Behind The Scenes Of How HubSpot Became A $21 Billion Dollar Company | Brian Halligan

there's a i feel like there's a new opportunity on the internet and i think the playbook is shifting a bit it's much more about how you sell than what you sell increasingly and that didn't know it wasn't always true yeah you can it's 20 years ago you just be really good at salary uh it doesn't work anymore it's not for the faint of heart we made that we made that bed and then it was just a full-on marketing effort oh it's a long side okay i want to hear this i want to hear [Music] this [Music] brian talk to us about how you first came up with the idea for hubspot there ah sort of two aha moments um i had one in my co-founder darmesh ahmad mine was i was working in a um an internship at a venture capital fund and i was working with all these venture-backed startup companies they had lots of money they had lots of expertise and i would ask them you know how are you marketing your products and they all have the same playbook we're gonna uh cold call lots of people we're gonna buy a list and send a lot of emails we're going to do the big trade show advertise and hire the pr firm it just didn't seem to be working well and my thesis was that people had caller id they were blocking the cold calls out they had spam protection they had ad blocker they had dvrs that it was like nearly impossible to market to them and so i was kind of on the negative side while that was happening my co-founder darmesh we were in business school together he simply blogged his way through business school and any time he had an interesting class or an interesting topic or a cheating book he would write walmart he had a thousand times more interest in his crap little blog than any of my the way i kind of thought about the way he was doing it is he was marking in a way that matched the way humans actually lived and worked and shocked like pulling people in from google in social and very clever ways and so we started to describe the world as the old school outbound world and the new school inbound world and started espousing the idea that people had to move from outbound to inbound and then we tried to do it and it was hard you had to put a piece of blog and software and a content management system in email marketing and marketing automation search engine optimization serum it was just a cluster truck of a project to try to get it done and try to get 20 different software to talk to each other and so we just said hey let's build a modern platform for entrepreneurs small business owners so they can get going with this stuff and really grow their business that was the sort of initial spark that started hubspot 13 years so it's kind of like most people are doing the push marketing right and you're thinking well we still try to push our message our products you know to people why don't we pull them in why don't we deliver content uh value up front and then so if you want to learn more they could they could book a time with us right now and here's what was interesting timing-wise about it uh it used to be that if you wanted to market and you wanted to do it on video like you're doing right now well you have to buy an ad on someone else's tv show and like rent space on somebody else's asset or if you want to you know do something audio you rent a little space in someone's radio station or if you wanted to do something written when you rent a little space on someone's newspaper or magazine and you couldn't create your own tv show it was very expensive you couldn't sharpen a radio show you couldn't start your own damn newspaper it's too expensive but the cost of creating your own content through a video cast like this through a podcast or through a blog dropped dramatically so we basically talk to people to become publishers you're really good at publishing content pulling people in from social pulling people on from search and transforming their go to market to match the way people buy i think it's interesting because on the surface when people look at hubspot today they might think oh it's just it's just a software well once i i thought it was just a software but once i get into it it's this business model that's i think it's it's just amazing what you built so share with us a little bit about the journey how did you kind of build it piece by piece was it i could tell that you are your company is very customer-centric right it's very focused much on how do we solve a problem for them and then one problem solved here's another problem then how can we offer solutions to solve their problem so share with us your business model sure um the the the history of upsell is really two acts in our history the first act was this act of inbound marketing and there was an arbitrage opportunity on the internet that still exists but was really big and wide open um 13 years ago it's still there there's a i feel like there's a new opportunity on the internet and i think the playbook is shifting a bit uh on the way small business owners and entrepreneurs really grow big businesses these days and i think some of the things that are shifting under our feet is it used to be really hard to build a product or a service or a piece of software take a long time and there is a deep deep barrier to enter these industries but increasingly it's easier and easier to build a great product of any kind whether you're building a software company a service company a content company um the tools are just more efficient if you're trying to build software for example you've got amazon web services out there you get open source software everything you buy you can buy per month you can use a wework like the cost to start hubspot with millions of dollars the cost to start hubspot today would be tens of thousands of dollars and so uh product advantages today are increasingly short-lived uh they're harder and harder to create a sustainable competitive advantage to me in in i remember business school we had a professor that