Liz Moorehead
This week, Chad wanted to get nerdy about HubSpot Commerce Hub, and Iβm so glad he did. Because this conversation turned into so much more than a list of feature updates. What we ended up digging into was what HubSpot is really building with Commerce Hub right now: a flexible, API-friendly, increasingly end-to-end solution that can finally meet the complex billing, subscription, and payment needs of serious businesses.
If you havenβt taken a close look at Commerce Hub lately, youβre probably missing a lot. From the Payment Write API and custom subscription properties to associating payments and subscriptions with custom objects, thereβs a quiet revolution happening under the hood. Chad, Max, George, and I unpacked how these updates are reshaping whatβs possibleβfrom SaaS companies syncing Stripe activity into HubSpot, to teams ditching their custom payment objects altogether thanks to new metadata capabilities.
π Go Deeper: What the heck is HubSpot Commerce Hub?!
We also didnβt shy away from whatβs still frustrating. Editing partially paid invoices? Still not possible. Mobile access to Commerce Hub? Missing. Quote template editing? Letβs just say itβs... not great. And yet, we all walked away from this conversation with the same feeling: HubSpot is closer than ever to giving revenue teams the tools they need to manage deals, payments, subscriptions, and contracts in one place. Itβs not perfect yetβbut itβs getting a lot harder to argue that itβs not ready for prime time.
If youβre working at the intersection of sales, finance, and operations, or just trying to figure out if Commerce Hub is finally worth building into your stackβthis episode is your crash course in whatβs changed, whatβs possible, and whatβs still on the wishlist.
What We Cover
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The Payment Write API and Why It Matters: Chad walks through how external systems can now generate payments inside HubSpot and associate them to deals, quotes, invoices, and moreβno manual entry required.
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Custom Subscription Properties and Flexible Metadata: You can now add custom properties to both subscriptions and payments. That means no more workaround objects to track deposit types, feature flags, or product-level access.
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Goodbye to Redundant Custom Objects (Sometimes): Max explains how new metadata options in Commerce Hub mean teams can often ditch extra custom objects they used to need just to track payment or subscription details.
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How Line Items and Products Actually Work: We clarify the difference between products and line items (and why theyβre basically the same), and what that means for line item-level reporting inside HubSpot.
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Building Real SaaS Payment Infrastructure in HubSpot: With better subscription APIs, payment object flexibility, and custom associations, HubSpot is inching closer to being a viable backend for modern SaaS billing structures.
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The Dream (and Pain) of Quote Templates: Max and Chad share some strong opinions on the quote editing experienceβwhatβs broken, what we hope changes with the Cashflow acquisition, and why HubSpot needs to get serious about document generation.
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Where Commerce Hub Still Needs Work: From invoice editing limitations to mobile app support and more intuitive quote design, we share the features that still need loveβand why feedback to the product team really does matter.
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What the Future of Commerce Hub Could Look Like: Usage-based billing. Graduated pricing. Contract generation. Integrated doc workflows. We talk through the bigger vision thatβs clearly coming, and what it could mean for B2B and SaaS companies using HubSpot to run revenue.
And so much more ...
Episode Transcript
Liz Moorehead: We are back gentlemen.
Max Cohen: that was the best transition you've ever done, George
George B. Thomas: that?
Max Cohen: Congrat.
Liz Moorehead: smooth.
Chad Hohn: know it's coming somewhere, it still always gets you by surprise, and that was particularly good,
George B. Thomas: Uh, I do what I can. I do it. I'm, I'm refreshed from vacation. So that's, that was that good intro there for you?
Liz Moorehead: Yeah. Well, the gang is all back together again, folks. How we feeling? George, do you still have vacation brain or are you dialed in?
Max Cohen: I still have vacation
George B. Thomas: yeah. I'm, I'm trying to get dialed in. It's, uh, you know, I got back Liz and it, there was 47 HubSpot up dates. There's about 4,700 emails. Um, and so I'm trying to get dialed in. I, I feel like Monday is like, let's, let's ease my way into trying to like, figure out what HubSpot did in a week while I was gone.
Uh, what all the people in my email need now that I'm back yet also create some, uh, content. Uh, because before this I was on the, um, customer platform podcast and we're doing this podcast, and then I have two women of HubSpot. Interviews I'm doing today. So it's a content rich day, but also a helping human.
