Near Death Accidents and Hitting $1B ARR with Brian Halligan, Founder and Exec Chairman of HubSpot
Inbound Marketing, Grateful Dead, and Near-Death Experiences - October 14, 2021 (over 3 years ago) • 01:03:06
Transcript:
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Sam Parr | This is kind of like a movie, right? So, a guy builds a huge tech company, becomes a billionaire, has a life-changing accident that changes everything, gives it all up, explores the world, and becomes like a monk. You've never met Sean, right?
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Brian Halligan | no if you say something you | |
Shaan Puri | don't like you could just fire sam and that pretty much takes care of the whole thing | |
Sam Parr | I love that | |
Brian Halligan | I've always wanted to fire sam | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah, exactly. And okay, so you listened to the first episode or just a random episode? I rip.
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Brian Halligan | I rip through a couple of little random things. Okay, so sorry about the Wright brothers and some random stuff.
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Shaan Puri | Okay, and from that random stumble, describe what you heard. What kind of podcast is this?
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Brian Halligan | It's a podcast for entrepreneurs to get inspiration and ideas.
Yeah, it sounds like it. By the way, I'm not being condescending; I thought it sounded great. What I heard sounded great—kind of like something I would listen to.
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Shaan Puri | But that's what I was going to ask you. You know, is this something you would have done earlier in your entrepreneurial career?
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Brian Halligan | yes | |
Shaan Puri | Because now, you know, you're Mr. "I've made it." You don't need that inspirational juice anymore... or maybe you do. I don't know. | |
Brian Halligan | you ain't never enough never enough inspirational juice | |
Sam Parr | look he doesn't listen to podcasts like ours sean he just buys them | |
Shaan Puri | yeah most people listen I purchase | |
Brian Halligan | So, one thing we... I don't know what you plan on talking about, but one thing we could discuss that might be interesting is my snowmobile accident.
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Sam Parr | Yeah, so we're live now. We're recording now, so yes, we can do it.
What I'll do is ask you about that. I want to know about that, and then we're also going to talk about some different business ideas. I've got a few that I want to ask your opinion on.
So, let me do that.
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Shaan Puri | This is a super short intro. This is Brian Halligan. He was the CEO of HubSpot and is now the Chairman or Executive Chairman, or something very fancy like that.
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Brian Halligan | something fancy like that yes | |
Shaan Puri | alright cool | |
Sam Parr | And you, you basically... like, I think it was about 2 weeks. So, basically, HubSpot bought The Hustle of my company, and like 2 weeks after, you got into a really bad accident, right?
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Shaan Puri | yeah | |
Sam Parr | and you like broke like dozen a dozen bones or I mean it was pretty serious | |
Brian Halligan | yeah I | |
Sam Parr | I was like, "I hope Ryan's okay." But also, I was thinking, if this deal had happened like two weeks before the deal closed, I wonder if that would have changed anything.
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Brian Halligan | Yeah, because I was a big proponent of the deal. I was really happy we did it. I'll tell you the whole story. I'm just going to go... I was snowmobiling up in Vermont with my son, Luke, and...
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Shaan Puri | we were we were right you know we're we're right | |
Brian Halligan | In the middle of nowhere, right square in the middle of nowhere, we were cruising along. He was cruising along, and I asked him to slow down. He just kind of got confused between the gas and the brake. He jammed his finger on the gas and panicked a little bit.
We basically flew off a cliff and landed on a tree. Wow! I don't remember; neither of us actually does. He's 17, and neither of us remembers the accident at all. We were both passed out before we hit the tree and passed out after.
So, we're both lying there in the snow, passed out. I wake up first, wake him up, and we are banged up. It's like a cartoon; our arms and legs are a mess. I thought, "This is it. It's 4:30 in the afternoon, it's freezing cold, we're in the middle of nowhere, and no one knows where we are. We're gonna die tonight."
I reached into my pocket and grabbed my phone, thinking there's no way there's a signal. I had enough signal! I called 9... I never called 911 in my whole life. When I called, she picked up. I roughly described where we were, right square in the middle of nowhere.
Then they called in the troops. The troops in Vermont are volunteer firefighters; they're not professional EMTs and ambulances and stuff. It took them about an hour.
One interesting thing that happened is that the one guy who found us came from below us. He marched up the hill, yelling for us, and we were yelling back. When he finally got to us, he started to ask those questions. He said, "Wait, are you Brian Halligan?" I said, "Yeah." He said, "Hey, I'm Joey. I'm the guy who plows your driveway."
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Shaan Puri | oh wow | |
Brian Halligan | I was like, "That's a volunteer firefighter, and they are badasses." These volunteer firefighters strapped us to sleds and pulled us straight up out of the ravine back onto the trails. Then, they helicoptered us to the hospital.
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Shaan Puri | when you're laying there are you just in an incredible amount of pain what's | |
Brian Halligan | broken incredible amount of pain | |
Shaan Puri | what what did what broke what what was broken on your body | |
Brian Halligan | I broke like 12 or 13 bones. I could show the pictures, but my left knee, my tibia, and my femur broke. My right wrist broke, my left elbow was trashed, and my left shoulder was trashed as well. I already had a lot of loose screws up top, and now those screws are getting looser.
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Sam Parr | well just like you had like a concussion or something | |
Brian Halligan | yeah I had a concussion | |
Sam Parr | and your son | |
Brian Halligan | I broke my my I hit the tree so hard it broke my helmet | |
Sam Parr | oh my god and your what about your son | |
Brian Halligan | He was banged up too. He broke his femur, which is a terrible bone to break. He also broke his knee and got a concussion. So, he was banged up. Then you had to like... you.
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Sam Parr | had to cut him out of the wheel I mean after | |
Shaan Puri | the after this accident | |
Brian Halligan | He's doing great. I mean, he's 17, so he bounced back fast. He was at soccer practice today and stuff. So yeah, I was just taking care. He really bounced back. I'm... you're.
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Shaan Puri | Sitting... you're sitting in this chair. It looks like you're not in a wheelchair.
No, no, no, no. I was in a wheelchair for three...
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Brian Halligan | And a half months though, I think a good long chunk. I can walk, I can drive, I can do like a light hike. My brain is 100%. I'm fine. I think my brain's actually better.
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Shaan Puri | And what percentage of you, you know, sort of attributes this to the hustle? The deal, the timing... it's coincidental. I mean...
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Brian Halligan | it was the adrenaline from the hustle deal not the whole whole thing | |
Sam Parr | You know, like, so basically, I don't know. HubSpot, at this point, is like a... maybe I forget the market cap today, but it's in the $30 billion range. Revenue is north of $1 billion, with employees at like 2,500 or 3,000. So, we're talking about a really big company.
You had been the CEO from the beginning, and after this accident, you removed yourself and replaced yourself. Now you're the executive chairman. Did the accident, when you were having this near-death moment, make you think, "What am I doing with my life?" Was it like a crisis? Or was it something different when you were done recovering?
