The Future of B2B Commerce: HubSpot Commerce Hub’s Biggest Updates Yet

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Guys, I gotta be honest, I'm super excited because today we don't have one. One amazing guest, Mr. Jack Cooper Smith. We have two. Two amazing guests.

Real good.

So. So first of all, Adam, this is your first time on the podcast. Why don't we just start actually by taking a few seconds, explain people who you are, what you do, why the heck you're in the room. And then after Adam's done, Jack, I'm sure people know who you are, but let's go ahead and spin it to you. You give the lowdown and then we'll get into the good stuff.

Yeah, that's a great place to start. Yeah. So it's a pleasure to be on this morning. As you all know, my name's Adam Wainwright. I've been effectively in. I'll sort of start with my background. I've been selling into and working with product teams, building revenue, operations, tooling for like the last 20 years, give or take. And that includes, you know, contract lifecycle management, clm, cpq, of course, revenue operations tools, sales, performance management tools, sales behavior tooling, learning management tooling. And so I've really run the gamut in terms of all of these different technologies that really are meant to effectively help sellers and businesses just unlock their revenue process. Easiest way to say it. And so why am I here? I joined the Cash Flow team. I joined my co founders, the Cash Flow about a year ago, and we really brought that business online in a major way. And then of course, in about whatever three months or so ago, HubSpot decided to bring us on board under the hub, under the HubSpot brand. And so our objective now is going to go and build a cpq, a modern CPQ platform, and begin to try and distribute this thing across all of these lovely hundreds of thousands of hubs across this globe.

There are about 12 different ways that my brain goes and I want to talk about, but it's not time yet. Jack, Jack, remind The people. Well, remind the people who you are. And then, Jack, how long has it been since you've been on the podcast? Like, sheesh, Six months? A year?

Lord, it's been a while.

It's been a while.

Minute.

Yeah. Like, I. I know we initially we talked about Commerce Hub and its purpose. We even had you back on. We talked about, like, cpq, which is interesting that that's kind of where Adam, like, kind of went into this and some of the capabilities. Anyway, anyway, third time. It's been a long time. I don't know. By the way, Jack, I don't know if we have another three peat. I'm going to just throw that out there anyway. Let the audience know who you are, why you're in the room.

Well, I'm absolutely honored, of course, George. And I'll admit, I don't know how long exactly. It's been a handful of months. Too long, though, is definitely the answer there. Honored to have a three peat under my belt here. Also, I think I may be one of the only guests that has my own superhero too, so I'll flex there a little bit as well. So I've been at HubSpot for over eight years now, and I've been. Been on the Commerce Hub team for more than three years now. So really since the very beginning. So I've seen it grow from a tool that may be launched a little.

Early just based on where it was.

To where it stands today. And if you're listening to this podcast, I'm sure you're very familiar with HubSpot and how we think about growing the platform more broadly. The way that we don't think about it is by acquiring a bunch of companies and then just bolting on their software. We are very, very, very careful around, like, who we acquire and whether we want to go into that space. I'm really excited to have Adam here as we are now teammates, and we definitely do have our legs under us because it has been like, what, Adam? Four months now?

I was gonna say, I think it's. I think actually going into March, it's about four months.

I think it's been. Yeah, it's been four months or so. And so it's been really awesome to see these teams come together. And I can tell you, folks, we have a really, really interesting 20, 25 shaping up. So excited to chat with you about what we've been up to the past few months, as well as maybe give just a little bit of a crystal ball as to, you know, how we're thinking about the future?

Yeah, definitely. I definitely want to talk about the future. I, I, we, we can maybe even dip into some of the things that have changed in like, because of the acquisition and, and where we might go. I know you can only share certain things, but I mean, listen, the idea is like, let's, let's highlight what's been changing in the first four months or three months of 2025. Because Jack and Adam, Max and Chad, you know, we're trying to swim and keep up, but, but Max or Jack and like, There were over 35 product updates to Commerce Hub in 2024. 35, by the way, that's just one little hub. The whole thing of updates is just getting kind of crazy.

But yeah, it's like a micro hub within the hubs, you know?

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, there are things like invoice, payment links, subscriptions. Think about the updates in 2024 and maybe even dip into some that you've done so far in 2020 25. How have these updates improved US HubSpot users and the people that we serve? So just in general user experience in like, business operations.

Adam, I'll take that, if that's okay.

And then I was going to say when it comes to the, when it comes to the hub, absolutely. I think, Jackie, you start with that.

We'd love your take though, of course. And Chad, Max, you all as well. And George, I know you use these tools day in, day out too. So as I Look back at 2024, the thing that I'm most excited about is we really rounded off our billing platform. So when I first started on the team, we were just a payments platform. And everyone was like, Jack, you have these payable quotes, but I need it to say the word invoice on it. And what that essentially was is like, I need to Bill from HubSpot. And then we went down that road, was like, okay, I need some milestone billing. I need subscription management, I need recurring invoices. And so the way that I think about 2024 is we really rounded off our billing platform to solve for the different ways that firms bill. And then as we ended last year and as we start to go into this year, the acronym du jour is API. So of course, as I'm sure many of you all know, we're creating objects in the CRM. That's all we're really doing to represent this revenue data. And of course a core piece of an object is going to be an API. So that's the thing that we're thinking about a lot Right now, we started to go down this road, Chad, as I'm sure you know very, very well, and we're going to go down this road. So that's the thing that I'm immediately most excited for. But it is pretty nice to be able to look back and say, you know what? All those questions that people were asking me about, when are you going to have this feature? Most of them are out the door now, which I'm personally really excited about. Still a lot to do, don't get me wrong, but we've delivered a lot of value in the past year.

