The Cacheflow Acquisition

Foreign.

Hey, Kyle and Deanna and the rest of the HubSpot admin group. I'm so excited and thrilled to be here. First of all, I want to say I love the word hug. I've always said, you know, there's Salesforce and then there's HubSpot. HubSpot is the CRM that everyone loves, right? And so hug word just goes hand in hand. So great naming of this group, but I want to basically say maybe let me just start with a brief introduction. So I've been building software, B2B software for 25 years now. And I've worked in several companies like SAP, Ariba, all building code to Cash Solutions or Procure to Pay Solutions. And one of my favorite parts has been over the 25 years, actually the favorite part has been working with users to really build meaningful software. So I really value the time I get in front of people like you so that I can actually get feedback from you and we can build products that matter and products that can actually change the world. One step at a time is how I think about it. So let's maybe start with the first slide, Kyle. And as you guys, some of you probably saw, HubSpot acquired cashflow. And this was November 2024. So it is exactly five months in that I have been at HubSpot and our cash flow team has been at HubSpot. And one of the things maybe to remember about HubSpot is HubSpot is very customer first. So one of the first things about the acquisition was, hey, we know that you've built like great a great software piece, but we actually want you to come and build that great software on the HubSpot platform. So HubSpot is famous for natively building out everything on a one common platform. So your, you know, the experience becomes 10x for their customers. So that's sort of like maybe like a, like a baseline I want to establish over here. So. So what that actually means is we are right now actively building on the HubSpot platform. And today I actually cannot share with you demos or show you anything because we have to wait till we actually announce a release and you can expect something to be announced in the next months to come. But what I really wanted to do and Kyle encouraged me to do this, he said, come over and actually talk to the group because they love to hear early and want to give feedback early. So what I'm going to share with you is a little bit about Cash Flow, but really like more about what is my vision, what is our team's vision of what we can do on HubSpot for together with Commerce Hub. And what I'm looking for is I'm going to actually share with you the problems that we're looking to solve. But my goal or my agenda for today is get feedback from you. Right. So we'll kind of I lay the foundation and then I actually have a survey in the end where I want to get feedback from you. I also want to give a shout out to my colleague Adam Wainwright, who's our head of revenue. He is on the chat so he can actually answer your questions as I'm talking through. So feel free to make this super engaging and super collaborative. Right. Okay, cool. Let's go to the next slide. So let me just share with you because I'm not sure many of you have actually ever heard about Cashflow, but I started Cashflow with my co found founder Brian Zotter in 2021. And the reason we had both been working for 20 plus years, right. And we had bought and sold millions of dollars of software, of services. And one of the things that we could both agree on was that the software buying and selling process kind of sucked and it was pretty broken and it was very fragmented. Right. And so what we defined our mission and this was during COVID right. So I actually traveled to North Carolina wearing three masks and met with Brian. And we said, let's really hone into what is our mission because that's going to define the company that we built. And, and what you see over here is we said we want to make B2B selling and buying surprisingly simple and delightful. And the word simple and delightful really resonated for us because we felt it was unnecessarily complicated what we were doing. So maybe just one cool anecdote to share with you is Brian Zotter worked at Salesforce. So half our company was Salesforce employees. So when we first started the company, we said, of course we're going to get all the Salesforce customers and we're going to build a solution to help, you know, the selling and buying process for Salesforce customers. And to our surprise, we found HubSpot users. HubSpot customers like you came to us and 50% of our customers became HubSpot. We started engaging more and more with HubSpot. We've actually built out an entire integration with HubSpot because there was just so much, so much pull from HubSpot customers. And that's when HubSpot approached us and they said, hey, what you built is Super Interesting for HubSpot our customers are asking for us. And that lays and starts the story of how cash flow and HubSpot came together. Now just maybe I'll lay the foundation. What did we build at Cash Flow? Right. So I was actually looking this morning. I think the G2 reviews are gone. But that would have been one of the nice things to kind of show you. We built a really beautiful experience for sellers to send out quotes to their customers to get the contract signed to then bill their customers and collect payment from them. So we built an entire end to end system from coat to cash. Right. And the love that we got was, was really intense from, from sellers, from people who were like running billing system, from revenue operations people and any sort of ops people. Right. And so, so that was like we, we, we knew that we were onto something and we were super excited because what we really needed was a platform and access to the largest like all the HubSpot customers to, to make this really amazing. So let me like move into like what are we, what is, like what is some of our things, what are some, what is our vision and what are some of thinking about as part of HubSpot? So team came in, we joined hands with the Commerce Hub team. Commerce Hub has been around for a couple of years. They've laid the foundation of quotations, billing payments. Go to the next slide, Kyle. Because what I wanted to do was lay kind of the foundation of what are the things we are thinking of very, very deeply and what have we heard from, from customers today. And this is where the time for you guys to give, give us, you know, feedback of what you care about comes in. Right, Right. The first one is we are not thinking of individual things like how do you send an invoice, how do you collect a payment, how do you send a code, how do you get a signature. We are actually thinking of this as an integrated revenue management solution that we want to bring for you. And you know, internally we call it the revenue os. We want to actually think of how can we actually help close deals? Because we know if you actually help you close deals better, we can automate things like billing and payments and make all the manual handoffs that typically happen in companies just completely go away. So we are thinking of an entirely connected system. The second thing that we are thinking of is how do we make it super, super easy for sellers and buyers. So a user first approach. And when we talk about users, we're not only thinking about one user, we're thinking about sales reps, we're thinking about the customer the buyer, the sales manager, the revenue operations or the admin, the finance person. And we're thinking about the workflows that connect all of these people together and automating these workflows. The third piece that we're thinking about is how do we make this fast and flexible? So we, when Cashflow was built, it was built to replace Salesforce cpq. Right. And Salesforce CPQ was all about you had to code everything, like to implement, you had to code. So the first thing we want to say is it's always no code implementation. And one thing that, the other thing that we learned over the years is no company stays stagnant for many, many years. So pricing models change, go to market models change, the number of sellers, the number of bills that you have, all changes as your company grows. And we want to build a system that's flexible, that grows with you. So if tomorrow your pricing model changes, then we can actually very quickly help you to move to the next pricing model. Those are maybe three of the tenants that we are focusing on. Let's actually go on to the next slide. By the way, as we're going on to the next slide, I can see some comments coming in. I don't see. Is Adam able to reply to some of these comments? Kyle, just checking in on. Does Adam have capability to reply?

