Ep 41 - The Legend of hapily with Dax Miller | Developers:After Dark
In this episode of Developers After Dark, host Speaker A interviews Dax Miller, co‑founder and Chief Care Officer of Happily, an event‑technology platform built natively on HubSpot. The conversation covers Happily’s origins—from early HubSpot apps (Alchemist) to a focused events and quoting solution—its product‑market fit journey, and the challenges of building on a platform that eventually replicates your features. Dax shares technical deep‑dives into HubSpot constraints such as workflow rate limits, queuing, UI extensions, custom objects, and the powerful App Events system, explaining how they architect solutions to stay native while handling high volume. They discuss how to identify real user pain, validate ideas, prioritize roadmaps, and avoid building for non‑existent problems. The interview also explores the company’s culture and philosophy of “technology + kindness,” mentorship advice about intentionality, and Dax’s personal influences from video‑games. Finally, Dax explains how the product is positioned differently for customers versus investors, emphasizing growth potential, macro trends, and the importance of deep, T‑shaped expertise.
Chapters
Hello and welcome to Developers After Dark. We are the show that finally gives your imposter syndrome a 401 unauthorized. A little, uh, a little humor there for— they're getting better, they're getting better.
Nerds in the room.
Exactly, exactly. Today we're going to be talking with a chief care officer who is no stranger to HubSpot and its ecosystem. But before we get into that, what I want to do is I want to tell you that whether this is the first time you're watching or the 40th time you're watching, because I believe we're on episode 40, that this is not the only place that you're going to be able to see us. We want you to go to the HubSpot Developers YouTube channel, and AJ's going to post that, our producer, in a second there at the bottom. It's going to be the place where you can watch all of our back episodes and not just us, but you can also check out all of the other things. Both HubSpotters and external developers alike have tons of videos that you can get lost for days watching tons of content, whether that be from developer advocates like Brooke. There's other external developers that go through tutorials. It's really a great resource to learn everything about everything going on at HubSpot. And then of course, the only website that you're ever going to really want to visit is devsafterdarkpod.com. That's devsafterdarkpod.com, twice for Dennis. And that is where once I update it, you will be able to see all of the past episodes, learn a little bit more about us. It's, it's, it's, we're doing a little bit of updating to that, so there'll be more content coming very shortly. But go over there, check us out, and then of course subscribe to the YouTube channel, like our videos, love us because we love you. But with all that aside, let's get to our guest because this is going to be somebody who we're really excited to talk to. So, Dax, why don't you tell everyone who you are and what you do?
What's going on? I'm Dax Miller, co-founder of Happily. We are event technology native to HubSpot. Chief Care Officer, I run around tending to the flowers, you know, caring for the, you know, guiding the growth, tilling the GTM. And making sure everybody has snacks. That's what we do over here.
I love it. Now, for those who are unfamiliar with Happily, can you talk a little bit about like what Happily is?
We are all native inside of HubSpot event management. As the internet grows faker and faker, and I don't even know if Dennis is real or not, might be a avatar or something, you know, make your hair is too much on point. So you might not be real. As the, as this, you know, as this world online becomes faker and faker and filled with things that may or may not be real. In person is where everyone wants to be. We want to go back to this tribe. We want to go back to the campfire. We want to dap people up. We want to hug. We want to actually really make connections. And Happily fosters that with a smile. We make sure that you can manage your events, whether you're hosting or attending events, where you're hosting your dinners, your conferences, your trade show, any of those things that you're hosting, or you're actually attending, going to trade shows, going to conferences. You're able to get your leads, make those connections, have context with AI, AI-powered scanning of lead badges. Take a picture, get it in HubSpot. You get all the context, you get everything in HubSpot before the person's even walked 2 steps away. So that speed to lead, that follow-up is pretty much done right away. And that, the rabbit hole goes deep on that. But just feeling a real intimate connection with creating intimate connections and the technology, the power of that, and to make sure people can see that it's worthwhile, right? That's the challenge. It's like, why should I be doing this? Am I just sending I putting people on vacation, or am I actually putting them to work to really spread our gospel? And this technology helps foster that because it is the real deal.
How satisfying is it when you get people that say, well, I don't, I don't need that, I can just, I could do the event myself, I could do it. And then they, and then they use you and they're like, oh my God, I am so glad. Like, isn't that— do you ever get— because I imagine all the time, man, right? All the time.
It's the— well, it's— here's the, the secret, right? And this goes for people that are building products because I know we're talking developers at the doc. I feel like I need a cocktail right now, but like the— everybody can build. Everybody. It's just like, it used to be punch cards. Then it was like Fortran. So you actually could like type stuff and COBOL and all of that. And it became JavaScript and it became like Ruby on Rails and it starts to abstract, abstract, abstract, and everyone moves up in that abstraction layer. So it's like everyone can build stuff. I don't need to go to Fiverr to get someone to do like a Ghibli drawing of my daughter. I can just do it now.. But when you come to like, when you actually have something worthwhile, because everyone can build, but it's like, what are you building? Is something worthwhile? When we built this, the first, I just always remember the first time we used it at Inbound last year. I was like, what am I doing? How did we do this before? Oh, I remember. I remember going to kickoffs in Dublin. I remember doing this and taking pictures of people's badges and like drawing on my phone of like two words I could probably like maybe remember and going through Google Photos and seeing all the badges and the people and trying to remember what we talked about. It was silly, right? So when we used it, we're like, what are we doing? Like, there's no possible way to not go to a conference and have this tool and use it in this way. And people do the same thing because it's like, I got my chicken scratch notebook. I have like this E thing. I kind of scribble down and I have to— you're tired. You got to go back home. You know, you get to finally come back with the kids and see everybody and you got a plane, you got a bus, you got a bus to a plane to a shuttle to the luggage, to a train, to your car, to your drive, to your house. Them leads are in the washing machine. The people you talk to, those kind of, those, they're, they all got chewed up. Dog ate my homework style. So like having that directly in HubSpot, like we were just like, oh my gosh. So people, when they, they use it, they're like, I don't know how I did this before. And that's when you have product market fit. You're like, didn't, what am I doing? This shit up, this is so simple and I should have been doing it. Like, That's the answer. We get it all the time.
