HubSpot to Continue Delivering the Promise of Connection Platform solutions have always been known as a one-stop shop for all of a marketer’s needs. At their core, platforms are meant to help marketers, whether that’s understanding their customers’ journeys, optimizing the path to purchase, or quantifying the revenue that a campaign produces. And, as I discussed last year, HubSpot delivered on the promise of platform through our world-class solution that doesn’t sacrifice power for ease of use. Last year we focused on what it meant to be a valuable platform for our customers. Since then, we’ve made a number of product enhancements to double down on this promise. Here at HubSpot, we’ve intentionally built our platform to meet the needs of organizations regardless of where they are in their journey. Our customers have always taken comfort in our easy-to-use tools and freedom to scale when they’re ready to. That said, a lot has changed in the last few years and as a result, our customers’ needs are shifting. Although platform solutions are still the answer, customers need more than just the promise of strong technology. They need connection. Facing the Crisis of Disconnection We’re living in a disconnected world – disconnected from one another, from the people we work with, or in this case, from the companies we do business with. In a time when connection matters now more than ever - this is a huge problem. At INBOUND 2022, our CEO Yamini Rangan introduced this concept, that we’re...

The Age of the Connected Customer Growing a business has never been easy. But these days, it feels impossible. Companies are trying to predict growth in an unpredictable macro environment. The economy is down, the market is volatile, socio-political issues are raging, and the dust is still settling on hybrid work. Every week, there’s a new twist or turn. In case navigating all this uncertainty isn’t hard enough, companies are dealing with another major shift. Over the past year, the strategies that businesses rely on to attract, engage, and delight customers have started to break. It’s harder to generate demand, drive leads, reach prospects, and meet customers’ high expectations. At the height of the pandemic, many businesses thrived in a digital-first world, but now that momentum is slowing and it’s harder than ever to connect with customers. The flywheel feels frozen. But why? This question keeps me up at night. Helping organizations grow better is our mission at HubSpot. We’re passionate about helping scaling companies get ahead and navigate periods of uncertainty. That’s why we went on a listening tour to understand what’s standing in the way of our customers’ growth, and how we can help solve it. Across hundreds of conversations with customers, there was one word that kept coming up: disconnected. We discovered that companies are in a crisis of disconnection today, caused by three major disconnects. They’re struggling with disconnected systems, disconnected people, and disconnected customers. I want to share what we’ve learned about each disconnect, and...

Partnering with Kanarys to Support the Future of Diversity, Equity and Belonging HubSpot’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) best practices has played an essential role in our success and we know that it can for all companies in the HubSpot community. We’re seeking to help our customers achieve their best performance through adopting these practices too. Our commitment to DEI helped us foster a culture that prizes a range of ideas from people with an array of experiences and backgrounds. We invested innumerable people hours, hired professionals, and sought world-class expertise to identify the DEI best practices, implement them and measure their success. Although there’s no finish line for this work, that massive effort has supported our company’s growth trajectory through talent acquisition, employee retention, and workplace culture. We recognize that not all companies have the resources to make an equivalent investment, but all companies in the HubSpot community can make DEI a sustained advantage. We asked, shouldn’t it be easier for companies to identify and adopt DEI best practices and measure their success? This increasingly common challenge faced by companies of all sizes is why HubSpot Ventures is excited to announce our investment in and partnership with Kanarys, a DEI technology company focused on providing the tools that organizations need to create long-term systemic change around DEI. Kanarys utilizes human resource information systems integrations and artificial intelligence (AI) powered assessments to gather the data organizations need to meet DEI challenges head-on. Knowing where to start is...

Why HubSpot is Launching a Podcast Network We've built HubSpot on the belief that you earn attention by being of value. That belief is at the very heart of HubSpot's success; creating remarkable content is what makes a remarkable brand. We've spent the past decade investing in educational content to help all kinds of business builders be successful. Marketing, sales, customer support, customer success, product, engineering, entrepreneurs are all helping to build and grow businesses. And, we've provided free education through our blogs, YouTube, Academy, and podcasts to help. With nearly 114,000 customers now using HubSpot to scale their companies, our ambitions around content have only gotten bigger. It's why we're excited to announce the launch of HubSpot's Podcast Network, a new audio destination that is home to six great shows that represent a wide range of business topics and backgrounds. Together, this collection covers the scope and mastery every company needs to find success. The inaugural members of the network are: Entrepreneurs on Fire, which delivers the inspiration and strategies you need to fire up your entrepreneurial journey and create the life you've always dreamed of. Business Infrastructure, which provides solutions and real-life stories to owners and operators of fast-growing small businesses seeking practical tips for creating the operations and business infrastructure needed to grow a company. Being Boss, an exploration of not only what it means, but what it takes to be boss as a creative business owner, freelancer, or side-hustler. ...