Yeah, well, guess what? I just got working for a client the other day.

QuickBooks.

Well, no, it was related to that, but because of the invoice create and read API being available, I was able to basically create very simple invoice generation with all the correct information on the invoice and based on business logic rules or all of the different types of invoices that would be created for this particular client, saving just a ton of time for them. Because you guys opened up that API. It still doesn't let me do everything. I need to always gripe about that until we can actually, like, edit live things. But, yeah, it's like, so much better than it was. So much better.

So, Adam, this is for your benefit. And Jack, I don't know, Chad's new to the show since you've been on last. I think we're all nerdy on this show, but Chad is like the nerd's nerd. Like, he, he. He's the.

Me and Jack go way back these days.

Hey, buddy, like, what do you think about this, like, scenario? And then it's like these, like, MC squared things start floating in front of my face.

Our team and, you know, the marketers. Yeah, yeah.

So, so here's where my brain goes, because I hear you kind of talking about laying this, like, better foundation for everybody, Jack, since we kind of launched and got going. And I know, Adam, you immediately started to talk about, like, cpq. And so I'm interested in where we stand now with a good foundation and maybe some things that excite you about, you know, of course, what you can talk about, but excite you of, like, where we're headed or. Or how the acquisition is, like, accelerating where we're headed or things like that.

So it's a good question. And I'll, I'll certainly. What I'll share is I think the word foundation is the right word, first of all. And I think nobody on this podcast is a stranger to the Idea that, I mean, we're talking about revenue, we're talking about how you close business, and we're talking about that across a portfolio of hundreds of thousands of companies. And so, first of all, there is no such thing as two businesses looking just exactly the same. And so in that inference now, you start to understand that 35 releases over the course of 24, from where I'm sitting, that, frankly, that's light. And it's simply a reflection of the fact that you've really got to account for a myriad of different potential use cases that come up depending on who you're talking to. And of course, at the end of the day, this is why a lot of we have a lot of very happy and successful deep partner networks, because there's just no shortage of compounding problems when it comes to optimizing how our businesses manage and, you know, run revenue. So to that end, that being sort of like the lead in, we are in. We are hot on the trail of continuing to pour the concrete and the concrete, I think. I think Jack actually nailed it. I think the concrete is a reflection of objects. And so really, for us, it's going to be a function of building a bunch of framework that will allow customers, regardless of what you're doing, to then go out and build this. I like to think of this sort of beautiful scaffolding to build the tower of how you choose to build your process, but in a way that is not complicated, in a way that actually services and favors not only your internal teams, but your sales team in terms of how they close. More importantly, your downstream team in terms of how they actually manage what's been closed. I think a lot of the reason why we're here is because all too often the folks that have to kind of manage what closers are doing to squeeze those deals in at the end of the quarter ends up kind of creating a bunch of work for AR teams and finance teams. And so there's an opportunity for us to come in here and optimize and streamline, at least lay that foundation so that you can go and continue to build on top of that. And then. And so I guess sort of the long story short here is objects end customer experience. And then I guess, finally, I'll say we are also acutely aware that the better the experience for our buyers, the better the experience for our customers, the more memorable we can create that experience, which means they'll likely come back and choose to do business with us again. And that's really what we want to make sure we get right. So we're really focusing on those kind of core areas of this work that we're doing now and are really looking forward to having something for you all to play with here very soon.

Oh, I, I can't. We like to play with things here.

Yes.

You know who to play.

Just give it here, give it to me, the beta. I don't care if it's ugly, like, I'll just mess around with it. Let's see what's happening and what's fun is my brain really leans into the word memorable. The fact that you're going at this, that we want to create something that creates memorable experiences during the time that some people love, some people hate. But you're giving, you're giving your hard earned cash, right. You're like, you're hoping it solves a problem. You're, you're standing on the ledge and like I've got my credit card in a dream. If I buy this thing, this is like. And so I like that it's, it's going to be memorable. Max and Chad, where are your brain at so far?

I want that.

I want them APIs dog. I want them APIs dog. That's like, I, I mean the, the thing with Commerce Hub for me is, you know, I think that that was the, that that's one of the biggest things, kind of like holding it back excessively. Especially like thinking about like how a SaaS company might build like literally their entire business and framework on HubSpot. Right.

Yeah.

Because sure, it's really easy to do the customer service stuff. I mean now since we have all those like really awesome new conversations APIs and you could build your like your own custom channel into, into help desk and stuff like that. Like, that's amazing. Like, sure, we've got APIs for everything else. So if you, I don't know, you know, like a license, app, license object that stays up to date, that you can even like update and Change like from HubSpot to like update the experience they have.

Yeah. So your reps see what they have, what subscription, update, user access, blah, blah, blah.

Yeah, yeah. I mean we do that. Like we're able to be like, oh, like look, this HubSpotter installed, quote, happily. Well, I just have a workflow that changes a property to demo mode and then all of a sudden they've got everything unlocked, right?

Yep, yep.

But then it's like where I remember always getting caught when I was a solutions engineer talking about Commerce Hub. It would always kind of come down to, all right, do we have an API to manage the subscriptions and that's where it'd be.

Absolutely.

Still got to use stripe. Right?

Right.

So I'm really excited for that because I feel like that's the biggest missing puzzle piece. Right. Is like really when it comes to SaaS companies, I feel like that's the, I don't want to say that's the final thing, but it's really close to like the final huge thing. Right. So I'm super stoked on that.

It's like in the top three of huge things.

It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a Jordan, a LeBron or a Kobe of missing SAS features for HubSpot.

See the fact that you didn't mention Larry Bird when Jack just said was at the Celtics game at the beginning.

Of our listen, I'm the biggest Lar.

Bird fan you could find. But room any so, so here's the thing I want Chad, do you have like, do you have a place where your brain's at? Because I have a place where my brain's at. Where. Where you at.

Yeah, go for it. Go for it. I mean, I've, you know, I've talked extensively actually both to, to Jack and Adam on like our use case. So they're aware of the things. You know, I'll share if there's time.

For our listeners might want to know about your use cases as well. So.

Absolutely.

Here's the thing. I, I live in this world where and I love that Max was like, give me those APIs dog.

Because like, dude, seriously.

I, I realized that we have listeners and viewers. They're like, what do you mean my post it note doesn't integrate with HubSpot? Like, what do you mean? I got to get rid of my Excel spreadsheet and so I want to maybe even take a step back. I want to ask the question around this because if we're going to talk about CPQ and we're going to talk about commerce hub, like what are the key mindsets a business needs to adopt when they're thinking about building a CPQ process inside of HubSpot, I'll take that one.

But Adam, I would love your. Your take here.

Yeah, that's a deep one. That's a good one.

Yeah, that is a deep one. And I think a lot of it kind of boils down to Max. I think something that you were putting your finger on and maybe this is a little cliche, but it's having HubSpot really be the hub for your business. Really managing everything within one place. Now that doesn't necessarily mean like building your app on HubSpot by any means, but it does mean having your marketing, your sales, your revenue activities, your customer service, your webhooks and everything else coming out of that HubSpot platform. So when it comes to the mindset, really staying within HubSpot is ultimately how we're thinking about things. I'll tie back to Yield Flywheel, which I know we all love, if you're going to manage all of your leads and grow them into opportunities and then close them into happy customers. But you have to jump out of HubSpot between that opportunity to customer stage, which I would argue is one of the most important parts of the entire customer journey, then are you really giving that memorable buyer experience? Probably not. Or at least you have opportunity to do so. So managing all of your revenue in one place is really that mindset so that we're pushing all of our users towards in a big way. Adam, curious if you agree what you would add there.

No, I, I, I'll, I'll sort of start, I'll actually start on the heels of, of what your, your comment and then I'll even back up maybe with some, some history that I've Learned over these 15 or 16 years actually being specifically in revenue operations in, in 2020, everybody was kind of clipping along and, and the market changed and the, the pretty heavy duty considerations that a lot of businesses and I mean depends on kind of where you were and what you were selling at the time or how you made your money, I should say. But the market effectively made a pretty significant shift in terms of how the financial fiduciaries of the business were trying to figure out where they could effectively optimize their sort of spend across their investments. And technology was probably the single largest source of savings that a lot of CFOs try to figure out how to control for. And so which really kind of comes back to what Jack's saying. Like one thing that I observed over my years is especially in that particular timeframe is it's like we just got to figure out how to do more with less. And what that really meant was how do I consolidate back into my system? Can my CRM do all these things and then of course Max enter APIs? Well, does it possess the capability, the flexibility and the extensibility where we can just build out things on top of it? I got an army of engineers in some cases, maybe I don't, maybe I can bring in somebody who can help me but is there an opportunity for me to figure out ways to basically ratchet back my spend? And so that sentiment has carried over. And so that's sort of like big piece of the puzzle, number one. So a lot of companies are really still just trying to figure out, like, can my investments do way more than I think I had initially thought that they were supposed to. And so, of course, HubSpot is uniquely positioned to say yes. I think we're in a position where we can continue to grow our platform and actually help cover all of these different tooling. You know, enter a Commerce Hub. Now, Commerce Hub solves a compound problem. You know, Commerce Hub is not one thing. Commerce Hub really is three or four things that's doing a bunch of different things. And you may not necessarily need the whole suite, but depending on what you're trying to accomplish, maybe you do, you know, billing payments, again, closing deals. And so you've now got kind of these compounding problems where you have to solve a bunch of different work streams and you have to do it under one roof. And so we came in because we effectively represent, at least in our minds. And I think the collective decision makers here at HubSpot felt like we were maybe missing a piece of this puzzle, which for us is the first domino to fall. How do you close a deal? Now, HubSpot obviously has quotes, but I think there's a lot of opportunity to have a better experience in how you're actually closing deals or using that tooling, sort of enter, you know, enter a cash flow. And so in that context, what we want to make sure we're doing is, is we're actually building a tool that is really, really easy to use, but effectively can do any number of things, depending on what your business is actually how your business is built. And so getting that right is going to take some time. But what we want to, as long as we're focused and anchored on the mission of making it again and, you know, fast and easy, which, which is, you know, a cash flow. Well, before I joined HubSpot, that's a. It's a fun little checklist of things to say, fast, easy, and unified. But the reality is that the CFOs come to expect that. The reality is that VPs of sales have come to expect this. And I've run and stood up sales teams over my years. And the number one place where typically the deal starts to break down is when I have to figure out a way to get my customer a thing to sign. Right. So I was very eager to come and sort of solve this problem. So when I was at Cashflow, we even coined the phrase. One thing I would love to tell my customers is that at the end of the day, the business just simply wants to close fast and get paid well. That's ultimately what we want to accomplish for our customers in this hub, and at least the iteration of the hub that sort of we can come to expect coming out of this year. And so I guess that's a long winded way of saying we are uniquely positioned to help our customers do that. And I really like the way that you frame that up, Max. I think conceptually, if we can build this thing on the back of all of the APIs necessary so that you don't necessarily have to do it in our guided steps, we think there's just a triple win across the board. Right? Customers are going to win, the buyers are going to win, and your users are going to win. And so we're very, very confident that what we're ultimately building is going to be something that's actually going to accomplish that mission of helping you consolidate, save money, and do it really, really efficiently. But this is not going to be a stamp it, close it, ship it, and then move on to something new. This is going to be something that we're going to continue to invest in over these years to come. Because as we all know, every business loves. They all have their own DNA. And it's got to be flexible, it's got to be usable. But we really want to make sure we get that initial user experience right, and we really want to make sure that we're helping customers leave a really good impression with their customers.

