How Do You Successfully Vibe Code Tools for Your Website? [Endless Customers Podcast Ep. 156]

This transcript has been generated by AI and not checked for accuracy. 

00;00;00;04 - 00;00;19;19
Bob Ruffolo
Is it possible to vibe code a HubSpot CMS website? And when I say vibe code, I'm talking about building an entire HubSpot website using AI. We are pushing the limits here and impact. We're figuring out what you can do and what you can't do. And we're going through all this. In this episode, I'm going to be joined by one of our lead developers who's assisting me in this project.

00;00;19;21 - 00;00;32;09
Bob Ruffolo
And stick around to the end of the episode, because you're going to learn a ton about what you can do right now where there's still limitations, but how far out we actually are until we can fully vibe code a HubSpot website.

00;00;32;12 - 00;00;50;29
Stephanie Baiocchi
You're listening to the Endless Customers podcast, brought to you by the team at impact. Endless customers is the proven system to become the most known and trusted brand in your market. If you want to learn the principles of endless customers and how you can implement them in your business, pick up a copy of Endless Customers, a national bestseller wherever books are sold.

00;00;51;00 - 00;01;12;20
Stephanie Baiocchi
Ready to start implementing endless customers in your business? Talk to impact about how our coaching program can help you implement endless customers to success. And if you want to experience endless customers in person, don't miss our upcoming event, Endless Customers Lied in Hartford, Connecticut, October 5th through the seventh, 2026. Registration is now open. And now on to the show.

00;01;12;21 - 00;01;15;08
Stephanie Baiocchi
Here's your host, Bob Ruffolo.

00;01;15;10 - 00;01;50;02
Bob Ruffolo
All right. Welcome, everyone to the Endless Customers podcast. And we have a great episode. Today we're going to talk about vibe coding. If you don't know what vibe coding means it's using AI to build software or websites. And particularly we're going to talk about websites today. So is it possible for say, in the endless customers community and the types of websites that we build here in the customers community, websites with learning centers and lots of content being regularly updated and having multiple contributors and having pricing pages and self-service tools.

00;01;50;04 - 00;02;09;06
Bob Ruffolo
Can we vibe code all that? And can we do that in a HubSpot environment? And so where is all this right now? We're going to try to make sense of that. So today we have our Danny from our team here Danny Escargot. He's been with us man Danny you've been here what seven years of impact?

00;02;09;09 - 00;02;10;14
Daniel Escardo
Eight years in July.

00;02;10;15 - 00;02;31;11
Bob Ruffolo
Yeah. So Daniel's been with us for eight years. Many people of the endless customers community might not know who Danny is. They may have seen you at one of our events, but you're like a hero behind the scenes here, Danny, because you're the one that's actually building websites for for our clients. Well, we have our strategist. Maybe it's Mary who's very much more public facing.

00;02;31;11 - 00;02;44;02
Bob Ruffolo
She's been in the podcast before. She speaks at the events. But like you and Melissa and Joe Rainaldi, the three of you guys, you're actually the ones building the websites here at impact. So, so we've never had gone the shows your first time. Welcome.

00;02;44;05 - 00;02;46;05
Daniel Escardo
Thank you. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

00;02;46;06 - 00;03;05;02
Bob Ruffolo
And Danny is down in Miami. So you're gonna get that Spanish accent here? It's a little flavor on the show. Danny is a great guy. I'm a very, very dear friend of mine as well. And it's been awesome working with you for all these years. So. But we're going to get into this, Danny. So, vibe coding. I just kind of tipped off what it is a little bit.

00;03;05;02 - 00;03;22;15
Bob Ruffolo
And we hear all these headlines, people of Vive Coding Software's Vive coding websites and, and, you know, I guess we'll just start with the biggest question right now is in the endless customers environment, how should we be thinking about vibe coding when it comes to our websites right now? What can we be doing?

00;03;22;17 - 00;03;50;25
Daniel Escardo
Yeah, so there's a a shift in the way that we develop software, obviously, and vibe coding is becoming integral to that. It used to be a novelty, used to be something that people would do just create scaffold of projects, MVPs and things like that. It's much more widely accepted now. Even professional developers are using it. It's a very efficient way to do it.

00;03;50;27 - 00;04;06;22
Daniel Escardo
In terms of the customers community itself, we're seeing a lot of clients that are starting to vibe code their own tools, and they're starting to create their own software and trying to leverage it for the endless customers journey.

00;04;06;24 - 00;04;29;28
Bob Ruffolo
Yeah. So many of the people in that we've worked with, I mean, every website, for the most part, we've built for our client, probably for the last ten, 12, 15 years has been a HubSpot website. As long as HubSpot CMS has been out. We've done some WordPress websites. We've never here at impact when and did like Shopify or many of the other things are out there.

00;04;29;28 - 00;04;48;06
Bob Ruffolo
But we've stayed, you know, mostly HubSpot, some WordPress. Is it possible to stop doing design development like we used to and start just connecting with Claude code and start building a HubSpot website right now? Or are the challenges that we're seeing right now doing that?

00;04;48;08 - 00;04;55;14
Daniel Escardo
I think that I think the the vibe coding in and of itself is, is.