Good. Yeah. Adam, let us know if you run into any trouble.

Yeah, because it's very hard for me to answer questions and.

Oh, sure, yeah, yeah.

Okay. Awesome. Okay, he's gonna reply now. Awesome. Okay, great. So I wanted to start with the problem, right? And this is probably to me one of the biggest and most grounding slide that I'm going to show to you. And this is how we see it. We think the world has changed in the last 10 years. Life used to be really simple. Used to have one simple transaction. You would have one deal, one quote, one bill and then you would collect that bill with a check, right. And you probably had like a sales team and you had a finance team. The world has become much, much more complex because we have more complex relationships with our customers. So what you're always trying to do is you're trying to get a foot in the door with your customers and then you're going to try and sell more to your customers. I call it. It's about building a relationship with the customer where that relationship deepens over time. So it's no longer about a one time sale. It's about many deals, many upsells, many cross sells, many invoices, many payments. Right. And the Personas have changed. So instead of just seller and finance, we talk now a lot about revenue. So we have this building a super flexible platform. So as we think of what we are building in Commerce Hub, we are going to leverage the HubSpot platform completely. And that's where the flexibility part comes in. So we understand everybody's business is different, everybody's needs are different, and these needs change over time. And by leveraging the HubSpot platform, we're going to give you the capability to fit your business processes and business needs to what we provide to you. That's our second piece where our promise is we're going to enable you to leverage the HubSpot platform flexibility. And the third piece is, you know, one of the sort of unique situations for us is we sit here with 300,000 customers and we learn from them and we want to share those best practices with you. So we're going to incorporate these best practices in the product. And one of the hardest things as a business owner was how do I, how do I price my product? How do what kind of go to model, go to market. Models are actually working. What's best in class? How should I actually create a proposal for my customer? What are some best practices? We're going to actually collect these best practices and put them in the product, make them available to you. That's maybe the third piece that we want to promise you. That's the vision of what we want to build for you. I think this might be the last slide. Kyle, let's check. Okay, well, this is a bringing it all together. You know, this is Adam's slide, so I want to give him credit for it. So what's the. We believe we're going to create a fast, easy, and unified revenue journey that minimizes errors and accelerates growth for you. So close fast, bill, easy, and get paid all in one place. So that's, that's. That's the promise that we are working towards. It's going to be a journey. Our teams are very, very working very, very hard right now, today, like every day to get this to you as fast as possible. But it'll only be as good as the feedback we get from you. Right. And which brings me to kind of the last slide over here, which is. So here I want to kind of talk to you a little bit about the inspiration that we had at Cashflow. By the way, this was three years ago, so let's keep the politics aside. But the one thing that Tesla did really, really well was it reimagined the car buying experience. So we've all bought cars and we've all have some sort of like scars from car buying experience where you have to go to the dealer and you have to negotiate with them. And what Tesla did was they put the car buying experience on your mobile phone. So you can actually, literally right now you can open up your phone, you can go in, configure a red Tesla with this kind of tires, and you can go and check out right there and there, that's a $60,000 purchase that can be made. Very, very simple. We imagine that. How can we help your customers have a similar experience where it is very easy and frictionless. Obviously this changes when it comes to services or when it comes to certain goods. But the idea of really giving some control to the buyer, giving them transparency and making this a very connected process between the buyer and the seller is very key for us. If you go to the next slide, Kyle, the way we are thinking about this for HubSpot is how can we actually create connections between the workflows that sit between sellers and buyers? Let me give you an example. When you create a quotation today, you actually have at least 15 people that are involved in it. The seller who's creating it, there is a manager who's approving it, there's maybe a CFO who's approving it. Then there's a buyer champion who's actually trying to look at the coat. But then the buyer actually has multiple people on their side. Like they might actually have their manager, their cfo, their procurement department, or the legal department who gets involved in just getting a coat approved so a sale can happen. We are thinking of all these people who are involved in the selling, billing, payments process. And we are mapping out and completely looking to automate these process. And what that means is sometimes you can just get rid of processes. You can just say, hey, this is a useless process which was manual and you no longer need to do this. The second thing that I want to talk to, which is really, really important is we are living in and or we are moving towards an AI world. I think one year ago everybody was wondering if AI was real. I think now it's pretty