I, I better be dialed in. I guess my answer is, Liz, I'm officially dialed in.
Liz Moorehead: Well, good news. We are easing you in with a super simple, lightweight, very frill free conversation.
George B. Thomas: I saw the notes.
Liz Moorehead: no, because see, when you left Chad. Showed up and said, I wanna talk about nerd stuff today. I wanna talk about nerdy Commerce Hub stuff today. But before we get into that, George, let's pop quiz for a second.
George B. Thomas: Uh oh.
Liz Moorehead: Let's dust off the little dust bunnies from vacation. Can you give the listeners a home a quick recap of what Commerce Hub is in case they are unfamiliar with the platform?
George B. Thomas: A little recap is kind of difficult because what Commerce Hub used to be to what Commerce Hub is now is like dramatically different. Um, but, but I'll, I'll simplify the complex in saying Commerce Hub is a way for you to, um, get paid and there's multiple ways that you can get paid. So when I think of Commerce Hub, I think.
Quoting, I think of invoicing, I think of payment links, I think of subscriptions. So these are like the terminology of things that would be in there. But it, but it, for me, if I really just go high level, it's a godsend because our business runs completely on Commerce Hub, meaning the, the whole CPQ, the whole like, uh, getting people to book for super admin training, like every, everything that touches money.
Is Commerce Hub. And what's nice is we literally have our accountants, uh, in there as well. And so like they can see things and there's integrations and like it just again, godsend and think of anything that touches money or getting paid. That's Commerce Hub.
Liz Moorehead: Chad, did he miss anything in his love letter to Commerce Hub.
Chad Hohn: I mean I think that's, uh, that's a great way to put it. You know, there's a whole bunch of different mechanisms. You know, we can go into detail in any of those types of things, but really a lot of the stuff that's been updated recently has been backend changes and the ability to do things that you used to not be able to do, but still with some limitations.
Commerce Hub has always been like, unless you're just gonna use HubSpot and be okay with HubSpot. Everything that it currently has, it used to be a hundred percent. Like that's good. Okay. I can work with Commerce Hub, but if I want to connect to any external system, it was just like a giant nightmare. Um, and like there are still some limitations that make design, you have to take design considerations, right?
But it's. A lot, a lot, a lot better than it used to be. And I'm really, really interested in Max's take on all this as well when we get to subscriptions especially.
Max Cohen: Yeah. Uh. Can concur. I don't know if I have anything additional to add beyond what George and Chad said. Um, but what I will say is it's, it's an exciting time with, uh, with cashflow joining the fray and injecting a completely different perspective on commerce and the backend engine that makes it all run.
Um,
Chad Hohn: Well, and I think part of that's gonna be a rev rec engine that's gonna be a little better across all your stuff. And that's one thing that people have a hard time with in Commerce Hub.
Max Cohen: Yeah, you're gonna start seeing some really cool stuff in the next coming months. So I mean, we already are seeing little bits and boops here and there. Right. But
George B. Thomas: be Bob Boop coming.
Max Cohen: Little pee boops. Yeah.
Liz Moorehead: Speaking of, speaking of incoming beep ups and beep poops, Chad, you already started digging into this a little bit, but I want to ask you directly, you had a number of updates that you wanted to specifically talk about today with HubSpot Commerce Hub, and we may have more on that list that we expand with, but what makes you excited overall about some of the things that we're going to be discussing today?
Chad Hohn: Um, I mean, I just think that, you know, overall, I, I get really excited about the fact that it's no longer just like, I mean, again, design considerations need to be taken into account with what's allowed and not allowed, but. It's not just an, it only works if your source of truth is HubSpot anymore. Like you can actually start to come in and you know, they're truly trying to make payments.
Like a, a first class object, if we call it that way, or like, not a second class object. Right. Um, and someday they'll do that with quotes that they're not there yet. But it's, it's very, very, uh, exciting to see. I mean, just like Max was saying, it's an exciting time to be alive, right. When it comes to all that we can do in the realm of, of Commerce Hub and money and transferring and I mean, you can.
There's really cool stuff you can do. You can associate subscriptions to objects. They never were originally gonna be associated to before, like custom objects now, which is really cool.