00;04;55;17 - 00;05;09;10
Daniel Escardo
So if you watch videos online or if you see somebody saying like, vibe, vibe called me a website, or I ask Claude to code me a website, the vast majority of those products that is that are going to be output are.

00;05;09;12 - 00;05;12;03
Daniel Escardo
Essentially scaffolds of full websites.

00;05;12;05 - 00;05;17;08
Bob Ruffolo
And we say scaffolds. What does that basically means, like HTML, LCS files sitting on a desk?

00;05;17;11 - 00;05;52;16
Daniel Escardo
Exactly right. So HTML, CSS may be some JavaScript for the functionality, but in reality there's really no integration with any particular system. Right. So HubSpot and you know, again I saw an example last week where somebody was trying to leverage the latest model against something like Shopify. Right. And it was creating e-commerce website that clones Shopify. And that is such a misleading thing to say, because there's so many things happening under the hood in Shopify that have nothing to do with the front end, right?

00;05;52;17 - 00;06;11;17
Daniel Escardo
Has nothing to do with the way that it looks, has nothing to do with the way that it feels. Yeah, it's it's taking a whole bunch of things out of it and just sort of layering it into what is the front end of the website. Yeah, same thing with HubSpot. Yeah. So HubSpot in and of itself has a ton of stuff in, in the back end that's baked in.

00;06;11;17 - 00;06;12;03
Daniel Escardo
Oh yeah.

00;06;12;05 - 00;06;13;27
Bob Ruffolo
So very robust platform.

00;06;14;01 - 00;06;24;02
Daniel Escardo
Very robust. It's all integrated with the CRM. There's a ton of analytics and information about user behavior and conversions and all kinds of stuff.

00;06;24;04 - 00;06;26;00
Bob Ruffolo
World class security.

00;06;26;02 - 00;06;54;29
Daniel Escardo
Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And the CMS is one portion of that, the CMS being the content management system. So for developing websites, tools or anything that live in the CMS, there's a certain way to do that. There's underlying code that exists that has really nothing to do with the team, the CSS or the JavaScript. Right. And that is the power of HubSpot is the ability to make changes inside the content management system.

00;06;55;04 - 00;07;19;09
Daniel Escardo
Being able to hand that off to a marketing team and let them work in in the website after it's been created. And a lot of the stuff that comes out of the vibe coded tools doesn't take that into account. And there's a way to make that part of the process. You just have to really sort of think about the project in a little bit of a different way.

00;07;19;12 - 00;07;38;12
Daniel Escardo
Yeah. Rather than saying something like create me a landing page or create me a tool, you have to be very specific and precise about how that tool needs to be built. Yeah, you have to tell the AI where it's going to live from the from the get go. You have to communicate the goal of the of the tool.

00;07;38;14 - 00;07;58;17
Daniel Escardo
You need to have it interview you and ask you questions about what, what sort of caveats there are to the to the to the flow of the tool and or the website. And there's just a tremendous amount of preparation that goes into this that a lot of people don't, don't, don't put in.

00;07;58;22 - 00;08;32;27
Bob Ruffolo
So. So, Danny, you said something really important there just a second ago. Watch videos online, YouTube. Are you going LinkedIn? And you see posts and headlines. And I think as audience members, we know AI can do a lot of stuff, but but we also people put out content that's like shocking to get attention, to get views. And just because they are showing one thing they're saying that they accomplished, it doesn't mean it's a fully functioning version of it and that there might be a lot of things.

00;08;32;28 - 00;08;50;18
Bob Ruffolo
They're not showing the video. That's trade offs that that we're not considering because that's just the world we live in, right? We're all about capturing attention. So we got to be realistic with what AI actually can do right now, because yeah, it might be able to build a whole website. Is it great? We see all these headlines too, about like, you know, we've been talking about this on impact.

00;08;50;19 - 00;09;03;04
Bob Ruffolo
You know, people are all building this software and they're saying we're going to build the software and we're going to build a multi-million dollar business. It's like, well, if you can vibe code, so can somebody else. And it's like, is it really gonna be a multi-million dollar business? And you're going to see a lot of false stuff, false stuff out there.

00;09;03;05 - 00;09;19;22
Bob Ruffolo
People just try and get attention for themselves, and showing that they are the leader in this doesn't mean that they don't know what they're talking about, but they're still gaps there. So that's why I think we're trying to hear a little bit when we're talking about vibe coding. A website is especially in our environment where, you know, HubSpot websites, we do a lot of.

00;09;19;24 - 00;09;41;07
Bob Ruffolo
So, so what is more possible right now? So obviously we don't want to lose the power of HubSpot. We don't want to lose the security of HubSpot. There's a CMS function, which means we can have a marketer go in and write an article, and that shows up in our blog or in our learning center. We want to be able to update pages.

00;09;41;07 - 00;09;56;02
Bob Ruffolo
But then there's the other side of it too, that like, all right, if we have just a file based website, we could probably do a lot of that too, right? Where we just say, you know, we just have a whole bunch of files that live hosted online and, and we can say, well, we want to just update this page and change the copy.