Now, this is an iteration from what Happily was in the past, right? This has been a transition. What led to that from what Happily— I mean, can you talk a little bit about like what Happily started out as to what it's become now in this latest?
Yeah, the original thesis, I mean, taking it all the way back, Dennis remembers Alchemist back in the day. It's hard to say back in the day now, but it was truly back in the day, you know, 4+ years ago. Wow. The entire thesis was HubSpot is an amazing platform. It does pretty much all the things in some way, shape, or form. It checks a lot of the boxes, but everybody's gonna need a little something special, right? Everyone's gonna need, uh, a tweak here, a Band-Aid there. You know, for all my skateboarders out there, we need to Bondo a couple cracks is what we need to do. We need to just make sure everything is real good. And we wanted to do that at scale. I wanted to make every kind of possible thing. And as just before, I knew HubSpot was going to do it, like associate automatic dynamic associations. Of course, HubSpot's going to do it. Of course, it's challenging to do because of the fire hose that is the webhooks and that, that what workflow executions are. But it was a need since day one. So we solved that need and, you know, 8,000, 10,000 people are still leveraging this thing, even though you could do it natively. It's just, you know, you got something going on, right? Same thing with like cloning and clone attack and having all those. So our original thesis was building, solving for the gaps so that people could have a seamless experience with HubSpot. Nobody grows when you gotta say no. So when a rep is like, oh, can you— there's somebody's like, can you do this? And they're like, no, no, like, yes, and here's a— there's an app for that, right? There's an app to do this, there's an app to do that. And it's awesome to see that iterations of how HubSpot's been coming out. I know there's a beta out right now with like the list, like the object list view or something like that, where it's like you can see different, you can see multiple objects in one view. Like, I know I saw that, that was a private thing that came out. Um, and I was like, yeah, we made that like a long time ago called Mass Edit. And it was like, you click a button, you can like group things and we call it Super Groups. It was like after Super Contra. So I'm just like, I've seen like years later, it finally came out and like That was our moat, in essence, that we would always just have another idea because we're so deep in the weeds, we're so entangled with the community, with the ecosystem. We're always around. We see what the, you know, the pebbles in the shoe. We see them all the time. So we just build, build, build. That's where it originally kind of our thesis with Alchemist was. As we grew, we realized that it's hard to explain what we do. Hey, what is, what is Alchemist? We build apps for HubSpot. What kind of apps? How much time you got? Hmm. It's not as simple like that's not enough for a lot of people. There's, you know, the model which I look at and I haven't really looked into it now in the Shopify ecosystem, but Bold was a really big influence on kind of how we wanted to be. 'Cause Bold Apps has Bold this, Bold Checkout, you know, order bump, email this, all that, all the things, right? And I believed that we were going to really be able to use that, maybe even leverage like a service component to that because like once you have it or help partners because they'll, you know, just some sort of, there's a lot of distribution mechanisms for this because it's a, it's a pain and we have a pain point and there's a solution. Just get the solution. What we realized is again, it's hard to, you can't raise on that. That's not a venture business. That opportunity still exists for people listening. Like you can still do this and eat. All day. There's, there's so much that you can do and deliver with this ecosystem and all the new things that you can build and all the new features and, you know, developer experience. You know, as HubSpot's been super, super, super keen on investment in the technology partner space, in the development space, uh, there's a lot to do. There's almost infinite things you can still do, but it's not a venture-scale business. And as HubSpot invested in Happily, One of the theses that it had to move is that we need to do something that can get to the, you know, the 7, the 8 figures and really huge business at venture scale. Building apps and band-aids is not a venture scale business. And that's what we're kind of looking to move towards. So we eventually kind of cascaded into this, one of our, one of our biggest wins. We were looking for that like rockstar app that could grow beyond even potentially even beyond the walls of HubSpot, but as HubSpot is our mothership and our, you know, where we pledge our allegiance. The idea is, is there— we ended up finding two, right? I'm probably segueing into something the next thing, you know, long-winded as I am. We found that quoting and events were mammoth to adoption with HubSpot, and we decided to focus on those two.
That makes sense. I'm curious, as you've gone through this whole thing and as you said, like, You build something and then later on HubSpot does it as well. This is a common theme throughout, you know, all technology, right? You know, the mothership's gonna be doing it at some point in time. How do you just keep that, the energy going then? I mean, what, how do you say, damn, you know, why, why, why, you know, slow down.
We have gone through that multiple times. There was lots of, oh man, like, do you have the phone taps? I remember when we were coming out with mass edit and me and Tyrone were like, I'm like, we have this thing, here's this idea, let's do it, blah, blah, blah. It's, it was basically like go into the CRM card and you could easily see all of the associated objects in one view. So like I can see associated contacts, deals, tickets, out, customize, all the stuff in one thing. And I can like edit and play around with it. Kind of like it was, but it was before, again, this is timing before you could click View related records. Used to not be able to click view related records and see the associated records to it. You could just see a list, like in the car or a bunch of cards and that was it. And we're like, you know what you could do is this and it's awesome. The day we were going to put that out, Kyle Jepson hits the streets with, oh my God, guys, you gotta check this new feature. Just check it out. And he goes, boop. And I was like, oh no.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Right? There was a, I had File Fantasy with, before files were default public, they were always like private and you couldn't really adjust the settings for files. So we came out with File Fantasy, which allowed you to, when you upload files, it would set different parameters. It was really, it was basically a better file uploader. The next day, Now you can update. It's like obvious, right? So we, it's, it's like you always know your death is upon you. Like ninjas, monks, we know that you will die at some point. And we knew our, any app was a short-lived thing. Now with us focusing on events and understanding where our true north is, there's no possible way that any platform is going to go as deep and as nuanced as us because we're in it. We're in it every day. We see events all the time. HubSpot's, it's just like HubSpot and even sales and selling, like Those are bigger pieces of HubSpot that are ingrained. I mean, HubSpot has a sales team. Granted, HubSpot has an events team, but they might be using something that you might know that rhymes with Dapoli. And the idea here is we really wanna go deep and we tell people all the time, like, you can go wide and shallow. Well, HubSpot's gonna really just come like Pac-Man and eat everything up. Or you can go super deep in something, right? You can be T-shaped and have something that you really are passionate about, you know really well, like understanding the nuance of check-in, understanding the nuance of QR codes and texting and getting the QR code and then having the backup. And when you check in, you want to be able to point people in the right direction and you want to do volunteer management, you want to do space management and meetings at events. All of these, those things are so deep in that particular industry, event running events and managing events, that there would be no incentive nor understanding for HubSpot to go that deep.