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Brian Halligan | It's a perfect question. Lying there in the snow, thinking I was going to die, I thought to myself, "How is your life? Are you proud of it? Are you enjoying your life?"
As I reflected on it a second time, I asked myself, "If you live, what do you want to change about your life?" It was sort of a reset button for me.
Over time, as I look back at the accident, it may be the best thing that ever happened to me because I made a lot of life changes since then.
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Sam Parr | like what | |
Shaan Puri | what what what sorts of changes yeah | |
Brian Halligan | I broke up with my girlfriend of a couple of years. You know, my whole life was HubSpot. I really didn't spend any time on any other causes; I'd just write a check.
So, I went on a kind of broad search for a cause that I could put my energy and some cash into. I found one that I fell in love with. It's called the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. It's like the Harvard of the ocean.
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Sam Parr | I've I've hung out there a bit right next to coffee obsession the coffee shop down there | |
Brian Halligan | Exactly, exactly. What got me about the institute, besides the fact that I live near it and knew nothing about it despite living near it for 10 years, was the blatant optimism among the scientists regarding their ability to slow and reverse climate change by leveraging the ocean in a sustainable way.
It really caught me by surprise as I was walking the halls and getting to know them. There's a lot of optimism, and there's a lot of stuff in the lab that they think can scale on a global level. So, I picked them, and I'm on their board. I'm doing a lot with them these days, and that's been very exciting.
So yeah, I've done a lot of different stuff. I used to work out sort of casually every day, getting my heart rate up into the 160s. I'm not screwing around anymore. I want to live a long, healthy life. I'm 54, and I'd like to live a long, healthy life. I don't want to be an old man when I'm 70; I want to be a very vibrant 70-year-old. | |
Sam Parr | What have you been reading since your accident? Did it put you down this different path of learning? Are you like, "Okay, I want to explore this path," or this spiritual thing, or this giving thing? I don't know, like a different trajectory.
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Brian Halligan | Initially, it was like, "Lock yourself in a room, keep it dark, and don't read or see anything." When you've got a... | |
Sam Parr | concussion yeah | |
Brian Halligan | Yeah, I read random stuff, but I'll tell you one thing that surprised me. When you have a concussion, like I did, I had a neurosurgeon helping me, a shrink helping me, and even a shaman come and visit me. I had all kinds of people consulting me on how to recover from a concussion. From the neurosurgeon to the shaman, they all said to do one thing. What do you think that thing is?
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Shaan Puri | sleep | |
Brian Halligan | Meditate, meditate, meditate. Yeah, they all were just like, "You gotta meditate. That's the way you're gonna get through it." And then what I... what the... were you?
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Shaan Puri | a meditator before | |
Brian Halligan | I was not... I never really meditated, or I tried, and I was just so bad at it that I gave up.
So, yeah, I'm a pretty big meditator these days. I'm just looking right here at the books I'm reading. One of the books is *Becoming Supernatural*. I'm not sure about it yet; I'm only through chapter 1, but it's basically a meditation book.
I'm taking a class on Vedic meditation next week because I want to get better at it. It just seems like it unlocks a lot.
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Sam Parr | This is... it's kind of like a movie, right? So, like, a guy builds a huge tech company, becomes a billionaire, has a life-changing accident that changes everything, gives it all up, explores the world, and becomes like...
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Shaan Puri | a it saves saves the action starts to get into this and starts to meditate | |
Sam Parr | But I will... like, yeah, this is like a movie, right? This is how it's... | |
Shaan Puri | gonna happen | |
Brian Halligan | That could become... The other thing I would say is I'm still involved with HubSpot. So, I'm still, like, today I've had four HubSpot calls. I'm very much engaged with HubSpot; I'm just not engaged in stuff I don't like to do.
I don't like doing one-on-ones with people, doing performance reviews, and talking about their salary and stuff like that. I really... I'm not great at it. But I'm able to work on the product stuff and the vision stuff—the stuff that really motivates me.
So, it's really worked out, but I'm still very busy with the HubSpot stuff.
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Shaan Puri | And I always wondered this. When I was at Twitch, Emmett is the CEO; he was the original founder, right? So, Tay's like 10 years in. He basically went from starting the thing with 2 or 3 buddies to having 2,000 employees and millions and millions of users.
For a long time, his thing was like, "Yeah, I'm not the professional CEO manager type. I'll get coaching so that I'm not awful at it." Yep, but you know, I'm great with product and growth.
There was this perpetual candidate search for a Chief Product Officer that somehow was never getting filled. It's like everyone knew it was because Emmett loves to do it and he's great at it. We had a little...
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Brian Halligan | I had a little of this yeah yeah | |
Shaan Puri | So, I think it's pretty common for this to happen where the CEO is like, "Well, that's the thing. Don't take away the one thing I like," when the rest of it is just firefighting and politics. You know, I'm not super into that bit.
Eventually, I found somebody who was a really good product leader and a general leader. Over that year, I saw that person take more of that role. Then I was like, "Alright, Emmett, what are you going to do now?" He was like, "I'm going to work on the vision and the long-term strategy."
I was like, "Yeah, but when you wake up, what do you do? Do you just sit there and think about the vision?" Right? It's such a weird question. What do you do day to day? I never really understood what that meant. So, when you say, "I think I would work on the vision and strategy," when you wake up, what the heck do you do?
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Brian Halligan | Okay, so today there was a bunch of emails back and forth between Dharmesh and me about what HubSpot looked like 5 years from now. So, literally, I woke up thinking about exactly that. Right? Turns... | |
Sam Parr | You're doing long-form writing, so you're just writing out. You guys are basically having an email brainstorming session.
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Brian Halligan | Yeah, it wasn't even that long-form. It was just emails back and forth about different product ideas in different areas we could go into.
Then I read a lot, and you guys probably saw that Amazon came out with like a billion new products yesterday that looked kind of interesting, actually. It's just amazing how much new stuff they had and how well it tied together.
I think that started the thread like, "Holy crap, it's a lot of innovation coming out of that company." And yeah, there's a lot of R&D in there, but it's amazing the amount of innovation coming out of there, and I think that sort of started it.
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Shaan Puri | By the way, did you see this Infinidash thing that came from Amazon? Did you guys see this?
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Sam Parr | no what is it | |
Shaan Puri | So, AWS, or Amazon, launches all these different products. Somebody said, basically on Twitter, "Oh my God, you know, AWS Infinidash looks like a game changer."
I think Werner Vogels, who's one of their CTO types, tweeted out something like, "At the Infinidash event tonight, blah blah blah, celebrating..."
And it's a fake product; there is no product called Infinidash. It wasn't just a meme, but people started kind of memeing it into existence.
Someone immediately responded, "I'm buying open.io so I don't get locked into AWS as an open-source alternative to Infinidash."
