This isn't an UNBOUND episode, George B. Thomas promised up top, so nobody freak out. Last week's debrief covered Boston. This week George, Max Cohen of hapily, and Chad Hohn got into something smaller and sneakier: the moment you realize a tool you've been using just fine changed right under your feet.
First, a detour. Chad caught the audience up on the Even Realities glasses the crew had talked about during UNBOUND: connected glasses with a screen in part of the lens, not full AR, just monochromatic green, plus a developer hub for building custom apps. The teleprompter-in-real-life angle came up fast. They support prescriptions, too, which George needs. Two pair, actually, one for driving and one for working.
Everything Was Rocking, Until It Wasn't
George opened the real topic with a question for both co-hosts. Have you ever been rocking and rolling, in HubSpot or in life, and suddenly realized you're not good? Something changed under your feet. You catch up fast, and then your mind starts playing the game of how long, and how many things, and if it happened to me, how many other humans?
The first answer on the call went straight to API deprecation, the old days of building workflows in make.com, when somebody deprecates something and suddenly all you get is error emails. Tech moves fast. Who moved my cheese? And the cheese doesn't only move when something goes away. Sometimes something new shows up.
Max, asked directly, said this has happened to him a thousand times in HubSpot. A property that wasn't getting written. A feature he thought was there that wasn't. Something that turns out doesn't work the way you thought it did for so many years. The specifics are gone, he admitted. His HubSpot trauma response suppressed them. They were miserable and awful, and he chose to move on.
George's Clean Pro Connector Wouldn't Connect
Then George shared his own. Kevin Fremon of Helpful Hero, the human behind the Clean Pro theme for HubSpot, released a YouTube video titled "New: Build Clean Pro pages with Claude or ChatGPT." Kevin built a Clean Pro connector that lets you describe the page you want and watch it get built with the theme, and it comes with a skill, too. (Not a sponsor, George noted. Twice.)
George was in. He has clients on the Clean theme, and a workflow where his Claude builds landing pages would be, in his word, dope. There's history here, too. George moved his own website off the HubSpot CMS a while back because he wanted to vibe code it, and he's said that if he could AI code his website, he might come back. He even reached out to another theme builder, who said yes, they have a thing for their theme as well.
Then he tried to set it up. It didn't work. His HubSpot connector for Claude had been connected since what felt like ten thousand years ago, and he'd been using it to ask questions and pull information. He went into the connector settings in Claude. He'd clicked all the boxes and given it all the permissions. He emailed Kevin, who replied, in the nicest way possible, that everybody else had pretty much gotten it working right away.
So George slowed down. He disconnected for about the fourth time, then uninstalled, reinstalled, and reconnected. That's when he found the section in HubSpot he'd never looked at: a long list of view permissions he had to enable for the first time. It felt like 27,000 boxes, he joked. It might've been 22. Either way, the connector had been getting updates the whole time, and he, the human, hadn't realized it. As soon as he flipped them on, the connector worked.
His reply to Kevin was a confession. He'd just clicked a pile of boxes inside HubSpot that a normal human like him would assume lived in Claude or ChatGPT, because it's a connector and all the verbiage is about the connector.
“Hey guys, guess what? Even I am an idiot. Even I have problems with tech.”
His takeaways, straight off the tape:
- If you want an easier way to build pages with the theme you already have, ask the theme creator whether they've built a connector, MCP, or skills you can vibe code your pages with.
- Go look at your ChatGPT or Claude connectors in the connector area.
- Then check HubSpot to make sure you're getting the latest and greatest. It baffled him that this wasn't just auto updating behind the scenes.
Nobody Can Know Every HubSpot Update
George asked his co-hosts to walk him off the edge. Max's first move: you've got to learn to live with it a little bit. The product is so big that setting a standard where you know every single update and change is unreasonable.
George pushed. Doesn't a large majority of the HubSpot ecosystem feel like they need to know everything? Max didn't budge. You don't. You need to know what's important for you to know. Hold yourself to every single thing going on and it'll drive you crazy, you won't get anything done, and it won't be worth your time. So don't beat yourself up over it. Find ways to follow what's relevant to the majority of the work you do in there.
“It's a different product than it was 10 years ago, man. It's massive. There's stuff getting updated every hour.”
Scopes Get Set When You Connect
Chad's brain went to the operational side, starting with a heads up: enterprise portals have additional things you have to go through that George didn't show.
Then came the explanation that reframed George's whole story. The way authorization connections work, scopes, meaning API access levels, are determined at the time of connection. That's how OAuth has worked for public apps since forever. There's no way to dynamically push additional scopes, because it needs to check whether that human has access. Maybe it could be done a little more nicely, came the caveat, but that's the model.
That's where George's disconnect lived. Say "scopes" and he thinks APIs: add a scope, then rock and roll. With API keys, the point came back, you can update a key and the scopes apply immediately without reminting the token. He'd never mapped that difference onto the Claude or ChatGPT connector. And think about all the humans using those connectors, came the follow-up. They just sign in. Boom. Done.
So how often should they go back and check? One answer: sometimes multiple times a week, from a host who's always hunting for new access on the remote hosted MCP connector that unblocks things Claude can't do yet. Give me them scopes, brother. Which makes sense, the reply came, because it's relevant to his job.
Build a Routine, Then Chase Your Humans' Problems
George came back to Max with the question underneath all of it. How does a human know what they need to know if they don't know what they don't know? Max's answer: build a routine for how up to speed you want to be. HubHeroes is a show. Max does a show with Kyle. There's plenty of content, and you don't even have to watch a show. Just set the time aside.
You're never going to know what you don't know, Max said, because HubSpot is going to come out with a billion things over the next, as he put it, three days or so. You'll know what you need to know when your business has a problem whose answer should lie in HubSpot somewhere. That's when you do the deep stuff.
