Speaker 1Hi, folks. Welcome to the Science of Scaling podcast. I'm your host, Mark Roberge. On this podcast, we talk about the best practices of scaling sales. Today, we have a co-founder, longtime CEO of HubSpot, Brian Halligan. Brian hired me as the first seller. He's the architect of the go-to-market strategy. We're going to talk about building the early team. We're going to talk about developing the pricing model. We're going to talk about the most important go-to-market strategic moves that made HubSpot what it is today. We're going to laugh. We're going to cry. Buckle in. Let's go. It's going to be a fun one. Hey, Brian, such a pleasure to have you. Welcome to the show. Great to be here, Mark. You look fantastic. I like the salt and pepper beard. Hey, you too. I mean, I think when we met, I was probably 27 and you were probably 37 or something like that. Yeah. That's probably about right.
Speaker 2You're aging well, my friend. Aging well. Let's
Speaker 1focus on you for a second. So you're at MIT. You came off this awesome run with PTC as a sales exec. If I remember it correctly, I think you were dabbling with venture capital. And then you could have done anything, but you decided to start something. Why did you do that?
Speaker 2I remember being torn about it. Dharmesh and I had been dabbling with HubSpot, while we were in school. He took it through a course called New Enterprises, kind of a canonical course at MIT. And we did the 50K business plan. And I graduated a year before Dharmesh. And I spent basically a year as an entrepreneur at a residence, a venture capital firm. We continued to tinker with the idea. And I remember he was about to graduate and we got together at a place called CIC in Cambridge. And Dharmesh sold me hard on doing HubSpot. And I really liked him. And I was like, screw it, I'll do it. And I'll give it a year. I said, let's give it a go for a year. Let's check in and if it's working, great. And if not, you know, move on and do something else. And honestly, after a year, it wasn't completely obvious that we're onto something. We had a lot of wood to chop. I
Speaker 1don't think I heard
Speaker 2the words Dharmesh in selling in the same sentence. It's a little odd. Also during that conversation, so we agreed on it, shook hands. And then we had the conversation about how are we going to make decisions? How are we going to do this? How are we going to disagree? And how we're going to split equity, all sort of in one hour session on the whiteboard. And then the next week, I was going on vacation in Nantucket. I rented a house and I had it for two weeks. And I could only do the first week. And I said, why don't you take the second week? And he was nervous he was going to lose me. And so I remember, so the plan was, I would take the first week, he was going to take the second week, would overlap over the weekend. And I remember he came down with his wife, who's great. And he showed up and he had never been to Nantucket. It turns out he had never been to the beach. He had never been to the beach. He didn't know how to swim. And he showed up with his black lace up shoes or whatever sneakers on. He didn't have flip flops, a bathing suit, hat, something like that. He didn't have any conception of what it was like to do that. And so I remember we got there. And so I was like, all right, here's what you need to do. Here's what you need to do. And so I was like, go in town and buy a bunch of stuff. Bought a bunch of stuff, came back and put the umbrella in. We sat in the sand and he sat there for like 10 minutes. And he was like, this is stupid. Why am I sitting on the beach? And he went inside and he just started coding.
Speaker 1I didn't know that one either. So fine. You guys do the company and Dharmesh is coding away. Like what does someone like you do? Like as a non-programmer, when it's two people, we don't have a product. We have a vision. We have a business plan. We have a little bit of seed money.
Speaker 2I sort of think of it as he and I divided up the work where he was coding. People don't know this about HubSpot, but we hired this guy, Patrick, who was a fresh grad from Yale, really smart kid. And then we have two people in Egypt, Farah Maui and Nader, really nice guys. And the four of them would code. And because Dharmesh was the night owl and the time zone sort of worked, like I worked all day and he worked all night and I used the product all day. So I was trying to use it to write blog articles, market, do SEO. And then I would go show it to potential customers and try to sell it during the day. I'm trying to sell it and trying to service it and I'm using it. And at the end of the day, I would write like, here's my list of the 10 top bugs I found today. And there was like a million, but the top 10 and give it to Dharmesh. They work all night.