Then Signal, the big messaging app that has like 50 million users, was like, "We're hiring an engineer with an emphasis on Infinidash lifecycle management."
There are even YouTube videos of Infinidash demos, and people are saying, "I'm an Infinidash consultant." It just took on a life of its own. If you knew it was fake, you knew, but everybody kind of played the part.
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Brian Halligan | that's awesome a whole bunch | |
Shaan Puri | of people thought it was real | |
Brian Halligan | that's awesome that's awesome | |
Sam Parr | Brian, I saw this graph. I think it was from Darmesh at a talk at SaaStr, and the graph was pretty amazing. It was like maybe HubSpot's first five years of revenue. I'm almost positive—I was trying to read the graph, but it wasn't all marked out clearly. However, I'm almost positive it said something like in year three, you already have about $6,000,000 in ARR. Is that accurate?
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Brian Halligan | I doubt it | |
Shaan Puri | it's too | |
Sam Parr | too low or too high | |
Brian Halligan | And it was too high, too high. I would say the thing about SaaS businesses that's fascinating is it takes you approximately forever to get to $5,000,000 in ARR. But once you get to $50,000,000, it's like bam, you know? It's tomorrow.
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Sam Parr | well that's what I thought but like | |
Brian Halligan | It took us a long... No, no, I think you're misreading that graph. It took us a long time to get to 5,000,000 in ARR. It took us a long time to get to a million.
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Sam Parr | how long did it take | |
Brian Halligan | I forget, but we had a lot of churn. We've transitioned into a product-centric company, a design-centric company, and a customer-centric company. However, it took us a long time to get there.
We had lots of customers coming in, but we also had a lot of churn in those early days, which was eating away at our growth. It felt like forever to get to a million. I remember it took a long time to reach 10 million, and then all of a sudden, bam! A hundred million. Then bam! Two hundred million. You know, it started happening fast.
Even now, we reached a billion, and it's starting to happen really fast now.
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Sam Parr | and well and and like your first there was like the joke was like but | |
Brian Halligan | No, I actually disagree with you. I think you... I think Dharmesh maybe squished that graph a little bit.
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Shaan Puri | yeah I I I | |
Sam Parr | I could have read it wrong, but for some reason I was like, "Wait, they hit something. They hit like 15 or something."
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Shaan Puri | didn't break any records | |
Brian Halligan | on that shit well and | |
Sam Parr |
And he made a joke. He was like, "The first five people in the team were like Brian, who was an MBA salesperson, and then like another marketing guy, another salesperson, and then another operations person, and then me who was a technical person and I actually had to build the thing."
They're like, "This combination is a horrible combination for an early team." Yet somehow, it kinda worked.
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Brian Halligan | I actually think his... On that, the early team was a bunch of people we knew from Sloan, where we got our MBAs. They were people we thought were super sharp. We started them as contractors, then we hired them. In a lot of ways, that was good, and in a lot of ways, that was bad.
In the early days of HubSpot, there were a lot of pluses and minuses to it. The first person—very few people know this—but the first version of HubSpot was built by Dharmesh and these two guys in Egypt that he found online. He put a test out there, and Faramawi... I forgot the other guy's name. They built the prototype.
Here's how HubSpot worked in the early days: all day long, I would be using the product, demoing the product, pitching the product, and using it to run our marketing. At the end of the day, I'd write up, you know, "Here's the 10 most important bugs I found." Then at night, Dharmesh is a night owl, and those guys were obviously working at night because they were in Egypt. They'd fix all 10 and create like 50 more. It was just a constant game of whack-a-mole that first year.
Then we hired a kid from Yale who was a political science major but a computer scientist on the side. He was really good—named Patrick Fitzsimmons. He joined the team, and then we started getting going. After that, we hired a guy from MIT who ran engineering, and then we hired a guy who ran Dharmesh's last company, who was an engineer. That’s when we really started cooking. But that first version was written in Egypt, of all places.
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Shaan Puri | wow and you know when we think like I I think back about it | |
Brian Halligan | was upshot what's the what's the name of the company ups upshot what is | |
Sam Parr | the the | |
Brian Halligan | when you can outsource your dev projects | |
Shaan Puri | it's like | |
Brian Halligan | odesk fiverr what's the other one | |
Shaan Puri | odesk or elance or upwork | |
Brian Halligan | Upwork, it used to be called Elance. Yeah, he found him on that, and that's that.
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Shaan Puri | you're kidding me | |
Brian Halligan | no no he found him on that that was our | |
Sam Parr | First deal... I think I heard stories about a friend who was early at Uber. They used to keep this as a secret that they didn't tell a lot of people, but one of the co-founders of Uber is Mexican. Oscar... I forget his last name, Oscar Salazar or something like that.
They used to make jokes that some of the early code was in Spanish and they couldn't fix it. I was like, "Why? What's going on?" He said, "Well, apparently, you know, you don't think about it, but Uber was just like any other small business that didn't have any money."
One of the co-founders was Mexican and he lived in Mexico. They had their peers or friends, like contractors, that they could only afford to make the early Uber code. There was this joke that a lot of the early stuff was in Spanish and they couldn't fix it.
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Shaan Puri | no money | |
Sam Parr | and so it's kind of funny here that's yeah | |
Brian Halligan | It's funny you say that. You don't ever think of Uber as like a struggling little startup with no money, but everyone starts that way.
Except for today, there's so much money sloshing around. People don't start that way; they start with like $5,000,000 in their bank account.
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Shaan Puri | Well, the Uber guys had money. They just thought of it as a side project. They didn't think of it like, "This is gonna dominate the world." They thought of it like, "This would be cool. We'll roll around in black cars in San Francisco and not have to worry about taxis." Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I don't think they... | |
Sam Parr | I don't think they had that much money. I know Travis had an exit, but I don't think that they were like rich.
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Shaan Puri | ripped through stumble upon right he he had done well like he done another | |
Sam Parr | They're rich enough that they could put $3 or $4 million into a business before they really knew it was going to be worth it. I don't think they'd...
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Shaan Puri | be worth it guys are hyper connected right like they | |
Sam Parr | can sure | |
Shaan Puri | They can raise like a seed round if they needed to.
So, we were talking last episode about this company called NerdWallet and the NerdWallet story. The part that's relevant is that it's basically a big finance blog. They make a ton of money because they rank at the top of the search engine for "best credit card," "best credit card for business," and whatever else. They make like $100,000,000 off that referral essentially at the end of the day.
But they got there by making great content. It was like the tortoise and the hare. Everybody else was just trying to farm as much content as they could, while these guys were focused on quality content. For two years, they were sitting in their apartment just banging away at blog posts, and the traffic really wasn't impressive.
I was telling Sam, "If I had started this company, I would have pivoted 10 times by then." If I was advising them, I'd be like, "Guys, look at the data. This is not working." But they had a lot...
