HUGS2011 – Founders Recap Remarkable Year, Share Big Vision
With more than 1,000 inbound marketers in attendance for the 2011 HubSpot User Group Summit, Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah highlighted a remarkable year of growth and innovation for HubSpot. Presenting in a facile and amusing repartee of long-time buds, the founders shared the year’s accomplishments of HubSpot customers:
- 85,000 blog posts
- 600 million visits
- 5 million leads
And HubSpot’s banner year:
- Doubled customers to over 5,000
- Doubled employees to over 300
- Sequoia Capital, Google and Saleforce.com $32 million investment
- Purchased Performable and Oneforty.
- Tripled investment in research and development (as promised at HUG 2010)
“Go Big or Go Home”
The pair then revealed big plans for a bigger and better HubSpot:
- Focus on Middle of the Funnel
- More robust email functionality, including quantity of contacts and segmentation
- Increase the quantity of available lead nurturing campaigns
- A personalization engine
- Social media integration
- Enriched customer info from Hoovers and Jigsaw.
- Moving to a more integrated platform with thousands of third-party applications to extend the value to the end user
- Revisions to the content management systems
Halligan even disclosed his doubts about HubSpotter Pete Caputa and his idea to resell HubSpot through a partner program. He let him run with it and now the VAR 
program touts 470 partners who account for 20% of the sales. As a pre-event to the HUGS, Caputa held the rapt attention of more than 100 entrepreneurial VARS.
For the second year, HubSpot inspired and invigorated users to join them on their quest to become one of the best software companies in the world. The leaders’ vision and staff’s mettle, and the users evangelism, it will happen.
/mh
Martine Hunter is the creative director of inbound marketing with the Atlanta advertising agency, MLT Creative, which specializes in B2B marketing. She holds the Inbound Marketing professional certification and serves the Atlanta chapter of the Business Marketing Association as president of the board of directors.
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