Arise RevOps, the New Orchestrators of Customer Experience I care about customers. Whether they're your customers, my customers, or my customers' customers, I want every one of them to have a good experience every time they pick up the phone to call a business, open a marketing email, or visit a website. It's what gets me going every morning. That's why I was thrilled in 2019 when I had the opportunity to launch HubSpot's first-ever 'voice of the customer' team. I assembled a group of passionate people, each more dedicated than the last to improving customer experience. We met weekly, talked about our customers, forensically analyzed feedback, and dug deep into the weeds to see where we could root out friction. And then one day it hit us. The answers to most of our questions didn't lie in more cross-functional meetings, increased headcount, or longer hours for support staff. The answers to our questions lay in operations. Operations teams carry the responsibility for making sure that, well, everything works. If a marketer is having trouble segmenting a contact list, they reach out to operations. If a salesperson's automated emails are misfiring, operations gets tagged in. If a service professional can't access a customer's communication history, it's operations to the rescue again. They're the people who set every customer-facing team up for success. As such, they are the orchestrators of the customer experience. And yet, most companies view operations as a reactive function whose sole purpose is to frantically find fixes to issues as they arise....

Announcing Our Investment in OneSignal A widening set of engagement channels are leveling the playing field for businesses of all sizes to bring customers back to their products. This is particularly true for modern software companies. Their products are increasingly reliant on non-product communication channels to drive awareness, engagement and customer success. For data-driven teams, this is particularly powerful: increases in personalization, content optimization, and customized deliveries have become a force multiplier in a company's ability to reach and maintain a loyal audience of customers. Some of the world's best brands have taken notice, differentiating through an integrated messaging approach that reaches users across devices at the right time.  Enter OneSignal. Founder George Deglin and his team began as a small crew of app and game developers solving their own problems with reaching their users in a unified way. They built OneSignal to initially power push notifications. Today, they are a customer engagement platform of choice implemented by over 1,000,000 developers across 500,000 live apps and almost 4% of sites on the internet. They've built a web and mobile SDK that developers install and marketers use to offer omni-channel messaging across web-and-mobile push, in-app messaging, SMS, and email.  HubSpot worked closely with OneSignal to develop an integration (in Beta) that's now available in our marketplace, and we've been steadily impressed by the power of their product and the considerable value it can bring to our customers' core HubSpot experience.  In addition to our integration, we are thrilled to announce HubSpot's...

How HubSpot's Customers Are Shaping the Next Normal This week marked an important milestone for HubSpot. The company Dharmesh and I founded over 14 years ago welcomed its 100,000th customer and passed $1 billion in annual recurring revenue. We've come a long way since we began banging the drum about inbound marketing, and yet, it feels like HubSpot is just getting started. In many ways, it feels like the whole world is just getting started … or re-started. The events of the past year have transformed entire industries, upended the way we work, and re-shaped human behavior en masse. The technologies we embraced and new habits we formed during the pandemic will not retreat when the coronavirus eventually does. Rather, they will come to define "the next normal." This represents one of the most profound outcomes of these times: that never before have companies, and the products and services they provide, had a greater capacity to influence human behavior. When gyms re-open, people will still workout from home, facilitated by fitness apps. When offices re-open, people will still work from home, facilitated by work productivity and communications tools. When theatres re-open, people will still watch live concerts and new movies from home, facilitated by streaming services. Without these products and services, many of which have gone from being novel to necessary in the past year, life during the pandemic would look very different. And it would be much more likely to snap back to the way it was in 2019. Instead, we've witnessed...

Why HubSpot is Acquiring The Hustle The battle for customer attention has never been so fierce. We've seen an explosion in brands using online channels to promote their services and products to potential customers. The problem with this model is that you're not only battling other competitors for that attention; you're competing against every site that publishes informative videos, the latest trends, and educational content that serves the needs of their audiences. We've built HubSpot on the belief that you earn attention by being of value. That belief is at the very heart of HubSpot's success; creating remarkable content is what makes a remarkable brand. It's why we've invested in publishing blogs, courses, ebooks, templates, and videos that help generate millions of visits to HubSpot every month. We can't stop there, though. Just as the product requirements of growing companies have changed over time, so have their content needs. Newsletters, podcasts, premium content, and other media have exploded in popularity for startups and scaleups looking for best practices and tech news. So how can companies adapt to this change? We believe that the next generation of software companies will invest in media that earns the attention of their audience. Instead of the traditional model of having a software company embedded inside of a media company, we predict that the next generation of tech companies will have the opposite – a media company embedded inside a software company. We're taking our first steps in that direction today with an acquisition...