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Shaan Puri | Of faith that they sort of kept going. There are these perseverance stories, and then there are other stories that are like, "Well, we tried this thing, we saw the signal, and so we made a shift in strategy."
These inflection points are the hardest thing because, as an entrepreneur, you never know which one is one of those moments where you should be persevering in spite of the data, or should you be taking the signal and making a dramatic shift in what you're doing—pivoting in some way.
I think everybody has... I look back at any startup I started, and I see multiple moments where maybe I made the wrong decision, maybe I made the right decision. It's very hard to say because you never know what would have come out the other side.
When you look back at early HubSpot, were there any moments like that? Where you know either it was not when it...
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Shaan Puri | was not working and you decided either to persevere or shift | |
Shaan Puri | in your strategy shift in your your the way you guys were doing something | |
Brian Halligan | Yeah, there have been **two big pivots** in HubSpot's history that people don't talk about.
The first pivot was about six months in. We were building a kind of general-purpose platform for legal firms, which we called **Legal Spot**. This was probably stuff we were still in business school. We spent time on it and had a prototype. We would go to law offices, demo it, and try to get people excited about it. However, they weren't super psyched about it.
There was a little piece of it that was around **grading your website** and **SEO** that the law firms got excited about, particularly the lead generation piece. We stuck with this Legal Spot idea for a really long time, but we were just getting very mediocre feedback. Finally, Dharmesh and I thought, "Why don't we just work on that one thing they keep asking us about?" So, we killed Legal Spot and built **Website Grader** and the lead generation system. Then we abandoned the idea of verticalizing it and went horizontal, selling it to all our friends and startups basically.
So, that was the first huge pivot we had: giving up on the original idea. The reason the original idea was there was that when we were in business school, they put us in little pods for projects. There was a woman in our pod who was terrific and had started a company in the legal space. She convinced us there was something really there. She might have been right if we had stuck with it, but we ended up pivoting away from that, and she ended up not joining HubSpot.
The second huge pivot we had was that we were a **marketing app software company**. I mean, we started as a Web 2.0 company back a hundred thousand years ago with SEO, blogging, and social media. We were good at helping people get on the front page of Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon, and stuff like that.
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Sam Parr | Wait, that was the service? That you were good at getting people on top of Dig and Reddit?
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Brian Halligan | We were good at helping people turn strangers into visitors on their site with no advertising money.
So, start your blog, get good at search engine optimization, start a Twitter account, and basically get going on Digg and Reddit. Start building credibility there and create these channels into your business. That's how HubSpot effectively started.
We were SEO geeks at heart, and then we moved into marketing automation, which was an obvious move because everyone was buying HubSpot. But then they'd buy Marketo, Pardot, or one of these other platforms. They'd spend a lot of money on it, and we thought, "You know, we've taken into that business." So, we moved into that business.
But the big pivot was when we said, "We're not a marketing apps company anymore; we're a CRM platform company." We really turned ourselves on our head, and we made that decision about seven years ago. That turned out to be a very, very good pivot for us, and we're still in the middle of it.
We have so much more work to do on our apps and so much more work to do on our platform. It really works well, and our customers love it.
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Sam Parr | You're talking about... oh, I know! I was going to ask, when you guys were early on, when did the company launch? 2005?
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Brian Halligan | 06 06 | |
Sam Parr | yeah what what was | |
Brian Halligan | We launched it; that's when we officially started it. Actually, we never really launched the company. We just kind of started it.
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Sam Parr | When we were doing that, what percentage of your success do you attribute to just picking the right idea in a huge market and having fantastic timing?
You know, you’re a behemoth now, but how much of it was that you got pulled to success compared to the fact that you made the right decisions and you’re smart, talented, and skilled?
I mean, what percentage of that came down to luck? Was it that we saw this early on and it kind of worked out because we just stuck with it, versus the fact that we’re both good?
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Brian Halligan | **A healthy dose of both** is very important. The thing that anchors me is that I watch the way people shop, buy, and evaluate products. I'm sort of a little bit of an anthropologist when it comes to observing how people purchase items.
I noticed two things were going on. First of all, all the marketing strategies I had used throughout my career—whether it was email marketing, advertising, cold calling, or any of this—didn't work anymore. People had caller ID, spam protection, and ad blockers; it was broken.
At the same time, people were no longer relying on sources like IDC or Gartner. Instead, they were reading blogs, articles on social media, and going to Google. Those two realizations clicked in my head, and I understood that a transformation needed to happen. We had to shift from very old-school, outbound, interruption-based marketing to this new-school, inbound marketing.
You have to match the way you market to how people actually want to shop and buy. The nice thing about this new type of marketing is that your success relies much more on the width of your brain than the width of your wallet. You didn't need a lot of money.
Initially, we targeted small businesses, and we eventually moved up to larger businesses. It turns out we were right about that, and we were early on that thesis. I remember there was a decision...
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Brian Halligan | In the early days of HubSpot, we were starting to get traction. It was beginning to take off, but we were unsure. You know, is this going to be a big company? Are the two of us going to fund this? Will we do some angel investing, or is this going to be a "go big or go home" situation?
I remember looking at it at some point and thinking, "We're right about inbound, and other people are noticing we're right." We had to raise a lot of money and go fast because some people were going to start copying us. And people did copy us like crazy.
At some point, we sort of flipped the switch from having a little business that was going pretty well—maybe we had 50 people—and we might end up doing a lot of services. We realized we were building a big software company. It was the realization that we were early and right about this idea of inbound. | |
Shaan Puri | And the gotcha? One of the reasons people love the pod is because we started off with, kind of like what we're doing a little bit now, which is interviews with people who are successful. We would say, "Hey, how'd you do it? What did you do? What was it like?"
Somewhere along the way, you just said, "Hey Sam, let's record an extra episode on a Friday. What I really want to do is help them promote trends." I was like, "Let's just talk about trends. Let's talk about what some opportunities your research crew has found, and let's just shoot the shit about it."
It'll sell some transcriptions, and I think it'll be interesting. It's like how we talk offline; let's just record it. What that started was a lot of the podcast now is basically brainstorming and just shooting the shit about, "Well, today here's what I see as some opportunities."
Maybe I'm not going to do them because I'm already doing two businesses and my hands are full, but if somebody's out there looking, you know, I think this is really interesting. This is where I would be sniffing right now.
So, I don't know if that's hard for you because you're so concerned by a large company.
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Sam Parr | Let me ask it a little bit differently. Earlier, you had this thing called LegalSpot. Now you guys are just HubSpot, which is the CRM for, you know, any business ever.
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Shaan Puri | right | |
Sam Parr | But I see a lot of companies pop up that say they are the "HubSpot for X."
So, you said you started as LegalSpot. Now, there probably is a company that claims, "We are HubSpot just for the legal industry." There might be others saying, "We are HubSpot only for dentists," or "We are HubSpot only for doctors."