00;09;56;02 - 00;10;16;00
Bob Ruffolo
It just updates the page. We're interacting with Claude or Claude, coworker opposed to, going log into HubSpot and nothing a page. So I guess like that's like really unpack that a little bit. And by the way, Danny and I were doing a lot of this on the fly. This is not well prepped out conversation. He knows where I'm trying to bring things.

00;10;16;00 - 00;10;22;12
Bob Ruffolo
I know what he's seeing or he knows what he's singing inside. So you're seeing a lot of this, like in real time as we're getting all this figured out.

00;10;22;14 - 00;10;55;13
Daniel Escardo
100%. Yeah. I guess, yeah. You're right. So essentially working in HubSpot in the UI of HubSpot, and eventually I think there will be a world where a shared agent could update a straight HTML, JavaScript CSS website. Right now, though, the challenge is getting set up on something like that. I think the vast majority of the people who are attempting this, they pretty much have it on their machine.

00;10;55;15 - 00;11;30;06
Daniel Escardo
Yeah, right. And so whomever creates the thing is not responsible for the thing. Yeah. Going forward. Right. And so I think for a CEO or business owner like yourself, that becomes a blocker for the rest of the teams that are trying to update the website and or create new content and so on. So the the happy medium or the, the, the Nirvana moment would be getting all of this built into something like HubSpot, where you have the best of both worlds.

00;11;30;06 - 00;11;37;26
Daniel Escardo
You can create new features using vibe coding, but also still hand it off to a team in a way that they're used to.

00;11;37;29 - 00;12;01;05
Bob Ruffolo
I think I think the solution for that would probably be something like having a server, or I know a lot of people using Mac minis and having all the files live there had that connected to a Claud teams account, and then they can then access those files through Cloud Code or Cloud Coworker. And all the people have access to the shared projects that live in Claude.

00;12;01;06 - 00;12;17;25
Bob Ruffolo
So you can do that, although, you know, you're also giving a lot of people the same power, because I don't know how permissions would work with that. Right. Because then, you know, I'll say, Ashley, on our marketing team that she's going to blow anything up, but she can maybe use the wrong prompt and AI can go a little weird.

00;12;17;25 - 00;12;39;06
Bob Ruffolo
And then all of a sudden she's breaking the website, and she didn't even know how she did it, because she's got teams permission to access the files. And so that's a that's a challenge. You're right. So like one person company, this would be a little easier for. But when you have a marketing team and maybe by the way to any of our viewers are watching this, I know there's a lot of smart people.

00;12;39;06 - 00;12;54;20
Bob Ruffolo
If you have more of this figured out than we do, please let us know and leave a comment or share. Because I think we're all still figuring this out in the HubSpot community will still figuring this out. So but that's you know, I think there's some some solutions there, but still not really fully baked out yet.

00;12;54;25 - 00;13;03;00
Daniel Escardo
It's a great point, I think. I think it's a it's a very valid point in terms of creating.

00;13;03;02 - 00;13;23;27
Daniel Escardo
The challenge again comes from that. All of that, even the Mac mini needs some sort of infrastructure behind it. There needs to be some sort of version control on it. There needs to be some sort of deployment structure on it so that you can make a change and have it deployed to the web, because you probably wouldn't be hosting the website on the Mac mini or an internal device or anything like that.

00;13;23;28 - 00;13;30;26
Bob Ruffolo
Yeah, would probably ship up to GitHub. And then from GitHub go to someone like Cloudflare and then you're living GitHub.

00;13;30;28 - 00;14;01;06
Daniel Escardo
100%. And the people who are doing these kinds of things, they are technically inclined, I would say, right. There's a lot of people, smart people who can do these things and be guided by all kinds of tutorials online. They can be guided by AI itself. So it's not it's not that it's not doable. 100%. Right. I am saying in terms and we have a ton of clients who are like that, but there are there is a challenge for some of the less technically inclined people.

00;14;01;06 - 00;14;06;19
Daniel Escardo
It's hard to set up all the systems that need to be in place for that to happen.

00;14;06;22 - 00;14;35;18
Bob Ruffolo
So let's let's go to a WordPress site next, and then we'll go back to to HubSpot. Yeah. I feel like it might be easier to buy a WordPress website, and I could be wrong on this, but I feel like you have more access to the files of a WordPress site, so you can have a clone that lives on your desktop or Mac mini, and then the cloud can access those files.

00;14;35;18 - 00;15;03;15
Bob Ruffolo
You can edit any of the files. So you're building out the site architecture, the styles, maybe some custom tools, and you're able to ship all of that to your main website. Do all your schema and then you still use the CMS, which is connected to your, your WordPress database. And that's where all the content lives. And someone can log in and, and do the content management while you have a vibe coded website in the background.

00;15;03;17 - 00;15;17;08
Bob Ruffolo
And then you just ship all those to GitHub, which then ships up to your wherever you're hosting your WordPress files. So that's the right. Am I right in saying that as a setup for a vibe coding, say, a WordPress website?

00;15;17;11 - 00;15;48;27
Daniel Escardo
Yeah. Yes it is. That is the correct flow. The thing with the only thing I would say about that is in terms of creating files, there's a, there's a structure that you should that should be followed for software development where you keep everything dry and dry. Just stands for do not repeat yourself. Try to separate as many concerns as you can into separate pieces of code that doesn't repeat, right?