Yeah, I love that. And, Adam, before we move forward, I want you to know that you've actually unlocked a Hidden Hub Heroes challenge. And so let's give Adam a round of applause. Adam, round of applause. You're officially. You get the award for the first person to use the word fiduciary on the Hub Heroes podcast is what you. You now have that award. We'll be sending it out in the mail.

I love it.

I was a banker before I got into SaaS. I was a banker and all my friends, I lived abroad for a few years and I came back and I wanted to learn how to sell. And so I went and I became a banker. And in the banking world, you have two options. You can either close customers, think checking accounts, or, you know, financial instruments, or you can be a fiduciary. And so I opted which was more of a customer relationship. Protect the interests of your customer.

Yep.

Anyway, that caught up to me.

Oh, my God. I have a question. So every time HubSpot, you know, goes and like, makes a strategic acquisition, merger brings another company into the. Into the. Into the family, if you will. Right.

Come on. Into the family.

Yeah.

Right.

There's always, like, if you're gonna do that in your cheeks, I think, but go ahead.

There's always, you know, the, The. The magical thing about that product that gets sort of like built and reimagined into HubSpot. Right. What was it? Like, what. I guess, like what's happening behind the scenes right now? What's that? Like, magic. That real unique magic juice from cash flow that's getting. What's the reimagined into. Into a HubSpot manifestation of that juice. Right. Like, from your. Your perspective. That's what I'm.

Yeah, it's. It's a. It's actually a really good question.

So it's a weird question. I said it weirdly.

But no, I, I actually totally get what. Frankly, again, Max, you know, coming on board of the company, my whole, like, I was set. I had my sights set on solving a problem that for decades. CPQ traditionally is something that generally sucks. It's something that is not easy. Okay. And so I had sellers selling internationally and they had. They had SLAs, they had to ship quotes in certain time frames, and we had to have deal desk got online. I had to wake up people that were in Florida to help my rep that was in, you know, Cincinnati close a deal because. And the deal was international. You know, when we were. And we didn't close our books, we would. We were. We would be staying up until midnight. And so you got all these swirling interests just trying to figure out how to get quotes out the door. Well, that's all solved with cpq. So to answer your question, the. The easy answer here is the first of all the seller experience the place where you're actually producing the quote. You know, I remember before Salesforce bought steel brick, I remember big machines being at the Salesforce event floor before Oracle swooped them up. And so there's a. There's. The market had sort of established that you're supposed to walk through, like a guided set of processes in order to actually just get the initial quote built. I. In my mind, that had to be something that could be effectively easier to do. Cashflow. Got that right. Getting a seller in an environment that just effectively helped them edit the quote in a way where it felt like you were building more of like, A piece of content we thought was one way we could reimagine the process of building a quote. That was one. But number two, as soon as the customer is actually in the process of buying, wouldn't it be sweet if the customer could not only sign the deal, but could also vendor accept, like produce, do all of the things that the second step of the actual closing process, beyond the booking, which was typically something that was done offline, right, the seller would close a deal, the cfo, maybe the buyer would close the deal. And then of course, I'd have to have somebody on my finance team reach out to actually facilitate the actual transaction. Right now there's this exchange of paperwork maybe, you know, there's, there's documents going back and forth, there's banking, there's routing information at Cash Flow. We built that checkout process inside of the actual workflow and as a result, we actually ended up coming up with something that kind of felt B2C ish. It felt like buying a Tesla is the, is the analogy we like to use internally, but for a sophisticated software solution that took six months to nine months of strategic value engineering and negotiating to close. And so in those two sort of those two cuts for cash flow, we really want for our customers. And then the third one is, how do I then take that information and automatically stand up a billing event? How do I automatically stand up all of the payment schedule associated with how my customer has opted to actually pay me over the duration of our, of our relationship? If we could do that, then what we could now do is we could help your install sales team or your customer success team actually manage the relationship. And so in that way, what Cash Flow has unlocked and what we were successful doing was we kind of converted the idea of the transaction in a way where we now became more of like a relationship tool. We're actually helping the business manage the relationship of the customer because the people who were actually doing the relationship management could see precisely what the customer had actually commercialed, right? What they had actually built and how they're going to be invoiced. And, and then we, then you can start to tune via APIs. Well, is it usage based? Are they buying? Are they consuming more? I know exactly what they purchased. I don't have to Go tap on CSOps or Revenue Operations to figure out what the heck they purchased so that I can expose my commercial white space and then upsell them. It's all there. And so between these kind of three phases, all happening in a really, really delightful system, really what now happened was the CF like the finance leader can actually create like a net dollar retention strategy that otherwise just was something you never focused on. Sales teams always got the cool toys but the people who actually had to do all of the renewals and upsells were left having to unpack what the seller sold. Yeah. And so now we could actually completely change how the business monetized any stage of that customer relationship life cycle in a way that was actually meaningful to both the business and the customer.