used to always say if you want to build a great company your product needs to be 10 times better than the competition and sustainably that is incredibly hard to do you may do it for a little while but if you get a good opportunity capitalism is incredibly efficient and one of your listeners is going to figure it out and catch up or at least get close behind them increasingly it seems like it's not about getting to product market fit but getting to experience market fit it's much more about how you sell than what you sell increasingly and so my new bandwagon soapbox whatever you want to call it is the winners in the market have similar products to the incumbents or slightly better products and income it's immaterially better end-to-end experiences for their customers materially better business models than their than their incumbents that seems to be where the the kind of arbitration arbitrage opportunity has but so our second act is yeah we build a marketing system sales system service system content management platform a full end-to-end kind of crm customer experience platform to help people do this modern kind of experience disruption we're assuming they're going to get the product right we want to help them create a gorgeous beautiful and end customer experience and i want to emphasize like myself i'm a client of hubspot right and now we are transitioning a lot of uh of different things to hubspot making a big it's a big switch right and throughout this process and i think that's one of the things that i just have tremendous respect not just for the software not just the tech but from a customer service perspective from a brand perspective because a ceo i look at these things too right where the onboarding process of documentation and everything that you've done it just tells me that the kind of leader that you are and the culture that you built because it's the people right it's not just the the piece of tech like you said anyone can build a piece of tech but like it's something that i just feel like i aspire to be aspire to build a organization like that great it's just a huge huge amount of respect i appreciate that i don't know how much is me versus everybody else doing a good job around here but we are a little bit customer obsessed over here yes and i just don't think you can it used to be dan that like the the relationship between the customer and the vendor the vendor actually had a lot of power the customer couldn't really do a proper evaluation of the product without purchasing it yes um the customer if they weren't happy with it couldn't and they paid for it up front they couldn't just like stop paying like everything subscription now if they weren't happy they couldn't go on social media and complain to everyone and so it used to be the power where the power really was with the vendor and the customer really now the other thing that's flipped is supply and demand i think is flipped for the reasons we were talking about before that in any given industry there used to be three or four maybe five major players in every industry most industries were organized inside an oligopoly type format i don't know an industry today that doesn't have hundreds of competitors like think about razor blades for example you know amazon there's like ten thousand yeah and then that doesn't even include harry's and dollar shave club there's 6 000 marketing software companies out there that's supplying demand away if you're not obsessed with delighting your customer you're it's a good you're going to have a really hard time i think uh if you're not and that didn't know it wasn't always true yeah you could it's 20 years ago you'd just be really good at selling yeah uh it doesn't work anymore in in the beginning of hubspot days uh what what was what were some of the things that you did to kind of get traction because in the beginning it's a new software maybe it's a new concept like inbound marketing what is this right how does this what do you mean you don't cold calling how did you get traction uh okay one of the the first biggest arguments we had inside of hubspot was what to call this thing and some people inside of the early days of hubspot were saying we should call it inbound marketing it's inbound versus outbound okay and other people are saying no one knows what the hell inbound is or outbound is let's call it internet marketing because people will understand that people actually search on internet marketing we can get found and run and we battled that for like a couple of years and finally we decided all right we're betting on this idea of inbound versus outbound and it's not for the faint of heart we made that bed and then it was just a full-on marketing effort to establish inbound as a category in order to do that we wrote a book so you've got thank you my book up there uh i personally wrote hundreds of blog articles about the topic uh i did uh thousands of speaking engagements on the topic we created a conference and we have you know twenty five thousand people came to our internet conference so we really put our back into creating this kind of new category and that uh that paid off i'll tell you another story though dan i remember in the early days of hubspot once a week the whole team five of us or whatever small team would get together and would we count our customers and then every everyone would go through and say the health of the customer are they happy unhappy you know what's going on with these customers and the product was very raw it's nothing like it is today at the time and then we had another column of where we found them and the first 50 customers there was a thing called fob and we showed we showed it to a new employee and and like 47 of the 50 were fob the new employee said what's fob with friend of brian and so 47 of our first 50 customers were you know colleagues of ours and then once we got up over 100 customers very few i i don't have that many friends most of them were pure inbound marketing and almost all