00;15;48;29 - 00;16;19;21
Daniel Escardo
So again, if you approach the task, even the vibe coded task, with that in mind, and you guide the AI to create small chunks of code, small pieces of or files that can be consumed by other files that I think is is the best approach to what you're saying. And yes, it can absolutely be done. It's probably easier for WordPress 100% because WordPress and HubSpot as well.

00;16;19;21 - 00;16;30;12
Daniel Escardo
The only thing is the control. The control structure for, for HubSpot is a little bit more involved. But, but it can be done.

00;16;30;13 - 00;16;31;25
Bob Ruffolo
Walk us through that. What does that mean?

00;16;31;26 - 00;16;32;20
Daniel Escardo
Like on either one.

00;16;32;21 - 00;16;40;27
Bob Ruffolo
Am I able to back up my HubSpot website with files that live on my desktop?

00;16;41;00 - 00;17;04;02
Daniel Escardo
You can back up the theme so you you establish say you create a theme, right. And that theme would have modular pieces. HubSpot is more opinionated about that. And what I mean is every HubSpot theme is a series of templates. And then there's a series of modules. A lot of people use modules in different ways. Ours is full sections.

00;17;04;02 - 00;17;40;20
Daniel Escardo
Correct. So, if you had, let's say 20 different modules in our theme, there would be 20 different possible sections with different layouts for each one. Right. And so the task of creating the theme would be creating the possibility of a layout. So creating the inputs and how those, how those inputs are consumed by the, the Hubble code, that is that's what powers HubSpot theme and what that looks like when you select one option versus another.

00;17;40;21 - 00;17;48;07
Daniel Escardo
Right? So whether it's left aligned, centered, whether the image should be on the right or the left and so on, all the functionality.

00;17;48;07 - 00;17;49;16
Bob Ruffolo
And modules.

00;17;49;19 - 00;18;21;23
Daniel Escardo
The functionality of the modules. Correct. And so that is the way that you would I would approach any HubSpot theme. Marketplace theme would be would approach creating a theme, the content itself, you can't download. So once those pages are created, I believe they have an HTML backup option in HubSpot where you could download it, but that would literally just be a dump of all that, all the rendered data, not the inferred data that actually lives inside of HubSpot.

00;18;21;23 - 00;18;43;18
Daniel Escardo
And it's the same with WordPress. So WordPress, you could create one template for every single page. You could hardcode everything in each one of those templates. Yeah. Select in the dropdown, select the template. And that would just get applied right. No content would happen in the content management system. All of it would just be. But at that point there's almost no point in even using WordPress.

00;18;43;19 - 00;19;15;07
Daniel Escardo
Right. So so that's the challenge. The challenge is really the shift of thinking when you're trying to build for either one of these content management systems is to really sort of think modular, think in blocks, think in reusable pieces where someone on your team can come back and change the original headline of a section, the original description of a section, the original image, or even swap an image to a video, and so on.

00;19;15;09 - 00;19;38;12
Bob Ruffolo
So, Dan, you, you saw the work I did. I went nuts trying to build out endless customers. Com and I've, I've coded. It was very strategic. Worked through all that. Yeah. So here's the process I went through when building site, which I think was probably the right word of operations. However, I don't know if I could use the files I built, but it's a lot of it's I could repurpose a lot of this.

00;19;38;12 - 00;19;52;26
Bob Ruffolo
Right. So the first thing I want to do was I wanted to get my design system right. I have a very clear vision for how I wanted the site to look. So I picked out the fonts and I built out the style of sheet, and I had one HTML page and that I created, and I did all this.

00;19;52;27 - 00;20;18;16
Bob Ruffolo
Actually, I did most of this with Claude coworker. I didn't even use, cursor or or Claude code. I don't know why. I just tend to. Every time I start using one of those, I just navigate back to, to coworker. And so I got my design system right. Then I started working. I had the strategy done. I knew what how I wanted to site organized what I want to the main navigation.

00;20;18;16 - 00;20;37;00
Bob Ruffolo
I want to live under those. I have my taxonomy already built out for the content and the learning center. What I mean by that is categories of topics. So I had all that map down how everything connected and how it would connect back to the user profiles that you know of the people of our company. So all the content showed there.

00;20;37;01 - 00;20;57;04
Bob Ruffolo
I had all structurally more in my mind than anything. And then I, I built out the navigation. So that was the next thing I built with Claude, the main navigation in the footer. I said built as components. So I had that all saved as components files in my on my drive. And then that's basically where I got to.

00;20;57;04 - 00;21;18;18
Bob Ruffolo
And I agree that the rest of the pages should be modules. How could I now say get this into a house bot environment? Because I bet you a lot what I just talked about. I bet you a lot of our audience could probably figure out on their own, or they know somebody could do that work. But I think where I'm getting hung up in is how do we now move this into a HubSpot environment?

00;21;18;18 - 00;21;29;29
Bob Ruffolo
So I actually have a menu system that looks very detailed, icons, all kinds of stuff. It was beautiful. But how do I actually set that up in HubSpot?