So that's.

That's long but I mean does that. Does that.

No, I like it. Where. What's the. Where are we sort of at? Like if you could explain like I'm a. Like I'm a five year old. What's the. Where are we at in the story of. Of the transition of commerce Hub in the background getting all of the special goodies if you will from asking for a friend.

Yeah.

No, no.

It's a big. What's a big question.

I like to know what's going on behind me.

There's a lot. What I can tell you is we've never been as resourced as we this obviously we're resourced very, very well and so there's a lot happening. I don't want to go down a rabbit hole but there's just. There are. There's a lot of different teams that are working on a lot of different things because we want to build this native to the hub and and so we've not and we're advantaged because we have the world's brightest minds working on the problem. What I will tell you is that we're moving a lot faster than I had initially anticipated we could so we're very, very HubSpot's.

HubSpot's fast for the size they are like the amount of speed that the HubSpot team can do stuff for the size of org they are. I mean I know there's some beanbag chairs sometimes right Jack?

But there's a lot of decisions to be made. There's a lot of ways that you could skin this cat as it were. You can start to see how you know what you really need a cool heads to prevail. But the net net is is that we've got a vision and the. And the folks that are meant to go and help us accomplish and realize that vision are doing a very good job.

I love that.

I'll throw out a couple of things too if that's okay. And Chad, sorry to just take the mic.

No, it's all good. You're good.

It's been really interesting for me to be on this side of things. Obviously, Adam and I are very much on the same side, but. And nor do I think of you as a former cash flow person at this point at all, Adam. But it has been interesting from my end because we obviously have a framework and a design language and we want everything to look super consistent. And so the way that we've integrated our teams is actually really interesting. So the leaders of cash flow are now the leaders of our hub. And while they obviously, the cash flow folks who are now obviously hubspotters, have a lot of expertise in the billing and the CPQ space, it's been awesome to see them just, like, go nuts and really. And really build everything that they know how to build while also still integrating the HubSpot DNA into those teams. So, like, without dropping names, like, we've moved some engineers who have been on the team for, like, 15 years, like, really early HubSpot days, move them over to work on those tools with our new colleagues. And so it's been really interesting to see everything come together. And to me, it feels like the DNA is really fused nicely. And I've personally made a lot of new friends too. So it's been awesome getting to know you folks and it's been really cool to see these teams come together. We've melded them in a really, really thoughtful way, in my opinion.

So can. Chad, do you still have your question?

I do.

Yeah. Throw that out there. And then I want to. I want to go nerdy and I want to talk about something that all humans love.

So.

But.

But you're first.

Then I'll dive in.

Yeah.

So curious. And I'm hoping to get an answer. Are quotes going to stick around or be replaced or will there be an addition to HubSpot quotes? Because right now the like, and I was just joking about this in chat, but, like, the experience of signing a HubSpot quote, we have help articles that we send with our emails to people to tell them what to expect and how to sign a bloody HubSpot quote. It's like, oh, you're gonna get a second email or you have to click that email takes you to a link and then you gotta click here and.

You gotta do the thing.

You have to bring the magic beans to the wizard on the hill. You'll approve your quote.

Yeah, seriously, that's like, what? It's like. It's the worst. And like, I love you guys, but, like, and I know you, you know that that sucks. Right. Like it was good for like the time that it belonged in and it was for security reasons or whatever. Because reasons. But like if it's not as good as like, basically it's, it's like to me where my brain goes. What you guys are trying to build is like the more complex billing solution version of Shopify. Something that's so simple like Shopify, where like people can just like almost have like this universal access key as a business. But then boom, they're in, it's got all their stuff, it already knows who they are because it's like this integrated platform that they're a part of. And then they can do whatever their historical stuff was on top of it, much like that. I mean, it may not be quite to that level of integration because it's supposed to be business to like company to company.

Right.

And white labeled. But anyway, all that to come back to like with quotes. Right?

There's the question.

