?? Pursuing Inbox Zero, HubSpot Operations Hub and AI Updates Abound
Hypha HubSpot Development
Hypha is a purpose-driven, New York-based HubSpot Agency specializing in solutions that help B2B organizations grow.
Welcome back to The Hypha Wire!?
Today, my colleague asked if anyone had solutions or recommendations for managing their inbox. I didn’t have any new apps or plugins to offer, because I have a pretty good relationship with my email.?
I’ve developed a personal email management strategy that keeps me productive and up to speed without being tethered to my inbox. Here’s what works for me:
Schedule email time, but stay connected. I dedicate specific blocks throughout my day to check emails thoroughly, rather than constantly interrupting my workflow. However, I always keep a light eye on urgent client messages that need immediate attention.?
Conduct quarterly subscription audits. We’ve all enthusiastically signed up for newsletters we neglect to actually read. Every few months, I go through and decide which subscriptions provide real value and unsubscribe from the rest. This simple habit dramatically reduces inbox clutter.
Develop a meticulous folder system. I have meticulously kept folders spanning my entire 7-year tenure at Hypha, allowing me to locate any client email whenever needed. Having a designated place for everything eliminates the stress of searching through a chaotic inbox and creates a valuable record of communications.
Don’t give up on the pursuit of inbox zero. If you dream of an empty inbox but feel overwhelmed, start fresh. Dedicate a couple of hours to a thorough purge—delete the unnecessary, archive the important, and create a “want-to-read” folder for items you’re reluctant to part with. The zen that comes alongside inbox zero is worth the initial investment.
Remember that your email should work for you, not the other way around. With these intentional practices, you can transform your inbox from a source of stress into a powerful tool that actually enhances your productivity.?
- Sage Levene , VP of Marketing, Hypha HubSpot Development
?? Open Mic
Web Scraping for AI Agents: Tools and Techniques
By Zachary Lyons , Integrations Developer, Hypha HubSpot Development
Hello again! Last month we talked about AI Agent platforms and today I would like to continue that discussion and talk about web scraping.?
Our team has been accelerating our internal and client workflows with AI. There are a couple of ideas that come up in almost every use case: leveraging a knowledge base & collecting information from the internet.?
Today we’ll be diving deep into the latter—web scraping! By providing these functions to your Agent, you can supercharge its ability to do research (function calling is currently supported by OpenAI, Google Gemini API, Mistral AI, and Microsoft Copilot).
For example, say you have a Contact’s first and last name but want to find their LinkedIn profile, could you automate finding that specific URL and enriching the Contact record? Or perhaps you want to find competitors in your or a client’s industry and start building out a knowledge base. Maybe you just need to get the latest pricing information from a provider’s website. All of these obligations (data enrichment, market competitor research, accessing real-time data) that could add up to hours or days can be handled in seconds with web scraping.
Axios & Cheerio
One tool we use for research is Axios, for easily fetching HTML. You may be able to find out if a potential customer uses HubSpot by searching their site’s HTML for identifying strings like “hs-site-page.”
Additionally, you can combine Axios with Cheerio, a library for parsing HTML, and use it to collect information from a URL. Here we use it to find all links on the Hypha website:
Google Custom Search API
If you need to perform web searches for free you can leverage the Google Custom Search API, which offers 100 searches per day for free. Below you can see a parsed list of search results that you would receive from the Google Search API if you queried “Hypha Development”:
If our Agent decides any of those are relevant, we can then pass that search result to our Axios and Cheerio functions to collect more information using the link!
Playwright
Last on our web scraping tool roundup is Playwright, Microsoft’s browser automation tool. If your research requires navigating a SPA, a complicated interface, or logging a user in, browser automation is the tool you need.?
Behind the scenes Playwright loads and interacts with a hidden (“headless”) browser, which gives you the ability to define exactly how you need your agent to interact with the site. Below you can see a picture of how to set up Playwright to collect all the text and links provided on a page.?
Once you have all the data you need to be parsed, you can pass that information to your LLM of choice and have it summarize or search the text for relevance. While this tool is a little more complex than those previously listed, it offers functionality that you may need to call on when traditional web scraping techniques are insufficient.
Putting it all together
With our web scraping toolkit, we’re now data detectives! Google’s Custom Search API helps us find relevant pages, Axios and Cheerio extract structured data from public sources, and Playwright handles private or dynamic sites. Once the data is collected, it can be exported to spreadsheets, enriched in a CRM, or fed into an AI agent or LLM—ensuring accurate, context-rich insights to streamline workflows and decision-making
?? Second Hand News
YouTube has surpassed 1 billion monthly podcast users, which is quite the feat. The fact that YouTube is the second largest search engine means adding your podcast to the platform is a no-brainer.
“As a result, YouTube is now the most frequently used service for listening to podcasts in the U.S. and often the first place people go when looking for a new podcast. Our unique search and recommendations help people discover their next favorite podcast. Podcasts on YouTube and YouTube Music are also everywhere our users are, even TVs. Last year, viewers watched over 400M hours of podcasts monthly on living room devices.”
Harvard Business Review : AI Agents Are Changing How People Shop. Here’s What That Means for Brands by Jur Gaarlandt , Wesley Korver , Nathan Furr and Andrew Shipilov ?