of them found us through our blog or through social or through organic search and that was customer 100 to 65 000 that's the case and in in some way that's kind of what you guys have done is being the pioneer of education marketing right you educate first and then uh you get them on the phone it's very interesting even as i we're using hubspot i was talking with my team and saying hey you know do you think hubspot has this feature like i was thinking about something right yup they got there whatever what about this thing they got that too oh what about this thing i want to do no they got that so i'm like like everything is so well thought out right it's like oh yeah they have that like i didn't even know because before the solutions we have as we grew so rapidly it's this software but it doesn't have all the functions i needed how many people do you have right now 50. yeah we built it for companies between five and 500 employees you're like perfect for yes and then we have like a couple hundred sales um closers that we train that closing for us congratulations by the way it's not easy it's not like people make it to that uh you're doing something very right and you get [Laughter] what do you got here that's actually my last name l okay oh i see okay yes and you're from hong kong or guangzhou or hong kong i lived in hong kong for five years five years yes that does that little bit of cantonese [Laughter] that's awesome that's awesome so let me let me ask you this so with the even with what i do i when i i launched my my sales training program right high tech closing program um just kind of like what you did i go in the marketplace and say okay everybody else is talking about cold call and talk to people why don't i create a program that teaches me how to close on the phone but inbound right and that's how the program was born and now transition to closers.com that we have this this platform and and so with your experience what are some of the the mistakes like during this journey when you're growing hubspot i'm sure like we all make a lot of mistakes like some of the mistakes and how did you overcome those mistakes and how did those mistakes become a turning point like i'm still making them unfortunately we're still making them um here's my attitude towards mistakes i'm actually okay with people in my org and even myself making mistakes and i'm very forgiving of it where i get really irritated with myself in the org is when we make the same mistake twice which we've actually done a lot it's hard as you scale it's hard not to make mistakes i'll give you give you an example like this year um you know we've got about 3000 employees we hired about i don't know 800 ish i can't remember the number but a large number of employees two years ago we had to hire a large number of boys we fell behind on hiring when you fall behind on hiring it slows your revenue down it particularly hurts you if you fall behind in hiring let's say customer support because you're signing up lots of customers with your sales reps and your marketing but you don't have enough customer support people and the problem with that is when your customer support falls behind then your wait time increases and if your wait time increases on a telephone call when people get irritated two they complain about you three they call your sales reps your sales shop's not selling you know they're made they're doing crappy support and so we have made that mistake a couple times and in the thing what we try to do that helps us not make the same mistake twice most of the time is when we make a mistake then we look at all right we figured out the mistake on march 1st what do we if we were looking at a certain piece of data on january 1st could we have found out early and so i have a powerpoint deck that's google slides deck that i get once a month and there's about 100 slides in there that i can zip through and i can look at every slide and say oh i remember why we made that slide it's because we fell behind on hiring and support and that caused all these other problems and we wish we had tracked support interviews or whatever it would be before that so we had a leading indicator of it so we're pretty good about okay we made a mistake let's try not to make a mistake how do we prevent making this sick well usually it's looking at data the thing about mistakes as you get bigger is there's unintended consequences like i was just talking about like we fell behind on on hiring and support and it had unintended consequences that our net promoter score fell for a while and then our new sales productivity was low because our sales reps are doing support and so it's oftentimes there's these ripples through the organization that are unintended and do you find that your how would you describe your leadership style maybe in the beginning of the startup to like to today i would say like as a founder and a startup versus a scale-up your greatest strength in a in a founding ceo oftentimes is you're kind of a control freak you like to make decisions control yep right that turns into your greatest weakness as you get bigger it turns out um as you're scaling people don't want you making all the decisions they want a little leeway and they want you to have oversight and so one of my big mistakes is i it took me too long to transition out of that role of being micromanager making every decisions and too long before i felt comfortable just hiring great people and trusting them and delegating them and i still struggle with it i still definitely still try i just got out of a meeting where people are bringing that decision to me and i should have been like you guys decide you know i'm not comfortable with making this decision anymore and so i i think one of the reasons companies so few companies go from five employees to 50 to 500 to 5 000 is the great strengths of the founder that got them to 50 or 500 turned into kryptonite and was the thing that prevented them to get to 5050 very very true and did you