clear AI is pretty real. And there are certain use cases that AI is amazing at. And one of the most amazing use cases it's at, it's really great at is handling unstructured data. And what does unstructured data mean is call recordings. You know, anytime a buyer and seller is talking, it's getting recorded on a zoom call or Whatever call, right? Like you can actually record these calls and, and then you can take this unstructured data and you can do all kinds of amazing things with it. Let me give you a couple of examples. One of them is when the seller and buyer are talking, you can take unstructured content and help to create a coat which actually has a business case summary and business pain points that were discussed in these calls. And the seller does not have to do anything, it's automatically added into the coat. Another example to share with you is in billing, right? So one of the hardest parts of billing and by the way, I was a, I was a business owner, so I know this is collections, right? And following up and really getting people to pay you is one of the most painful parts of running a business. And what you can do with again using AI is, is do clever or do smart collection smart reminders so you don't even need a person involved. The system can actually do the work of sending these messages at the right points with the right messaging to get the buyer to respond. So these are a couple of examples that we are thinking of. We want to basically in some ways take all the grudging, hard work, admin work that you have to do and help and free you up to do more strategic tasks, more fun tasks which we all are excited about. Anyway, let's go on to the next slide and we'll talk about the third piece which is fast and flexible. And I would imagine as admins, this is what you guys care most about. One is easy, no code configuration. That's our promise. We don't want you to go in and have to code anything. Of course, if you do want to code, you can. And that's the flexibility and the beauty of the HubSpot platform. So when cashflow came into HubSpot, we were actually really, really excited about two things. One is of course we have this wonderful community and ecosystem around HubSpot and that is so, so hard for a startup to build. The second thing we were excited about was the platform. And HubSpot has done an amazing job at building a super flexible platform. So as we think of what we are building in Commerce Hub, we are going to leverage the HubSpot platform completely and that's where the flexibility part comes in. So we understand everybody's business is different, everybody's needs are different and these needs change over time. And by leveraging the HubSpot platform, we're going to give you the capability to fit your business processes and business needs to what we provide to you. Right. So. So that's our second sort of piece where our promise is we are going to enable you to leverage the HubSpot platform flexibility. And the third piece is one of the sort of unique situations for us is we sit here with 300,000 customers and we learn from them and we want to share those best practices with you. So we are going to incorporate these best practices in the product. And one of the hardest things as a business owner was how do I price my product? What kind of go to market models are actually working? What's best in class? How should I actually create a proposal for my customer? What are some best practices? We're going to actually collect these best practices and put them in the product, make them available to you. That's maybe the third piece that we want to promise you. That's the vision of what we want to build for you. Okay, I think I have. This might be the last, last slide. Kyle, let's, let's check. Okay, well, this is a. Bringing it all together. You know, this is Adam's slide, so I want to give him credit for it. So what's the result? So if we actually manage to do all of the things that we talk about, it's, we're, we believe we're going to create a fast, easy, and unified revenue journey that minimizes errors and accelerates growth for you. So close fast, bill, easy, and get paid all in one place. So that's, that's, that's the promise that we are working towards. It's going to be a journey. Our teams are very, very working very, very hard right now, today, like every day, to get this to you as fast as possible. But it'll only be as good as the feedback we get from you. Right. And which brings me to, to kind of the last slide over here, which is we want to hear from you, so please provide feedback. And feedback can come in many forms. What is important to you? How does your business run today? What do you care about? We know you care about reporting. We know you care about flexibility. We know that you have unique business processes. Please give feedback and we'll try to get back to you. We also are starting to recruit, and secretly only you guys know about this. We are starting to recruit for a beta program that we're going to start soon. So if you are interested in participating in that beta program, open up the survey and there is a question in there where you can actually put in your, you know, your, you know, you can say that you want to participate in the beta program and we will Contact you. Having said that, you can see I put my email address here. You know, I am a customer first founder and a customer first GM now. So feel free to ping me directly and, and you know, give me your feedback that like, I was not joking. I love to hear from customers. That's how we build great product. So that's what I'm looking for. All right. That's all I had. I see that. You know, Diana, thank you so much, so much. You posted the survey result. Can everybody access it? Maybe. Question for you guys.