Max Cohen: Oh, is that out?
Chad Hohn: Yeah, I at least I was able to like, add it. At one time I was looking at it, which is pretty dope. You can't do it with payments yet.
I, uh, had a bone to pick with a friend of mine over at Commerce Up about that, but they said it's on the roadmap. But like, man, all the stuff that's been on the roadmap is finally getting off the roadmap and in beta or into production, which is amazing.
Liz Moorehead: Phenomenal. All right, so let's dig in. We're starting with HubSpot Payments, correct?
Chad Hohn: Uh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean the payment, right? API is huge. And, um, I think the ability for you to just hit from an external system with the API generate a payment and associate it to. Invoices, quotes, deals, uh, basically all the commerce objects, you're still limited to what you can associate it to, which is one of my, uh, gripes as it currently sits.
And, um, there's like, you know, when you associate a payment to say an invoice, it locks you from editing some invoice properties. And unfortunately. Custom properties are still not on the list of properties you can update while an invoice is partially paid, but I do have it on good authority that that may change at some point.
And they ultimately really want to let you edit invoices whenever you want. Just like other accounting platforms like QuickBooks, right? You can just edit an invoice in QuickBooks and like ad line items, like let's say, or or, or an estimate or whatever, right? Like you can just update it. And then show.
Okay. Hey, we, you know, this is a lot in, I came really originally from the construction industry. Um, and one of the things that's huge there is I need to be able to have. Partially paid invoice, but also add a scope of work so that my customer truly understands the total amount, including like a line for a change order or something like that.
But right now with Commerce Hub, if you want to do that, even still, uh, you have to create a new invoice for every payment that you really want to bring in. Right. Uh, and not everybody in the construction industry likes to do it that way. They like to have one running invoice and you sign another quote and it updates an existing invoice, for example, with another line item.
But all that to say, like being able to laser in a payment from an external system and now you know, of course it's already been out for a while, you can create invoices with an API call, like you can now create a backend integration with. Some kind of other system and make what's in that other system reflect in HubSpot against your deals.
So if you're mapping contacts companies, you know, for like contacts and customer, you know, whatever, and then you're doing deals for all of your sales or you projects or whatever kind of system you're using, you can actually make. All of the line items and everything reflect, which is amazing. You've never been able to do that before when it comes without manual effort.
George B. Thomas: And I'll, I'll throw one thing in here. I'm, because I've been hanging out with my friend Chris, Carolyn, for a while. You mentioned deals, Chad, I'll even mention in a world where you live in orders, orders instead of deals. Right. And so this idea of living in a world of orders and living in a world of an external system to be able to put these things in place.
'cause, 'cause that's the, that's the thing I was hoping that you would get to is like. External systems to then push it into HubSpot because I already use HubSpot payments, but I use HubSpot payments in HubSpot, and so I think that's a big differentiator that the listeners slash viewers should be understanding it.
If I have this thing over here, and I've always dreamed that it could interact with line items and invoices, been when somebody places an order or when sales closes a deal, the answer is yes.
Chad Hohn: Yes, it's awesome. And being able to like bring in those line items is like a thing, like, you know, we'll, we'll get to other stuff here, but yeah. I'll let you go Max,
Max Cohen: Chad. So, and, and just to like clarify it, so it's not transferring funds into your HubSpot payment account that then goes to your bank account, it's simply just showing the record.
Chad Hohn: Yes, it's creating the payment object record. Yep. And, and so you're now able to do that. There is not a way at this point to generate like, obviously a charge a card via API or anything like that. Right.
Max Cohen: this is more so like a reporting thing,
Chad Hohn: But it's huge being able to align some external system. Like let's say you have a big ERP some custom thing at your company.
Well now HubSpot's a viable option to actually show your revenue recognition and what line items were sold so that your frigging support team actually knows what in the holy heck was in the order or was invoiced.
Max Cohen: Yeah, I mean the big, the big thing for me, like, I think this was like one, this in subscriptions are subscription. Can you write subscriptions yet?
Chad Hohn: Yeah, dog.
Max Cohen: Okay. So, okay. So
Chad Hohn: they got them line items, dude. Like they got them line
Liz Moorehead: They got them line out of eh?
Max Cohen: So the, the other
George B. Thomas: all right over there?