make any what changes did you make in terms of when you grow from let's say a million to 10 and 10 to 100 within the organization if your leadership uh the leadership organization the only i remember the leadership team we hired so we kind of came out of mit and we hired a bunch of mit alums and people who went to school with who were what's smart and and was kind of the same core leadership team from 10 employees to i would say 200. and i thought we would have them all the way everyone said oh you're going to turn them over you have a new team and i said no no no we have the right teams going to scale we turned over pretty much all of that team around between 100 and 500 employees they all either left or were pushed out and the interesting thing is there's nothing wrong with them per se they just are more startupy and then most of them went just to found startups so so so many of the ex hubspot early leadership team are founders of their own company and then we brought in another wave around a couple hundred employees and we're kind of on our third wave we've got a new cfo now we're hiring a new chief customer officer so we're on kind of our third wave of leadership as we've gone it's like tens of employees hundreds of employees thousands of employees waves so basically the the the executive team that you had in the beginning what what got you here won't get you there it's not the same team right that you started with it's a little sad but at least for us that's been the case the only the only people left from the founding from that like if you look at how many of the executives in the company that we have 20 employees versus today it's just my co-founder and i um lots of people still here from niagara but like the head of services had a sales head of all the departments it's all good right and in touch with them they're all that's about customers and they're great and they're doing startups they just didn't like the big company thing is is it too corporate they feel like i guess it moves fast enough uh they didn't really like managing big teams and going to weekly meetings how do you manage like what's your day-to-day like okay i have a couple weird things about my schedule i spend a day a week working from home okay um and i don't take any calls or zoom meetings or anything it's my day to think and work on like projects yes then a day like today so i'm having one of those days down where just before i walked in here in another meeting and just after i be very good at other meetings and they're back to back and then tonight i'm having an event for my top 30 sales reps at my house and their spouses is gonna be great okay that's one of those days and there's no time like some of the things that come across the transom aren't just quick email response they're like i gotta think about that or talk to people um and so my my day off wednesdays is my project day that helps a lot a lot and also my like it helps just get real thinking and work and strategic stuff done projects it also helps i think to get a day away from you know to being around humans takes energy it's you're super extroverted so you don't feel this but i'm a little i'm kind of in between and i get tired when i'm around humans for like five straight days like it wears me out and so that break from humans helps a lot that helps a lot um yeah i uh what another thing on my day to day that i try not to do is live by my inbox so a couple times a week i'll go and make a to-do list and rank order of the most important to the least important and when i do that then i'm i'm pushing out of my inbox versus dealing with all my inbox like if my inbox is great but it's everyone else's to-do list imposed on me well what about my to-do list i want to post that's right that's right i'm pretty harsh about the prioritization of the stuff i'm doing and not doing in any given week or month and i publish that on our company wiki so people know that it's important so if something comes in in the transom for someone's asking me to do it and it's like kind of a pain in the neck to do i just feel like you know it's not my priority list i just can't do it right now and i can point them at my priority list so that that that's a little hack that's helped me um i've worked about 55 hours a week since the founding of hubspot kind of the same okay okay and and how do you uh what kpis you look at or do you have a a a a weekly meeting with your executive team like how do you manage uh we have uh well we have daily charts on how everything's going so i know really every day on what's going on yeah and then we have a monthly powerpoint deck that comes out that i can know what's going on uh that's very helpful we run the kind of monthly cadence um in terms of the meeting schedule i don't particularly like the the like one-on-one check-in meetings um i do them and i don't like them where we get a lot done is we have something called the hubspot executive leadership team helm and there's like 12 13 people on it and we get together twice a month first week of the month or week of the month for like three hours so they're long meetings they're not like staff meetings the first one is operational the second one is all about customers we only talk about customers we have customers come in and talk to us we just it's three hours of the whole team obsessing about the customers i'll say another thing that we've got in the habit of doing is in a couple things that as you move from startup to scale up that become important important is just planning and decision making and so my decision-making style when we were early on was maybe we're in a meeting and there's six of us here dan i have four others and three of you are on three of you say red and four and three of you say uh blue and we have a rich debate about the topic and for whatever reason i'm convinced a little bit that the the the red is right and so we're doing red and then what happens when i'll leave the room and the next day one of the blue people