Speaker 1Yeah. It's like cool to think about Brian Halligan is kind of like the first seller, the first business person in this whole HubSpot ecosystem. And he is playing the part perfectly because this is not a business. It's not a business. It's not a business. It's not a business. It's not a business. It's not about acquiring customers. This is about generating exceptional feedback, feedback on the product, feedback on who the customer is. And that's what Brian spent all his time doing, surrounded by these programmers. All right, let's get back to
Speaker 2him. And then every night they fix all 10 and they create like 11 new ones. So I was sort of the QA guy and I was the sales marketing service person in the early days. And I, I do remember, we should probably talk about how you got involved. Sure. I didn't have any sales experience.
Speaker 1I give you credit for serendipitously pushing me into sales. I was just Dharmesh's friend from school who like was one day we came out with him and he introduced me to you. And, and I'm like, I guess that's kind of interesting. Like why the heck did you hire me to do sales?
Speaker 2First of all, Dharmesh has good taste in talent. Somehow I hadn't met you in business school, but he was super high on you. And he's got a very short list of people he's high on. Everyone I met, he was high on. I always liked and we overlap in our taste. I remember I was like, well, we have a lot of interest in this nascent thing. See if you can sell it. And you said, I'll give you a day a week. And you were working on your own startup, which had nothing to do with this stuff. And you had zero sales experience. And I was like, I would buy from this guy. And I think that people always forget that when they're interviewing sales reps, like, would you actually buy this person or you're interviewing a leader? Like, would you actually go to work for that CEO? Um, and you started doing it a day a week and you were fantastic at it. You're really good. And I remember I was tracking on Alexa. I had a feeling it wasn't going great. And I remember I took you to the Red Sox game and I just put the full court press on you and you said, yes, enjoy full time. And that was a huge moment in the history of upside. But I think one of the interesting things about all of that is our first sales hire, our head of sales never sold anything before. But it worked out great. Worked out great for everybody.
Speaker 1All right. Yeah. You're giving me too much credit. I remember the email you sent me. If you all know, like Brian, part of, I think what he's taken from his individual sales experience is he writes extremely provocative emails to people that change their minds on something. And that was the email you sent me. It was like just a screenshot of the web traffic of my startup against the web track of HubSpot. Like we should talk. I remember the game. It was, it was at Hebdecky Matsu. It was his first. Matsui? Yeah. I think it was his first game, which is a big deal. Cause I think it was one of the first Japanese players to come out. And Brian has awesome tickets. Like you're literally like in the front row ordering lobster rolls or whatever at Fenway Park. And he's like closing me to run sales. I did feel though, dude, I never really asked you this. It must've been going through your mind. Like he did a great job. He brought on, helped us bring on the first hundred customers or whatever. There's no way he's going to scale through the first two years. So let me just throw out like an audacious goal. I remember you saying, I don't know, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. So you said to me, like hire one rep a month and like do that forever. And I remember Larry Bond, like rightly so our series ambassador from general Canada as being like, you know, I don't know about Mark, you know, like we just gave you a $5 million check. Like, do we really want to be messing with that? Like, shouldn't we hire real sales? I don't know if you remember any of that, if that was like going through your mind.
Speaker 2I remember that. There's a little bit of like, are you sure Mark is the right guy? Like, I'm not sure, you notice, but he never sold anything before. I felt like you were good. You were an that worked in the early days of HubSpot is we hired a bunch of athletes who, you know, hadn't seen the movie before.
Speaker 1Yeah. This concept of like athletes versus specialists is pretty well researched and important, but I don't think embedded in the strategy of new founders as much when folks go out and say, okay, I need to hire my first sales leader. I need to hire my first marketer. I need to hire my first product leader. They tend to be looking for specialists, people who've done that function in their context with their product, with their market. And the reason why that's not optimal is we're still in pivot mode. We don't know what our product is yet. We don't know what our messaging is yet. We don't know what our marketing is. We don't know what our market is yet. And if we hire specialists, it might feel like trying to jam a square peg in a round hole. But when we hire athletes who are smart, who execute, who want to learn fast, who want to work hard, we set ourselves up more optimally for finding the right answer. So great advice there by Brian. Let's get back to him.
Speaker 2What I liked about you is you didn't bring all the baggage of the old school way of selling. Proved to really work. It was huge for me because I couldn't see it. You had that
Speaker 1experience and you could put those together and really helped elevate my career.
Speaker 2The other thing I think worked for you, we hired John McMahon, who was my old boss, who ran sales at the place I worked for for 10 years and is a mentor of mine. And he's kind of a legend now, but he was a consultant and he was a mentor. I never asked you. I think he helped you a lot. Probably the most out of any professional mentor.
