962 Why Hubspot Spent 1000's+ Hours On Pricing
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What is the main focus of HubSpot's pricing strategy?
This is the Top Entrepreneurs Podcast, where founders share how they started their companies and got filthy rich or crash and burn. Each episode features revenue numbers, customer counts, and other insider information that creates business news headlines. We went from a couple of hundred thousand dollars to 2.7 million. I had no money when I started the company.
It was $160 million, which is the size of many IPOs.
We're a bit strapped. We have like 22,000 customers. With over 5 million downloads in a very short amount of time, major outlets like Inc. are calling us the fastest growing business show on iTunes. I'm your host, Nathan Latka, and here's today's episode. Hello, everyone. My guest today is Brian Halligan. He's the co-founder and CEO of HubSpot, and he's co-authored two books, Inbound Marketing, Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs, along with Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead. Recently, he's been writing about how to turn your startup into a scale-up. Top 10 highest-rated CEO by Glassdoor in 2014, 2015, and 2017. He was named an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year in 2011 by Inc., Founders 40 in 2016, and
And Brian is now a senior lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management. His favorite charity is Camp Harbor View. Brian, are you ready to take us to the top?
Yes.
And we have a guest today, Romeo. Pan your camera down real quick. Let's talk to your dog.
How we doing, Rome?
Romeo's excited. All right. Brian, HubSpot. Let's talk everything HubSpot. So I'm going to just jump right in because I think and we'll talk about kind of what you do as you go along. You recently put out a tweet written by, I think, a really great writer, Michael Simmons, about how Zuckerberg and Bezos are optimizing not for 10,000 hours on anything, as Malcolm Gladwell would advocate, but for 10,000 experiments. My question for you is at HubSpot, you have many different things you do, science fairs, things like that, which we'll talk about. But how do you maximize the number of experiments you're doing at any given time and have a decision process in place to quickly pick a winner to implement it?
Okay. I'm going to tell you the truth about that. The reason I tweeted that is I don't think we're nearly good at it and we're not at Amazon level or Facebook level. So I sent that around to all our executives and I tweeted it out to try to motivate the team. Like, let's get better at this. Like, there's a reason Amazon and Facebook are doing so well is they're great at experimenting. And the truth is when we were very small, you know, 10 employees, 20 employees, it was easy to experiment. It gets harder. which is counterintuitive as you get bigger because you have more people and you have more things as more value to experimentation. But man, making those changes gets hard. So I think I would give us a B on experimentation and I want to get to an A plus.
So I tweeted that because it's kind of aspirational for me.
What kinds of... I mean, when you say experiments, people could be thinking, well, is he talking about landing page experiments or whole new business model experiments or pricing experiments? Where do you even aim your experimental firehose at?
Everywhere is the real answer. Of course, landing page and all those growth hacking methods, but... sort of, we have a direct channel and we have an agency channel. How do we experiment with the shape of the organization and the commission plans and the structures to try to get much better alignment between our customers and our agency partners and our direct sales reps and our agency reps? And a lot of the problem as you get bigger is you do these annual planning cycles. And once a year you make big decisions and you may change your go-to-market or change your setup. And it's just too slow. So what we try to do is break up little teams and let them innovate. Often we do this in Australia, actually, because they speak English and it's sort of an isolated place to experiment.
And we try to learn things from them, and if they work, then we apply them to the whole company.
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