What do you think about those? If you're not a fan or you don't think that they are necessarily going to have legs, which industry do you think could have legs where you could have a HubSpot for X that you guys just simply can't meet because their needs are so specific?
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Brian Halligan | As soon as you brought this up, I was like, "There's an infinite number of opportunities for people to build stuff on top of HubSpot that's vertical specific."
So, someone should build a legal spot on top of HubSpot. Someone should build a hospital spot on top of HubSpot—like whatever they want. It's all sort of there; the APIs are there.
There is incredible low-hanging fruit for entrepreneurs to build and then just sell into our install base or sell to new customers. There are lots of channels you can sell through HubSpot.
It's probably the upside on it. You're probably not going to build a $100 billion company, but the beta on it is low. You can build a good company and make good money by doing that.
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Shaan Puri | are there any success stories of people doing this so far | |
Brian Halligan | There are a bunch of them. There are these kids in the UK—not kids, they're in their twenties—but they built something called **Org Chart Hub** on top of HubSpot.
The idea was, "Hey, I'm working on selling to Procter and Gamble," and they pulled in Procter and Gamble's org chart. Then, as a team, you can go and change that org chart around as it changes. It became wildly popular inside of HubSpot for sales reps using the product.
Now, they've built a series of different apps inside of HubSpot that have worked out. That was the first of them, and now there's a whole bunch of them popping up.
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Sam Parr | Have you seen the organization called "The Org"? Okay, so I think it might be theorg.com, actually.
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Brian Halligan | is it sean similar idea | |
Shaan Puri | something like that yeah | |
Sam Parr | And so, all they do is create a database of organizational charts. They recently raised, I think, two rounds of funding, but the most recent raise was a $20,000,000 round from Founders Fund or something like that—like a tier 1 VC. Yeah, and so this org chart thing actually...
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Brian Halligan | like it's new to it yeah | |
Shaan Puri | on one | |
Shaan Puri | Of the very first brainstormers, when Daniel Gross joined, we had brainstormed this because I had said, "It's so hard to know who the heck is who inside companies."
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Brian Halligan | and linkedin linkedin linkedin has become impossible to | |
Shaan Puri | Know exactly. We said this is a wedge to build a new style of LinkedIn. LinkedIn basically took all the resumes and then created, you know, basically like a social network on top of this database of resumes.
Well, why don't you create a database of org charts? Get people to crowdsource because I think people like to say, "Here's my hierarchy. Here's where I am in the hierarchy." So, people are willing to fill it in for their company, and you could crowdsource that. Then, use that as the basis of a new style of LinkedIn. I think that's what these guys are doing almost to a tee.
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Brian Halligan | I think LinkedIn is... there are certain companies that I believe are ripe for disruption. I think that org chart hub thing is cool. The company that I bet is kicking themselves is... it's the, you know, the Information. Do you guys subscribe to the Information?
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Sam Parr | yeah they have an orchard thing | |
Brian Halligan | They have an orchard thing, but it's awesome, by the way. I bet they're kicking themselves for not spinning that out into a company and raising venture funding for it and crowdsourcing that because...
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Shaan Puri | right | |
Brian Halligan | it's very good I I I refer to it often actually | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah, that's the media company DNA though.
Alright, so what about non-HubSpot related? What if you were 21 today and you're thinking about business ideas? Or you just graduated business school, like when you started HubSpot.
What would have been your fascination, your curiosity? Where would you be building? What opportunities have you seen that you're like, "Okay, if I had a clean slate of time, here's where I would go, what I would go for?"
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Brian Halligan | okay I like to think about like | |
Shaan Puri | the big trends and then sort of 0 in on okay | |
Brian Halligan | What's an idea on the big trends? So, trends... and then sort of zero in on, okay, what's an idea on the big trends?
I just think the most ginormous trend that's going on, and I saw it in HubSpot's board meeting last week. I've been out for six months, and I went to the first board meeting. We had an hour and a half discussion about the environment, and we have this whole chart on how we eventually want to get to a zero carbon footprint.
Every board meeting in the world is having that same conversation, and that's a hard thing for companies to pull off. And that's just the beginning. You know, Europe sort of taxes carbon; the U.S. doesn't tax carbon. Eventually, the U.S. is going to figure that out and tax carbon.
I just think cleantech and ocean tech... there's going to be a trillion dollars made in that industry. | |
Sam Parr | Explain that from a big company's perspective because I've never... you know, our business was much smaller than HubSpot.
When I thought about climate change, I'm like, "Yeah, that's important to me as a person." But for my business, I'm just trying to make payroll. I can't even think about how my company fits into that at the moment.
You guys are much bigger. From your perspective, what does that mean? You're willing to spend money in order to...
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Brian Halligan | do oh we are we're spending huge money | |
Sam Parr | So, tell me, like, how much are you spending? What are you spending that money on? And what's the motivating factor there?
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Brian Halligan | is it | |
Sam Parr | Like a dollar and cents thing, is it to look good? Is it to feel good? What’s the motivating factor there from a buyer's perspective?
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Brian Halligan | I think fundamentally it's a moral issue for HubSpot, its board, and its leadership team. We all are behind it. Even if you didn't morally believe in that type of stuff, your employees are going to force you to do it. Your investors are going to force you to do it. Your customers are going to eventually force you to do it.
So, you don't have a choice if your company is HubSpot's size or even a little bit bigger than where you are, Sam. Eventually, your employees are going to be like, "You know, what are we doing about this?" They are eventually going to be asking you about it in your group meetings.
What HubSpot has done is, you know, we've tried to lower our carbon footprint as much as possible and get our energy now through wind, fund sustainable projects like forestry projects, river projects, and renewable projects out there to offset some of the energy we consume. We're changing policies to consume less carbon dioxide.
So, at this point, you know, we're at zero from the beginning of HubSpot, but we want to consume far, far less. We don't want to be buying offsets.
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Shaan Puri | how are | |
Sam Parr | How do you track that? Is there like a dashboard? I mean, I'm...
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Brian Halligan | It's very hard to track, and the companies that are trying to track it are the same as your auditors, like Pricewaterhouse and people like that. There's no great way to track it, so it's a big business opportunity for companies that can figure out how to track that stuff well. | |
Sam Parr | Have you heard of what we were talking about, Sean? Was it LEED? L-E-E-D?
So it stands for **Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design**. Have you ever...?
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Shaan Puri | been to a | |
Sam Parr | Have you ever seen a building that has like a lead stored? Yeah, or something like that. That'll happen.
We were looking it up on the show, and we were talking about that. We're like, it's kind of interesting.
So it's a nonprofit, and you could actually see their sales and their revenue is like $36 or $38 million. I think it's highly recurring. It was kind of a shocking business.
And it was weird. It's like, what on earth made all these people believe that lead is like the thing? You know, it's like JD Power for cars. It's like, I don't actually... or Gartner. It's like, I don't know. I think they just kind of said that they're the experts, and everyone kind of bought into it.
