HubSpot was founded by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2006. The company grew from $255,000 in revenues in 2007 to $15.6 million in 2010. Later that year HubSpot acquired Oneforty, the Twitter app store founded by Laura Fitton. The company also introduced new software for personalizing websites to each visitor. According to Forbes, HubSpot started out targeting small companies but "moved steadily upmarket to serve larger businesses of up to 1000 employees." HubSpot filed for an initial public offering with the Securities and Exchange Commission on August 25, 2014, requesting they be listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol HUBS. In July 2017, HubSpot acquired Kemvi, which applies artificial intelligence and machine learning to help sales teams.The company reported revenues of $674.9 million in 2019.
Software and services
HubSpot provides tools for social media marketing, content management, web analytics, landing pages, customer support, and search engine optimization. HubSpot has integration features for salesforce.com, SugarCRM, NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and others. There are also third-party services such as templates and extensions. Additionally, HubSpot offers consulting services and an online resource academy for learning inbound marketing tactics. It also hosts user group conferences and inbound marketing and certification programs. HubSpot promotes their inbound marketing concepts through their own marketing, and has been called "a prolific creator of content" such as blogs, social media, webinars and white papers. In 2010, an article in the Harvard Business Review said that HubSpot's most effective inbound marketing feature was its free online tools. One such tool, the Marketing Grader, assessed and scored website performance. The company introduced a Twitter tracking feature in 2011. In November 2016, HubSpot launched HubSpot Academy, an online training platform that provides various digital marketing training programs. In 2018, Hubspot integrated Taboola on the dashboard, a global pay-per-click native ad network. In November 2019, Hubspot acquired PieSync, a customer data synchronization platform.
HubSpot CRM Free
The company launched HubSpot CRM Free in 2014. The CRM product tracks and manages interactions between a company and its customers and prospects. It enables companies to forecast revenue, measure sales team productivity, and report on revenue sources. The software as a service product is free and integrates with Gmail, G Suite, Microsoft Office for Windows, and other software.
Tech industry reviews
HubSpot has been described as unique because it strives to provide its customers with an all-in-one approach. A 2012 review in CRM Search said HubSpot was not the best business solution in each category but that taken as a whole it was the best "marketing solution" that combined many tools into one package. It identified HubSpot's "strengths" as the sophistication of its Call to Action tool, its online ecosystem and its "ease of use." Its weakness was described as having "more breadth than depth." The review said the lack of customization and design tools could be limiting and that it was missing advanced features such as Business Process Management tools to manage workflow.
Conferences
HubSpot hosts an annual marketing conference for HubSpot users and partners called "INBOUND." The conference is typically located in Boston. In 2019, Hubspot hosted its largest conference in the event's history, with a record of over 26,000 attendees from 110 countries. The first INBOUND conference took place in 2012. Since then, speakers such as Michelle Obama, Tig Notaro, and Issa Rae, have spoken at the conference.
Controversy
In July 2015, Hubspot's CMO, Mike Volpe, was dismissed for violating HubSpot's code of business conduct after it was found that he tried to obtain a draft copy of the book , written by his former employee Daniel Lyons. According to an article in the Boston Globe, records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act indicated that HubSpot executives considered the book "a financial threat to HubSpot" and Volpe used "tactics such as email hacking and extortion" in the attempt to prevent the book from being published. In April 2016, after his book was published, Lyons wrote in the New York Times that HubSpot had a "frat house" atmosphere. He also called the company a "digital sweatshop" in which workers had little job security. Later that month, HubSpot's founders gave an official response to the book, in which they addressed several, but not all, of Lyons' claims.
Reception
The Boston Business Journal named HubSpot a "Best Place to Work in 2012." In 2015, the company was named the best large company to work for in Massachusetts by the Boston Globe. In 2017, Hubspot was named 7th by CNBC as one of the best places to work in 2018. Glassdoor named Hubspot the best place to work in 2020.