Max Cohen: oops. Yeah. Um. The thing is, is like, I feel like that was the last two big missing pieces of the puzzle for HubSpot to be the, the ultimate final tech stack for a SaaS company, right? You think about it, we had all these awesome marketing, sales and service tools, but like the thing is, most of the SAS products, you're not sending someone money on a HubSpot quote to go activate your app.
They've got it hooked up to Stripe, right? They've got their backend system where someone logs into the backend, goes into the settings and pays with the credit card. Right. But now you could take that subscription that's generated and send it into HubSpot. You could take those payments that are made.
Yeah, exactly. Right. Like a customer account or like a, a. Some internal, we call 'em app licenses. We have an app license object at happily. Right. Um, you know, and so like you could take those and make 'em show up as hub buy payments inside of there. Right. When people are paying in your app through like whatever custom payment system that you have set up.
Right. Like, I think it's fine. Like they've, they've, they've gone full service now with how good service hub is. Right. To like run your support team on it. It's a joke. It's a joke now. Like it, it, it, it literally has everything you need. Right. And, but customer can go, can, can make API calls to your internal system to do stuff now,
Chad Hohn: Exactly, yes. With the customer agent being able to interact with your system and you can fire off an API called a query something in a middle of a live chat, like that's insane. You know? That's also another thing.
Max Cohen: it's officially, to me, it officially has everything a SA company
George B. Thomas: Well.
Chad Hohn: I think so.
George B. Thomas: And here's the thing. I know this is not why we're here, but I wanna throw this in because Max, you literally said help desk this morning. There were six updates, six different unique updates to help desk. So
Max Cohen: Can't wait to go through every single one of 'em on the live show in an hour.
George B. Thomas: it's crazy.
Max Cohen: Sweet.
Chad Hohn: It's exciting.
Liz Moorehead: I'm excited. I understood 60% I think of what was just discussed, but that's 'cause I'm a content nerd. You'll find me in the content marketing hub. But Chad, tell us where we're going next. What are we talking about?
Chad Hohn: Yeah. Well, well, one more thing I forgot to mention. Um, well, I guess this, this is kind of, we were alluding to it right, is being able to generate subscriptions via API, you can mark those subscriptions via API to either send invoices or not send invoices. And so those, they'll be able to like actually pay for those subscriptions or whatever.
And um, then there's like, I mean, there's some pretty advanced functionality and now in the Data Model Builder, you can actually add those subscriptions. Two other objects, custom objects, whatever. And that gives you line item level reporting like some people have done kind of what you know, max and the team have done when it comes to what they're selling and keeping track of it and put it in a custom object and run associations.
But realistically, you could actually use line items now to see who has what products. More or less like there is a world where people coming into this who don't have like legacy architectures and a bunch of custom reports built around this can actually have the information they need. And in addition to all of that good, juicy Delectable, updated goodness, they also give you the ability to add subscription custom properties, which is super.
Amazing. So you can add any kind of property you need. It's not just the standard HubSpot subscriptions.
Max Cohen: Yeah, it could be like what features someone has, what, what
Chad Hohn: could have feature flags on your
Max Cohen: whatever it.
Chad Hohn: a hundred percent. Like in your quote, if this line item's here generate the subscription with that feature flag that tells your backend system, boop, or you know, whatever after, you know when it, when your quote goes and then it syncs back or something like that.
But you can at least make it accessible now to your support team and help desk. They know truly what subscriptions this company has, if they have multiple, if you have multiple products or whatever, and I mean. It can be updated, it can be created, like all these things can, can occur. Now on subscriptions, there are some limitations like, like I said, with invoices, with being partially paid, you, you kind of get locked down.
But luckily subscriptions you can update over time. You can just REIT initialize the subscription,
George B. Thomas: So
Chad Hohn: is
George B. Thomas: I, I wanna jump in here for a second because we're throwing the word line items around and products around, and, and this is something that I've had to teach people. Um, so let's go back to basics. We're gonna step out. To nerd Ville for a second, which by the way, I'm, I'm, I, yeah,
Max Cohen: yeah. We're gonna step outside of nerd to give a nuanced take on products and line items.
George B. Thomas: so,
Chad Hohn: that's not nerdy.
Max Cohen: Yeah.