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Brian Halligan | And I'm like, it's similar. Yes, and I think even beyond that, **carbon sequestration** is going to have to become a thing if we're going to solve it. People are investing in ways to pull carbon out of the air. They're really expensive right now.
I'm optimistic about our ability to pull carbon out of the air with the ocean in a more effective way. But at some point, you're going to need to be able to say to HubSpot, to Microsoft, to whoever, "Hey, you purchased a certain amount of credits around carbon sequestration. Is it legit?"
There needs to be a true measurement system that's quantitative, not just like most of the stuff out there, which is survey-based. Did you do this? Did you do this? Did you do this? And you sort of self-certify it.
Right? There needs to be more like **Nielsen** than **JD Power**, you know?
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Shaan Puri | right | |
Brian Halligan | and there's there's a huge opportunity there | |
Shaan Puri | For so, let's say you're right. Okay, so that's the megatrend. You say, "Okay, I could see the world is moving in this direction, and it's gonna need some catalysts—some companies that help accelerate it in that direction, pull the future forward."
Where's your inclination? When or how do you approach something like that? Because I think for most entrepreneurs, they say, "Okay, climate change. Well, okay, that's daunting. Like, I gotta save the planet." Alright, that's a sort of a big idea here. I don't really know where to start.
Then there are all sorts of frameworks you can use, like picks and shovels businesses. How do you sell tools to the people who are gonna be trying to fix this problem? Or investing in a portfolio of companies that are all doing this?
There's deep science where, like, you know, would you go find a partner like Damesh who's got an idea around some technical solution to pulling carbon out of the air?
How would you actually go about approaching it? Once you decide, "Okay, this is where the puck is going," how would you actually tackle that as an entrepreneur?
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Brian Halligan | Okay, so we just rolled the clock back to when I was an MBA student at Sloan, and I was looking for a partner and a business opportunity. Back then, it made perfect sense. Dharmesh and I were both super passionate about small businesses, Web 2.0, and disruption. We took all the same classes, and we liked each other.
Now, I wouldn't be looking for a Dharmesh. I'd be looking for somebody from the other side of the university, most likely someone who could help me figure out how to get more plastic out of the ocean. Or, how do I take that plastic and turn it into products in a much more efficient way?
How do I get really smart about carbon sequestration? How do we get kelp to soak up all the carbon in the world and then drop that kelp to the bottom of the ocean to sequester it for thousands of years? I'd be looking for scientists and engineers who are working on that type of stuff.
I think it's endlessly fascinating, and I believe the answers are out there. I am actually confident that the capitalist system and the startup environment can solve some of these problems. You read the news, and it feels like, "Oh, it's never going to get fixed; it's the end of the world." Whenever we talk about reaching that 1.5 degrees Celsius, it seems like it's going to blow.
But actually, I think startups and entrepreneurs, with the same gusto that went into the biotech ecosystem and the software ecosystem, will bring that energy to cleantech and ocean tech. I believe it will happen.
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Sam Parr | Did you see Sean? I think you're friends with this guy, the old CEO of Reddit, who has a new business. It's like he's Johnny Appleseed, only planting trees or something like that.
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Shaan Puri | right terraform I think is the name of it what | |
Brian Halligan | is that | |
Shaan Puri | do you | |
Sam Parr | know what that is | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah, so this guy, Yishan Wong, he was, I think, early Facebook. Then he ended up becoming the CEO of Reddit. He was basically kind of a user of Reddit who just ended up becoming the CEO because he had the right tech background.
Now, what he's doing is he has this startup. I'm trying to find the name real quick.
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Sam Parr | I'll find it | |
Shaan Puri | Terraform or terraformation. What he's doing is basically... he started thinking about climate change, I don't know when exactly, but he has really made it his next project over the last five years.
I think what he decided was, "Oh, I think one way we can attack this is to find large plots of land and we need to plant millions of trees in this area." We need to basically re-terraform, sort of like resurfacing the way we use land.
That's what we're going to do. I think it's called Terraformation Inc. is the name of his company. He found this plot of land, I think near Hawaii or something like that.
He's basically published his idea of, "Here's a full solution to climate change that can be done in under 30 years." He has a bold view of what that looks like. I don't know all the details; he hasn't really shared everything just yet, but he's been revealing more and more over time.
It's one to watch; it's one to keep an eye on. | |
Brian Halligan | Yeah, the climate tech VC community is going to explode in the next couple of years.
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Sam Parr | I think Chamath said something like, "This is the number one thing that I want to invest in." Huge! But the problem is... he actually just made an investment. They launched it and announced it today. I think it's called **DroneSeed**.
I was reading about it, and I think it's like these custom drones that basically operate before a fire happens in a forest. They go and map out where they think fires will occur. I don't know exactly how it works, but somehow they can predict where they think a fire is going to happen, and they'll help fix it before it occurs. I believe that’s what it is.
Chamath just invested in it, but he basically said, "This is the main thing that I'm focused on for the next few decades." When he said that, I was like, "Okay, that's cool in theory. I'm totally behind this." But I was thinking, "I have no idea how to solve it." It's such a grand, huge thing that... so you're now investing in or working with, you know, scientists at... I forget what it was called.
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Brian Halligan | the oh wait woods hole ocean and grabbing institute | |
Sam Parr | Yes, and I'm like, "Well, that's just incredibly intimidating."
Then I think, like, because I mean, it's so much... that's so much more challenging than just sitting in your room with Darmesh and coding something, and then calling someone asking to buy it. Both are hard, but one seems like way more... yeah.
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Brian Halligan | you you can get to market a lot quicker building software that's | |
Shaan Puri | for sure | |
Sam Parr | Yeah, and I was thinking of other ideas in this space because I'm like, "Well, I'm behind this. I like money. What's this huge trend?"
Let's say, if I can build a huge company and help the world, that sounds like a win-win. But I was struggling to get my hands on something that is actually interesting and can be attainable.
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Brian Halligan | There's a bunch of people working on measurement systems. Our measurements are horrible on global warming, beyond just the aggregate temperature of the globe.
For example, there are measurement systems for the tides. You tell that measurement to the insurance companies so they know when a big storm is coming. We need to get really precise about that kind of stuff.
There are also systems to measure the salinity of the oceans, the temperature of the ocean, and the temperature of the atmosphere. We can use all that information to input into the carbon exchanges that happen in Europe and hopefully globally someday.
There's going to be a whole stock market for carbon. Think about it: there's a commodities market, there's NASDAQ, there's the New York Stock Exchange. That's going to happen for carbon, and think of all the businesses that will emerge around that marketplace.
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Sam Parr | There's this company right now that I see being advertised everywhere. It's called, I think, **Aspiration**.
Basically, have you, Brian, noticed that there are all these new credit card companies coming out? What they do—I'm kind of dumbing it down, but I believe this is exactly how it works—is they partner with **Mastercard**. Mastercard typically takes 1% of the purchase price from the merchant and makes money that way. Then, Mastercard says, "Hey, if anyone starts a new credit card system and you're able to convince these people to sign up, we'll split that with you." That's kind of how they operate.