Yeah, that totally makes sense. How do you know? I know you know now, but for another app company out there, How do you know what that is? What is the big fish? Well, how do you know what to go deep on? And you know what, how do you know?
Yeah, you gotta, you have to just be out there, right? Us, like, you have to be out there and you have to be using HubSpot. That's the key. That's always been how we found out about all the things is using HubSpot all of the time. What, and how do you get those reps? How do you get those ad bats? You have to, be doing client work. That's it. You just have to be sharpening your sword, always playing in HubSpot. Our original, like my very, very, very first app was Timerman, which was, um, it was before he was even called Timerman. It was like one of my clients. Well, let me take a step back. This is two. So one was a customer portal, like before HubSpot had a customer portal, there was one company had one, but it didn't do all the things., and one of the clients that I had had just as a consulting client had HubSpot, had to learn what HubSpot was. We did a migration. They were like, hey, this is great. Where do our clients see our tickets? And I was like, what are you talking about? Look, look, look, they don't have that. I was like, I guess we're going to build it. We build that and put it in the market, found out there was a marketplace. Cool. Slap it in there. See what happens. Phone starts ringing. Like, hey, I need this deal to, I need this to close this deal because they need a place for their clients to see tickets. And then once we start getting those clients, we listen, right? They use it. I'm like, okay, can you just use it for like 5 minutes? I'm just gonna sit here and watch. And then they're like, look, start clicking around. They're missing clicks. They're looking for stuff that doesn't exist. And I'm like, oh, well, we have to build that. Okay, we have to build that. So then the customer portal ended up having so many features that, like being able to customize columns, being able to CC people that aren't in HubSpot or a user, all these things were were just product-led growth, I guess you wanna say. Like it's, they were, hey, I need this, I need that. And every single app was iterated upon that. And then when we had this concept of, hey, why are events so hard? You know, being involved in inbound at, in, I believe it was 2022 or 2023, just being involved in that process of understanding how many tools, it was like a junk drawer of like tools. To get this going and it still was missing and there were still gaps with a sword, a knife, a bat, a club, shrieking. Oh yeah, all the weapons and there were still, stuff was still bouncing off and still missing. So that was where I was like, well, all right, is there a solution? No. Great. Like, is there anything outside of HubSpot? Of course. And then each of those, we start to see how fragmented it was, right? Every, and just to, again, I'll get long-winded with it, but every single app that, or idea has come from someone being like, man, I'm really thirsty. Do you have water? I was like, oh, that would be a good idea to have water. Like, let's build water. Here you go. Like, you should put a water fountain at the thing. So there's no water fountain, build a water fountain. Great. Right. There's no, that was it.
Is that sitting like you, like you were saying, like sitting back and watching them to, to, you know, and to identify those things. Would it be safe to say that that's probably one of the biggest things that others building in the platform or building for a platform are missing?
That they do wrong? I mean, I think that either the thing that does is people are doing wrong, if I could say that they're doing anything quote unquote wrong, is are you solving a problem that doesn't exist? Are you building in a vacuum? Meaning like, I'm going to shut my door. I'm going to spend 3 days building this thing. It used to be like 3 months. Now it's like 3 days building this thing. And I come out with it and it's awesome. And yay, I have this thing. And nobody wants it, no one cares, it's not that big of a pain, right? If every SaaS company's enemy is a Google Sheet or Excel spreadsheet, and if that Excel spreadsheet is okay, it's fine, it works, it's not— the pain isn't big enough where we'll just put a spreadsheet, put another tab in it or something, then yeah, you're not solving for it. And if you're not listening to your users complain and moan about, I wish you did this, I wish you did that, which if you have a SaaS company, people will be emailing you about, I have to do this. Like I have this square peg, you have round pegs and round holes. Like I need a square hole today. And you're like, but that's not how it works. I still need this. And then once you start hearing it over and over again, does it make sense? That, and then also using it yourself, like dog fooding, I call it cat fooding, champagne sipping, whatever.
Right.
When you start using your own stuff, then you're like, oh man, why, why is it like this? This is dumb. Like, why do we do this? That's a big one too. Like, if you're not, if you don't even have the problem yourself, like, again, you're not scratching your own itch. Like, what are you doing it for? It's really hard to be passionate and really want to solve the problem if you don't have the problem. Like, if I'm just, I wouldn't be able to get up if I'm solving a problem I don't have. So I hope it's working, but I have this challenge because now being as meta as our event management tool is because we go to events. And we use it all the time. And then we go with clients and film them using it and listen to them click the wrong thing or try to find something that's not there or not see a button that I thought was obvious. It's not obvious. Like I'm solving a problem that I see and then I'm a part of as well.
How many, uh, do you solve all the problems? You know, like I can see where this could be like the scope creep get crazy on that, right? You know, I mean, what's your threshold for a problem to be solved?
Uh, I guess if, if you're talking about like, should I build an app or should I build something to solve this problem? I would imagine that the threshold is, can you find people complaining about it on the internet? Can you go on Reddit? Can you go in the HubSpot developer forums? Can you go on the HubSpot community forums? Can you go on the support forums and find people mad? That's, again, we validate, it's the validation, right? When we had the customer portal, I found people on the developer forum or on the support forums Talking about why this, found on the support forums and oh my gosh, I think it's, it's gotta be an 11, it was like 8 to 11 year old thread of why can't I duplicate stuff in HubSpot? I was like, are you kidding me? Why did I not find this 5 years ago? I would be chilling. So if you can validate, like there is vocal, there is public, public vocals of this is a problem, please help. Then you're good. You have to see it. Then you have to see if, are they willing to pay for it? Right? Or are you, or do you have a smart way to monetize it? Not necessarily you can give it away for free, but if you do services or you're a consultant, then yeah, then you have someone to talk to so you can learn more about the platform. Again, falling on itself, learn more about the platform, get more at-bats of helping people out. Then you find more problems to solve, more things to validate. Maybe you can wrap it all into like a single solution. But again, those at-bats and listening to what's out there already is where you're going to have the ideas.