Speaker 1I mean, I still talk to him multiple times a year. John McMahon. I think I probably spent five years with him, four hours every month being mentored, talking about what I was going through, getting his advice on the strategy. And people often ask like, how did you do what you did at HubSpot when you've never sold before, when you'd never led a sales team before? And the two most important things were one, having a great mentor like John, and that takes time. And number two is I had a quarterly dinner with peers who are other sales leaders that were going through the same thing. And every quarter we had a dinner and talked about our one problem. And we worked as peers on each of our problems. It was those two things that I learned the most. And they took time to build. It's not like I just like stumbled into my mentor on the street one day. I was like, hey, great. Or it's not like I stumbled across these 12 people that ended up being like great thought leaders with me. Every month, every week, I met with a different sales leader to find out what they were about and to learn from them. And over time, I was able to pick the best of the best to surround myself with. That was key to me. My growth in that role. It got to a point, as you know, Brian, that scale, it was difficult for me to see the issues that would happen six months from now, but it was absolutely critical. And that's one of the things that John really brought to me. Speaking of athletes, let's talk about some of those early people. And I think the ironic athlete, do you remember Colleen Coyne? I do. Gold medalist in the Olympics. She was like our first customer success manager, I believe,
Speaker 2or support. Colleen worked with me in my last company. She was our first hire. And she was with HubSpot for like 10 years. And I still hear from her.
Speaker 1She's great. There wasn't a problem that she'd complain about. Like, even though like the bugs kind of fell on her, she had to take, she just didn't care. And then I think another one that also came from a past employer of yours was Dan Tyre.
Speaker 2Okay, so both Dan and Colleen came from my last company. Dan was like a central casting sales rep, like really extroverted, super loud. He lived in Phoenix. I don't know, I think he was heading towards retirement. And I remember the day I said, Well, why don't you come in to Cambridge and work out of the office for a week. And it was Monday morning, probably seven or eight of us. I don't know, it's early. And Patrick and Dharmesh are coding away. And Patrick, the developer sat between Dan Tyre and I and, and I said, we had lots of leads and interests. And so I basically gave Dan a pile of leads. And he comes in, he was probably got there before everyone else real early in the morning and pounded the phones. And he's telling the story. And he's got the story all wrong. And it's like a real cringer listen to like really bad. It's a Patrick walks in, he's coding away, like from like 10 to 11. And then he disappears. I figure he's going to get coffee or whatever. And he comes back and he's got like the little Apple headphones thing because trying to block Tyre out. Yeah. So 1130 to 1230 is coding away. I figure he's going for lunch. He must have gone to Best Buy because it comes back and he has headphones. Like these on which no one had headphones. Like it looked like he was back then. It looked like headphones like a pilot. We're trying to tire out. But I just remember losing the tire. And he was just after every call back. All right, let's can we just chat about that? And let's just go over over the facts. And I remember he he sold a customer that first day. And he like comes over we high five.
Speaker 3Yes, yes. Hi, everyone's high five. We were so excited. I said, Dan, why'd they buy? Unclear. Exactly. I remember that.
Speaker 2Exactly. I had no idea. Articulate why they purchased the product. He was just thrilled they bought it.
Speaker 1I mean, you all have to picture this. Like we're literally all in our 20s and 30s wearing hoodies. And this guy's been selling for 30 or 40 years. He's showing up at this environment in a suit and tie. Like imagine going to an incubator and there's this dude with 30 or 40 years experience, super loud. Knows everyone. He's in a suit and tie walking around. It was the most contrasting thing, but he was such an important part of our culture.
Speaker 4Hey, Dan Tire here. Just pushing pause for a second. First of all, I had known Halligan for my fourth startup. He and I were friends and he was a great sales guy. Just so you know, he used to walk behind my chair and yell at me. He's like, no, you're not doing it right. Oh, my goodness. That's not what SEO is. And I'm like, okay. And people were on the phone. They'd be like, who is that? Like, are you saying I'm like, don't worry. It's my buddy, Brian. Anyway, there was no policies. The only dress policy we had is you need to wear clothes. And it was all phone sales. We didn't even have Zoom, right? No one saw what we look like. And I thought to myself, okay, we're a professional organization. We've got a couple of dozen people. Somebody should wear a tie. And you remember ties, right? You see them at funerals and sometimes at bar mitzvahs. Dave Stack, our first CEO, didn't even wear a tie. I'm like, nah, that's a little out of mouth. I'm going to wear a tie. So one day I'm walking by, where's his cubicle? And he said, we have to talk. He was like, kind of serious. And we were never really that serious. And I'm like, cool. What do you need? He's like, it's your look, man. And I'm like, what about my look? He said, you're a little off brand. I'm like, excuse me? What is off brand means? He's like, do you have like any t-shirts or cargo shorts or anything like that? I'm like, what? And you're telling me I'm overdressed for this sales organization? And he's like, we skew young and it's a startup vibe. And so lose the tie. And I'm like, I got to be the only person in the history of business who his boss asked him to dress down. And I'm like, that's frigging epic, right? Huge Brian Halligan fan, huge Mark Roberge fan. All right, enough, enough. Let's get back to Mark and Brian.