00;21;30;01 - 00;21;59;05
Daniel Escardo
The the trick is to start off with. Yeah, the trick is not to vibe code the the thing without telling the AI that this will eventually live in HubSpot or without forcing the AI to create components that have inputs. There are many. There are many tools out there that or skills or MCP servers that can facilitate this.

00;21;59;08 - 00;22;28;10
Daniel Escardo
There's a HubSpot developer MCP server that you can connect to, Claude Cursor or any of the the most popular coding vibe, coding softwares. And what it does is it essentially unlocks the eyes ability to find out directly with HubSpot what it can and can't do. Right. So it's a facilitated way to search the documentation, search filters to search functions that are available.

00;22;28;10 - 00;22;50;07
Daniel Escardo
What global variables, all the things that you would use if you were creating a HubSpot module or even a HubSpot template. Yeah. And it guides it in such a way where the output is already sort of pre-configured to be used in HubSpot. Right? And so that's essentially what I did when we when we grabbed your website and started to try to convert it.

00;22;50;08 - 00;23;22;03
Daniel Escardo
Right. I took the website and I initially asked it to inventory all of the different sections on the page, on all the pages. Right. And I asked it to try and figure out which ones could be reusable. Right. So I gave me a whole list of reusable modules and then essentially went asked it to go through and to inventory all the controls that were going to be needed to accomplish this so that a marketer could update it.

00;23;22;04 - 00;23;42;28
Daniel Escardo
Yeah, right. The style part of it is actually the easiest part, because thankfully you would already you kind of already had that in a modular way that each one was living in each page. So and all the classes were sort of independent from each other. So it was able to grab those and associate them with specific sections.

00;23;42;28 - 00;23;48;21
Bob Ruffolo
Which is what I started. That's why I started with the style sheet and design system, and so I could build everything off of that style sheet. Yeah.

00;23;48;24 - 00;24;14;13
Daniel Escardo
Yeah, which was great. That part was great. I think where it struggled was and again, what we were trying to do was provide a, an experience for our content builders that impact. Yeah, that was very similar to what they were used to. Yeah. And so what it didn't do was it didn't know that what we really wanted was a media option, not just an image option.

00;24;14;14 - 00;24;20;17
Daniel Escardo
Right. Because we offer five different kinds of media inside of each module.

00;24;20;18 - 00;24;22;03
Bob Ruffolo
Images, videos, etc..

00;24;22;04 - 00;24;46;12
Daniel Escardo
Exactly. It didn't group them in the way that we would group them. It didn't establish visibility conditions for each control. So when you select this option, this control really doesn't apply. So remove that so that there's no confusion. So those are the things where it struggled. But I think over time if you were able to sort of explain or give it an example, it could understand what it needed to do.

00;24;46;13 - 00;24;46;28
Bob Ruffolo
Okay.

00;24;46;29 - 00;25;11;04
Daniel Escardo
So I would say for anybody who's trying to develop for HubSpot specifically, start off with HubSpot, tell the AI this is going to live in HubSpot. These are this is the way I want each one of these pages to be structured. I want each section or each feature to be its own module, and I want to reuse as many of those as I possibly can.

00;25;11;05 - 00;25;37;10
Daniel Escardo
Right. And then when you create a template, I want you to plug the module in for the in the template instead of outputting the hard, the hard coded HTML and everything else. Yeah. And what that does is it still gives you the sort of experience of I'm applying the home page template, so everything's already in there. But but it's still, it doesn't there's nothing hard coded.

00;25;37;11 - 00;25;48;29
Daniel Escardo
Right. That's the thing we strive for here is we don't want to hard code anything once you leave impact, unless you want a drastic change or a brand new feature, you don't need to come back for a developer.

00;25;48;29 - 00;26;09;02
Bob Ruffolo
And that's what's so great about our theme. And I love our team. That's why people buy our theme. It's called the trust theme and it's available in the HubSpot marketplace. It's not the cheapest theme that it's available, but it's one of the oldest themes that's been there and the most managed themes. And we've it's been launched on hundreds of websites now and it's, you know, everything responds perfectly.

00;26;09;02 - 00;26;31;11
Bob Ruffolo
It's been cross-browser tested. It's fast. It's it's it's it's really, really well built. So now, as I'm hearing you, I think I probably should have started with that. Say we're going to use the trust theme, download all the files of the trust theme on my desktop. And then I could have worked off of those. And that's, that's where all the modules.

00;26;31;13 - 00;26;35;22
Bob Ruffolo
And then what about all the what about the menu system. Same same thing.

00;26;35;25 - 00;26;54;12
Daniel Escardo
So your menu system could have been created from scratch. So it was great that you had it. I could tell from the rendered HTML that it was at one point a component. I think you're, you're, you're setup had a script that it would run so that anytime you'd make a change in one file, it would output it to all the HTML files.

00;26;54;12 - 00;27;03;01
Daniel Escardo
That's right. We don't need that in HubSpot. Yeah. So you can literally just call a file into another file. So

00;27;03;03 - 00;27;08;01
Bob Ruffolo
Would that be it has to be like a custom module that's built in HubSpot. This is where this is where I get pretty dumb.

00;27;08;01 - 00;27;09;09
Daniel Escardo
I'm pretty cool.