Yeah. I got one last question, Nick, if you don't mind. No, go for it. Your old stuff, you iterated, you're quick. You just, you boom, boom, boom, boom. This is like more, you know, intense focus on a single thing. When did you think launch ready was for it compared to, you know, you launched all the time in the past and you focus really hard on this one.
We, so when we launched Event Happily as now it is Happily, it was originally, like, I just launch. I launch when it's not ready. That's just all the time because it's never going to be ready. It's never going to be done. There's never going to, it's always going to be gaps. So you need to get it out. I remember we were at Inbound, man, I forget which year it was. It's all a blur now, but it was while we were talking about it, it kind of worked. It was being worked on in the hotel room while it was being talked about and while it was being demoed. It doesn't matter. But also, originally, my original thesis was completely way off. I built it originally to solve for webinars, right? HubSpot has a Zoom integration natively. Awesome. Um, there's a lot more stuff that you can do with it. And I was like, that's what people want, right? You— everybody's doing these webinars. They're doing, um, virtual events. Um, this was post-COVID, but they were still doing— I mean, it was— so it wasn't like, hey, no, this is all people can do. But it was originally around like, man, we could do a really great Zoom integration. We can bring it to Teams. I wanna do all-star teams as like RBI baseball for Nintendo. I wanna do all-star teams as a cool integration for Teams. And that was kind of the motion that it was around. Turns out when we started talking to people, which is like just talking to partners originally, we were, I originally just did the whole roadshow of all the HubSpot partners that I knew. Hey, let me show you this thing. They're like, this is cool. Um, curious, how does it work with the in-person events? I was like, what are you talking about? They're like, well, you're like checking. I was like, oh, back to the drawing board, everybody. So then we start to iterate and we started selling it and putting it out. There was a lot of, yeah, I have virtual, but what about in-person? I have virtual, but what about in-person? And that was kind of an afterthought when we were building Happily, like Event Happily as a stance. And ended up being like, well, this is really good. Once you could do that QR code check-in and see that in HubSpot, like I can check people in, the person that is checking people in, like, I don't know, it's my cousin. He's just gonna help me out. I don't, he doesn't have a HubSpot user. How does that work? All of those things were iterations on once it was out. You can't, it's building in a vacuum. You're like, I'm gonna be ready one day. You're never ready. It's never gonna be ready. It has to be out. It has to be in the public. People have to step on it, chew on it, push it over. See it work, fail. Like you have to have that out and then you will learn all the features that you need. Then you pri— and that'll be feature creep, but that's called prioritization.
You know what I mean?
You set it a roadmap every week or so. Let's prioritize. What are we gonna build? What are we gonna fix? What are we gonna do? And then you have a product that's going to be stable and you're not gonna have features that no one uses. Yeah. Like the biggest, I mean, I've made this mistake in multiple things is that you could spend so much time building features no one uses. Like if no one come asked about it, like a lot of companies that are larger, like a lot, I know, um, a really, really popular ERP doesn't have a roadmap. And I'm like, I get it. Just what do people ask for? There's a roadmap and then prioritize what people ask for.
That's it. Now, does that, I was going to ask you that, like to attract customers, like that, it sounds like the perfect blueprint. But with, with business and growth, is there a different like position that you kind of explain when it's trying to attract like investors? Is it a little bit of a different kind of, because like creating that roadmap, is that, is that the way it's pitched when you're trying to get someone to invest in Happily as a company? Because I mean, what you just talked about, like if I'm a, if I'm an end user, I mean, that's, that's brilliant. Like that's exactly like the time you're spending. The empathy that you're showing with the customer's problems, like issues. And, but, and, and I mean that in like the best way possible. Like, well, I would love it to do this. Is there a, like, is there a diff— I'm sure there is, but is, I guess the question I'm asking is, is there a different mindset when you're approaching like investors when you're trying to position Happily to them?
So the investor, the investor ecosystem is completely different than what your product does, right? As we know, like you can have nothing. It's almost like a pets.com arena right now. If you say AI, like you're doing it, if you don't have AI, like I don't even care if you're solving cancer, it doesn't matter. Like I need something that I can have a sentiment around that will then like an investor comes in, why are they coming in so that somebody else can come in? Why are they coming in so that somebody else could come in and then somebody sells something, right? That's the only reason why they're in. As a VC type of investor, but as position, as far as positioning goes, it's going to be, do you have, is there a ceiling, right? Are you going to grow to here and then that's it, right? Have you already hit the ceiling? Like you're already too big. There's no more that can happen. Like, so if I give you a bunch of money, like it's just going to keep the train going. Like, or is there a bullet train in your future? Is there like more train tracks in there in like the world's future, like the macro stuff?, but now it's about, are you doing one thing, right? Because you can't explain to investors, yeah, we do this and this and this, and there's like 4 things and we have this app and this app and this app. And they're like, what do you, what? Somebody's gonna build all these things. You don't have maturity in anything. You just have a bunch of stuff. But when you, you have to position yourself in a, that here is the growth projections, here's the challenge that we're solving, here's the macro challenges that we're a part of or we're riding, right? Like we're writing on in person because everyone's going to in person because everything on the internet is questionable and they're being inundated with messages. It's not even like a calm place anymore. It's a chaotic place. But in person, as chaotic as conference may seem, there's like a warmth in, at least I know this person. I remember I'm going to do business with them because I know them. Like I know there's a throat to choke or like I know I've connected. So writing something on a macro level, having something that is, I would say buzzworthy. Again, I would say investors have a tendency to fall, to, I would say, lean into things that are buzzworthy. Like AI is currently a thing. All the labor displacement is like a big deal right now in the macro world of like, hey, we have to fire everybody. I'm sorry. And then stock goes crazy. They're like, oh, the profits, profits. It's just, it's a really interesting economic vehicle to attach to when you're talking about investment, but you have to at least be riding those 3 things. Like, so I'm riding a macro, riding on the drafts of a macro event, having something buzzworthy and having like, you're not at a ceiling and there's like a projected really, really high place of growth where there's open, like you haven't even gotten to this fulcrum or this inflection and this inflection and this inflection. And we just need the money to get to those inflections and watch what happens. So that's, that's how you have to position if you're looking to like raise money, um, in a, and you have to obviously have to have a certain, like, you have to be tall enough to ride the train. Like there's a lot of entry, there's a lot of like entry points you have to be before even anybody's going to entertain it. Like you can't be at like a million ARR and be like, I'm going to raise money. I mean, you can do anything at this point, but it's the, the main front door, not like the third door, like the front door is you got to have X amount of things and then have a nice cute deck that will ride those 3 things that I talked about. I believe, again, I don't know anything, but that's what I feel. I feel as, as, as doing it a couple times.