Speaker 2If you want to have a picture of Dan Tyer, that movie, Jerry Maguire, throughout the movie, they pan to Jerry Maguire's mentor, who's like guy in his fifties, suit and tie, old school. And he's like, I'm going to wear a tie. And he's like, who's like giving lessons to Jerry. I don't know if people remember that, but that's Dan Tyer. It's that guy. And by the way, Dan Tyer is still at HubSpot.
Speaker 1Still living in Phoenix, I think. Still carried a quota. It's insane. So let's talk about two other people and what you remember about that in the early days. I remember you told me at some point, we sold the hundredth customer, Tyer was on, you're like, all right, cool. You need to kind of like go from selling to scaling, right? So your new goal is hire a salesperson a month and make them productive as soon as quickly as possible. I think it was in November. So I'm like four hours in. And I was like, hey, guys, I heard about this business startup, two guys that they're closing it down. And one's a seller and one's an engineer. They need jobs. I think they're good. Why don't you interview them? And you guys interviewed them. You said, yeah, we'll take the seller, but not the engineer. Do you remember who that was?
Speaker 2I remember it like it was yesterday. This is the scene of two, I have a million mistakes of two mistakes I made. The seller was a guy named Pete Caputa. And the engineer was G2 Matani. And I remember interviewing them both. And we said, we'll take Pete and G2. We passed on him. G2 went and took a sales job somewhere, which didn't seem in character with him. Did really well at an agency, came back, we hired him. And I just ran into G2. He runs services. He probably has a thousand people reporting to him at HubSpot. And he just passed his 14 year anniversary at HubSpot. So that was a miss, but we recovered on it.
Speaker 1And he took us international too. Which was just as impactful.
Speaker 2Yes. Yes. He ran all of international sales. He opened the Dublin office. He did an amazing job for us. But Pete Caputa, there's an interesting story about him. Do you remember the Pete Caputa story? The joke with Pete was the pyramid scheme. He was always getting made fun of for the pyramid scheme. So tell us about that story. Well, one thing we didn't have a problem with was lead gen. We had a lot of leads. We got a lot of leads from marketing agencies. And our original vision of HubSpot was we were going to make marketing so easy, you wouldn't have to hire an agency. To help you with the marketing, you'd in-house it. And marketers like to hire agencies. And then we were going to disrupt the agency business. And Caputa had kind of come from that world. And we'd have like a stack of leads from agencies coming in. And I said, we're not going to call on agencies. Maybe later, we'll figure out that we're not going to disrupt them, that they can be a channel. But the product's not ready. We're going to have to support this thing ourselves. We can't outsource this. It's too buggy. It's too early. I said, don't do it. And at the time, Google had this thing called the 20% time. And we had debated, should we do the 20% time? And we decided not to. But we had this thing like you can do something nice. And Pete, for months, was like, we should call on these leads. Like, Pete, don't call on those leads. He starts calling the leads, of course. And a month in, he's like 400% quota, like just scratching it. All right, maybe you're right about those leads. Yeah, this concept of selling
Speaker 1through the channel is critical. And Pete was so important. And the timing of Pete bringing this to HubSpot, I think, was critical. It's a pothole in the science of scaling. And that is that most founding teams, most like eight engineers in a room, we now need to start scaling. They'll say, okay, we can either hire a bunch of salespeople, which sounds scary, we can sell through the channel. There's dozens of companies that are selling to our customers. Let's just go talk to them and give them 20% of our time. our revenue and scale that way. Big mistake. Because we don't know how to sell yet. We don't know how to message it. We don't know how to do qualification and discovery. We don't know how to close deals. We don't know how to onboard our first customers. And trying to do that through someone else's team that doesn't even work for us is a disaster. So even if you are ultimately going to sell to the channel, it's highly advisable to sell direct first, to learn all those key ingredients around your go-to-market process. And then you're ready to enable the channel. And Pete nailed it with us to be able to enable and build a program that's still so important to HubSpot. All right, let's get back to Brian.