Yeah, that's a good thing to test. Also, I will say this is a good group to recruit beta users from. A comment I saw from a few different folks was when can we try it? When can we see it? When can we get our hands on it? So I'm sure people will take you up on that. I would like to work through some of the questions in the Q and A form completed. Chris is on top of it. He'll have good feedback too. So friends everybody, if you can hop over to the Q A, look through the questions that are there. I see. I currently see 20 upvote the ones you. You want to talk about. Add the ones you think you're missing and then I. Yeah, make sure to share feedback in that. In that form. I think that will be. Oh, there's a slide that says Q and A. I'm sorry, I didn't share that one.

That's okay. So let's. I mean, Kyle, I think we may have time for Q and A. Yeah, for sure. Yeah.

So let's just. We will. I'm coming in and I'm going to sort the. So the Q and A function has an upvote capability. We'll just work through most popular to least popular and see how far we get in the time we have. So with. With 20 upvotes from Riley, is it even worth building anything making adjustments to our existing commerce objects and tools right now or should we all just wait until September when everything will different said differently? How much of a shift will occur once this launches? Existing objects properties be used, repurposed or net new everything. This is a very admin question. They want to be able to brace themselves and optimize their efforts for what's coming.

You know, we will absolutely leverage everything that's there today and try our best not to disrupt your business because we understand that you have taken the existing product line items, the existing deal object and customized it to your business. So we don't want to disrupt you, but we want to give You a path to move to, honestly, hopefully a better world. Right. Where you don't have to customize things to that we will try to. This is a very detailed question and the one thing that I was talking to Kyle was we should actually have a second session when we do release things because then we can actually talk in a lot of detail.

Yeah. Everyone stay tuned. Expect very soon an event to be scheduled for September when we can talk about what they have built, what is now available, whereas right now it's very early days. A question in a similar vein from Jenny and I saw Adam. You answered this in the chat earlier, but I figure it's worth calling out anyway. Jenny wants to know specifically how if at all the current HubSpot quote tool will be affected. I saw Jeremy also mulling this over. Seems like a lot of people are using the Quote tool and they, they're worried about being disrupted. Adam's answer talks about how, you know, quote is part of this and the whole idea is to make everything more connected and smooth. But are there, are there chances people will lose existing quotes or need to change their workflow? How are you thinking about that?

So absolutely, if you're using the quotes today, we will not disrupt you. Right. Like, so, again, like, disruption is not our goal. Business continuity is our goal. So we will not disrupt you. If, if we had to make any changes to anything, we would give you ample time. And, and this is where we'll take feedback from you and, and make sure that you feel okay to, to move to where you need to. Right.

I think, I think that is maybe the best, the best words you could have said to anyone. Business continuity is the goal here. Friends, don't, don't start losing sleep over this. Be excited. Lose sleep in an excited way, not in a dreading, oh no, what's going to happen kind of way. Chris says, I'm in the midst of a product pricing source of Truth project right now. Can you share any guidance on what the product object and product library is going to look like after cash flow? For example, will we be able to associate products to other CRM objects as we can the rest of the CRM objects. In short, should I build the pricing source of Truth into product properties or somewhere else?

Chris, we should take this offline. I think this is a pretty detailed question. And Chris, since I know you, I can probably connect you to the PM and we can, we can talk through this in quite detail.

Yeah, I was gonna say if your team's not talking with Chris, he's definitely, he thinks A lot about this stuff. I'd be shocked if you're not already working with him, but. All right. Joshua asks what use cases and industries are your top priorities? There are a lot of industries that use proposals and line items that aren't quote to cash or cpq.

That's a very good question. We, you know, maybe just to share with you, cash flow was SaaS, right? WAS software first. And so definitely software will be one of the categories. We understand services is a very big category for HubSpot. That's going to be the second category that we go for. And then, you know, we will then do fast follows with others. But again, you know, it's hard for me to share details around this, but we will do this in a way where, you know, we'll, we'll kind of maybe think of like one industry at a time or one, one industry area at a time and solve for everybody over time.