There's this new company called **Aspiration**, and we predicted this on **Trends**. Shockingly, this is something that we nailed way before this company came out. What they do—and I have no idea how they do this—is whenever you make a purchase, it tells you on your phone how much carbon it used or what the impact on the environment was.
When I heard about this, I thought, "I don't buy this." I can't believe someone would care about this stuff enough to switch credit cards just for this reason because switching credit cards is a pain in the ass. These guys, I think, have raised over $100,000,000 and they've attracted so many new customers just on this idea. It was shockingly interesting. I never in a million years would have thought that this would take off like it did.
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Brian Halligan | Yep, I think this is a huge, huge $1 trillion industry. It's going to be like the software industry, which is a huge industry, and biotech, which is also a huge industry. This is going to be a giant industry, and there are lots of ways to get at it.
But it's a different model. You can't just, you know, hack together something on the weekend, test it, and then iterate on it. It's a little different. | |
Shaan Puri | So, if climate is a trend—a big trend, a big wave—that you believe in, what are some things that you see other entrepreneurs doing that you are less excited about? Or that you’re not a believer in?
Are there some trends? Because there are sometimes head fakes or things that are too early, that the time is not now. I'm curious, what do you see?
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Sam Parr | or the time has passed | |
Shaan Puri | you're not a believer in you're not interested in that sort of thing | |
Brian Halligan | You know, the old enterprise software companies with their giant outside sales forces... it just feels like the time has passed to build that kind of thing. I've predicted that before and been wrong, but it feels like there's a new breed of company that sells in a new way.
They start with small businesses, whether it's Shopify, Stripe, or HubSpot. There's a new way to build a company, and it's not targeting Fortune 500 companies. When I see these companies starting and saying, "Yeah, we're targeting the Fortune 500," I think about all the compliance work you have to do to sell to those companies and all the boxes you need to check to get in there.
Then the sales model is just like, "Oh, good luck." It's a tough road to hell.
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Shaan Puri | And I want to read a couple of tweets that you had put out. I want to hear you elaborate on it a little bit.
One is, "You need to manage your creative people with loose reins." That's from Lorne Michaels, the producer and creator of *Saturday Night Live* for a long time.
So, what struck a chord with you about that?
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Brian Halligan | Okay, you brought out something earlier that was really interesting about the Twitch CEO.
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Shaan Puri | yep | |
Brian Halligan | So, in the early days of HubSpot, I'm not a product guy, by the way, by training or by DNA for that. | |
Sam Parr | I I think someone described you I believe it was kip I'll I'll | |
Brian Halligan | I'm a sales | |
Shaan Puri | guy | |
Sam Parr | he said you're the bet you're the best salesperson he's ever met | |
Brian Halligan | Yes, I'm a salesperson, and I grew up in sales. I grew up in enterprise sales, which is ironic because they just said that industry died. But I tried to convince myself that I was a product guy in the early days of HubSpot.
So, I read everything I could about it—design books, everything about Steve Jobs, you name it. I just tried to get really smart on it. The truth is, I just was not good at it. We hired one product manager, but it didn't work. Finally, we found a product manager that I liked, and we sort of built around that person.
I was like, "Oh, I see. I don't actually have that DNA. I'm not good at this." It took me a while; it took me seeing someone who was actually really good at it to understand that I'm not good at it. I was like, "Oh, I get it."
Then I had to figure out, well, how do I manage this type of person? The way I managed this person and the team was by really giving them a lot of free rein—giving them very wide boundaries—and just saying, "Hey, you guys figure out what's inside this box. This is what the box looks like."
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Sam Parr | And what was that box like? We need to attract this type of customer. We need to grow by this. We can't have these people churning out.
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Brian Halligan | I'll show you the box. It's a box I've drawn on whiteboards in the product organization a million times. Like, here's the CRM platform. Oh, you got it?
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Sam Parr | mark bryan's literally drawing a box right now | |
Shaan Puri | by the way he's got like a professor style | |
Brian Halligan | oh you guys try so I'm so on the board I'll describe what I'm drawing I | |
Sam Parr | drew a pen | |
Shaan Puri | this is good we have a youtube channel | |
Brian Halligan | that box on the bottom that's like the hubspot crm platform | |
Shaan Puri | keep keep | |
Sam Parr | drawing by the way we have a youtube channel this is gonna be on there | |
Shaan Puri | Okay, it's a CRM platform on the bottom, and then on top are apps. Like, we got a marketing app.
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Brian Halligan | We have a sales app, a service app, a content management system, and an ops app now. Basically, I would draw that on every board.
What's interesting about the dimensions of it is that the vast majority of the space in the drawing is in the big box at the bottom. This is a message to the developers and product people: "Hey, the power inside of HubSpot isn't a whole bunch of applications that we're going to buy, glue together, and cobble together. We're going to build a killer platform."
That platform is going to have workflows as part of it. It's going to have social media, messaging, and a set of shared services. The apps themselves are actually quite a bit smaller, but they're all just woven together pieces of the underlying platform. They got it, and actually, they extended it in big ways.
Then I said, "I want a marketing business that's going to be a $1,000,000,000 business growing X%." This year, I want a sales box, and in that sales box, I want that to be a $300,000,000 business growing Y%. I would just draw out the numbers and draw out the boxes. They would decide what to put in there based on what they thought, what customers were saying, and where they thought the world was going.
So, I manage them very, very, very loosely. I manage other parts of HubSpot very, very tightly, but the product works very, very loosely.
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Sam Parr | But I heard... I've heard that you are like that most of the time. Then, when something isn't going well, you get down and dirty. You're hard-edged and you're like, "We have to nail this."
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Brian Halligan | I do I'm either at a very high level or I go very very deep | |
Sam Parr | And one of the first things that you said to me was, "Keep being you. Keep being crazy." Yes, and if anyone says anything to you about what you can and cannot say, you’d let me know.
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Brian Halligan | yeah stay weird | |
Sam Parr | yeah that's what it was it was stay weird you're like you're | |
Brian Halligan | In Austin, and Austin is a "stay weird" town. So I just naturally thought, "Stay weird." Because what makes you, you, is you're... you're a fucking dude. You're weird.
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Sam Parr | Well, dude, so Sean, Brian has a book. If you Google "Brian Halligan guitar," he bought Jerry Garcia's guitar, and you could see the price on there, which I thought was weird. I know that he bought a $2,000,000 Jerry Garcia guitar. That's crazy!
Also, he has this book called "What the Grateful Dead Can Teach You About Social Media and Marketing."
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Shaan Puri | it is | |
Brian Halligan | by the way a lot | |
Shaan Puri | a lot what can I learn from the grateful dead just give me that | |
Brian Halligan | give it a few points we're gonna have to do a whole other podcast about it it's just too much | |
Sam Parr | I do, you know, so there's this company called, I bet you definitely know what it is, Nugs.net. You know Nugs?