will come say hey let's grab coffee and have coffee and he was like i think he messed up with that red decision i think i think it's really blue was right and i'd be weak and he would convince me or she would convince me and then an email i changed my mind it's not red it's blue and when you're small it doesn't really matter because like it doesn't mess up lives when you do that per se but when you're big changing your mind is incredibly expensive you get all these i.t resources and comp plans and all the stuff tied up in to it and so i've almost never changed my mind it takes me longer to make a decision so we're in that debate red versus blue if it's not clear to me at the end of it i just say we gotta meet again and then when i decide it's red somebody will look at me and say well you're sailing the ship on it and that's what we call it sailing not nautical helm metaphors whatever and i would say yes for selling a ship and then that means two things one they can't lobby me and two even if they didn't agree with the decision they have to let you commit they got to do it i know you didn't agree you got to do it i don't care do it uh that that was a big cultural shift that's really worked uh for me personally and for my teams kind of like a thing slow but act fast i never read that book but maybe i heard that yeah that makes sense that makes sense so it's because each decision now affects as a dominant effect affects so many people right and it's it's almost like before it's a little speedboat we can't we can navigate right now we've got this bow cruise with 3 000 people on it when we want to change course is a big slow thing right yes that's how i see it as well that's incredible uh before i'll tell you another one related topic dan um another thing we've had to get good at is annual planning and so okay uh the way we kind of work is we have a big conference in in september our inbound conference and after that conference is like the most exciting part of the year is right now actually between uh september and december it's the september november where it's like any crazy idea is on the table of where we can take the company and what's where different things you can do then by the end of november we decided all right this is this is the plan for next year and we typically outline four big plays the company will do and then we'll outline here here are the things we'll track to see if we're on track and then there's the other 40 things that we decide not to do and that's been a key for us is what are we doing and what are we not doing not doing it not revisiting it that reduces the thrash inside the organization it gets people kind of focused on it so then january 1 we're cranking on those four we have our inbound conference and then we revisit everything that cadence has helped us that's incredible so when you when you decide something you're not going to do you just this is this is it we're not going to no one can bring it out don't even bring it up don't want to hear about it we decided we're not doing it we're not doing it i want to hear it talk to talk to me about it after events ask and how do you find how has the event helped the entire like organization in terms of branding and getting a message out there i don't think that's helped us with branding and getting the message out it's just got the organization a little it's got all 3 000 people lined up behind a few things i'll tell you i'll tell you an interesting story so uh i went to a talk once by elon musk the um tesla founder and somebody asked him about scale maybe he's not the best person to ask about this maybe he is whenever you're opening elon musk he had an interesting answer he he described an organization as a set of vectors and in physics a vector is a force going in a certain direction and a vector has a force how how how much force is behind it and it has a direction on it and some people have more force than others like some people are higher impact than others but there's one direction and he said if you really want to get stuff done you need to get all of your vectors pointing in the same direction if you've got some vectors pointing that way and some vectors pointing that way and some vectors pointing this way you kind of limp along when you get them all pointing the direction you can move very quickly i don't know if he takes his own advice on that or not but i thought it was good advice and i try to follow it that's that's powerful that's powerful and from what i see and this is just like you see some of these i think a personal question for me um the way i look at hubspot which i think that's where the similarities are the same thinking that you're we're not just thinking about selling a product right let's say within my organization from one thing my whole goal is build an ecosystem so everything is one thing is stronger another thing is stronger otherwise i would just have let's say the education division but why do i have the closest.com the software and then all these other things that we have because it's like a one thing least another it's like almost a horizontal as well as a vertical integration if that makes sense like what's your point of view it's similar like we're trying to solve the entire solution for our customers of how do they grow and so we have a suite of our own applications we built sales marketing service website stuff like that um and then we surround that with there's about another 400 other applications out there that could plug in whether that's surveymonkey or eventbrite or you name the other third party application and we made it easy for them to plug into hubspot so we can leverage all that stuff so we have sort of this our suite and then an application ecosystem around us then i think of like on the other side that we have these agency partners so we have about 4 000 of these agencies that will go in and they create content for you they can do seo for you create your automation for you create your website for you so