No, no, that's not true at all. And you know that. Now I wanna, I kinda wanna shift gears a little bit and just consider this a little bit more of like a technical deep dive. But now the things you've been a catalyst for and that you've managed has been across multiple verticals. Right? And from a technicality standpoint, what is kind of the most complex or interesting thing that you've built with Happily that you're particularly proud of?
I really love, so in the past, we were always proud of Associate beyond belief. I was really proud of TikTok Today because to get technical with it, I mean, you guys know on this this, this fun gathering of how firehose HubSpot workflows, like fire, like they just throw, I'm going to enroll 90,000 things into this workflow. Cool. And it just, and guess what your server gets? 90,000 messages immediately. You're like, oh, right. Like, okay. Then how that rate limit Can I, can you, I just need more than 4, right? I need more than 4 requests a sec. Like all of that, that it, it was, it reminds me and I'm very grateful for those experiences and the continued experience of building our platform because it is the constraints that breed creativity. It is how do you have the most ridiculous soundtrack that will love, that people will know for their entire lives on an 8-bit cartridge. With like 56 kilobytes? Like, how do you have, how does Legend of Zelda music that was built on a cartridge last forever? How do you make symphonic arrangements on like a Super Nintendo cartridge that's less than an email now? All of that was the creativity that's needed to build for a platform when you have constraints like that. When you have constraints of, guess what, I'm going to inundate you all the time. What are you going to do about it? Oh, you want to inundate me? You can't. I need forward time, please. So what we did with Associate, because of people associating workflows and the volume of users and understanding how to do parallel queues, where when you install, you get a queue and that's your whole queue. And it seems like elementary now, but when you, when you're building, you're like, oh, this is fine. That's why you can't like vibe your way through this because it would just explode immediately when you have 8,000 users doing 90,000 things at the same time. Uh, when we built TikTok today, it's like every day, like every single day. At midnight at your time zone, every record that you have in your HubSpot needs to get updated with a new time, right? Like it's set to today's date. Now the HubSpot came out with it, or kinda like now you have like a time between, which is the, what people would use TikTok today for is to do these measurements. But it was a free app that would take every single record and update the time. That's a lot of records. Imagine, imagine 4,000 people, users or HubSpot, like forms with however many records they have each that needed to get updated quickly, quick, fast, in a hurry. Well, and, and, and HubSpot's like, hey, can you slow down? Because I need to like, gimme 4 at a time, please. Just gimme 4. Thank you. Thank you. And you're like, how am I gonna get through millions? So that database had millions and millions. It was a very expensive free app. But those were, those were, I was really proud of those, those things because we really understood and really banged on the doors of limitations. And now we, I would say for better or for worse, we're, we're doing things in parallel. We want to do things on our side as much so that we can control our own destiny with the actual limitations. But it's still in, everything is going to be native. You're not going to be outside of our platform a lot. And as more and more things start to become possible, we bring those into HubSpot immediately. Like, can't stress enough, like, if you have to build in parallel, like outside of HubSpot for like admin panel or some type of processing. You don't wanna, I mean, you don't wanna get stuck in like the HubSpot cache. If you're doing something on CMS, you don't wanna do that. You don't wanna get stuck on the, I can't call the associated objects more than, forgot, like 20-some times on a single page. So like if I'm, I have an object that's, it's a page that's calling on an object and I wanna make an associated object. So like event listing, calling the associated sponsor object to those, I can only do that 20 times. So if I have more than, 20 spots, it's over. It's like, yeah, those type of things, right? Well, limit— there's some limitations that are hard stops, and there's some limitations that you have to be really creative with. And I think that as a team, I'm really proud of the Happily Dev team for the constant, constant understanding of how to get around volume, capacities, um, surface area, right? Where you can, where you can develop inside of HubSpot as that starts to expand, you know, you get more and more opportunities, but it's a constant finagling of the platform. And that's, I'm just proud of that as a whole. Everything we have to do is like, well, how does HostBot feel about this? Right? Like, how can we actually do this and make it native, make it where everyone else is working? That's kind of the biggest thing. It takes a lot of creativity around that. And you don't have that when you're just building like, all right, from scratch, let's go. Boom. Scaffold. I have like my own stuff. Right?
How, how, how do you, so these features that, you know, you, you can't put natively into HubSpot, how, how do you plan them in, in for the future to go into HubSpot? Like, are you thinking about that as you're building it so it's, it, the way you architect it, it'll be easily migrated over into a native feature within HubSpot?
Yeah. As things come out, that's where we really are able to do so. Like, for example, UI extensions. That entire, that entire body of work changed fundamentally how we were able to do things, right? Then you sent the CRM card. Now you have a UI extension. As you guys expand what's possible, then 100%, we want to do everything inside of HubSpot. Like we want people, we want people again that belong in HubSpot to be using HubSpot. For example, if you're managing your event, you should do it all in HubSpot. Like, build it where I put it. May not be in, they may not be in HubSpot. They may not even, your events team may not even have HubSpot users. But what they do needs to be reflected and visible inside of HubSpot for every single thing. For sure.
But we, I mean, you wouldn't force a feature into HubSpot if it, if you didn't feel like the, um, it's gonna do the service it should that it could do outside of HubSpot, you wouldn't force it and minimize it inside of HubSpot until you feel like it's ready to go. Yeah.
Correct.
We, we, we can't diminish like the utility of a feature because of a because of a constraint from HubSpot.
Yeah.