George B. Thomas: of all, first of all, products are line items and light items or products in HubSpot.
They're one in the same thing, like ba you see, you see what I'm saying? Like, like if you create a product and then you go to do a quote or do what Chad's talking about, you're basically, that line item is a product that you've created in HubSpot. And so like. It's just crazy how like we have these two different names for this kind of same thing.
So just know that a line item is a product and a product is a line item. But also what I wanna just double click on here is, um, for years, for years, people have asked for a line item reporting and the fact that you're gonna be able to now have line item reporting, but line item reporting based on an external system that is pushing into HubSpot.
So, so if you're sitting here and you're like, well, that's something we might wanna lean into, then you're gonna wanna figure out how to get your products AKA, your line items in HubSpot in a way that they can be used for what Chad's talking about.
Chad Hohn: Right. And
Liz Moorehead: clarify something really quickly 'cause I think I understand this. So a product is like the thing that globally exists in your database that can be pulled into any invoice. A line item explicitly refers to product that is listed within a specific invoice like that is that line item and that
Max Cohen: yeah, it's an instance. It's an instance of a product being associated to a quote is the easiest way to think about
George B. Thomas: Or invoice, or, yes. Yeah.
Chad Hohn: It's like a product is a template, right? And you start from the template, but then you can customize it while you're formatting the subscription or you're formatting the like invoice. And any of those properties that are changed on it, including custom properties, which you can put on products, and anything you put on a product is an option on a line item at that.
You know, it pushes down essentially. Um, and each of those are an instance of that templated item and they refer back to the product. So like, when you're doing line item level reporting, you'll know how many line items that you sold related back to that parent product. So if it's like an app license for, you know, quote, happily a user or something like that. Then you have, uh, four different invoices with like quote, happily user as a line item. Uh, you can sum total the number of users that you sold, right? But you know that it's related back to that product template.
George B. Thomas: Yeah, and it's, and it really, it does speed up things. 'cause again, you might. Think about, and by the way, we're now leaning into where Max is probably gonna show for, you know, who he should show for. But like, you have multiple products, a, k, a, multiple line items, which means you're also creating kind of like this bundle scenario, um, inside of, you know, your quote, your invoice, your whatever it is.
So,
Chad Hohn: Mm-hmm.
Max Cohen: Good luck building that bundle.
George B. Thomas: Mm, there you go. See, I, I served it up for you. I served it up for you. You can do that, by the way, with quote, happily
Max Cohen: Yes, you can
George B. Thomas: Yeah. Anyway, back to Chad
Chad Hohn: just
George B. Thomas: the
Chad Hohn: he max is just very mod modest
Max Cohen: Mm-hmm.
George B. Thomas: Yes. Typically he's the most modest on the podcast.
Max Cohen: listen, listen, George, you, you, you set that ad up all on your own,
George B. Thomas: I did. I did.
Max Cohen: you did.
George B. Thomas: I kind of did it on purpose.
Max Cohen: you did. You
Liz Moorehead: Shilling for Big Popsicle.
George B. Thomas: mean, listen, the team at quote happily have been killing it for like two of our clients who are using the product recently, and so. I gotta give him some love. I gotta give him some love. All right, back to
Chad Hohn: that's good. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, yeah. So the other, uh, one other thing that's really, really helpful is now not, not unlike the ability to have custom properties on payment or on, uh, subscriptions. You can do it on payments now. So the ability to store additional metadata about your payment, like, I mean, one thing at Roofing Business partner that would do happen all the time is we would have to create a like QBO payment custom object.
Because they would need to keep track of, is this like a deposit payment? Like a payment that happened for material delivery And they wanna like sum total or like, is this payment related to, uh, you know, like a material invoice or something like that. They needed to store additional metadata so you could run calculated properties to sum total up like.
I have a sum total of all of the deposit payments that are related to this. And then so you could take the amount invoiced, the amount received in payments, and regardless of how that payment got in there, whether it's um, you know, a. It manually added payment. It synced over from QBO to HubSpot using the the QBO sync.
Uh, it, uh, was created via HubSpot payments or created via your, bring your own Stripe HubSpot payments or whatever. Right. All of that functionality then, well, it still wasn't enough 'cause we didn't know what type of payments they were for. And so now you have the capacity to, um. Actually put in additional metadata about whatever that payment is, which, which allows you to, to create rollup properties or different things that you might need really, really, really, really helpful.