we're kind of similar and and i think there's this one plus one plus one equals i don't know if it's ten but there's a multiplicative effect if you think about like a flywheel the faster our customer flywheel spins the happier our customers are the more customers we have the faster that spins that makes our application marketplace bigger like it's more attractive for them to build an integration in our marketplace the bigger we are and better quality integrations yes same thing for agency partners the more customers we have the more of those agency partners so it's like i think it was like this up spot center flywheel is getting bigger and then application flywheel and then that partner flywheel and so they're all kind of together similar to yours yeah and the agency partner also helps to promote hubspot too it's it's like they get certified it's just it helps you get all your customers you know promoting you and then they become more successful because then in terms they'll hire them to do the integration they build the website right exactly that's beautiful for entrepreneurs let's say because i could see you do the same thing where you're creating content we're creating uh value creating we're creating even a lot of attention in the marketplace right you're a thought leader you speak you write like for entrepreneurs let's say someone who is maybe getting started maybe you know doing less than a million dollars in revenue they're very busy they're doing a lot of different things yeah and they say hey brian why do i need to spend time you know writing and publishing doing blogs why do i need to do that why can't i just do my thing like why is that important well if you want to grow you got to pull people into your business you got to pull visitors and leads and customers and i just don't think the way to do it is the old school cold calling no one answers the phone anywhere more or spamming people no one answers the spam even ads are getting blocked a lot uh i think the right way to do it is become a thought leader in your industry be the world's best at whatever your little niche is and i don't care if it's blog content or you create a video like this uh series or a blog pass series or whatever kind of series you want but create remarkable content in your niche and make it like a magnet that pulls people in that's the way you market today whether you like it or not you got to figure it out yeah yeah and one of the things i teach all my students i say when you when you call someone you're the salesperson when they call you you're the expert if you can have them call you you have much more power when you're talking i like that i'm gonna borrow that i like that do it do it yeah it's very very true because when you it's like one of the things i teach them to say on the phone let's say in the beginning what caused the agenda i say so what were you hoping to get from me today well you can't say that when you're calling somebody yes are you getting caught up hey what do you want to get from me today it doesn't work right but it's always teaching them to have that doctor kind of frame right when someone comes to the office and say okay when someone calls you you know what kind of solutions they're looking for what are their ping points right it changes everything and that's how you get the hi it's i think for entrepreneurs when i work with entrepreneurs they feel like well it's easier if i just go outbound and cold call it feels easier it costs less but you and i both know that simply that's not true if people don't answer the phone i don't even have a phone at my desk anymore and it creates a bad i don't know it's a bad way to start it yeah and it's so it's hard like cold calling is like the hardest thing to do it's painful yeah yeah and i also feel that the way it's not just how how we sell it but the way that they were brought in to the to the company the product service is very critical if you cold call someone and then that you are like you you got to twist their arms your heart close them and say okay fine they reluctantly sign and now they're like okay so show me show me what you got right it's like very skeptical versus now they they've been consuming your content been watching the videos listening to podcasts they're happy finally they get to talk to someone yeah and then by the time they join they sign up they they're looking forward to okay what can we do right it changes everything the testimonials the results i mean it changes everything right with your vision now some might say i'm just who just is your biggest competitor i think our biggest competitor is people who put together a whole bunch of little point solutions together they buy a website from one company and then they hire fto consultant and they actually get their social media tools and crm and like it gets scary and complicated and hard i thought i thought you would say salesforce i'm i'm surprised that would be my number two like number one is like gluing all this little stuff together number two is salesforce for sure we can meet with both we can be people yes but i do think there's plenty of competition out there no matter what industry you're in there's plenty of competition right by the way we're getting big 3 000 people what not their products great whatever we got to be on top of our name like i can't i can't mail it in for if i at all like i have to be on my toes engaging in the marketplace or we will get crushed by the competition they they don't the competitors don't wrap salesforce great company these point solution companies great companies it could be a little uh a different version of the hot spot a group of young people innovative right totally yeah you got to stay on top of your toes where do you see hubspot in the next let's say three years what's your vision yeah i think we have this sweet strategy to help people grow that suite is really powerful it's going to get much more powerful and there's kind of a few likes to that suite we'll add some