Yeah. We've done that in the past and it ends up not working out for clients. Like, it's just you have to put in HubSpot what you can. If something is more advanced or requires your own processing or your own timing, again, caching is a big deal. Like everything CMS, we did a lot of stuff CMS before and now we have to self-host it just because again, cache, people are like, hey, it's— I'm hitting refresh. What's going on? And you're like, well, is the app— did you shift F5? Did you— or like, did you like keep hitting it faster? That's— that ends up being like, hey, your app is broken. I'm like, it's actually not. Um, and there's a few, uh, specific cases where we're like, okay, we have to do this on our own, but the experience is still native. Everything that's possible as far as the HubSpot isn't doing work, right? Like, we don't want HubSpot to have to do the work. We want to do the work. And we want HubSpot to be that source of truth where people can rely and do, let HubSpot do the things it can do the best, workflows, automation, all that good stuff, right? So that's where we draw the line of can we do this inside of HubSpot or not?
I wanted to pull on that, you had mentioned both like workflows and app cards. I wanted to pull on the extensibility thing just real quickly, just pull on that thread. Now we know developers sometimes treat those type of things as checkboxes, right? And, and this is what this could be with anything that you develop, right? I've done, you know, similar things, whether it's building a website, building an app. You know, there's, there's certain things that you, you put on that list because you want to check them off because they're a thing that you should do. That's not— doesn't always necessarily work out, and it's not really the best way of doing it. But the question I had for you is just based on all the experience that you've had, Um, what of those features of these extensibilities do you think is underutilized? And, and kind of as a follow-up, basically, how are you using them differently at Happily?
Man, when the OG way was— that's a shout out, Remington, if you are out here listening. He better be. Yeah, Mr. Impulse. Like originally, he was the first person I talked to as far as like, how do you build stuff like here? Cause I see your name. I don't see really any other people. How does stuff work? He said jamming on the contact. This is before custom objects, this is before everything like that's possible now. He's like jamming on the contact. I was like, okay, that makes sense. Right. And I feel like that mantra, people do that today still. They're like, yeah, you know what we do? Our integra— we have an in— oh, we have a great native integration to HubSpot. We update the contact. Oh yeah, man. Great. That's supremely underwhelming. That can't, you can't do that. People need all the things. They don't just need a contact. It's like, what happens if the contact does two things? Oh, well, see, you gotta look at the property history. No, no, man. Like you, the surface area is great now. I think what's being underutilized is, you know, custom objects, of course. Right. Because there's a lot to it. There's a lot of possibility. There's a lot of the pairing with the standard contact is, is there. Um, there's some upcoming updates that are great as well. I don't know if I can say them or not, but those are underutilized. The app event is the most powerful thing that you could ever do because you can, you can, every, anyone else in the CRM can leverage and trigger anything else off of it. You can be as specific as you want with that data. You can power a workflow. You can see it in the timeline event. You can do a report on it. You can do all this stuff. Because the— it brings the external platform, especially if you aren't like a native app, like you're a— you are a SaaS company and you just happen to integrate with HubSpot. You're not like built with HubSpot in mind. Anything that happens in your app, you can have happen inside of HubSpot technically. We use it for almost— I mean, everything. Everything is built with like, okay, what's the app event going to do when this happens? What's the app event going to do when this happens? So for specifically, For us, when someone checks somebody in, right? There's an app event that happens. Like, I mean, if I'm a user of Happily and I check someone in, there's an app event that says Dax checked in this person at this event. And then in a workflow, you can trigger when Dax checks people in, Adam, it must be VIP, do this, do that, do whatever you want, right? And then if you, as the owner of the SaaS company, so in our HubSpot, We can see Dax checked in somebody at this event, so I can monitor their usage and start to tabulate their usage and even run my SaaS and run my billing or my credits through HubSpot and see that gives the power of, hey, I haven't— and gives it— I mean, I'm a fan of HubSpot. I mean, it's clear just when we, as we talk about it, my friends have it and they're using us, they're using other stuff and they're just like, May I, may I tangent here? I have a friend, has a SaaS company. There's no semblance of a subscription in their database. Like they're victims of circumstance, right? Like they're using this, they're like, I mean, things happen, things get built, things change, things aren't, you may not know how to build software and somebody comes and be like, yes, I can, I can build you this thing. And then they have no semblance of a subscription. Even though they're a subscription-based service. And you're like, how is this even possible? But guess what you could do? You can take your database that just adds some flags. Hey, when this is a, when this flag's here, do something in HubSpot. And you can actually build the entire subscription model inside of HubSpot. It is ridiculous. And it was helping guiding him into how this would work. It's like, yeah, when people, when that person goes into the backend and creates a new user, then just boom, turn that into like a license object inside of HubSpot, associate. Then you could just— the world— once one piece is in, one trigger is in HubSpot, you can do all the magic. And then you can actually have a better data model in HubSpot than you do in your actual production database. And that's like bananas to people, right? I mean, we have our own setup, but it— our setup in HubSpot mimics our database and the concepts and the actions. And all that, like when someone triggers them. But when you don't even have a good foundation, HubSpot can save you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then everyone that uses it, it triggers, like I said, going back into the app event, it triggers everything, your entire customer success, right? They know if they don't scan 20 people in a month, workflow alert, hey, your people's not using it. What are they doing? Right? Or, hey, they're reaching capacity. Maybe you should see if we want to upgrade. All of these things, it's just like infinitely powerful, right? Like every, again, everybody can build everything. But it's like, what do you build? And when you have all that data in HubSpot, you know exactly what to build and you can make it all work. You can make everything kind of happen and you didn't even ask a dev. It's just kind of workflow. If this, then this. If this number goes here, then do that. And there you go. Like you're building a SaaS and I think we're, we're kind of dancing around this. Like HubSpot can be your SaaS company. You can just build it right there, provision it and all the stuff because that, Cause once, as we've grown through that and iterated on it like 1 or 2 times, so what happens, like our entire HubSpot is a hub where people have multiple different types of apps and they all are managed within HubSpot. So secret's out. Like I use, we use HubSpot for like a bunch of stuff. I'm sorry. Should have known. You're right. But that's what, like, I think again, app events now, because app events weren't always a thing. There used to be timeline events so you could kind of do this stuff., but now that it's App Events, everything is possible. Your SaaS outside can just trigger anything and all your other team members can have visibility on everything that any of your clients or users or any, or you do. I think that's like, if people aren't doing that, like you're blowing it. You're truly blowing it if you're not using the App Events.
Always worry like, because you can do so much with it, I always worry you drown in the riches, you know, like how, like you have so much coming at you. How do you know how to deal with it all? Like you can, you can trigger it on anything and you just, get overwhelmed. Like, I guess this goes back to my whole, like, you know, building features. I guess you, you are being very, very, uh, deliberate with, uh, where you create an app event.