I, as a person who has literally zero insider knowledge on this, I'm, I'm free to speculate because I have no secrets to share. I just want to say I think it's really admirable how HubSpot outside of the commerce hub space is starting to think about industries. We're seeing like industry templates for real estate and education and healthcare for data models and stuff. And HubSpot being HubSpot, I imagine somewhere down the road, maybe a year or more, once this transformation is done, the opportunity for these things to start working together is huge. And so I'm very excited to see how it develops this.

Exactly. And Kyle, like, we actually totally understand that the go to market part can be very industry specific. Like they can be industry specific. There's things, some things that are common. So we're going to, we're going to build the common things first and then we're going to look at industry by industry and we will either build ourselves or partner. But what we, our goal would be to solve for every industry over time, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Becca asked a question that gets at a pain. I know a lot of HubSpot customers feel, will this finally allow true MRR pricing for products with setups with step ups? I don't know what step ups is, I'll be honest, Becca, but I know a lot of recurring revenue pain exists for customers in HubSpot.

We actually totally understand the pain and we totally understand the step up problem too. And yes, we would like to solve that problem as soon as possible.

FYI. Jesse also asked, will this help those of us that are ARR and not.

MRR yes, we will look at this as ARR and mrr. First of all, we understand that the reason you want to actually do integrated billing and so on is that your ARR MRR reports are really good and then your sales teams can use them. We understand the value of this and we know that there's some pain there from the past that we'd like to address. This is an area where I actually would like to get your feedback. I'd like to understand what kind of reports would you like to see? So if you do ARR reports, what are those reports? If you do MRR reports, what are those reports? I'd love to get examples and that will give us real contextual examples to respond to, right?

Yeah. So hit that survey, friends. That's, that's the place to, to share this stuff. Chad, who is very nice and lovely person, I feel like I should preface this comment with that says, does anyone else have strongly negative feelings about how hard it is for customers to sign current HubSpot quotes? Currently it's a non starter for our industry as it's far too difficult. What is the plan to address this atrocity? Joking of course, about it being an atrocity.

So I don't know, Chad, without saying it, I'll say it. We think it's an atrocity too and we want to make this. When we talked about creating simplicity and beauty like this amazing experience, it really is. That's the starting point at which you actually share it with your customers and you get them to sign it. And if that is broken, that's a very difficult place to start. Right? Or it's not broken actually it works today, but it is difficult today and we understand that. So we are definitely. That's our number one priority to start from that and make that super easy for you.

This is the thing I love about HubSpot's product team. If you say to a product manager who owns a particular part of the system that a thing in HubSpot is bad, they never like get defensive and like, no, it's really good, you should like it. They're always like, yeah, it is pretty bad. How can we make it better? I mean we have to own the things that don't work if we're going to make them better. And that's part of why HubSpot is as great as it is. I really love that Crystal says we are using line items now. Will this replace product line items and if yes, what's the timeline? We're mid build and curious if we should hold or press On. So I think there is just a lot of nervousness about being disruptive.

Right, Right. And again, you know, line items is such a core part of HubSpot. We will not replace it. We don't want to disrupt it. Like again, business continuity. We understand that's sort of like the line items are the core. Right. I, I totally understand that and I understand any anxiety around it. I just want you guys to sleep at night to know we will not disrupt you. We will only try to make things better for you for. For line items. So in some ways what I'd like to hear is what are you missing on the line items? What are the fields that you would like to have? Right. What else would you like to see on the line items? Right.

Love that I get, I get feedback online items on a regular basis. So if those of you who have talked to me in the past could just go put all that in the survey, that would be all right.

Kyle, maybe you and I should talk.

To people love to DM me on LinkedIn and be like, hey Kyle, can you fix this thing in the HubSpot product? And my answer is always no, I'm sorry, I can't. It's not actually my what I do. Yeah. Anyway, Michaela says which focus will be prioritized at launch, rebuild of the quote to cash workflow with new tools, reporting possibilities connected to the already existing workflows or both.

So it's hard for me to share again, you know, being a public company, I unfortunately cannot share that with you. It just, it's hard for me to. I would love to and you know, let's, let's wait till I can actually share that detail with you.

Sure. I think what I would say though Mikayla, is if you have feedback on any of the parts of the system, go ahead and drop those in that survey. If you would encourage them to prioritize one part or the other part or to work on them both together, that feedback is helpful. So instead of asking what we're going to do, tell us what we should do.

Right. And sign up for beta and give us like feedback. Yeah.