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Brian Halligan | yeah I'm a say nugs | |
Sam Parr | So, Nugs... is this okay? The reason I know about it is that the hustle started in this small apartment that I rented for really cheap. But it was Craigslist's old office. Craigslist was doing like $900,000,000 a year, and Craig Newmark basically owned the whole thing. He was based out of this little, shabby apartment that I ended up renting right when he moved out.
We shared it with Nugs.net. Nugs.net is this company that started out basically, I think, only for the Grateful Dead. But basically, I remember as a kid... Sean, I don't know, you probably didn't have an older brother, so you probably didn't do this. But you would meet people on the internet, get their address, and mail them a tape. They would mail you a tape back, and you would have a live recording of a particular concert.
Nugs.net was the platform or the message board where you could meet other people who went to a Pearl Jam or a Grateful Dead concert and trade tapes. I don't even know what they do now.
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Brian Halligan | Now it's cool! It's a live broadcast for concerts. It's awesome!
So, you want to see a Dave Matthews concert tonight? You know, they're probably broadcasting it. It's awesome! They've really come a long way. That's an awesome app now.
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Sam Parr | And they started as this exchange, I guess. Now they have a thing. We were talking about the Grateful Dead, and we can learn about these people who have the most...
You know, there are a few things. Like, moms are really culty about products for their babies. Dog lovers can be like this. Health nuts can be like this. And then there are Grateful Dead fans.
Yeah, the people who are into bands like Phish and the Grateful Dead... their engagement is off the charts. Yes, when you go look at it.
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Shaan Puri | the | |
Brian Halligan | So, I'll give you an answer in a weird way: the Grateful Dead inspired HubSpot.
Here's how. Sam, let's say you're going to a Rolling Stones concert. You show up with your big camera and your giant recording equipment. What happens when you get to the door?
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Sam Parr | they say bounce you know you can't | |
Brian Halligan | and what do they what does the grateful dead say | |
Sam Parr | I think they have a section where you can sit they | |
Brian Halligan | Have a special tapered section for you. Like, come on in, sit right here, put your microphone up, and get your gear all set up. Come early, and you get VIP access. Then you listen to the concert.
One of the things about the Grateful Dead that's interesting is that when you see the Rolling Stones, for example, in Boston, they play a certain set list, and they play it very precisely. They're very good. Then they go to New York, and what do they play?
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Sam Parr | it's a totally different thing | |
Brian Halligan | being back to being big like no oh it's pretty | |
Sam Parr | yeah most answer the same thing but grateful dead it changes every night | |
Brian Halligan | It only changes every time. Sometimes, by the way, it's terrible, but usually it's quite good.
So, you tape in Boston, and then you go to New York where they do, you know, Giants Stadium for two nights. Then you go to Philly and you follow them around. By the end of the show, you've got like, you know, 15 shows of your tapes. You pick the two or three really good ones, make copies for your friends, and send them around.
Then you're at some fraternity party or whatever, and somebody's playing the tape. The person next to you is like, "Hey, what's this crazy gypsy music they're playing?" You'd be like, "Oh, it's the Grateful Dead. Why don't you come with us? We're going on the summer tour this summer. Come along with us!"
The Grateful Dead were the first and best inbound marketers. They gave away all their content and used the best content to spread the word around the internet. They were very inspirational behind inbound and content marketing. They were the first ones to really embrace viral marketing in a super modern way.
Back then, there wasn't email marketing and there wasn't social media, but they were big on message boards, and their message boards were on Waygo.
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Sam Parr | I think the live music space is interesting to me. There are a few opportunities that I've seen. There's this company that streams live concerts on Apple TV. I forget what it's called, but they...
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Shaan Puri | what nugs | |
Brian Halligan | by the way that's exactly what snugs does | |
Sam Parr | Yeah, and this company, they just built... they don't stream live ones, but it's like a... it's like Netflix for concerts. They were doing about $20 million a year in subscription revenue, and I think they bootstrapped it. They're based out of England. I'll have to look up the name in a second.
And then the second thing that I always thought was interesting and it totally bombed was Songkick. Sean, did you know Songkick?
Yeah? No?
Okay, so Songkick, what it did was... you would say where you're living, and it would tell you all the concerts happening that day or for any...
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Brian Halligan | other day email I still get email | |
Sam Parr | So, they have this huge email. It's basically like an email marketing business. They raised a little bit of money, and it completely... I think it failed and was sold for nothing.
But the thing about the live music space is that a lot of people have tried to build stuff in there because it's fun, right? It's like you're passionate about it. However, very few companies have been able to pull it off and make money.
Another one was something FM... what was that called? I forget what it was called. It was started in San Francisco.
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Shaan Puri | turn table fm | |
Sam Parr | Turntable FM... it bombed too. It didn't work out. Nothing in my rights problems.
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Shaan Puri | There are rights problems; that's one issue for music.
Then the other thing is, the trick in business is, I think, to do what you're passionate about, but not what every other human is also passionate about. You want to follow your passion, but you don't want to follow everyone's passion—that's just competition.
For example, Brian nerds out about inbound marketing. He's passionate about something that a percentage of other people don't even know or care about. So that's the beauty of HubSpot and how you can build a giant company.
I'm sorry, but if you're going to go further than everybody else with live music, okay, great. Here you go—you and every other 20-year-old wants to do it. I'm not a huge... I'm not.
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Brian Halligan | A huge beer deal fan, but he said something interesting in his book. He said, "In order to be successful, you need to be right about something that everyone else thinks you're wrong about." And they think you're wrong about it for a long time.
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Shaan Puri | yeah | |
Brian Halligan | I I I think that's right ish | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah, somebody said something like that. They go, "Investing is... being a great investor is investing in things that everybody agrees with you about later."
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Brian Halligan | yes yes | |
Sam Parr | It's called **Quello**, by the way. Q-E-L-L-O. They claim that they have 2 or 3 million subscribers. Very interesting business.
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Shaan Puri | Alright, we gotta wrap. We have another podcast right after this. Actually, Brian, this is great. Thanks for coming on.
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Brian Halligan | thanks for having me this is fun | |
Shaan Puri | you're a fun hang I I like this I didn't know anything about you before this so this is cool | |
Sam Parr | I want to have you on again. The next thing I want to talk about is the evolution of how you go from being scrappy to now being a very corporate CEO. That sounds like an insult, but it's not. I mean, you're able to manage thousands of people, and very few people have been able to pull that off. So, I want to... | |
Brian Halligan | We can talk about the CEO journey and how it changes over time. It's interesting, but we definitely have some more Grateful Dead.
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Sam Parr | I'm down. Well, thank you, man. This is awesome! It's kind of your podcast now, so anytime you want, come on. Let's do it. |