“You should be seeking out the problems your employees are having with HubSpot more than seeking out what are all these features that may or may not be relevant to me that are coming out at all times.”
George circled back to it later in the show: as a super admin, you pay attention to the humans in your portal and what they need. If you're weighing whether you need a dedicated HubSpot Super Admin, that's the job description.
Go See What Your Connector Can Reach Now
George shared his screen with a challenge for anyone who connected early. He did, too, and he'd checked it maybe once or twice in the last six months to a year. Search for HubSpot's knowledge article, Set up and use the HubSpot connector for Claude, and scroll the data it covers.
The list he read off runs from contacts, leads, companies, deals, tickets, and custom objects through line items, quote templates, invoices, payments, and subscriptions, to segments, campaigns, attribution data, landing pages, blog posts, marketing emails, marketing events, teams, engagements, the partner client object, conversations, and HubSpot Work projects and tables.
His test is simple. Ask your Claude: Can you see segments right now? Can you see partner client objects? What can we do with teams? If it doesn't know what you're talking about, go hit your settings and update this bad boy. (For context, here's what the July connector update added.)
Chad tied it back to Max's point about solving problems for the humans in your portal. Earlier versions of the Claude connector, and even the current ChatGPT connector, are fine for humans in sales who mostly dink around in contacts and deals. They have the notes, the meetings, everything they need. Custom objects are another story.
“If your team deals with custom objects and you haven't disconnected and reconnected the Claude connector in the past, like month, month and a half, then you will not be able to access custom objects.”
HubSpot Work, the tables at the end of George's list, came out at UNBOUND, and Chad's pretty sure you have to turn on the beta. If your team uses HubSpot quotes and wants Claude to help, they'll need to disconnect and reconnect, too. (We covered the Claude connector's quotes and revenue access when it shipped.)
The Approved Apps Screen Chad Went Hunting For
Then Chad asked to share his screen, and George's reply was that he didn't even know why Chad was asking. Depending on your portal, connected apps may live under marketing or under settings. The screen Chad wanted was approved apps, which he believes is related to enterprise portals. It's the one he'd tried to show George in the green room, and he loves it from the governance side.
Install permissions matter here, Chad explained, because most apps fail closed when an admin installs them. Access stays with admins, and you can give it to specific humans and teams, or let everybody in. This was also where George had to go for his so-called 27,000 boxes, and it comes with a warning built in: your super admins get an email saying new scopes were added for the connector. For more on HubSpot's controls in this area, see our breakdown of app install governance for AI connectors.
Don't Let HubSpot Notifications Become Noise
George hit pause right there. That email is exactly the kind he deletes so he can get back to work, and by his joking count, probably 27,000 of them were telling him to go to this exact screen. Some humans have those notifications routed straight into a folder or tagged with a label they never see. So be careful.
Chad showed what you miss if you skip it. The connector now includes a schema, so it can explicitly query what your data structure is, something that used to be available only through API keys or the more powerful local MCP connector. Some juicy goodness, in his words, and the scopes are about a mile long. The ChatGPT connector has a lot fewer, 72 on his screen, though it does include CMS landing pages. He didn't know whether ChatGPT has added the schema functionality yet.
You've always been able, in a way, to have your AI assistant help with your CMS. You just had to go through extra hoops. George's point: most mere mortal humans don't know those hoops. That's where theme providers like Kevin come in, with connectors that plug right into Claude. The CMS pages switch was the real one he needed to flip for the Clean Pro connector to work.
What If a Routine Watched HubSpot for You?
Max's word, routine, sent George somewhere. You don't know what you don't know, but you do know your hurdles and your gaps. So in a world that's AI assisted and human powered, what if you built a bot and told it: these are the hurdles our organization faces, these are the features we wish our CRM and CMS had. Every day, go out on the interwebs or log into my HubSpot portal, look at the updates, and come back when something helps. Then you can focus on your humans.
The reaction on the call: a great idea. Have something pay attention for you and surface what you've told it is relevant. Go check for new HubSpot updates every day, give me a summary of the Marketing Hub ones if I'm a marketer, and just list the rest.
Then came the ask for HubSpot. The HubSpot updates are walled behind a login instead of living in an RSS feed you could just point a bot at. Some things have to stay behind the curtain, but that wall puts friction between humans and understanding what's coming out.
George went a step further. Could Breeze run that routine? Could Breeze look at the gated stuff? The answer from the other side of the call: Breeze can already talk to Claude through the Claude connector, in beta. So George wondered whether you could have your Claude ask Breeze about betas and updates on a routine.
He doesn't know yet. If you've hacked your way around this, or it sounds like a fun weekend hackathon, let the crew know. What he wants is what he calls real time learning. It's here. Let me learn it, get it in place, and move on to the next thing.
George Vibe Coded a New Sidekick Site Over His Birthday Weekend
So does full access to the HubSpot CMS through his connectors pull George back? He tested it, and he didn't move. What he did do: his birthday was Saturday, September 26, and testing the connector gave him an itch. He vibe coded the entire Sidekick Strategies website to look different and new over the weekend, dark mode and light mode included. He still dreams of the day he can do that in HubSpot and get all the HubSpot goodness.
But the moral of the story, he told Chad, is that not everybody's George. You might be on a theme that looks and does all the things you want. If so, make sure your theme provider has built this, and that your connectors are set up the right way.
“Make sure you're building systems that work for your organization, work for the humans inside your organization and work for you and how you're trying to show up for the world.”
Be a Happy, Helpful, Humble Human
If this episode has you wondering what else changed in your portal while you weren't looking, start with your connector scopes, then keep going. The HubSpot Portal Audit Checklist gives you a place to start.
Be a happy, helpful, humble human, and do some happy HubSpotting along the way.