Yeah, you just have to know, and that's the challenge with people when they build stuff. They don't, like, if you are a heads-down developer, I'm gonna poke at all my developer homies at this. If you're a heads-down developer, you're building it, you have a task, you do the task. You're not thinking of like what's, what's supposed to happen in 4 years. That's not your job. Like you're supposed to construct. There needs to be an architect that gives you the plans. Right. And then there needs to be someone that's a visionary. Right. It's like the whole like E-Myth book where it's like you need a manager, a visionary, and a technician type of thing. If that's someone that knows, hey, I'm going to want to report on this. I'm going to want to look at this in the future. I'm going to want to look at that. And if you don't build it with that, then like you end up having to do what I talked about, like you have to finagle something that's like an intermediary to actually get to your end because it wasn't architected at that. Otherwise you have to tear down the foundation and start all over, which is, you're not gonna do, but you could have now, let's say like your CRM can't, or CRM, ERP, whatever you have can potentially solve for those rather than being like, hey Dennis, I need a report on like how many users are over 30 days. Can you build that report for me? Thanks. And you're like, What do you do? Why are you calling me for a report?
I'm a developer.
Right, right, right, right. For sure. Like you should be able to do that somewhere else. Like here's the data, do that somewhere else.
Right. So my problem, like, have you ever watched that Simpsons episode where Homer builds a car? Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Like any bankrupts, like that's, that's me as a developer there, man. Like I've like all the features into it.
That's the racket peanut steering.
Isn't that, isn't that what that was? Right. That is super funny. Like, yeah, man, they, they got it. They nailed it on, on pretty much everything. But that's the game. Like you just build, it's like, you told me to build database and they're like, well, you didn't think of how users were going to use it and like what was going to come out the tailpipe. Like, no, what are you talking about? Like you asked me to build this thing. I built it. It works. It's great. Yeah. That's a planning. That's like understanding architecture, like not even architecture. It's about Why? Why are we having this thing? Why are we building this? Period. Like, that's huge. You know what we want to do with no one. That's what I'm saying. Everybody can build right now. Everybody can build anything. They just talk to it and it'll build it and be like, why? Yeah.
I mean, like personal history, you know, before I worked at HubSpot, I worked for an agency that did HubSpot work and I had never heard of HubSpot, you know, and I, as a developer, I knew what to do, but I didn't know what HubSpot did or why I was doing it. And I felt Yeah, it, it, there was no why to it. It was just like, I build feature X and not sure what the length of, like, the quality of that is gonna be in terms of HubSpot feature set.
So yeah, I hear that. Yeah, you just gotta know what, you gotta know why you're building something and at least get some insight of like, here's the business use case. Like, as simple as that. Right. But that's, that gets drowned out a lot with being busy. Yeah. Hmm. Are they, are they, how many lines of code do they churn out? And you're like, all that stuff is like irrelevant now. It's like, I can churn out a trillion. It's constantly, it's currently doing lines of code right now as I sit here. So what else do you need? Silly.
Now let's, uh, let's transition to probably one of my favorite parts of these episodes and that's to getting to know the person. So we want to get to know Dax. So, uh, now, uh, like I said, like I tell everyone, uh, like respectfully, I stalk everyone on LinkedIn and, uh, you have yourself listed. As a chief care officer. Now, I saw that and I had to do a double take because that's not— let's be honest, that's not LinkedIn speak, Dax. That's not what people put on their titles. And then I wrote this down too, because I really like this. And this was leading with technology and kindness. Like I said, that's not your typical— you don't read that kind of stuff on LinkedIn, but I do appreciate it. And the question I want to ask you is, what's the story around that kind of philosophy and how does it show up in what you do at Happily?
So I just, I have, uh, I'll, I'll say the word fudge, fudges. I have unscalable fudges for everything, right? Everything doesn't, that I do doesn't scale. And which is all the things because originally Happily, Eight Labs, Alchemist, me, it was all just me. Like I'm doing this, I have this idea, I will find out how to sell it. I will go talk to somebody. I will, figure out how HubSpot's calendars are formatted and start jumping on sales reps' calendars and just be like, hey, what's up? You heard of me? Nope. Guess what? I have some stuff. It's pretty cool. You should see it. You won't like it. It's all good. So I don't sit in the CEO's seat. That is definitely a Connor trait. That's a Connor single only child, like been in the ecosystem, like, you know, double the time as me. Like that's a, that's a specific set of skills. And my set of skills is just mad science. But that mad science grew to a team of 17, 18 people, however many they have. And where I provide the best value is number 1, tinkering in the laboratory. Number 2, making sure that I'm connected to everything. I am the, the grandmother of not only our clients and making sure that, oh, you know what? Let me bring you something. Let me take care of you. Right? Like, I want to take care of people. Because everyone can build. I'll say it like a trillion times, but can you care? Can you give a shit like about people? Can— it used to be where all companies needed to be media companies. Like everyone needs to make content. Like, like we make content all the time, but everybody can do that now. Like you don't even have to have humans, but it looks like it's humans. They click a button and now they have content, right? But people need to become like hospitality. People need to care. They need to give, they need to understand, like, and make relationships. And that's what I do both internally and externally. So I was originally like the onboarding person, like getting people onboard. I was originally doing all of the support. So I understand the support. So I've played all the roles because it was a single solopreneur thing. And I can put, you know, dignity, respect, and care and infuse the team with that. And that is kind of my positioning. I work a lot with partners. So understanding and building relationships with people that are good people. If you're not good people, you get to see the door. But if you're a great person, you get everything under the sun possible that I can give you. And that's a part of one of our, like, it's our, our company culture. Like, I'm super geeked on in all the slides. And one of them is that we are real people. Like, there is flesh and blood on the other side of the phone. Like, I'm not going to talk to you in a business. I'm not even going to sell you. And that's my problem. That's why I'm not in sales because I won't sell you anything. I will give it away. And I'll put that as public now. It's in this. I'm just like, you just want to use it? Like, you just have it. Like, I'm sure I'll get something back. I live in abundance. I'm grateful for you even being here. Go ahead and use it. Let me know. And our Joe on our sales team would be like, dude, stop. Hey, this is what I do. And I'm gonna continue to do it and I'm not gonna care because it's how the, we need to give to each other. We need to support each other. And guess what? It'll come back. I'm not worried about it. And it has come back 190% of the time. So that is where I need to make sure that people feel a certain way because everyone will remember how you made them feel. And that's both internal and external. So that is what I do and that's why I'm the chief care officer. Awesome.