00;27;09;11 - 00;27;22;25
Bob Ruffolo
I'm pretty good with HTML. I'm pretty good with CSS when it's got the JavaScript. I was always good at that because obviously impact started as a web design company and I was building the websites back then. I just built HTML and CSS websites and eventually got to WordPress, and I was like, all right, this is over my head.

00;27;22;25 - 00;27;40;03
Bob Ruffolo
I started using Upwork developers and that's how the company got started, right? So that's where my expertise kind of stops. I know enough to be dangerous. But yeah, and I never built a HubSpot website. I've always had Christine on our team and we always built the site to go. I tell her what I want and she would we would build it together.

00;27;40;05 - 00;27;41;24
Bob Ruffolo
Right? So yeah.

00;27;41;26 - 00;27;44;20
Daniel Escardo
You hit the nail on the head. It's a custom. It would have been a custom module.

00;27;44;21 - 00;27;46;12
Bob Ruffolo
Custom module. Yeah.

00;27;46;14 - 00;27;55;00
Daniel Escardo
Right. And you would have just described the way you wanted the menu to work. So you can either have a repeater inside of a module that lets you manually control everything.

00;27;55;02 - 00;27;59;03
Bob Ruffolo
Yes, I want them. And then pick a different icon for it.

00;27;59;04 - 00;28;18;17
Daniel Escardo
Exactly. So each one of those items would be you would sort of classify it as a parent menu item, or a sub nav item, or a mega menu item, and then you would have inputs in there for the icon and for the the main text of the of the of the menu item. I think yours had a description, a small description underneath also.

00;28;18;20 - 00;28;40;18
Daniel Escardo
So each item that you added would be added, and then there would be repeaters inside of repeaters inside of repeaters to establish the hierarchy of the of the menu. That's one way. Another way is to just use a HubSpot advanced menu. The only difference is it doesn't have the capability for adding descriptions and stuff like that. You would have to like drop HTML into the label for that to happen.

00;28;40;24 - 00;28;55;19
Bob Ruffolo
Okay, so so again, I think it's going to be useful for a lot of people. So then what I'm going to do next then is I'm going to download the theme, it's going to be on my desktop. And I'm going to. And by the way, I did tell the Claude that this is going to be a spot website.

00;28;55;19 - 00;29;11;25
Bob Ruffolo
So it probably made some decisions based on that. But because I'm using Cloud Coworker and I'm not using cursor, I think you were saying use cursor and then say, and what was that part I missed about the having access to the documentation of HubSpot?

00;29;11;27 - 00;29;21;21
Daniel Escardo
Yeah. So and so you can use it with cloud code. Okay. An MCP server is think of it like an API, but it has like a direct path.

00;29;21;24 - 00;29;23;03
Bob Ruffolo
And we have that set up.

00;29;23;04 - 00;29;30;11
Daniel Escardo
To the API. Yeah. So MCP server just provides information that the AI can consume in a very efficient way.

00;29;30;12 - 00;29;30;22
Bob Ruffolo
Yeah.

00;29;30;23 - 00;29;53;07
Daniel Escardo
Okay. So and it it works incredibly. The minute I connected the MCP, I stopped having to say go check the documentation. That doesn't work in HubSpot. Right? All the things that we struggle with when we're trying to create something that all went away. Yeah. And obviously with every model that comes out, you know, they're going to be there's going to be more and more sophistication in the models.

00;29;53;09 - 00;29;58;09
Daniel Escardo
Yeah. So I think all of that will get just better and better.

00;29;58;15 - 00;30;07;25
Bob Ruffolo
Have we seen anything come out from HubSpot in terms of, voting on the CMS website or CMS side?

00;30;07;27 - 00;30;37;22
Daniel Escardo
HubSpot has a nothing specific to the CMS. They have a, so they released something called projects, and it is something that you could create an entire theme on if you wanted to, but it's mostly for react themes. So people who use react. React is just it's Meta's version of JavaScript. And it it's a very it's a very efficient way to create websites.

00;30;37;22 - 00;30;46;01
Daniel Escardo
It's just not the way we create websites. Yeah. And originally when I investigated it, there were features from HubSpot that were not available that we absolutely use.

00;30;46;02 - 00;30;47;05
Bob Ruffolo
But like what?

00;30;47;08 - 00;31;11;04
Daniel Escardo
So like HubSpot video wasn't available at the time as a because the whole thing. So the control structure everything is react. Yeah. So they at the time that I investigated is probably not the case anymore that you couldn't do. HubSpot video, the CTA, the HubSpot CTA controls were very buggy. There was no real way to establish any sort of hierarchy between them.

00;31;11;04 - 00;31;29;12
Daniel Escardo
You couldn't say, don't show this option. If this other thing is selected. They probably worked on it all out by now. Yeah. But our our our bread and butter is the is the way that the theme is created right now. It's something that everybody on the team understands and it's, you know, it's just the way we created right now.

00;31;29;12 - 00;31;41;12
Daniel Escardo
There's nothing wrong with it. Yeah. Yeah. Right. The reactor would be I'd say react is more powerful for like a self-service tool or something like that. That's where I it would absolutely shine. Yeah, yeah.