Oh, Sam asked a question that actually rhymes with, with Michaela's question pretty well. Does your work overlap with reports? I'd love more insights into the future of line items. It's painful working around not having line item based workflows, price history reporting, etc. For those with recurring deals.

So just to maybe share with you, there is a reporting tool that's part of platform that exists today. Right. So that's not directly under Commerce Hub today. Like I'm just talking about functionally how we are organized. Having said that, we work very, very closely with reporting. Reporting is important to every single product area at HubSpot. But we are specifically working with this reporting tool to think about revenue reporting. Right. So happy to. Again this is probably an area where actually would like to have more feedback because reporting does change based on business and so give us feedback on what's missing. Like I hear line items and reporting all the time as being issues but I want specific details on what is missing and what would you like to have?

Yeah, yeah, I love that and I think reminder everyone. HubSpot has a massive product or lots of different teams but they're all on good relationship. They have good relationships with each other. And so if there's a part of HubSpot that you know is not under the Commerce Hub umbrella but you're like man, I really wish this was tied to revenue or quotes or whatever the case is, let us know. We can, we can have those teams have a conversation and see what, what opportunities exist there. Emily asks will there be at some point in the future a way for customers to self serve and get quotes and or make a purchase without a customer success person getting involved. For example, get an upgrade quote when they need one with pro rata.

So this is. Are you talking about self service where the buyer can actually say hey I want to upgrade, I want to add more seats.

Is that, that's what I'm getting out of this. Emily, feel free to chime in the chat if, if there was a different way you want to go. But yeah, I think, I think that's.

Yeah. Okay, so. So Emily, 100% we realize the value of what we're doing becomes actually 10x more important when you think about things like upsells and proration and calculation that, calculating that proration and then reflecting that in billing and, and payments. So we are absolutely thinking through that. You know I just want to say there is a lot of, there's a big body of work that we need to do over here and we will have to make priority calls of what we do first, second, third. This is very top of mind. It was actually by the way Emily, a big piece of cash flow was how we did upsells cross sells and we thought about this as CS led or sales led as well as customer led. Right. So where the customer could do self service. So these are definitely areas that we're thinking about.

Great. Daniel asked this question in the chat. I'm really grateful that he moved it over here to the Q and A. Just products versus service versus orders versus carts. How will they all work together? HubSpot has a lot of objects, and we seem to like to introduce new objects. Do you have a sense of how, if I don't know, we'll be more prescriptive about how people should use these things?

I think there are a lot of objects, but they're all interconnected. And for us, it's to create the lines of the interconnection. So products are interconnected with product line items. You know, deals are connected with quotes, quotes are connected with subscriptions or contracts or orders. And then. And they're connected with invoices. So we're thinking of these. So when. When I say we are mapping out the workflows, that's what I mean is we actually thinking about what is the workflow that makes sense, where we can have an opinionated view of, here's some workflows that you can use. You can obviously change this in another way, but in some ways we don't want to build a platform. We want to build an opinionated view which has best practices built in so that you can have the most automated, you know, experience around this. So we like. And you know, today, like I talked about, you know, there's lead and contacts and companies and the deal object. We definitely. We are thinking about the last mile, right. So there are other objects there. So invoices is an object. We are working on credit memos today, but there will be different kind of objects. But honestly, to me, these are all. They all work synchronously together in some fashion. And that's what we want to bring to you, is an opinion around that.

I love that anytime HubSpot can lean into being an opinion platform, it just makes my heart sick, I think, because I'm on the education side of things, right. And we have stances on the right way to do business. I think people come to us, they don't want to just automate any process or build any process. They want to build the best one and automate the best one. And we're going to help them with that. I love that.

Yeah. And tell you, Kyle, when I started Cashflow, even though I had been working in this area for so many years, I still did not actually understand that I needed to do certain things. So I actually forgot to invoice my customer for months until one day somebody asked me, so did you invoice your customer? I'm like, no, I forgot. And so these are the things that you actually, because there's so many steps to a business, you, you forget and you really want to have a system that, that helps you to remember or actually does it for you. Right. That's. That's how we're thinking about it.

Love that. Joshua asks, where will the pipeline or flow for this integrated revenue process live? Another pipeline? So he asked this right at the beginning of your presentation. I think when you first showed one of those early slides.

I don't think we think of this as a new pipeline. I think we think of this as a connection to the pipelines you have. What I've seen is you may have, for example, a new sales pipeline, renewals pipeline, and what we are building would just connect to those pipelines is the way to think of it. It's not a net new pipeline that we're talking about.

Great. Drew asks, will the revenue platform portion handle revenue recognition?