I love that. And, uh, is that— now you've mentioned, um, Final Fantasy, Contra, uh, Zelda. I'm guessing, I'm taking a wild guess here, there's, uh, some video gaming or Nintendo background that kind of seeps into some of the things you do in naming conventions.
Is that literally everything except for Except for Haply. Haply was it, but AppChemist was— it was the, um, our logo was the— it was a purple version of the Zelda potion bottle. I just love video games a lot, if you haven't noticed. Um, they, they were— video games were the first home computing device. It's the first thing. It's the first computing device that most Americans and most people had in their house. It changed an entire trajectory of how we interact with devices. That was our first, first one. It's interacting. It's, it's, it's, it's everything. And I believe that that experimentation that I had with video games since I was— since I got the Nintendo and got the light gun and had the whole thing, had my VIC-20 and trying to learn BASIC on my computer, all of that was all video game oriented. It's all about experimenting and telling a story and experiencing that. So the feeling that you get, it's like reading a book, but you get to play it.
It's really fun.
And I'll be honest, did you, did you, did you cheat at Duck Hunt?
Or did you, did you, did you get up close to the screen?
I mean, every— oh no, I was behind the bed going for it. Okay. Even when I had Super Scope 6 for Super Nintendo, I was behind the bed going for it, right? Like, it's fine. So I had the original, I do 100%. I was going for it. It was good. It's good stuff. I did have— I did cheat on many things. I had a Game Genie. I also have the Konami code tattooed on my arm, so I definitely understand cheat codes. Oh, nice. Yeah, that's awesome. Couple down that, like, it's, everything's a cheat code, right? It's about having cheat codes because—
So you're a bit of a fan, you could say?
A little bit, a little bit of a fan. Well, I've played a couple.
I own a couple. I know, I saw some of them in the background too, the 64 and everything. That's classic.
I love that. That is a great call. Yeah, they are all, they matter a lot. And I appreciate the tech. I appreciate the technology. I appreciate the constraint and how magical you can make 56 kilobytes. Like, come on. Like, there's a little— it goes deep. And it always will have the— you do stuff for yourself, right? Like, we need to be— people need to be more selfish. Like, if you don't like it when you wake up, like, what are you doing? So everything that we made, all the videos we made for Optimist and all this stuff was all selfish as hell. I was like, I'm going to make it all video games. I'm going to throw Mortal Kombat in this. I wonder if Acclaim will get mad. I won't get that big. Doesn't matter. Turns out, turns out, if I put Pokémon in the white vans outside my room, you might get a couple of calls. You might. Maybe it was, it was more like HubSpot was like, do you have the rights to use Sonic the Hedgehog? I was like, no. Why would you ask me that? They're like, you can't put that on our website. I was like, you're probably right. Okay. But I won't lie. The damage was already done. Like I already was, I already made it like after that everybody saw it, it did its job.
So that was the whole thing, right? I added a couple of those and we, me and Dennis did an inbound talk and I put in some Sonic the Hedgehog and I was, I asked that same thing. I'm like, man, somebody's going to say something because I put it in my slides and everything. And I was like, cause I am also a fan as well. And it was like a lot of the little, uh, during the, um, presentation, like a lot of the things in there were like little Nintendo figures and stuff like that. And that was the first thing I said to Dennis too. I'm like, so when we get done with this, how bad are we gonna get in trouble for, you know what I mean?
Like, no, later we'll be like, you know what, I'm just not even gonna let this ride. I can't even do it unless it's like super slick where you just have like the emeralds and it was like, what's the emerald? Like, what is, what's the difference?
Like, you don't know. Let me ask you one of my favorite questions and that's mentorship, right? Because I mean, we, and also too, shout out to HubSpot here because we have our mentorship program and things of that nature. Nature, one of the things I love to ask our guests is what is a piece of mentorship advice that you've gotten that's been kind of like a cornerstone for you that you've either followed or you've also like passed on, like that kind of thing?
So, again, I think that I have to shout out my, my better half, my wife, Des, on, you know, stopping and being intentional. If you are ADHD like we all are, all of a sudden, which is again a byproduct of the world that we live in and the chaos and stuff is always going, always busy, always stuff is constant, constant. Everything is constant. It is so hard to like stop and be like, what am I doing? What am I doing? What? Why? What am I doing tomorrow? What am I doing with the fam like this weekend? Am I, am I okay? Like people could probably lose a limb and not know for a while because they're so in it. And I think that to me is like the best like advice. That's the most relevant now. That's the most relevant I believe for everybody is being intentional. Stop like, why are you doing this? What is going on?
And that's the game. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Dex, I want to say it has been fantastic talking with you. I want to thank you so much for coming on. I think your insight is tremendous. Um, it's great to also talk with a video game fan as well. I mean, and yeah, no, I just want to thank you for coming on because this is the reason why we do this is, like I said, and it's conversations like this, right? It's not just the technical deep dives, but it's also the getting to know the person, the business, the alignment with HubSpot. And I mean, this, this hits all the marks and then some. So I really wanted to say thank you. Yeah. Where can people, if people want to stalk you, where can people find, where can people find you?
I'm, uh, I have to put on the LinkedIn suit on every day. So there it is. Boom, boom. Immediately pops. That's like, wow. Hit the DMs. I'll try to wade through the automated ones. I'm not mad at the automated ones either though. Like some, they could be relevant sometimes., but hit your boy up tomorrow.
I love it. Thank you so much for coming on. And yeah, go check out Dax over on LinkedIn. And yeah, this has been another great episode. Thank you for— and don't forget to go to YouTube and check us out and check out back episodes and things like that. Like us, subscribe. We love you. You love us. It's a great, great thing. Thank you, Producer AJ. And, and a shout out to Producer AJ too, cuz he's been fantastic behind the scenes. Uh, we can't do this kind of stuff without him and obviously without Dennis, but No, thank you. It's been another great episode and we'll see you next time.
Right on. Peace out. Thank you.