And then people can ditch their whatever payment. Custom object now and free up a custom object, right, which is great on people who have enterprise portals, which is actually like becoming more and more of a problem that I'm noticing. People are getting a lot of custom objects in their portals depending on their ambitions, and not everything really needs to be a custom object anymore.
Like it may have once used to be right. Not everything even needs to be a pipeline stage. Some of the pipeline stages people have could be properties, but that's a diatribe we could get on another day.
George B. Thomas: be tasks. Right. That's forever. I'm beating the drum of like, deal stages or whatever stages. They, they're, they are not tasks, they're milestones
Chad Hohn: yeah. It's a send whatever is a deal stage.
George B. Thomas: Ooh, ooh.
Chad Hohn: Oh, well, you know what's amazing is, um, and this is like kind of just an update that happened a while back, but a task-based workflow. So like for example, if you're storing now information about whether or not you did a thing well, you could have a task-based workflow that says like, hi, I'm a task. I'm related to a deal that has, uh, whatever property filled in auto complete myself.
That way, like if somebody does it, at least the task cleans itself up and then it's not on somebody's list of junk to do, like steal that workflow. It's amazing. It, it like is such a quality of life improvement for people with complex business processes, but may end up going into one deal for one task and doing like four things that they were all tasked just so nobody forgets.
Right.
George B. Thomas: it. Hmm.
Liz Moorehead: So question for you guys. We've talked about three really great new features for HubSpot Commerce Hub, but what's still missing? What do our greedy sprocket loving little hearts want more of or less
Chad Hohn: Ooh, max. I wanna know what you want.
Max Cohen: I mean. Are we, are we, are we rolling quotes into Commerce Hub or are we keeping that Sales Hub?
Chad Hohn: It's both.
Max Cohen: mean
George B. Thomas: Yeah, I would say it's both.
Max Cohen: man, we need a much better way to edit those templates
Chad Hohn: Oh yeah. Oh,
Max Cohen: that is, uh, it is so stuck in the past. It's terrible. And like, hopefully this is something we'll see with, with the, the cash flow team coming on board right.
Um, but that's the, to me, that is the biggest hindering factor of Commerce Hub is the just horrific experience of editing a quote template. Um,
George B. Thomas: so here's, here's a question, max, because we've seen where like email got drag and drop, right? And we know landing pages and website pages are, when you, when you think about that, when you say that, do you envision, which by the way, I think knowledge bases, uh, they're still working on it. Last time I checked, but I was on vacation last week.
Maybe they fixed it. Like you can migrate knowledge base to a new customizing experience as well. Um. Are you envisioning like quotes, eventually having like a dragon drop or when you say
Max Cohen: but it can't be. Yes,
George B. Thomas: what do you mean?
Max Cohen: yes, but it can't be. It can't be, uh, as freeform as the CMS builder. It has to be something more in line with like a panda dog, right? Where it's like dragon drop on rails, where the end result is you're still building a quote, right? So it's gotta have information on it. It's gotta have a line item table, or line item tables, right?
And a lot of configuring. But then like, you know, you have full control, like easy control over the.
Chad Hohn: Yeah.
Max Cohen: The background, the thought, the, this, the, that.
Chad Hohn: Yeah, you'd be able to like filter these line items, go in this table, those line items. So this property go in that table. Right.
Max Cohen: like, and, and we, we can do that quote happily, but it's because we built an insane amount of quote modules that are still a nightmare to put onto the quote itself, right? Because it, it, for anyone doesn't know is like. A lot of, like the stuff you know about like coding stuff in HubSpot, CMS, you throw a lot of that knowledge out the window when you go into quote templates.
Like it's, it's bad, right?
Chad Hohn: it's its own animal.
George B. Thomas: exp So you, it's almost, I hear you saying it needs to be a little bit of a unified experience with the rest of what Dev deals
Max Cohen: What I'm, what I'm saying is HubSpot, it needs to get really, really serious about document generation, right? That's the next step here, because quotes also lead into contracts, which lead into this, that, the other thing, right? It's all related. You know, they, they need to make a big, take a big swing at PandaDoc.