So we understand that that's a very important need. I definitely think out of the gate, we probably won't have anything sophisticated. Right. It's a pretty long shot to do that. But having said that, we understand how valuable and important it is to have revenue recognition as part of this. So the first step will be give you all the right data. You know, make the product lines work in a way that you can actually extract the right data to do revenue reporting. And we may have, you know, we may leverage some partners. And then over time, we absolutely would want to give you a full, full system around this. Right.

Amazing.

Yeah.

Michael asks, will this also allow for more advanced customization of invoices?

Yes, absolutely. And, you know, I think one of the big asks that we get is, can you customize invoices? I'd love to hear what customizations you are looking for. So you can invoice, you can customize a little bit today. But, you know, are you looking for templates? Are you looking for branding? You know, I'd love to get more feedback on that. Are you looking for international support? Right.

Kevin asks, my team is exploring an external CPQ application specifically to create custom quotes and have agility within the sales team to manipulate templates. Is this something that will live within Commerce Hub or externally in the Quotes feature? Will customization be more in line with a deal Hub?

So I would love it if you pinged Adam and had a talk with them about what we're looking to do. We are absolutely looking at. At quotes. It depends on what customization you're talking about. Right. So let's take that offline and tackle your problem and we would be very happy to give you very concrete feedback on whether you should look at another system or not.

That's great. That's a powerful offer. Jesse asked a question and there were questions around this in the chat as well. Will this be an upcharge from our current HubSpot subscription?

So, so again, you know, I can't share that detail with you. We are still working on that. You know, I think, to me, I think of value, value and, and you know, charging for things as interconnected. Right. If, if we can provide you enough value, we believe we should charge. You know, we, we try to give as much as we can for, for, you know, as part of the platform as Commerce Hub has until now. But I can't share more details as, as we figure this out, we'll share definitely more details with you on this.

One thing I will say also friends, is my observation as a person who's been at HubSpot 10 years is the pricing is usually the last thing to get figured out. The that is ironing that out is, is. It's a long hard process a lot of people and a lot of math is involved in. And sometimes it feels to me right up until launch we're debating because the features have to be built and we have to figure out where we live and we have to figure out the value of them. And we love to provide things that are totally free and we love to provide things that exist at Pro and we love to have things that have it at enterprise. And there's just so many different. I, I would guess and Sarika, I won't look. So you're not giving. I would guess Srika doesn't know yet. Like it's not fully shipped. There's things still being decided.

I can definitely tell you we have not shipped a full decision yet. And as a product team, we think about how can we solve the biggest problems. That's what my focus is on. Right. And if we do that then, you know, the pricing or value conversation becomes easy. Right.

So yeah, yeah. So yeah, she's not, she's not being cagey. She's not trying to be difficult. This is just, it's, it's, these are hard questions to answer, especially this far ahead of time. Richard asked. Oh, okay. Similar to the TO above. I'm not sure which question he's referring to. Will we have the ability to see expected revenue generation, for example, replace effectively the recurring revenue analytics? So I guess we've talked about recurring.

Yeah. So Richard, I, I don't know exactly what the revenue recurring revenue analytics is today. So. So we're going to take a look at that. And again, you know, I think I see reporting being a big ask here. So please give feedback and we will take a deep dive into it.

Admins love reporting. Bill says, will there be a configurator included?

I think think of like we will build a base, you know, baseline workflows that go end to end and then we will layer on more complexity over time. So, so you know, a configurator, there can be a simple configurator and a complex configurator. I think you can think of like we will start with simple and then take it to complex over time. Right.

Love that. Tiffany asks, will there be an ability to identify the primary quote when multiple quotes are used on the same deal?

So you can actually do that today? I believe you can identify a quote as a primary quote and it is absolutely one of the things that we are thinking about because we know that everybody wants to share multiple quotes. So. So it's top of mind. But I believe that the HubSpot platform can support that today. Even.

Cool friends. I'm going to keep firing these questions at Sarica until we run out of time, but new questions keep appearing. I'm only halfway down the scroll of the Q and A so we're not going to get through them all, guaranteed. And so make sure you have that survey open. Make sure you have Srika's email because this conversation is going to have to continue outside the bounds of this meetup. I really appreciate all your questions. I promise I'll get through as many as I can. But I just, I just want to be perfectly transparent that in the 10 minutes we have left, we will definitely not get through all of them. Srika, I will export these questions out afterwards so you and your team can review them. But yeah, attendees here, if you want to continue the conversation, follow up, get answers to your questions, please submit the survey. That's. That's the way to go. So, Ellen asked, about 30% of our deals have more than 199 line items. We had HubSpot increase the maximum number of line items from 99. Will we be able to create quotes with 199 plus line items?

I don't know. I feel like saying challenge accepted, but it's a good question, Ellen. I have not heard that before for and. And maybe that's something we can look into. I. I did not know that there was a limit, so I didn't know that either.

