00:32:58 · Guillaume Moubeche
[00:32:58] S1: What's your feeling about like Google? Because you mentioned like potentially like 80% of the B2B traffic will come, you know, from LLM. So do you think that they're gonna move towards, like, a Gemini only interface, or do you think that they're gonna keep the search as it is? Like
00:33:17 · Kieran Flanagan
[00:33:17] S0: I think Google still wins search, it's just what is search? I think the cons... I think the people who lose are the publishers. And so what's interesting is when people have the search discussion, they talk about the disruption in, like, search is dead or Google is dead. I might have been... I might have said that before. If you actually look at the data, search volume is going up. Right? So the amount of people who are searching is going up because AI is actually bringing in a whole host of new people who can ask questions. What's actually going down is click through rate. It's like the number of people who actually click on anything to actually learn anything because AI gives you the answer. And so I suspect Google in the future is still going to own predominantly be, you know, the owners of search. It's just what is search? Right? Search is probably their AI overviews. I think I was always pretty bullish on a... They had it as a test project two or three years ago where they showed a future search kind of video of how the future search could work, and it was like dynamic UIs. And so you would search for something, and the AI itself would build like a UI wrapped around whatever your search would be. So if you said, what are the best restaurants? The UI would return those search results was completely unique to that search. It wasn't the 10 blue links. It was... It had crafted like a mini app for all intension purposes. And so I think search is just gonna become way more custom. You know, I asked my personal assistant to do something. It can either do it or build me a custom UI to help me figure out how to do it. But I don't think we're gonna be in a world where you have a singular page that has template links, every time you search, it looks kinda similar.
00:34:47 · Guillaume Moubeche
[00:34:47] S1: Yeah. It's gonna be interesting. And and for you, like, in the next year, because I think it's hard to bet on multiple years, but what's your big bet with HubSpot? Like, why are you investing heavily in term of customer acquisition? Because, I mean, when you look at your scale, like more than 3,000,000,000 in revenue, and I think last quarter or Q2, you grew like by 20%. It's insane growth for this scale, so you have to, you know, like find more and more customers and expand like revenue. So what's kind of, like, the the big bet you are doing?
00:35:25 · Kieran Flanagan
[00:35:25] S0: Yeah. I think I think for a company the size of HubSpot, you have to make a multitude of different big bets, and then... But I'll give you, like, one that's interesting is people love HubSpot's connectors, and so there's, like, two versions of that. One of the most popular new sources of users is Claude's connector, and people can actually use HubSpot readily within Claude, and they can do a bunch of cool things with it, and they love it, and that is like exponential growth right now. And I think that just speaks to the way people are gonna use software probably changes for for a lot of folks. And then there's a version of that through OpenAI. And so HubSpot just launched an ad... Ads integration with OpenAI, and so one of the first the first CRM to be able to actually help you manage your ads within OpenAI. And so there's always opportunity when there's new ecosystems of how do you build into that ecosystem. Like, one of the early experiments that I ran way back when was we built into WordPress. And so we did this little bit of research of trying to figure out how big the WordPress ecosystem was. It's actually insanely big. I don't know if it's still big. It was like 67% of all websites in... On the on the planet. And so we had a little team and we built a version of HubSpot that you could easily use through a plugin, a WordPress plugin. And so that's just an example of, like, every time there's new ecosystems that grow, you have to figure out how you build into them and how you be part of them. And that's one of the best growth opportunities for every company in terms of new user acquisition.
00:36:51 · Guillaume Moubeche, Kieran Flanagan
[00:36:51] S1: And for a long time, I think, like, one of the strategy was also to have, like, the free CRM and, you know, like, give heavy discount for, like, startups, like, small business, etcetera, etcetera. Like, how exactly do you track the success of such program over time? [00:37:10] S0: Well, the free... The freemium, so that that was one of the missions I had had at HubSpot. It was part of a small group to bring... To change HubSpot's go to market motion to be product led growth. We did that a long time ago. Now it's 2015, 2016. But the success is seen in the fact that over half of HubSpot's revenue now comes from people who start their journey as a free user. Wow. And so that has been, like, drastically successful. The HubSpot startup program, we can track that. We... Like, how many... We look at how many startups within these ecosystems are are HubSpot customers, and startup ecosystem is hugely important to HubSpot. We have great, great penetration there, great customers there. And so they've been hugely successful and, like, are easily visible in the in the results. [00:37:53] S1: And to set this up, like, how much time did it take you, like, to go through all the different programs, etcetera? Like, do you have to start by first reaching out to VCs, incubators, etcetera, etcetera, to start this up, and then afterwards it becomes well known and people reach out to you to set it up? Or how exactly did you put it at
00:37:53 · Guillaume Moubeche, Kieran Flanagan
[00:37:53] S1: And to set this up, like, how much time did it take you, like, to go through all the different programs, etcetera? Like, do you have to start by first reaching out to VCs, incubators, etcetera, etcetera, to start this up, and then afterwards it becomes well known and people reach out to you to set it up? Or how exactly did you put it at [00:38:15] S0: that point? Yeah. Start program has been around for some time now. And so like, know, we are... Part of it is a pull thing where like, you know, in early days of HubSpot, startups just loved using HubSpot. It was kind of built for startups. It allowed them to do a new way of marketing, and then we added CRM and sales. So it's built for fast growth startups and people who are trying to grow their business. And then, yeah, you go in through... You work... You you partner with a bunch of the incubators, and you make sure that starters can have a great onboarding path to HubSpot and can actually try out the software in a way that works for them in the first year and then can kind of... Because a lot of these startups are VC backed, they accelerate their growth and can move up to the plan they need pretty rapidly. And so, yeah, the startup program is like been around for a long time in HubSpot and is incredibly successful. And part... Again, a lot a lot of that comes from just startups wanting to build on HubSpot. [00:39:07] S1: Nice. I think we're almost running out of time. That your book in the background that I see a little bit black. Do you wanna bring it to the top Nice. So we