Okay, yeah, yeah, that's a good question. So here's what, here's what I can tell you. We are, we're aware, we're aware of what you've just described. We are deeply, intimately aware of the fact that there's absolutely opportunity to go and just make that whole process better. To the extent that I don't want to overshare in terms of how we're kind of thinking about these things. There's a lot of two way doors around that conversation. What I will tell you is that in the cash flow world, and you know, if you can read into this however you want, the idea was now a customer is getting the actual quote object and it's, and it is somewhat editable. Right? It's actually there, there's, there are ways that the buyer is now interacting with it. Maybe where they're actually updating the bill to, or ship to address, maybe they're updating the actual vendor acceptance details in the actual quote itself. Now what we don't want to necessarily do is have a, like a seller and this happens sometimes in B2B. Kind of get those details wrong and then what has to happen, right, they send that over the fence and then, then they have to cancel the order and then go and do it again. That's why we built our system to do, to facilitate that. So to the extent that we're in a position to take advantage of existing technology, we're going to do so. But to the extent that maybe there's an opportunity for us to try and do something different or maybe produce a version 2 or a separate System. These things are all on the table. That's what I'll tell you. But the good news is, is that. That is. We are. I'll just say that we are acutely aware that that is something that absolutely, in order for our vision to come true, we have to get out.

We got to get around that little email verification shenanigans.

Yeah, that's exactly right. In. In. In the land that I come from, one button is pressed and then a second modal comes up and says, hey, now you got to pay for it. And then in the same action, maybe I'm mailing it to my accounts payable person and the deal is now effectively closed. If we can facilitate a process where you don't just book it, but you now can even recognize what you or even collect, that's nirvana state. And we're gonna do our best to build towards that.

That's feeling real nice. Yeah.

Yeah.

Chad might need a money.

Jack, I gotta press you on some questions.

Here we go.

Jack, I. I need a. How are we doing on the. Oh, wait, now. I'm trying to remember if this. I don't know if this was public or not. Is there. Is there. Is there.

Oh, I love it.

No, no, I'm not gonna. Are there any APIs coming to help us with the creation of payment links? Is that a thing? You could say no.

Ah, that'd be sick and dope.

Am I imagining something?

No, you're not imagining payment links with query params. That'd be nice. Pass data into them.

Well, actually, no, you talked about that before. Here's the thing. What I think I really want is I really just want the forms to be better on payment links. The fact that the forms don't have the same functionality as at least the legacy form builder eats me up like that. I could just add, you know, I could just add two other like, fields or something. Can't really do much else with them. Like that. Like, I think that would be such a big win if, like the form could be built with the forms editor, you know, for payment links at least. That would just be unbelievable.

And I'm over here thinking about the massive amount of. Line of lines of code that you just said.

Oh, I love this.

You can get a lot fancier today than I think a lot of people expect. Using some custom logic. Maybe a little REACT here and there too. So you can. I've seen people get really fancy when it comes to progressive forms and logic that then surfaces the requisite pain.

Yeah.

And so APIs more broadly. Yes, we want to go down that road. Do I see us focusing on Those core object APIs likely first? Well, a lot of it's already, you know, in public beta, so, yes, I definitely do.

It's fair.

Now, do I see us trying to build a proper shopping cart? No, I don't see us moving in that space. Never want to say never, but I'd be surprised if we moved in that area. So, Max, I see us being more flexible. I think people can do a lot more today than what a lot of folks actually do realize. I don't see us trying to be that, like, Shopify competitor, though.

Yeah.

However, like Chad, you kind of put your finger on that one.

Yeah, yeah. I don't even think like Shopify computer. I think it's just the ability to have more information on the form, like for a payment link. Yeah, you know, that's the big thing because, like, you know, I, you know, for example, I would love to be able to make it easy for, you know, HubSpot payment links to, you know, register someone for an event. Right. But what I have to do is create an insane amount of, like, workflows and, you know, stuff in the background versus just being able to like, hey, it's a HubSpot form. I can have a hidden field in there, there's my event id, and boom, it registers. I'm like, yeah, like that. That's the kind of stuff, you know, where it's just like, if there's. If HubSpot's building a product that has a form on it, man, it would be great if it had parity to the, you know, the forms tool that it already has.

Or like a number of units. Right. Set a number of units with like a query parameter. So you could just send somebody a link onto something that has variable units and just say you need to buy 80 units, rather than sending them a screenshot of where the dropdown is because it's kind of hidden.

Or maybe have it just be like, instead of adding specific properties, you can just embed an existing HubSpot form and have that form beyond there. Yeah, that might be neat.

I think this is like the API show, by the way, because we're.

We're talking.

But I do want to commerce something dog because it's another API and it's something that we all love to talk about. We all love people complain about, but we know we really love it. That's taxes. Anyway, can you guys elaborate on the tax rates API? It was introduced in February 2025. Why is that important? What should businesses be thinking about how does it help manage tax rates? Talk me through that little nerdy piece.

Yep, I never thought I'd be as enthusiastic about taxes as I am. And I'm even starting to get into like EU tax law. I know more about German tax law today than I ever thought I would go. It is kind of crazy. Now, George, that is an API that is very much in tandem with the invoice Create API as well as the quote Create API as well. So Chad, I'm happy to hear that you had played around with that. You can add a tax rate in the UI today. This allows for you to essentially programmatically pull that and then create that artifact in one fell swoop. Also, quotes can be created via API as well. Some people get really fancy with that. So if that's on your mind, I recommend playing around with it because you can do quite a bit. So that's really what it's all about, George, is allowing for people to programmatically create those artifacts with the Create with the right tax. Now, I'm sure you all have seen a lot of stuff from us recently on the tax side of things. Obviously, west we have complex tax models. Canada, uk, again, I know way more about this than I ever thought I would. And so we're going to keep enabling on that front. So we want to allow for people to do it in the UI easily, but we also want to solve for the developers as well. And so that's what this new feature is really all about.