00;31;41;14 - 00;32;01;19
Bob Ruffolo
And again we've done hundreds of websites using the, the theme that we built in every client we've had. Go look at the reviews in the HubSpot directory and people rave about the theme. But but the challenge becomes vibe coding. That's where everyone wants to know is how do we start vibe coding? I was about websites. That's that's where we're we're at today.

00;32;01;19 - 00;32;22;20
Bob Ruffolo
And I know some people probably have figured out more, and we have a first to admit that, but I think it's something that we also have a very high bar of. We want things in a certain way, because we want to make sure everyone on the team is using the website the way it's supposed to be intended. So I think on my observation, I could be wrong.

00;32;22;20 - 00;32;41;04
Bob Ruffolo
And if I am wrong, please call me out on this. But I think my observation is that we see very small companies with one person who builds the website has has been able to figure out vibe coding a HubSpot website. But bigger marketing teams and companies are maybe larger and using a lot of HubSpot. They haven't done that yet.

00;32;41;05 - 00;32;45;02
Bob Ruffolo
And again, I could be wrong, but that's I haven't seen that quite yet.

00;32;45;05 - 00;33;06;07
Daniel Escardo
I agree, I agree, I think the the necessity is the mother of invention. I think people I think the smaller teams are the ones that are really going to take advantage of this. The larger teams are just going to there's just more people involved. Yeah, right. And that makes it much more difficult for management of the thing that we create using the, the AI bots.

00;33;06;08 - 00;33;07;07
Daniel Escardo
Yeah.

00;33;07;10 - 00;33;17;18
Bob Ruffolo
Awesome. Danny, what didn't I ask you today? I probably should have asked you. This is a very technical, geeky conversation, but I think a lot of people enjoy this.

00;33;17;20 - 00;33;55;14
Daniel Escardo
I think if I had to say one thing, it would be it's very important is, is really that specifically for our customers, the ones that really don't understand, you know, how to create these things or what the power of these things are. I think the most important thing when when communicating with any any AI, it doesn't matter what platform you use, whether it's a harness or if it's a desktop or coworker or whatever is really you need to you need to go into the project with your goal in mind.

00;33;55;15 - 00;34;17;21
Daniel Escardo
It's the most important thing. Yeah, that you can communicate to the AI. The AI does not know. So a lot of people look at the AI as some superintelligence. It is a prediction model. It just happens to have a ton of data that it can query. Right. So it doesn't really know what you want. It might take a really good guess at this point, which is what it's doing.

00;34;17;29 - 00;34;39;28
Daniel Escardo
But if you're not over communicating at the beginning and explaining exactly how you want things, exactly what the goal of the project is, exactly how your business logic works and your sales logic, it is going to take a tremendous amount of time, effort, and tokens to create the thing that you want. And that's the that's the one thing.

00;34;39;28 - 00;35;04;12
Daniel Escardo
The costs are growing. Yeah. The latest model is probably twice as expensive. They're saying that. They're saying that the token outputs are less than the previous model, which is true, but it's still costing more to create in the grand scheme of things. That might not be a lot for someone who's coding. Something is probably cost less than hiring a developer, but still something to keep an eye on.

00;35;04;12 - 00;35;20;06
Bob Ruffolo
Great point, great point. And if you ask Claude, say, hey, I want to give code a website. What's my order of operations? It's always going to tell you start with the goals and it'll create a markdown file. And and then you get your voice and brand all down. It'll be a separate file. And yeah, that makes complete sense.

00;35;20;07 - 00;35;21;17
Bob Ruffolo
Great. Great point.

00;35;21;23 - 00;35;30;27
Daniel Escardo
I haven't really used it for in in for my day to day day job. Does it have a plan mode? Is there a way you can create a plan mode for cloud.

00;35;30;28 - 00;35;35;15
Bob Ruffolo
Not a cloud code does not code, not coworker. Yeah.

00;35;35;16 - 00;35;36;28
Daniel Escardo
Definitely use the plan mode.

00;35;36;29 - 00;35;37;14
Bob Ruffolo
Yeah.

00;35;37;15 - 00;35;38;28
Daniel Escardo
Yeah, it makes all the difference.

00;35;38;29 - 00;35;45;08
Bob Ruffolo
Yeah for sure. We talked about the MCP, but Danny, I think you told me there's going to be a CLI coming.

00;35;45;10 - 00;36;02;01
Daniel Escardo
Yeah, there's a new product coming out. It's in beta. And as HubSpot states it, it allows for anything that a human can do in HubSpot, an agent will be able to do. And so that unlocks a world of possibilities in terms of the way that the agents will be able to work with with HubSpot.

00;36;02;02 - 00;36;03;13
Bob Ruffolo
HubSpot websites, particular.

00;36;03;14 - 00;36;30;21
Daniel Escardo
Types of websites, HubSpot CRM. Yeah. Hub DB another thing is orchestration. So, the power of orchestration is something that blew my mind when I first did it. I was struggling to get my agent to do something. It was taking too long, and so I asked it to come up with a plan that we would store in just a markdown file.

00;36;30;21 - 00;36;47;01
Daniel Escardo
It wasn't anything fancy, no database or anything, but essentially I asked it, here are the you know, I asked to make a list of all the things that we needed to get done, and then I asked it to devise a way for that markdown file to be the source of truth for this task that we were getting done.