Right? Um, you know, and cashflow had tech to do that, right? Like it's gonna have, I, they are gonna go into contracts because I remember doing the Monday morning briefing and them showing screenshots of some stuff, and I saw contracts as an object somewhere. I saw a thing, right? Uh, and, and
George B. Thomas: I don't know if you're supposed to talk about that thing.
Max Cohen: was public. It's public. They put it up publicly. They put it up publicly. Right. They, they haven't said anything about it, but someone accidentally leaked a screenshot just like they did with like the navigation. I mean, you broke that on the show. Like, you know what I mean? It's, they're, I I, I, I hope that's what they're doing, right?
They, they do, they, they, they've, they've. They're getting real serious about payments. But the next natural step is to get real serious about the document generation, because that still can like really screw up an experience when it's like, oh yeah, you're gonna build your quote through here. But then when you gotta go generate the con, oh, we gotta go to Panoc.
Oh, why are we using PandaDoc for our quotes? Why are we using DocuSign for our quote? Why are we using? it just, it muddies the water, right? Um,
Chad Hohn: just finished building a crazy like contract generation integration with the platform, and it's like. Man, I've never been so lawyered in my whole life. Like, it's insane. I've never lawyered up like so much. You know? And it's like, that is a world of its own and it's all like word docs and junk, you know?
And, and you also need to support like. Third party contracts. 'cause a lot of times, yeah, redlining and they're not gonna wanna sign your contract. They're gonna wanna sometimes make you sign their contract, you know, through their system because reasons. So there's like so much to consider when it comes to that, like mind blowing amount of CY that needs to be involved because what you sold also needs to feed into the generation of your desired contract template.
Max Cohen: correct.
Chad Hohn: So like you need to have a good document that comes outta your quote, and then all those data points need to be able to turn into something more legally binding. Then we just, uh, you know, flipped the little signature bop on the contract or on like a quote. Right. I approve the quote. That's all that means to anybody.
It's not in law, like Luna's no legal weight.
Max Cohen: And also, lemme be clear, I have faith. I think if any company out there can build a killer DocGen tool that kind of like disrupts. sub spot,
Chad Hohn: Well, I mean, end to end, like that's amazing. Having a end to end. That's, that's the beauty of it, you know? 'cause otherwise you're not making an in you, you have to make an integration. Right.
Max Cohen: yeah.
George B. Thomas: Yeah. Can I go? Totally not nerdy for mine.
Max Cohen: No.
George B. Thomas: I was, uh, I don't know how many times I've said I was on vacation last week, but, uh, if you hadn't heard yet, I was on vacation last week
Liz Moorehead: Wait, where were you? Were you.
George B. Thomas: and I was, uh, trying to get some sun, uh, on some beach somewhere and I was trying to go into my mobile app. I wanted to just manage some invoices that had came through while I was on vacation.
And, um, you know what you can't do on the mobile app?
Chad Hohn: Yeah, none of that.
George B. Thomas: get to none of that. You can't get to invoices. You can't like close them. You can't say it was paid by a CH or, you know,
Chad Hohn: It's like about sales and marketing is about all you can do in there and like CRM
George B. Thomas: so I wanna see Commerce Hub inside of my mobile device because then if I'm like using that on my phone or my iPad, then I can, and, and as a business owner have to like, impact some of those things or those things are impacting me where I'm at away from my desk.
I actually don't feel like I'm handcuffed. Because I did. I literally was like, okay, so now what do I have to do? I gotta go back on the ship and I gotta go plug in my laptop, you know, fire it up and freaking, I don't know, I wanna do work right where I'm at. And, and the reason I'm saying this is because they've done a massive job of actually bringing marketing into the app because it just used to kind of be like a sales.
App that you could put on your phone. Now, it is literally a sales and marketing app that you can have
Chad Hohn: They need support in there too, though. Like that's one of like, help desk is so good on desktop, but you're, you're balling chain to your, your desk. Like if you wanna step away to go grab a cheese boogie or something, like, you know your toast, right?
George B. Thomas: I don't know about a cheese boogie, but I'll take a cheese burger. Um, I'd eat one of those. I wouldn't eat the prior one. Uh, but here's what I'll say, and I think this is really important for HubSpot to hear, like there should be a good iPad version of the app. There should be a good phone version of the app.