Speaker 2I still think that's about half our revenue. It is not a pyramid scheme. We just set up resellers. And here's magic. We appeal to marketing agencies from a couple different angles. One angle was they like this idea of inbound marketing. They wanted to move from website design and brochure design and stuff like that. They sort of like, oh, that looks like a new thing. So they like the idea of inbound marketing and that there might be a tool for that. They liked our content. What Pete did that was quite remarkable was that was an obvious insight. His non-obvious insight was that many of these agencies. who are quite small, a lot of husband and wife teams, little tiny teams, didn't know how to properly manage and run an agency. And he had done that before. His big insight was, I'm just going to teach these little agencies how to run their business better. And so he taught them about inbound marketing, created all this methodology. We eventually created university courses for them. And he taught them how to properly run an agency. And that turned out to be a whopper aha for the agencies and a magnet to pull them in. And that was a really good insight. For sure. Huge impact on us.
Speaker 1And then let's flip through some of the first decisions and go-to-market design. And let's talk about positioning and inbound marketing. Because that was a big deal. I remember from my lens, I'm sitting down with you and Dharmesh and you guys are jamming about it. And I'm like, guys, it just sounds like you're an iteration on a marketing automation company. You're in the marketing automation category. Because LSU is a big company. And I'm like, yeah, I'm in the marketing automation category. And I'm like, I'm in the marketing automation category. And I'm like, Loco and Marketo were starting out there. And it was as if I punched you guys in the gut. You were so offended. So you want to talk a little bit about that? And I think that came out a little bit of MIT, et cetera.
Speaker 2I remember that argument in a related argument was, why the hell are we calling this inbound marketing? It's internet marketing. Why do we have to create a freaking category? No one cares about this. You guys are. Yeah, that was such
Speaker 1an important moment and such an important learning for me from Brian and Dharmesh. And that is, we had to create the category. Otherwise, you're just an iteration in someone else's category. It's a bit almost overwhelming and egotistical to think that these five people in a small office across from MIT are going to literally invent a new English phrase. And I think that's a really important moment. Because if you can, you crushed it. If you can, you own the first 10 pages of Google. You own the conference. You own the book. You own the LinkedIn page, and no one can catch you. It's hard to create sustainable barriers of entry in the world of software. But creating a category like inbound marketing is key to doing so.
Speaker 2Yeah, when you brought up that marketing automation thing, the last thing we wanted to do was automate marketing. We thought marketing was broken, and the conventional wisdom was broken. And we were like, no, the last thing you want to do is make more efficient spam. We want to transform marketing. And we want to match the way you market with the way people shop and buy. And the way people shop and buy is changing. And so you need to totally turn it inside out. And so we were super anti-marketing automation for a long time. And then, boy, a lot of water went under the water. We got serious about marketing automation probably till five, six, seven years in. After we did our Series D, we got serious about it. And so we kind of described the world as the top of the funnel. A lot of people called this Web 2.0 marketing back then, which was like blogging, SEO, social. And then marketing automation was more of the middle landing pages, marketing automation. And we just focused on the top. We were very passionate about the top. But eventually, we saw a lot of our customers were also buying email marketing software, marketing automation. So we moved into marketing automation, kind of figured out, how to do that in a HubSpot-y way. A couple of years in, we had the impact, starting the inbound conference and stuff. It's like, oh, there's a content marketing conference too. And like, crap. It's like kind of the same thing. And it's too bad because I think if they hadn't gotten traction with that content marketing thing, the inbound marketing would have had a lot more legs. Or maybe we could have joined their forces. I think it turned out okay, by the way.
Speaker 1It turned out okay. I do want to talk about early stage pricing too. Everyone expects there's this sophisticated McKinsey conjoint analysis or something. Yeah. What's your memory of how the hell we figured out what the price was?
