more. That was another thing. We couldn't support custom modules in templates in the marketplace. So then when we released that it was like, hey, now we have sort of the art of the possible where you can build all of the custom modules you want for these very specific needs and you can include them in templates and puts them on the marketplace. So it was really great to see the marketplace at that point and shout out to Sean and Bill Goodrich and that team that really and Matt Furtado of course, they took that and they were like, hey, let's make this a first class citizen. Bill did a really great write up. Gosh, this was probably like 2015 or so, 2016 of like how the marketplace beforehand was sort of like a duct taped ship that was barely afloat and they rebuilt it into a super yacht and they did such a great job. And once they rebuilt the entire system that time to account for all of the modules and all that work, that's when we also began to start automating some of the validation and removing the human element from It, I'd be remiss to say that we also, I think, were some of the first people to use the HubSpot CRM and that's how we were tracking all of the submissions. So it was great to drink our own champagne in that regard there as well.

Am I, am I wrong? The App Marketplace already existed, correct?

I don't think so.

No, this is pre App Marketplace.

Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah.

I want to say the Template Marketplace was first, and then the App Marketplace came after, and then the other revamp of.

That makes more sense to me now. Okay.

Let me ask you, let me ask you, Chris, with those first set of requirements, right, that, where everybody had to resubmit, how hard was it to. Because I mean, this, this usually comes up just in about every like, requirement we, you know, anyone tries to implement on anything. Right. This isn't just like theme specific, but how hard was it to kind of balance that, that kind of thing where you don't, you want to still enable the creativity, but you also don't want to stifle them to the point where the requirements are kind of forcing them into a certain way of developing? Was that, was that hard? I mean, I know it's hard just in general, but did that really kind of, you know, poke its head out at that point? Because these were the first kind of set of ones that were being created.

Yeah, yeah, it did. And there was definitely a level of frustration. And I don't, I don't want to. I guess frustration can be the right word where sometimes the developers just didn't quite understand why there is pushback. And if I went back, Hindsight is such 2020. But if I went back to when I created those requirements, what I would do now is probably have explanations under each one as to why that requirement is there. I mean, some of them are pretty obvious, but when you start to think about positioning, this sounds so basic. But it was one that was like really weird. Is positioning the submit button of a form in line with the last form field. And people would be like, hey, why can't we do that? And I was like, well, if you use a select or something, you're kind of using absolute positioning and it will break and blow out. And they were like, oh, I didn't think about that. And it's like, of course most people wouldn't because you haven't crossed that scenario before. But from my seat, I was able to not only see what every developer was creating, but also how these customers were using it. And I'd be receiving that feedback generally firsthand via through support channels or from folks reaching out. And then I was able to sort of look into it, inspect what was going on and identify the issue. And then from there often would update requirements to account for those issues.

Do you feel like this would have been as successful if it was a more mature marketplace? I mean, this seems like it'd be it's a lot of hand holding, in my opinion. Right. Like you need to have some conversations, which is you can do with 80, you know, templates. But once it gets larger, does this scale at all?

So it's a, it's a really great question. And I think if we didn't have the CRM at that point, but once.

It gets larger, does this scale at all?

So it's a really great question. And I think if we didn't have the CRM at that point.