It’s hard to take notes while fully engaging in a meeting, and Fathom enables users to stay fully present while its AI Notetaker captures and organizes the information. It’s a great tool, but there was initially a missing link.
“People wanted that information in their CRM,” says Fathom CEO Richard White. “They also wanted to bring CRM context into Fathom. That way, they could get a 10,000-foot view of deals, seeing the bigger picture across a whole sequence of conversations.”
Achieving this kind of integration with third-party tools is rarely simple for engineering teams. It usually demands weeks of development, significant upkeep, and a shift away from building new features.
“Integrations unlock a lot of value, but that comes at the cost of weeks of engineering time,” says Senior Software Engineer Austin Moore. “It also comes with a ton of additional hurdles, from proper security and UI variability to constant maintenance. It adds a ton of complexity.”
When demand for a particular integration hit a fever pitch, however, the team examined what it would take to make that happen.
HubSpot emerged as Fathom's most requested integration, both from customers and internal teams. The potential value was clear: combining meeting data with CRM context would provide customers with a comprehensive view of their sales funnel and customer relationships.
“Getting good outcomes from AI means bringing in the right contextual data,” Richard says. “Some of that lives in meetings, but a lot lives in your CRM. Marrying those two sources would allow us to give our customers a really rich view of what was happening across their sales funnel and customer base.”
Once the development team started on the project, they were blown away by how quickly things moved. “In terms of how long it took us to go from idea to beta, it was less than a week, which is staggering,” Richard says. “And honestly, only a day of that was actual engineering time in HubSpot.”
The secret behind that lightning-fast journey to “hello world” lay in HubSpot’s easy-to-use developer tools.
“The HubSpot developer platform as a whole has clearly been created for engineers to work effectively,” Austin says. “The typical rough edges we’re used to experiencing simply don’t exist.”
Using familiar standards like REST APIs, webhooks, and React-based UI extensions, the HubSpot developer platform removes many of the typical challenges of integrating with a third party.
“HubSpot’s intentional and well-architected design of their APIs and webhooks allow our engineering team to focus on solving the problems at hand instead of figuring out how to work around limitations to deliver the user experience we’re after. It makes building very complex and magical experiences effortless,” Austin says.
Fathom even built a ChatGPT-style tool called Ask Fathom, which quickly and accurately answers users’ questions across entire pipelines, allowing them to identify key people and properties.
Fathom achieved all that functionality with surprisingly little engineering effort.
“It all works because of how well HubSpot organizes data and how easy it is to access that with APIs and webhooks,” Austin says. “The amount of thought and effort that has been put into the developer ergonomics so we can produce something usable by our customers quickly is second to none.”
A core use case of Fathom is helping users mine information and insights from related meetings across a deal or account, not just the last interaction. Using HubSpot’s developer tools and its Contact, Company, and Deals APIs, Fathom built a smart solution that automatically consolidates all meeting data linked to an entity and allows customers to view deals more holistically.
Right after a call, without any clicks, the information gets logged into HubSpot automatically. Then, it pushes in AI-detected mapped properties from the call, driving more visibility into other engagements with contacts, companies, and deals. Without APIs, it would’ve been much harder.
“The APIs are our natural bridge between Fathom and HubSpot. They are really easy to work with, especially compared to other CRMs out there,” Richard says.
The Fathom team was surprised by the speed and ease of integration:
Thanks to the building blocks for creating UI extensions, Fathom embedded parts of its product directly into the HubSpot interface.
“Bringing those calls together into a single experience is a game changer for our customers,” Austin says. “Fathom users can view some of the deeper, in-app experience they’re used to from Fathom directly within HubSpot, so they’re not constantly context switching. They’re already in a tool they love, and Fathom shows up right there with them.”
The impact of Fathom’s development effort spreads far and wide. The developer tools have saved Austin and his team a lot of time, and customers can make sense of huge volumes of data faster.
Fathom has synced over 2.5 million call summaries to HubSpot. They’ve mapped more than 10 million contacts, four million calls and four million deals. It all flows seamlessly, with minimal developer maintenance.
“We’d normally try to avoid building embedded experiences because of the maintenance costs,” Austin says. “But with HubSpot, it hasn’t cost our small engineering team any maintenance overhead, and the platform has been incredibly solid.”
Integrating Fathom with HubSpot has been a technical win that’s delivered a clear ROI. Customers who use Fathom’s HubSpot integration have a 33% higher net retention rate.
“For a SaaS business, net retention is everything. And that’s a huge result,” Richard says. “We’re really excited that we’re seeing this roll down to our bottom line.”
The HubSpot integration has also become the sales team’s favorite feature to highlight.
“My sales team raves about it,” Richard says. “This is the thing that’s been helping them push a lot of deals over the finish line. It’s become the killer feature of our platform.”
Above all, Richard loves that HubSpot helps them move at the velocity required to stay ahead of competitors.
“In a very competitive AI space, we win by moving really fast. HubSpot helps us move as fast as we possibly can to stay ahead of the competition.”
HubSpot's developer tools are designed to enable seamless integration between third-party applications and HubSpot's CRM ecosystem. HubSpot provides developers with a comprehensive suite of tools and APIs that simplify the integration process while maintaining enterprise-grade security and performance. To learn more about building on HubSpot: