Hubspot User Group - Introduction

After the fun opening video of the Alanis Morissette remade by Hubspot employees with lyrics made relevant to the Internet Marketing community, the moderator began with Mike Volpe delivered an overview of Hubspot. It was impressive to hear that over 20% of their growth is directly attributed to Hubspot resellers. An interesting statistic was that the audience was an even division of men and women (women represented 49% of the audience and men 51%).

Hubspot seems to be looking more to hear what their customers are saying about both their products and services, and then changing things to meet customer expectations and needs. http://ideas.hubspot.com/ is a website that is dedicated to hearing what their customers would like to see included in the Hubspot platform.

Mike Volpe then introduced Brian Halligan (Grateful Dead enthusiast and co-author of a new book about Grateful Dead book). The great thing about Brian Halligan is that he's not only a co-founder of Hubspot, but he also uses his tool - which really puts him directly in touch with both the strengths and weaknesses of his tools.

Brian Halligan discussed how there is indeed a big press to hear customer feedback and after a large survey four main points were made about the products:
1. New Bugs
2. Old Bugs
3. Usability issues
4. Speed
With every new app created for the hubspot platform one or more bugs are introduced, some of which can be worse than others. As a remedy Hubspot is dedicating time and energy to create a plan to introduce new features to apps, while limiting the number of bugs that can make it into the production version of the application.

There are older bugs that are still in the system, and because of that a lot of version 2 apps will be coming out, that have been retooled without the bugs that were in the first version of the applications.

The are also consolidating and restructuring some of the features of the Hubspot platform, to make the product more usable and less time consuming to find the information that you need.

Several senior product developers have been pulled off of their current projects to focus on improving the speed of the tools over the next few months.

Besides product focused feedback, they also received customer service feedback such as:
1. People are frustrated with success.hubspot.com and due to that a version two of this is being created to make this tool more useful.
2. Communications from Hubspot can take on a "holier than though" feel which turns off the customers. Hubspot is working on reorganizing in order to address this issue and take on a better customer service approach, which also includes reducing the wait time to talk to a Hubspot customer service representative (In june the average wait time was 4 minutes, currently the average wait time is 2 minutes, and the goal is 1 minute. They are not going to try to go under a minute wait time, because they'd rather shift money into Research and Development versus customer service calls).