# Hubspot

The Situation Most Founders Find Themselves In

You've made the call. HubSpot is out, too expensive, too bloated, too enterprise for where your product is right now. But your product keeps growing. New users are still signing up. And that 8-email, 2-week onboarding sequence you painstakingly built? It's gone cold.

You don't need to rebuild HubSpot. You need something leaner, faster, and smarter. That's exactly where **Humanic** comes in.

This guide is for any team that:

* Has cancelled or downgraded HubSpot and needs to rebuild their onboarding emails
* Is still collecting new user signups (via HubSpot, Stripe, your product backend, or anywhere else)
* Wants to run a multi-email nurture sequence without re-entering enterprise tool hell

Let's get into it.

***

### Why Humanic Is the Right Tool for This Job

Before the how, a quick word on the why.

HubSpot is a sales-led CRM. Its workflows, contact properties, and email sequences are all designed around a human-configured, rule-based system. Every delay, every condition, every email had to be set up manually. It's powerful — but it assumes you have a marketing ops person with hours to spare.

Humanic takes a completely different approach. It's what's been called an **AI-native email marketing platform** — meaning AI isn't a feature bolted on top. It's the entire architecture. Instead of dragging conditions into a workflow builder, you describe your goal in plain language and Humanic's AI agents figure out the targeting, content, and timing.

For a team that just wants to get new users from "just signed up" to "actively using the product" over 2 weeks, this is a meaningful difference.

***

### Part 1: Getting Your Contacts Out of HubSpot

Even if you've cancelled HubSpot, your contact data is still accessible until your account is formally closed. Here's how to get it out cleanly.

#### Export Your Contact List from HubSpot

1. Log in to your HubSpot account
2. Navigate to **Contacts → Contacts**
3. Click **Actions → Export**
4. Select the properties you want to export — at minimum: Email, First Name, Last Name, Create Date, Lifecycle Stage
5. Download as CSV

**What to include in your export:**

* Email address (mandatory)
* First name (for personalization)
* Signup date / Create Date (critical for sequencing)
* Any custom properties that describe user type, plan, or source

#### Clean Your List Before You Import

This step is easy to skip and costly to ignore. A stale or unverified list will hurt your sender reputation on any new platform, including Humanic.

Before importing, do the following:

**Remove hard bounces.** If an email has previously bounced in HubSpot, do not bring it across.

**Segment by engagement.** Export your most engaged contacts first — anyone who has opened or clicked an email in the last 90–180 days. This is your warm list. Your full list can come later once your sending reputation on Humanic is established.

**Flag new vs. historical users.** Users who signed up in the last 30 days are your active onboarding candidates. Users who signed up months ago may need a re-engagement campaign, not an onboarding sequence.

***

### Part 2: Setting Up Humanic

#### Step 1: Create Your Account

Head to [app.humanic.ai](http://app.humanic.ai/) and sign up. No credit card is required to get started, and connecting your sending domain unlocks 90 days of free unlimited sending.

#### Step 2: Configure Your Sending Domain

Before you send a single email, set up your sending domain. This is non-negotiable.

Humanic handles the technical configuration — SPF, DKIM, and DMARC — automatically once you connect your domain. Here's what you need to decide:

**Use a subdomain, not your root domain.** Send from something like `mail.yourdomain.com` rather than `yourdomain.com`. This isolates your marketing email reputation from your transactional emails and primary business communications. If anything goes wrong with a campaign, your main domain stays protected.

**If you're on a brand-new domain**, follow a warmup approach: start with your smallest, most engaged cohort and scale volume gradually over 2–3 weeks. Humanic monitors bounce rates and spam signals automatically and will pause a campaign before your reputation is damaged.

***

### Part 3: Importing Your HubSpot Contacts

#### Uploading via CSV

Once your domain is live, import your cleaned HubSpot export:

1. In Humanic, navigate to **Contact List** from the left sidebar
2. Click **Import CSV** in the top-right corner
3. Upload your `.csv` file — you need at minimum an `email` column
4. Map any additional columns during import: first name, source, plan type, signup date, region, or any custom fields

Your column names in the CSV map directly to personalization variables in your emails. A column called `first_name` becomes the variable `user.first_name` when you're writing prompts. Name your columns clearly before you import.

> **Important:** CSV contacts in Humanic are for one-time or manually-triggered campaigns. If you want fully automated triggered sequences (emails that fire automatically when new users sign up), you'll need a data integration — covered in Part 5 below.

***

### Part 4: Rebuilding Your 8-Email Onboarding Sequence

This is the core of what most people are trying to do. You had 8 emails over 2 weeks in HubSpot. Let's rebuild that in Humanic.