They can be one in the same if we're smart. Um, but we're with, with ai. Okay, I'm throwing it out there. That's not what the show's about. Um, we are going to be living in a completely different world. You won't necessarily need to be or want to be chained down to an office or a desk or, or what we've called for years, you know, a computer.
And so Hub. Hopefully HubSpot can get us app-wise into a place where we can do business anywhere, anytime, time. And I think Commerce Hub in the app for this episode is my choice of things that I wish would be happening down the line.
Chad Hohn: I think for me it's uh, just being able to edit partially paid invoices. Like, please, please just allow us to do that. That'd be great. Or at minimum, like custom properties can be edited even if an invoice is partially paid. Thanks. That's all I want for Christmas. Thanks. Like,
George B. Thomas: simple Christmas list.
Chad Hohn: I mean it is, but it's been like two years that's been on my Christmas list, so. You know, you could put custom properties on invoices now, but once the invoice is partially paid, even if those custom properties are calculated, they stay at what they were at the time that it got partially paid. Even if the data is updated in the object data table itself, it does not re-render the like little webpage thingy that the invoice is hosted on. Feels bad, man. Yeah,
Liz Moorehead: Why can't we be happy?
Chad Hohn: Brutal.
Liz Moorehead: Any other wishlist items, folks, you guys aren't asking for much.
George B. Thomas: No, not a
Chad Hohn: Yeah,
Max Cohen: it's, I'm trying to think of anything else that it would actually need passed up.
George B. Thomas: I, I mean, my first response to question was gonna be like, I don't know if I need anything like how I use it. Right how I
Chad Hohn: It's suitable for you.
George B. Thomas: yeah, other than the mobile app gripe that I have. Like, I don't know if I need anything else. And those that did need a lot, Chad just freaking kind of knocked it out the park with like, Hey, for those of the, you couldn't, now you can.
Um,
Chad Hohn: Mostly, yeah,
George B. Thomas: Yeah.
Chad Hohn: we're, we're very, very, very, very close to like truly everything. I mean, we don't have the end-to-end, you know, if you're doing bigger products and contracting and stuff, but we're really, really close.
Max Cohen: I mean, may. Okay. So maybe some of the, like, I guess, I don't know if I'm begging for this yet, but maybe the, uh, the next horizon they should explore. Right is some of the more like complicated, you know, payment, um, structure, is it, or subscription types. I can't remember that Stripe
Chad Hohn: Yeah, like usage based subscriptions would be amazing. How
Max Cohen: graduated pricing, graduated pricing, tiered pricing, package pricing, that kind of stuff, right? Um, all things are pretty easy to do. Another app that I know, um, but like. This is, so that should be built in and, and, uh, natively supported by, you know, HubSpot payments. Right. So we'll get there.
George B. Thomas: Yeah.
Chad Hohn: don't beg for it too fast.
Max Cohen: Yeah.
Liz Moorehead: Well, George. Take home land, the plane. What's the one thing you want us to walk away with from today's conversation between one and 17 things?
George B. Thomas: I, yeah. No, I feel like it should be Chad's one thing that he wants people to
Liz Moorehead: Chad, do you wanna do it?
Chad Hohn: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, I would just say like the, the future is here, you know, and if you have a complex need, I mean, you can start exploring, you know, just get your postman out, start testing some API calls, start making some, you know, objects, start creating some custom properties. You know, the future's here.
You can really start to see where the limitations are and the Commerce Hub team absolutely loves. Like feedback and making sure that they're gonna account for everybody's needs. So don't be afraid to reach out to people on LinkedIn from Commerce Hub. Uh, you know, they, they'd love to hear what issues you're running into to make sure that they add the number of people who want the thing that they can't do.
You know, especially like partially paid invoices need editable functionality. Oh, ah, let's hit 'em up with that. Yeah. But yeah, like, I mean, that's it. Like the future's here and start testing it. Um, you know, give it a whirl. Um, you know, there is, there is still a, like, there's still lot to do, but so much more is possible than it was before.
George B. Thomas: Yeah, that's, I, I would, I love what you're saying, Chad. Listen ladies and gentlemen, at the end of the day, if you had given Commerce Hub a shot previously and was like, Hmm. Not yet. I would say to you, maybe now's the time.
