I can’t believe it’s already been over a month since INBOUND. Time has flown by, and I’m still wrapping my head around everything I learned over the three days. INBOUND brought together some of the best HubSpot developer community members together to learn and grow better in person. We had some great developer sessions, two demo booths focused on HubSpot integrations, a photo-finishing developer party, and the return of Jon McLaren’s orange cape. Let’s get into my INBOUND 2024 quick hits.
Building on last year’s successful developer presence, INBOUND 24 didn’t disappoint. We even had an official developer agenda on the main INBOUND site. At Partner Day, Karen Ng, Senior VP of Product at HubSpot, introduced app cards built with UI extensions during her opening keynote. As we all know, UI extensibility is here to stay, and now app partners can bring that extensibility to all HubSpot customers through the App Marketplace.
Later on during Partner Day, Sr. Developer Relations Manager Chris Riley and Sr. Developer Advocate Hannah Seligson hosted a series of brain dates with HubSpot product managers and external developers to learn more about how the developer community has been building with UI extensions.
Beyond Partner Day, we had five developer-focused sessions, including two deep dives and three education sessions. All of these sessions were completely sold out. Additionally, this year we had four speakers from our developer community at the first-ever developer community lightning talks. We even livestreamed it to our Developer YouTube channel. Finally, if you were around HubSpot HQ, you could stop by our demo booth — aptly titled Build Apps — and pick up one of our new developer t-shirts.
UI extensions meet the App Marketplace. All three of our education sessions focused on CRM customization with app cards backed by UI extensions. Why the emphasis? Well, app cards have made it possible for anyone to use UI extensions in their HubSpot accounts. Now, developers can build UI extensions that can be used by multiple accounts instead of individual ones. That flexibility is a huge win for all HubSpot customers.
If you didn’t hop on the UI extensibility train last year, then there’s no time like the present. We’ve seen UI extensibility open up a whole new world of possibilities for HubSpot’s CRM. From Sendoso seamlessly blending customer gift sending with the CRM record page to PandaDoc reinventing the CPQ process on deal records, developers have been able to build delightful user experiences with ready-to-use, React-based UI components. Want an example? Check out this GitHub repository to see app cards in action. And, watch this video to see how developers put app cards into practice.
Session 1: Unlock the Power of Customizing HubSpot’s Smart CRM
HubSpot Group Product Managers Katherine Man and Jeff Vincent discussed with audiences how customization of the Smart CRM is the key to powering better business processes. From getting key information to the right people to bringing in external data more seamlessly, CRM customization can help all customers work smarter in HubSpot. While this talk was geared more towards HubSpot admins, they did recognize the key role developers play in making this customization come to life with UI extensions.
Session 2: The App Marketplace Investment: How Apps Help You Reinvent
This session was for app partners and potential app partners. Brian Gorbett, VP of Ecosystem Product, and Melissa Greco, Principal Product Marketing Manager, discussed all things App Marketplace in this exciting session, with a major focus on the launch of app cards. They showcased how powerful app cards can be for the App Marketplace and mentioned that there were already 14 app cards available for HubSpot customers to download and discover.
Session 3: Taking a Platform Approach to Business Reinvention
This session was led by Bree Hall, Associate Developer Advocate, Sophie Higgs, Sr. Director of Product Management, and Ben Anderson, Engineering Lead. During their session, they discussed how developers can help businesses grow with CRM customization. Some highlights included Ben’s insights into how the engineering team thought through building scalable tools for developers and Bree’s GitHub repository of sample CRM cards for different industries.
A Developer’s Guide: Getting Started with HubSpot Development
Led by HubSpot Academy Professor Nicole Pierce-Casares, this deep dive focused on developers who were new to developing on HubSpot. Nicole guided attendees through setting up their local development environment, including how to use the HubSpot CLI and build their very first UI extension. Attendees walked away with a tech stack ready to build on HubSpot.
Coding for Marketers: Your Guide to Coding on Content Hub
Dennis Edson, Developer Advocate, and Nick LaPorte, Sr. Technical Program Manager, hosted a special coding deep dive aimed at marketers. This session focused on writing code for Content Hub, including how to code with HubSpot’s templating language HubL. Attendees said the live demoing was great and that any person “could walk in with no knowledge and walk out being able to dabble in dev changes.”
New this year: Community-Driven Lightning Talks
This year, in collaboration with four of our amazing developer community members, we hosted lightning talks. Jennifer Nixon, Anton Bujanowski, Justin Givens, and Carter McKay were each given ten minutes to teach the audience about different developer topics, from UI extensions to listing apps on the App Marketplace. And, it was livestreamed to YouTube for everyone at home. The community space was packed with developers excited to learn from their peers.
Developers love a good party, so we invited them to start their engines at the F1 Arcade Boston. Surrounded by several F1 simulators, we engaged in some friendly competition on the track. I will admit that, even on the easiest difficulty, I ended up driving in the opposite direction of the finish line. Oh, well. It was still a fun time!
SJ Morris, Sr. Manager of Developer Community at HubSpot, was our grand marshal of fun, waving the starting flag for us to get our fill of high-speed thrills and hearty appetizers. We had over a hundred developers attend and dozens of HubSpotters, all racing for glory and good times at F1 Arcade Boston. This was nearly double the size of last year’s party! Between races, friends were made, conversations were had, and drinks were imbibed. With so much of our community spread across the world, any time to get face time with them is a win in my book. And, if you want to know who took home gold, make sure to get in touch with Dennis Edson.
At INBOUND, we announced over 200 new features to HubSpot. That’s a mindblowing amount of changes. If you want to read about everything we released, check out this thread in the community forums.
While other INBOUND recaps may be a Breeze, let me tell you the things I’m looking forward to:
- App Cards (early access). This should surprise nobody as being top of my list. App cards are going to fundamentally change the App Marketplace, so my advice is to sign up today and start seeing what you can build to help solve customer use cases more effectively.
- Updated HubSpot Developers homepage and documentation. Jon McLaren, Sr. Developer Advocate, launched the brand-new HubSpot Developers homepage. Featuring new branding, this page was actually built with the dev community on livestreams on the HubSpot Developers YouTube channel. Additionally, the developer documentation has also undergone some powerful updates that make learning to build on HubSpot easier with updated navigation, easier access to guides and tutorials, and increased page performance.
- Public APIs for Orders and Carts. Commerce Hub keeps getting more powerful, and this latest API focused on orders and carts will be especially useful for keeping HubSpot data synced with external ecommerce platforms.
A sneaky, under-the-hood post-INBOUND release
While this release didn’t make a splash on the main stage of INBOUND, it’s pretty freakin’ awesome. What am I referring to? API limit increases! API limits for Pro+ customers are being increased, enhancing the reliability and scalability of the HubSpot platform. This update raises daily call limits and burst limits, allowing for better data integration and performance. If that doesn't inspire developers to build more, I don’t know what will. Check out our changelog that goes more in depth with these limit increases.
INBOUND 2024 was exciting, tiring, and so much fun. Developers were at the forefront of a major change to make HubSpot even more extensible. The App Marketplace will continue to be an integral part of the overall HubSpot customer experience. Today, the average customer has seven apps installed in their accounts. With app cards, developers can build their apps to be even more seamless to their end-users, which will reduce friction and lead to more app downloads.
As I wrap-up this recap, I leave you with these final words: San Francisco. See you all in 2025!