Speaker 2Yeah. I was pitching early pitching and go out and then sell it. And it was really nascent software. And somebody said, okay, I'd like to buy it. How much does it cost? And I said, actually, I don't know. Let me get back to you. So I went back to the office and I was like, what are we going to charge this thing? We honestly really had. Hadn't talked about it. And I think it was our mesh. But it's like, how about 250 a month? I was like, that sounds great. And so it was 250 a month for like five years. You want a price point that either works completely with PLG or works with like a true inside sales model. And 250 a month is no man's land that kind of sits in between that very light touch motion and a little bit of a heavier motion.
Speaker 1It was no man's land. I love what Brian's saying here. I'll couch it in something a little more abstract. And that is be careful raising your prices prematurely. I see it all the time in the boardroom is like, hey, just raise your prices, raise your prices. And you know what? It actually works for the first couple of quarters because you're kind of an early mover. You're kind of the only player right now. But what people don't realize is that by raising prices, you make yourself an easier person to attack. The higher your price, the easier it is for someone to slip under you with a lower price and the same value prop. So if you're going to raise your prices, you better have sustainable defensibility against that. Like literally what I tell people is like, what if five awesome engineers from Google quit, raise $5 million from Sequoia, reverse engineer your entire product and start selling it for half the price? How do you still win? If you don't, you don't have sustainable defensibility. And so that's why I love things like the PLG movement where it's like, yeah, let's raise prices, but not the opening. Instead, let's reframe it as let's raise average contract value for our customers and let's get there through expansion. Let's keep the opening price really low friction. PLG is the extreme version of that, free. And once people see success, once people see value, we expand the price correlated to that value. Brilliant. Let's get back to Brad.
Speaker 2I actually think we picked the ideal worst price point.
Speaker 1I totally agree. It kind of burned us. We tried PLG with a marketing product like two years in, I think we had had a dialogue with Drew Halston going, especially Dharmesh and Dropbox was just starting to take off two years later. And after Austin, like PLG and Dharmesh was like, oh, we have to do that. And he tried the free with a 50 bucks, but it didn't work. Part of it, I think, was because we chose that price point.
Speaker 2I think it didn't work because we designed the product for someone to handhold, who threw the setup. We didn't design it for a touchless.
Speaker 1Amazing. I learned a lot from you and there was a lot of things I talk about you as a leader, a unique leader. And one of those is the willingness to make extremely bold decisions, even as we were further along. 2008, our churn sucked. I think I still have the data. I think in February of 2008, we lost 8% of our customers in that month. I think you're right.
Speaker 2I've got to remember that.
Speaker 1And I was like, well, if we do that every month at the end of the year,
Speaker 2we're going to have 12 left or whatever.
Speaker 1And I was like, okay, but we're still signed up customers. And you're like, we have to change this. And we produced some data that showed that we were selling it wrong, that it was more of the salespeople. And you were like, we got to align the comp plan with the churn. And I just want you to kind of, can you help us get in the head and help founders get in the head of why it's so important to have that mindset?
Speaker 2Okay. What am I saying? If everyone's zigging, you got to zag. And there's been, I think, three points in HubSpot's history where we've gone completely against advice we've been getting and zigged while everyone's a zagginger. I'm going to go backwards. But the first is SMB. We were convinced that the internet disproportionately benefited small businesses relative to large, and that we could build a platform that would help entrepreneurs and turn their startups into scale-ups. And that if they were smart about it, they could really do that. And so we were really committed to that. We were entrepreneurs ourselves. We had been startup people. And everyone except Armesh and I wanted us to move up to the enterprise. And we were like, you know, startups and scale-ups. Every round of venture capital was a frigging dogfight. If we hadn't done that Sequoia deal, we didn't have a backup. But we were like, trust us. The second one was when we made the shift from marketing app to CRM platform. A lot of people thought it was stupid. Investors thought it was stupid. Wall Street didn't get it at all. And the argument was, you know, Salesforce just dominates in here. They have network effects. But we use Salesforce for CRM ourselves. We're like, that's really expensive, really hard. But, you know, it's complicated and you need developers and stuff. Like, it's got to be a better way to do this. That zig worked. And the third one is everyone says, you know, once you get to a certain size, you're a CRM company. It's very simple. You just start acquiring all these apps. You just plug them in. And you build a kind of a Franken system. And Oracle did that to great success. Salesforce has done that to great success. Adobe's playing that. It's just how you do it. I don't know. Developers are really good. They're really productive these days. They get a lot more done. And humans increasingly, particularly end users, want an Apple-like feel to their product. And user experience is going to really matter. So we kind of better ourselves. And we really haven't bought much of anything. And I think you have to be bold with the pivots.