#### How Campaign Generation Works

Humanic's campaign creation is prompt-first. You describe the campaign in plain language — your goal, your audience, your brand — and Humanic generates a full sequence: multiple emails, with delays between them, production-ready.

If you ask for a single email, it generates one. If you ask for a full sequence, it produces the entire series with appropriate delays. You can then adjust delays by typing a follow-up prompt or clicking the delay button on any email in the sequence.

#### Writing the Prompt for Your Onboarding Campaign

Don't write a single line. Write half a page. The more context you give, the stronger the output. Here's a prompt template to get you started:

***

*"Create an 8-email onboarding sequence for new users of \[your product name]. The goal is to help new signups understand the core value of the product, complete key setup steps, and become active users within 14 days.*

*Target audience: New users who just signed up. They've created an account but may not have completed onboarding.*

*Tone: Friendly, direct, helpful — not salesy. We're a \[your category] tool for \[your target customer].*

*Key actions we want users to take:*

* *\[e.g., Connect their first integration]*
* *\[e.g., Invite a team member]*
* *\[e.g., Complete their first \[core workflow]]*

*Email timing: Space emails across 14 days. Start with a welcome on Day 0, then roughly every 2 days. Slow down toward the end of the sequence.*

*Company URL: \[your website URL]*"\*

***

Paste your website URL in the prompt — Humanic uses it to match your brand voice and visual style automatically.

Expect to run 8–10 prompt iterations to get the content, tone, and design exactly right. The first draft will be good. The fifth draft will be great.

#### Recommended Email Cadence (Rebuilding Your 8-Email Flow)

Here's a structure that maps closely to what works well for SaaS onboarding:

| Email   | Day    | Focus                                       |
| ------- | ------ | ------------------------------------------- |
| Email 1 | Day 0  | Welcome + single first action               |
| Email 2 | Day 2  | Core value prop, show what's possible       |
| Email 3 | Day 4  | Feature spotlight: the "aha" moment feature |
| Email 4 | Day 6  | Social proof / customer story               |
| Email 5 | Day 8  | Check-in — have they gotten started?        |
| Email 6 | Day 10 | Advanced feature or integration             |
| Email 7 | Day 12 | FAQ / common objections                     |
| Email 8 | Day 14 | Final nudge + offer of direct support       |

Adjust this for your product. But the principle holds: start with one clear action, build toward depth, end with a human touch.

#### Adjusting Delays

After generating the sequence, click on the delay indicator between any two emails to change the timing. You can also type a follow-up prompt like: *"Change the delay between email 3 and email 4 to 3 days instead of 2."*

***

### Part 5: Setting Up Triggered Campaigns (The Automated Version)

The CSV import approach works well for your existing HubSpot contacts. But for new users going forward, you want emails to trigger automatically the moment someone signs up — not manually after you export another CSV.

Humanic supports this through **Data Connections** and **Triggered Campaigns**.

#### What Data Connections Are Available

Humanic connects with:

* **Segment** (available on the Segment app store)
* **Amplitude** (available on the Amplitude app store)
* **PostHog**
* **Stripe** (for transactional/payment-triggered emails)

These integrations let Humanic receive real-time product events — like `user_signed_up` or `completed_onboarding_step` — and trigger the right email automatically based on what a user did (or didn't do).

#### Bridging the HubSpot Gap

If HubSpot is still logging new signups (common when you cancel but the tracking snippet is still on your product), you have two options:

**Option A — Connect at the product level.** The cleanest solution. Install Segment or PostHog directly in your product. When a user signs up, the event fires to Segment/PostHog, which passes it to Humanic. HubSpot becomes irrelevant to this flow entirely.

**Option B — Use a Zapier/Make bridge.** If your product is tightly integrated with HubSpot and you can't immediately swap it out, use Zapier or Make to create a webhook: "When a new contact is created in HubSpot → add them to Humanic via API or CSV export." This is a short-term workaround, not a permanent solution, but it works while you migrate the underlying tracking.

**Option C — Use Humanic's Webhook API.** For teams with a developer available, Humanic's API lets you push new users directly from your product backend the moment they sign up. This gives you full control with zero dependency on HubSpot.

***

### Part 6: Creating Cohorts for Your Onboarding Audience

A **cohort** in Humanic is a dynamic or static segment of your contact list, defined by filters like signup date, user tag, source, plan type, or activity. Cohorts are how you target your onboarding sequence to exactly the right people.