00;36;47;01 - 00;37;12;13
Daniel Escardo
And then I asked it to assign subjects to take line items from that list one by one, lock them so that another sub agent can grab it. Then when that subject communicated that the task was done, I asked the orchestrating agent to review the work the sub agent did by checking the browser, by checking for any errors in the upload through the CLI.

00;37;12;14 - 00;37;17;23
Daniel Escardo
And it was incredible. So it cut the development time down.

00;37;17;24 - 00;37;25;12
Bob Ruffolo
We're going to dig into this little bit more because I want to understand this more. So first off, when you say orchestrating layman's terms what do you mean by that.

00;37;25;15 - 00;37;30;18
Daniel Escardo
So it's the the ability to have one agent control other agents.

00;37;30;18 - 00;37;34;16
Bob Ruffolo
It's like a boss and a staff. Exactly. AI staff okay.

00;37;34;20 - 00;37;45;18
Daniel Escardo
I appointed my agent that I was working with as the the boss. You need to get these done. I don't care how you do it. Assign it to ten different agents if you need to. But I need this done faster.

00;37;45;19 - 00;37;47;28
Bob Ruffolo
And you did this in Claude code or what?

00;37;48;00 - 00;38;01;19
Daniel Escardo
I did this in I, I use, so I use cursor. I did it in cursor. But you can absolutely do this in in Claude as well. Yeah. If Claude has the potential for creating sub agents I've seen it. Okay. Yeah.

00;38;01;20 - 00;38;13;20
Bob Ruffolo
So and, and, break down a little bit more in detail specifically what that was doing. So what did you put in the markdown file and what kind of work were you dividing up.

00;38;13;22 - 00;38;36;28
Daniel Escardo
Yeah. So we were in the process of taking your coded website and trying to make it into like a HubSpot theme. So sections became modules, pages became templates, and have it sort of plug in the content that you'd already generated. Because I know you spend a ton of time on that into the module controls.

00;38;37;00 - 00;38;39;25
Bob Ruffolo
A little bit of time in the content, not too much.

00;38;39;28 - 00;39;03;13
Daniel Escardo
It looked great. I looked fully baked, at least the ones I looked at. And so make that the defaults. Yeah, for all the all the inputs that it was creating. So that when I applied the template, at least on the first run, it would look exactly like your your hard coded website. Got it right. And it tried to do it in a whole bunch of different ways.

00;39;03;13 - 00;39;26;29
Daniel Escardo
It created a Python script and was trying to apply a whole bunch of things in one one shot, and it was just not working it like like it does. Yeah. And then it was revising and then it was not working and it was revising and not working. And we went through that for hours. Right. Eventually I decided to stop and just go back and think, okay, what would this what would this look like if it was easy?

00;39;27;01 - 00;39;37;01
Daniel Escardo
Right. And this is the plan. So basically let's create a plan. I went into plan mode and I asked it to.

00;39;37;04 - 00;40;01;10
Daniel Escardo
To essentially articulate to itself everything that needs to happen based on the conversation that we just had. Right? Yeah. Wow. Including a checklist of all the things and all the things were go to each one of the pages, look at each individual section right. And make sure that there's an input in a module, and that that module has the default content already baked in.

00;40;01;13 - 00;40;27;02
Daniel Escardo
And the only way I was able to get it to work is literally one by one. So one section by one section. And that was what was taking forever. So in order to to get it to actually function, I needed multiple levels of scrutiny, right? Not just me. I needed that agent to send it to another agent. That other agent was going to work autonomously.

00;40;27;02 - 00;40;43;22
Daniel Escardo
Then it was going to send data back. Then that agent was going to check it. And then at the end I had the final approval. Yeah. So and that worked fantastic. It caught the time I said in half and it really just blew my mind. I had never needed to do that before.

00;40;43;25 - 00;41;03;19
Bob Ruffolo
Danny, this is great. Well, why don't we plan to have you back on maybe in a couple of months when we have endless customers all refreshed and uploaded? I'd love to. I'm very, very excited for this, but I'm going to need your help getting this site done 100%. Awesome, brother. All right, well, thank you so much, Danny.

00;41;03;19 - 00;41;19;15
Bob Ruffolo
And this has been another episode of the Endless Customers podcast. We're figuring out vibe coding. This is all new and especially in HubSpot environments, it's still challenging. We got Hubble, we got modules, and things are different. But I think Danny is right. We got to talk about what are our goals, what are we trying to accomplish, how is our team going to use it?

00;41;19;16 - 00;41;36;01
Bob Ruffolo
Security. Make sure that our teams are not gonna break anything. These are all the considerations that we're figuring out. So here at impact, we're we're we're focused on this. We're working on this. We're going to power through it. We'll be on the cutting edge. If you have any feedback for us, please share our way. But with that, there's been an episode of The End This Customers podcast.

00;41;36;02 - 00;41;39;19
Bob Ruffolo
Until next time, we'll see you soon!

00;41;39;21 - 00;41;45;28
Stephanie Baiocchi
If you liked this episode, please take a minute to leave us a review. Thanks for checking out the Endless Customers podcast.