Speaker 1Not only pivoted, but went against the grain of what everyone was saying and smart people. You got to spend some time with Steve Jobs as a student at MIT. Do you remember what you. Learned? What you took away from that and how it influenced HubSpot?
Speaker 2I do. There was one of the best days we had at Sloan. They organized a field trip to San Francisco, which was awesome. And in the morning, we went to Apple. This is like 2005. And then the afternoon, we visited a little tiny startup that no one except for me had heard of called Salesforce.com. Sick. And that morning, we were in the conference room at Apple. I don't know how they were. I don't know how they organized this, but they got Jobs to come speak to us. And I remember Jobs walks in. He's got the turtleneck and the jeans, the whole thing. And he had just come out with the iPod like six months before he was on fire. He walks in and he stands up in front of everyone and he looks over his admin. He's like, F, did this get on my calendar? You know, he's just pissed that he's there. And he looks, he glares down at everyone in the audience. What are you doing here? I kind of sat sideways hoping he wouldn't call on me. And one of my classmates claimed to fame, J.P. Gorski, raised his hand. He said, oh, Mr. Jobs, we're here from the Sloan School of Management and we're studying innovation. And we're so impressed with your track record of innovation, particularly what you did with the iPod. And we're here to learn. And Jobs loved it. He was just like, oh, let's talk about that. And he just melted. And he just started going and spewing and going. And I remember sitting there and he talked about, here's how I thought about the iPod. He said, there's MP3. There's MP3 players out there, but man, they're complicated. You need to be a developer to set them up and get the frigging music sync to it and everything. He's like, we're just going to take the MP3 player. We're going to make a really simple one with one, you know, one button. We're going to create this like jukebox player and it'll be freemium called, we're going to call it iTunes. And then we're going to do contracts with all the record companies. And we're going to make it so you can buy one song at a time because you keep buying these albums, but there's only one song you like in the darn album. So we're going to let you buy a nine. And he's like, it's like one plus one plus. One equals 10. And I remember sitting in the audience like, that's internet marketing. You have to hire an SEO consultant. You have to put in WordPress. You have to hire social media, lose a bunch of social media. You got to put in Google analytics. You got to put in a CRM system working on it. It's like, oh my goodness, like really hard. What if we could pull it all together and do one plus one plus one equals 10. And so that's one of many data points that led to HubSpot. Then that afternoon, so we took the bus up to salesforce.com headquarters. And then. And Benioff walked in, you know, about an hour late. He was great, by the way. Really dynamic. He's telling a story. He's told it a million times. Told pretty well. I had heard a bunch. And then he opened up for questions and nobody. I've raised my, I'm in the front row. I raised my hand like a dork and asked him my first question. He answered it nicely. And then, yeah. Any other questions? No one else. So I asked three or four questions and he's like, all right, what else do you want to talk about? What's your name? Brian. I'm Brian. I said, it sounds like you're trying to move up market and you're trying to move across. More broadly, aren't you afraid you're going to get disrupted from below? Crazy. He said, no, no, no, no, no. We got it covered. We got that covered. Don't, don't even think for a second. That's we got, we got, we own that. And so that was like, filed that away in the back of my head that day. And then that was a big day. That was a big day. No, no, no, no. I remember that the worst thing about that day is Dharmesh wasn't on. I don't know what, what happened, but he wasn't on that trip with us. And so I remember coming back to talk to him. Amazing. These are puzzle pieces.
Speaker 1Not a lot of people know about, and it's really cool to hear it. So many of those like 32 year old founders out there that are having these experiences without knowing it. And I think you've given them the conviction that they're on the right path. So Brian, thank you so much for dropping knowledge on us today. Thanks for having me. We're great to see you. Today's episode is written and produced by Matthew Brown. Our show is edited. Edited by Pizza Shark Productions. Big thanks to HubSpot for Startups and to the HubSpot Podcast Network for keeping the audio on. Hey, also we're a new show. So if you like what you hear, or if you hate what you hear, leave us a rating and review over on your favorite podcast player. I love the feedback. Also check out Stage 2 Capital. We're the first VC firm running back by over 500 CROs, CMOs, CCOs. So if you're an entrepreneur looking to scale your business, check out stage2.capital. All right, that's it for today. I'm Mark Roberge. See you next week.
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