How'd that go? The first time somebody hooked up their QBO with taxes and they were a Canadian customer, like a Canadian qbo because you're required. Like this is something that I found out at my last job. We built our own custom QBO sync and you have to have a tax rate on every individual line item in Canadian QBO instances. And if you don't, it's just like, sorry, don't pass go, don't collect $200. Your toast, brother.

Yep, same thing with zero for the record as well. And so more to come on that I can promise that one there. But yeah, when it comes to the us, QBO has huge market share and obviously, you know, getting their feet in Canada and the UK a little bit. Zero is the giant internationally though, and they also have that requirement. So that's something that's front of mind for the team.

You, you, you nerds. By the way, for any of you listening what qbo is, it's QuickBooks Online. Yeah, sorry all of you mere mortal human beings and, and because you brought that up, we can't have an episode of the Commerce Hub where we don't just give you a moment, Adam or Jack, to talk about, like, where is the QuickBooks Online? Like, you know, Commerce Hub integration. Like, because I know we started using it when it was like a baby in diapers. Like, talk us through kind of what people. If they're like, they tried it and they're like, not for me, not yet. Like, how should they be rethinking about it or what should they know about it right now?

Jack, I can let you take that one. You have some more history on it.

Yeah, I'm deep. Maybe not as deep as Chad, frankly, even though it was fun.

I mean, I've had to work my way.

Wow.

Chad is deep.

Anyway, sorry.

So philosophically, I've mentioned this a couple of times, but we're really all about allowing for you to manage your entire customer journey and your entire revenue operations process from within HubSpot. Now, that does not necessarily mean we're going to be coming. We're going to be a back office platform or an accounting platform or an erp. I just don't really see us playing in that space anytime soon. Integration is the route that we're going to go there. And so it was our number one feature request for quite some time to be able to take HubSpot invoices and sync them out to QBO. We checked that box last year. That was a big deal. But as always, once we release something, we have folks like you all who are like, all right, we need this, this, this, and this. And so we very, very, very much hear you on that. And I think we're making incremental progress. So one of the most common errors that we saw once we launched this was the billing contact. So essentially, the Data model within HubSpot isn't the exact same as the data model within QuickBooks is the headline, which caused a lot of errors to take over. And so what we did is we were like, okay, it seems like everyone is running into this. Let's make it easier to select the correct billing contact within HubSpot. And so we have a little modal to pop up that says, like, are you sure you don't want it to be associated with this person? Because then that sync will be successful. Taxes is another big thing that we've been working on. I think everyone knows that at this point. And there's definitely a QBO and Xero work stream there too. And so really, George, the way that I see it, is we're making just progress on fewer errors and making it more. Making you have to think less, frankly, because in a world where you have to be an expert in the QuickBooks online data model and the expert in the HubSpot data model or maybe making you think a little too much. So we want to easier, frankly to adopt and leverage.

Yeah, my brain thanks you. My brain thanks you. As, as we kind of get ready to close this bad boy out, I'm gonna, I'm gonna ask this in kind of a two part question because I feel like we're kind of talking about Commerce Hub and we're kind of talking about CPQ and they're kind of the same thing, but maybe sort of not. And so if you guys could, so Jack, you'll probably answer one, Adam, you'll probably answer the other. Like if you guys could wave a magic wand and you could add one feature to Commerce Hub or, or one feature to CPQ tomorrow, what the heck would it be and why I can.

So, you know, we started the conversation. There's one thing that we, you know, I, I have been hesitant to go down the imagining what AI can do in the dry land of ledgers and finance. The reality is there's a massive opportunity for us to also bring in another brain into your ecosystem that actually helps you manage a ton of processes that today are just buttons and click. They're just, they're just things that you kind of have to do. Dunning's a good example. There's, there's so many things that some of these systems have to do in order for these things to be cohesive. And if, if the, if the objective, I think, I think Jack nailed it. Right. We're not necessarily, we're not planning on being an erp, but if there's an opportunity for us to maybe retire a lot of the capabilities that QuickBooks is sort of having to do because your finance leaders are like, don't touch my billing process. And then we can just effectively make it be the ledger. That would be a really nice place for a lot of our customers, especially the ones that are kind of going through their digital transformation journey. They're kind of early enough where they don't have to go out and get deep and knowledgeable on these super heavy back end tools. And so I think if I had to wave a magic wand and you know, I'd like to think that we're in the process of waving, would be to introduce a whole ton of reimagining around how the machine can effectively offload a lot of these processes. And so we're really excited about. And frankly, there may be an opportunity for a V2 of this conversation to bring in a brain that helps you helps the sellers understand, maybe even coach them through optimizing their quotes or their deals for margins in SaaS or for inventory review for your accounts receivable team. Maybe identifying and understanding where my risk is, maybe I'm building profiles for my customers based on buying behaviors or attributes across industries. There's a whole bunch of opportunity to look at an agentic component of this. And the irony of me saying all of that is that it feels like it's a little bit magic wandy, but the reality is that we're actually pretty close to coming online with something that's going to facilitate a lot of automation. And so I'm looking forward to having something to say at one point. It may have been a bit magical, but it turns out actually it's actually closer to reality than we think.