#### The Easiest Way: Ask the AI

1. Navigate to **Contact List** in the left sidebar
2. Find the **"Just Ask AI"** prompt bar at the top
3. Type something like: *"Create a cohort of users who signed up in the last 30 days and haven't unsubscribed"*
4. Humanic builds the segment automatically
5. Review and apply it to your campaign

#### Preset Cohorts Available Out of the Box

Humanic includes one-click preset cohorts including 30-day idle users, region-based users, free users, and paid users. For a migration from HubSpot, the most useful starting cohort is likely new users by creation date — filter by "Created At" in the last 30 days to capture your active onboarding window.

#### Building a Cohort Manually

For more precise control:

1. Click **Filters** on the Contact List page
2. Apply conditions: source (e.g., "hubspot\_import"), tags, subscription status, signup date range
3. The contact table updates in real time
4. Save the filtered view as a named cohort for reuse across campaigns

***

### Part 7: AI-Powered Personalization (The Part HubSpot Couldn't Do)

This is where Humanic genuinely surpasses what most teams could do in HubSpot without a dedicated marketing ops person.

HubSpot's personalization was largely token-based — insert `{{contact.firstname}}` and call it personalized. Humanic's personalization goes much deeper.

Every recipient gets content variation driven by who they are, how they signed up, and what signals they're showing right now. This isn't a merge tag — it's actual content variation. A free-tier user in their first 3 days gets a materially different email from a trial user who has already connected an integration, even if both are in the same "Day 4" position in the sequence.

To make this work well, ensure your contact data includes as many relevant fields as possible: plan type, signup source, company size if you have it, any product events you're capturing. The richer your data, the more Humanic can differentiate at the individual level.

***

### Part 8: Monitoring and Iterating

Once your sequence is live, Humanic tracks everything: open rates, click rates, bounce rates, spam signals, and domain reputation. Deliverability issues trigger automatic pauses before your reputation is affected.

Check your analytics dashboard after the first wave of sends. Key signals to watch:

* **Open rate below 20%**: Your subject lines or sender reputation need work. Try A/B variants via follow-up prompts.
* **Click rate below 2%**: Your CTAs may be unclear or your content isn't aligned with where users are in the journey.
* **High unsubscribes on email 1**: Your list may include unengaged contacts from the HubSpot export. Tighten your cohort.

Use those signals as inputs for your next prompt iteration. Refine the content, adjust the timing, and re-activate.

***

### The Migration Checklist

Here's a condensed checklist you can follow from start to finish:

**Before you start:**

* \[ ] Export contacts from HubSpot (email, name, signup date, custom fields)
* \[ ] Clean the list: remove bounces, filter to engaged contacts first
* \[ ] Identify which contacts are active onboarding candidates (last 30 days)

**Setting up Humanic:**

* \[ ] Create account at [app.humanic.ai](http://app.humanic.ai/)
* \[ ] Configure sending domain (subdomain recommended)
* \[ ] Verify SPF, DKIM, DMARC

**Importing contacts:**

* \[ ] Import cleaned CSV with properly named columns
* \[ ] Create onboarding cohort (users from last 30 days, not unsubscribed)

**Building the sequence:**

* \[ ] Write your prompt (half a page minimum, include website URL)
* \[ ] Generate 8-email sequence with 14-day cadence
* \[ ] Review and refine through 8–10 prompt iterations
* \[ ] Adjust delays to match your original HubSpot timing
* \[ ] Send test email to yourself before activating

**Going live:**

* \[ ] Activate campaign for your onboarding cohort
* \[ ] Set up real-time data connection (Segment/PostHog/Amplitude) for new signups
* \[ ] Monitor analytics after first sends, iterate based on results

***

### Getting Help

If you're migrating from a full HubSpot setup with complex workflows, Humanic's Scale and Enterprise plans include hands-on migration support. Their team will help you export and clean contact lists, rebuild sequences, validate domain config, and run a warmup phase.

Reach out to **<care@gethumanic.com>** with your current setup and list size to get started.

For quick questions, there's also a WhatsApp support group (linked from the Humanic docs) where the team responds fast.

***

### Bottom Line

You don't need HubSpot to run a great onboarding sequence. You never did. What you needed was a tool that could take your goal — "get new users to their 'aha moment' in 14 days" — and handle the execution.

That's what Humanic is built for. You describe the campaign. The AI handles targeting, content, personalization, and delivery monitoring. Your first sequence can be live within a few hours of signing up.

Start at [app.humanic.ai](http://app.humanic.ai/). Import your HubSpot export. Describe your onboarding goal. Let it run.

***

*Have questions about your specific migration? Leave a comment below or reach out to the Humanic team directly at <care@gethumanic.com>.*


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