A nice overview from HBR on Agentic AI and its potential impact on the retail sector. Its big tip: As the power shifts toward the agents, businesses must develop AI Agent Optimization (AAO) strategies to stand out.
“As we look toward the future of retail, it’s clear that generative AI (gen AI) could fundamentally transform the landscape, much like e-commerce did before it...With the advent of gen AI agents that assist consumers in their purchasing journeys, we anticipate a shift in the balance of power away from retailers and towards brands and AI-agents. That’s because AI agents will search for consumer goods more broadly, swiftly, and comprehensively than humans.”
??? Hypha Highlights
What Is Operations Hub?
Operations Hub is a product line of software meant to take the aforementioned challenges off operations professionals’ plates.
It enables users to sync customer data across over 100 integrations and automate business processes, freeing time to focus on innovation.
AI-powered workflows are among the newest bevy of features HubSpot has rolled out, automating complex processes like lead routing and predictive deal scoring.
“With Operations Hub, you have the tools you need to connect all your apps, sync and clean your customer data, and automate business processes, turning operations into a strategic arm of your business—not a reactive one,” HubSpot outlines in an FAQ addressing its many advantages.
? 5 Star Review
“Personable But Professional”
I have worked with the staff at Hypha for over five years implementing a variety of modules for a large travel site. Their staff researches all aspects of any application and its implementation. With Hypha, we approach every task as a partnership and I value their input for every project. They deliver projects in a timely manner and also communicate their progress. It is always a pleasure to work with such a professional but yet personable team. I appreciate them. They truly want us to succeed. -Gibson, L.
Industry: Technology - Software
Services provided: Website Design, Branding, Email Marketing, Help Desk Implementation, Knowledge Base Development, Customer Marketing, and Search Engine Optimization
?? HubSpot Hacks
Our Senior Platform Specialist, Kevin Campbell , is back with some HubSpot Beta breakdowns!
? Custom Object Health scores. Ever wonder how healthy your custom objects are? Welp, now you can find out! No matter what data point your custom object tracks, teams can now easily track their health!
? New Report Viewer Tab. Previously to toggle between reports you had to click into a report on a dashboard, close it, and then click on the next one. But no more! Now you can conveniently toggle between reports via a new tab!
? Summarize Record w/Breeze Workflow Action. Breeze is changing how teams leverage HubSpot, and now, some of those helpful Breeze tools can be automated! With this new beta, teams can automatically summarize records that meet certain criteria automatically. Is that Deal ready for a new quote, and you want to know how it got there? Summarize it automatically when it hits the Quoting stage!
? Line Item Revenue Reports. We all love knowing what products/services make us the most money, and previously, teams couldn’t report on revenue based on line items alone. Now they can! With this new beta, teams will spend less time making convoluted workarounds, and more time counting those precious greenbacks!
? To enable these betas, log into your HubSpot account, click your profile picture in the top right-hand corner, and navigate to ‘Product Updates.’ If you run into any trouble, just give your friends at Hypha a call!
? AI in Action
News, updates and tools from the AI industry.
This week, for whatever reason, was a big one for new models and drops. Here’s a (non-exhaustive) list of some of the developments to come out:
Claude 3.7 Sonnet: Anthropic’s, “most intelligent model to date and the first hybrid reasoning model on the market.”
Granite 3.2: IBM’s LLM ,“[has] been trained to offer enhanced reasoning capabilities relative to their 3.1 counterparts.”
Deep Research: Perplexity’s model, “performs dozens of searches, reads hundreds of sources, and reasons through the material to autonomously deliver a comprehensive report.”
Alexa+: Amazon’s assistant is back and, “she’s smarter, more conversational, more capable, and free with Prime.?
GPT 4.5: OpenAI launched its latest model on Thursday. “OpenAI is calling the release its ‘most knowledgeable model yet,’ but it’s warning that GPT-4.5 is not a frontier model and might not perform as well as o1 or o3-mini.”
?? Cover to Cover
The titles team Hypha can’t get enough of.
“Ellen Lupton provides clear and focused guidance on how letters, words, and paragraphs should be aligned, spaced, ordered, and shaped. Historical and contemporary examples of graphic design show how to learn the rules and how to break them. Critical essays, eye-opening diagrams, helpful exercises, and dozens of examples and illustrations show readers how to be inventive within systems that inform and communicate.”
?? How can we help you?
Industry: Accessibility
What Is Web Accessibility?
Simply put, web accessibility is ensuring all people can experience a website equally. This takes deliberate action during the ideation, design, development and testing phases, coupled with user testing and moderation to maintain the compliance of a website.
What is compliance??The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) is a list of common accessibility issues and recommendations for how these barriers can be addressed. WCAG is referenced in most accessibility laws, and compliance with WCAG ensures compliance with all accessibility laws.
It’s time to protect your business?and?your customers.?Whether you are designing a new site or looking to improve an existing one, we are committed to making your company more accessible.
Thanks for reading! We’ll catch you next week. -Team Hypha
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5 天前Great roundup! Kevin's insights on the new HubSpot features sound promising, especially for tracking Custom Object Health. Also, Sage’s inbox zero strategy is a lifesaver in today's email-heavy world. What do you think will be the most impactful update from those AI model releases?