Jack, that's awesome.

I'll add on top of that because when specific features are obviously something I'll always get excited about and talk about till my face is blue. But I'll add on top of what Adam mentioned because I think that that's going to be the real transformation for a given business. What I would add on top though, is around the extensibility of everything. In a world where we really can be the center of gravity for your entire business, but also speak to all of the other aspects of your business that we need to and allow for you to do everything in one place with just a couple of clicks, not a lot of tabs and not a lot of thinking. That's when I think businesses are going to say, wow, this platform is really transforming how we operate and allowing for us to really grow better, ideally. So I think it's the combo of AI, the framework that we have, and the ability for us to take in any information that you would want us to take in.

Gentlemen, I appreciate you taking time out of your day to come and hang out with Chad and Max and myself and just drop the knowledge bombs that you have. My. My one takeaway. And then actually, well, Max and Chad, do you guys have a takeaway from today?

I have a takeaway. I mean, I think what you guys are talking about with being able to have something to assist people I think will bring a lot of standardization and like that's one of the things that we run into a lot of issues with our clients is they find somebody in the construction space like they'll hire someone who's good at data admin work, who is probably not an accountant at all. They don't know the word fiduciary, right? They know the word like Excel formula and like, having something help keep them on the rails, like, doing things the way it ought to be done so that it will get where it needs to go and so that a business can grow is, like, that's a huge, exciting thing for me. And that's like a, you know, big takeaway is, I think.

You know, I'm.

I know Commerce Hub is headed in the right direction. I've known it for a long time. I've had to, like, fight tooth and nail to keep, like, our industry invested in staying on it because some things have been difficult for, like, again, exactly what Jack said, the customer structure, right? We have humans and projects underneath the humans. And like, the contact sync for Commerce Hub just doesn't do that. So I had to get really crazy with some fancy footwork of being able to laser in contacts underneath it and move invoices around after they get synced over and stuff like that so they stay linked up. But, like, all that to say, like, I know you guys are really headed in the right direction to make all that work. And like, if you had a bad experience with QBO sync before, try it again. If you had a bad experience with Commerce Hub before, I mean, now is still just right now. It's the worst it's ever going to be, always. Because it's always improving, right? It's not the worst it ever has been, but it's the worst it's ever going to be. Moving forward, theoretically. And with what Adam's been talking about, about cash flow and that great human user experience on both sides, the sales side and on the buyer side, man, I can't be more excited about that.

Max, final thoughts?

Me, I'm the ecosystem app guy. A lot of the times when I get super excited, I start to think about what this means for the broader ecosystem of the potential opportunity out there. If I'm hearing that we're building this new, solid foundation for commerce on HubSpot and giving you the ability to create all these things, whether it's payments or subscriptions or this, that, and the other thing, the slew of possibilities around apps centered around commerce and payment. Getting built on HubSpot is what really excites me. Right? I mean, you know, if we think about, hey, like, what do we need? We need an API for payments or transactions or subscriptions or whatever you want to call them and then, you know, the next person can come around and build like the literal, you know, Shopify built purpose built for HubSpot from the ground up off the tail end of those APIs. Right. Like someone in the ecosystem could come do that. Right. And that to me is really exciting because while we look at this as updates to core features of HubSpot, there's also a big other picture of what this opens up downstream of that and outside of that.

Right.

We built a CPQ platform on HubSpot code. Happily. Right. I had to get it in at the end, but all the stuff that you guys are talking about is going to be that many more toys for us to be able to like play with and make our platform better. You know what I mean? Like, so it's, it's, this is the stuff that really, really kind of excites me in that, you know, what feels like features getting out of the HubSpot is always a much bigger picture than just that. Right. So, yeah, ecosystem should be stoked right now.

Yeah. My takeaway is if you have looked at Commerce Hub but haven't tried it, maybe it's time to dip your toe in. If you've used it historically and you walked away, you might want to tease it again because in good HubSpot fashion, everything changes every single day. And we're in a new wonderland where magic wands are being waved and things are being created. And hey, maybe it's your time. We'll see you next time on the Hubby Heroes podcast. Don't forget to be a happy, helpful, humble human. Do some happy hubspotting along the way. Okay, Hub Heroes, we've reached the end of another episode. Will Lord Lack continue to loom over the community or will we be able to defeat him in the next episode of the Hub Heroes podcast? Make sure you tune in and find out in the next episode. Make sure you head over to thehubheroes.com to get the latest episodes and become part of the League of Heroes. FYI, if you're part of the League of Heroes, you'll get the show notes right in your inbox and they come with some hidden power up potential as well. Make sure you share this podcast with a friend, Leave a review if you like what you're listening to and use the hashtag Hub Heroes Podcast on any of the socials and let us know what strategy conversation you'd like to listen into next. Until next time, when we meet and combine our our forces, remember to be a happy, helpful, humble human. And of course. Always be looking for a way to be someone's hero.