applications to that suite that will add even more value that flywheel of application partners is 400 yeah there'll be a lot more of those as we open up more apis and make it easier for us to do business with those agency partners that will open up and be much richer and much easier to find there'll be a great marketplace for that and so we move from being what a lot of people would describe as an application software company to be much more of a platform partner for our customers they just come to us and they care about well just any group topic we'll take care take care of it through our lab it's almost like going to a buffet right okay if you like steak you can have steak you like seafood we've got that cover you've got a dessert oh you can have it all right that's okay too yeah then it's okay you come in the hubspot for whatever reason you don't like our sales application you'd rather use salesforce.com great plug it all in just make it really easy and and make it people don't want a bunch of our complicated stuff they want it to be reasonably priced and they want it to be easy there's a very much a consumer consumerization of the products people use and a consumerization of the business model people use so more and more of our business starts with people start with our free version and their free version does a lot like an entrepreneur you have two people yep don't pay for us but come and use the free one and if you grow and you need to pay for stuff you'll figure that out later but i think this is consumerization that to me shows the belief that you have for the products to say you know what test our products let us let us get some results for you and if you make more money generate more revenue we know you're going to upgrade and get our other plans it's like a no-brainer you're already using a software right i love it i love how do you view social media oh it's alongside okay i want to hear this i want to hear this it's disappointing and what's happened um i was just very very early adopter of social media very early on linkedin and twitter and whatnot and it's unfortunate how their business models have evolved and how the tone of the conversation on these platforms has changed and how the unintended consequences it's too bad um yeah it's too bad having said that as a marketer uh it's undeniable but even with all the bad stuff going on in social media that's where people let people live in instagram they live in facebook they live in twitter they live in snapchat all these different systems and so whether you are a big social media fan or not you need to figure out how to create content and get it to spread and resonate in social media because that's where people spend their lives so we are very cognizant of the way we leverage instagram the way we leverage facebook and twitter and all these social media platforms we are super active in there and they are fantastic lead generation platforms and fantastic brand platforms like it is a major important way you need to market social in search a lot of people spend a lot of time and energy talking about pay-per-click in google and pay-per-click works it's expensive but it works google organic still works it's super underrated people don't talk about search engine optimization as much but we get you know nine million visitors a month organically from google it just works we create great content it's worthy of acquiring links through it people will link to it and you'll get found in google that's the gift that keeps on giving your success in those platforms is much more about the width of your brain than the width of your wallet that's what i like about social inserts you don't need a ton of money if you're an entrepreneur and it's five of you and getting going you can get good at it uh boy that's a that's a that's a good way to generate customers and leads i love it so for my audience if they want to get started with hubspot or even just get an idea what do you recommend of course the book that's simple oh i would just go to hubspot.com and click the free button and start using it you can set up you can see your whole damn front office system up through hubspot you can do you can run if there's two of you you can run your whole front office through hubspot your website your crm your marketing automation your service everything through hubspot it's free just go to com yeah if you want to read the book that's fine i wrote that book a while ago by the way so things have changed a bit since i wrote it i would i would more say just go get it set up on hubspot it's easy even even in hubspot there there's so much training like it's yes it is yes it's incredible university in there incredible it's not just how to use the software i'm not talking about how to use the software it's information on sales on inbound on marketing there is so much and it's all free yeah it's all free you're listening to me it's all free it's it's really incredible well brian thank you so much for being on the show i i learned a lot i think i want my executive team to watch this because they're like a number of golden nuggets i think we can apply immediately thank you very much i appreciate your inviting me on thank you very much i look forward to you know working together you know forming a strategic alliance i think it would be fantastic that'd be great pleasure pleasure chatting dan thank you

Channel: The Dan Lok Show

Views: 3,913

Keywords: dan, dan lok, the dan lok show, Behind The Scenes of How Hubspot Became A $21 Billion Dollar Company | Brian Halligan, billion dollar company, billion dollar company ideas, billion dollar company shark tank, how to build a billion dollar company, how to start a billion dollar company, running a billion dollar company, brian halligan, multi billion dollar companies, hubspot, hubspot email marketing, hubspot marketing, hubspot marketing automation, hubspot overview

Id: dwzYWGrq6xs

Length: 43min 6sec (2586 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 18 2021