So Ellen, you're You're teaching us stuff here. That to me definitely feels like a connect with the team and explore your specific use case kind of thing.

Ellen the only time I heard about I heard about a thousand line items was from Nvidia procurement team and I said I think we like I think we're out, we can't help you there. They had a thousand line items which is very, very complicated.

Yeah. You're like, you know what, we will take our business elsewhere. 1,000. That's wild. John says how will this impact line items and the object limitations? Oh interesting. So I guess that sort of rhymes. People are running into limitations.

Yeah. So you know since I'm, I'm going to play the new card, I, I don't fully understand the limitations that you're talking about. The object limitations. Can you again please provide specific details about what are the limitations you guys are facing. Send it to me in the, in the survey would be by the way better or my email like you know my email is not the best but. But either one will work, right?

Yeah. Hey, Hayden asks will line items be treated more as true objects with calculated properties, workflow at success etc. That's not. That's almost exactly the example you gave when you told them about the survey. So Hayden, drop all your requests in there I think.

Yes.

Paul says, asks about E sign. We touched on that already. Adam says is there a solution being defined to handle irregular payment schedules such as schedules related to milestones or irregular dates as opposed to monthly annually it's Etc.

So we do support some milestone stuff in quotes today I believe. I think I'd be curious to know what else would you want right. I'm guessing you, you actually have a services or services and software play here. But you know milestones can come in many forms right. They can be like predefined milestones. It can be event based milestones. So again would love your feedback there. And as we, as we figure out the solutioning around that.

Great. Lucy says are we going to be able to handle products in multiple currency and also calculate or generate MRR with one time items and recurrent also in multiple currencies. So a mixture of one time and recurring payments in multiple currencies.

Yeah and I would say that to me feels like a very baseline ask. We absolutely will think about that and one of the things we definitely we're thinking global so we're not thinking just us only so we are thinking of multi currencies and so on. So if you have any specific problem today I was not Aware of it. But as we are looking at products and line items we are definitely thinking about multi currency as well.

Great. Adam asks the tax tools have vastly improved, but is there the ability to validate tax IDs to remove or change tax from invoices especially important in the current climate?

I don't know the answer. I know we're in beta program with, with tax today, so maybe we can take this offline. So, so what you want to do is once you actually have a tax, you want to be able to change that tax ID from the invoice based on whatever criteria, right? I'm guessing. So Adam, I think it's a. If you, if you ping that question to me, I can get RPM the right PM to look into it.

Great. Michael says will there be anything in the area of sales rooms.

So maybe the way I should talk about it. So if you remember in my presentation I talk both about the seller and the buyer and, and the reason for that is we think of this as a seller experience and as a, as a buyer experience. Buyer experience can come in the form of, you know, we think we call it a buyer experience by the way. But it's like what is a buyer looking at? Can the buyer share it? Can the buyer see what. What's due? We're thinking about an entire buyer experience now, whether that is called a sales room or not. I think I don't want to like get stuck in terminology that's used outside. But, but think of it like we are absolutely thinking of how can we give transparency, branding, give a branded beautiful experience to your customers. Right. And, and so, and that that is out of the gate. We're thinking about this because it was a pretty big tenant that we learned that was very valuable. Right.

Great. We're kind of in the long tail of questions that have gotten one and two upvotes and these are all very much in line with the sort of feedback you have said you want in the survey. So Emerson wants terms that for 17 months instead of 12 months. We I see a couple of requests for product bundles. I see payment links have optional line items quotes currently don't would love object parity there calculated custom fields for line items. It's coming up again people mentioning limitations, people talking about bundles. Calculated properties. Calculated properties, bundles, bundles. Starting to notice some themes here friends, please make sure you fill out the survey. Put all that feedback and requests and ideas and suggestions and your specific use cases into that survey so Sarika and her team can look through them. That is, I feel good about the state we are leaving the Q and A in Sarika. Was there there anything you wanted to any last thoughts before we we shut it down?

I I just want to say just even getting your Q and A is giving me a sense of what is important to you. Where are you having challenges? So thank you so much for for putting your questions in. Yeah, I hear bundles product line items, reporting more flexibility in product line items. These are all quotes signing and this is like exactly what I'm looking for. So thank you already for everything that you have provided and I look forward to going through each one of your surveys.

Amazing. Thank you so much for being here. I will be working with you as quickly as possible to get something scheduled in September. Friends, we'll do this again in a few months when everything is live and have a check in about what has been launched and what's coming later. Thank you all for being here, for asking, for asking questions, for participating in chat. Please, please fill out that survey, submit it and hope to see you all back next week. Have a great Tuesday. Bye everyone.

Bye everybody. By.