Free the Tampons: A Journey To Menstrual Equity With HubSpot | INBOUND 2024

How cool is that? That Aunt Flo is the opening session for Ryan Reynolds. Amazing to talk about not only HubSpot but periods on this topic. Welcome everyone. I'm Cass Vetter, Senior Marketing manager of customer proof at HubSpot. I'm thrilled to be joined by three powerhouse women. Claire Coder, CEO and Chief Estrogen Officer of OnFlow. We have Sarah Howard, VP of Marketing and Sarah Rose, Head of Revenue operations. It is incredible, incredible to have them here and they're on a mission to really change the world for people who with periods around the world. So that is incredible mission and I'm going to pass it on to Claire to talk about really where this mission came from. Where did this idea come and start from?

Wow. So holy smokes, wind the clock back to 2016. I'm at an event similar to this. I go to the bathroom and I realize I started my period. Does this happen to anybody else here? Yep, yep. I see you. I see you. 86% of women have started their period unexpectedly in public. And just like me, I found a quarter operated tampon and pad dispenser and I didn't have a quarter because no one carries coins. And in this moment I thought, wow, if toilet paper is offered for free, why aren't period products? If toilet paper is offered for free, why aren't period products? I was 18 years old, living in Columbus, Ohio in and I decided to. Yeah, let's go. Six, one four. And I decided to leave university to start building this company because I thought that the current solution, a quarter operated dispenser was not okay.

No, absolutely not. And so what did you do?

Well, after I left university, I started doing everything I could to try to convince people that period products should be just as accessible as tampons and pads. And we are so delighted that you all don't have to worry about getting your period at inbound because Aunt Flo, organic cotton tampons and pads are stocked across the bathrooms here. And at age 18, back in 2016, there was no legislation regarding accessible period care. And so I started working hard to evangelize and get people excited. And fast forward nine years. Today Aunt Flow is known for our proprietary free vend tampon and pad dispenser and organic cotton period products. And now we are in over 61,000 bathrooms across the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.

It's super impressive and like one thing to note is that you are not a non for profit even though you're delivering products for free. So tell us about your business model and how that works?

Yes. People hear free and they're like, I get it for free, you get it for free. Everything is free. But how the business model works is it's exactly like a paper towel or toilet and tissue company. We have our period products that we sell to businesses, schools, universities, convention centers. And then they offer the product at no cost to their employees, students and guests. And this is important because in 27 states they now require or fund students schools to offer free period products. And we have been able to show that by offering period products in the bathroom, it increases attendance amongst girls, which is so insanely powerful. And so we are a for profit company, venture backed. We've raised over $16 million from Harlem Capital, Precursor Ventures, JLL Spark Ventures. And that doesn't mean we don't have a mission, right? Our mission is to change the world one cycle at a time. And I'm also proud to say that, that since 2021, we have donated over 6 million organic cotton period products to organizations supporting menstruators in need.

These numbers are incredible, like, really, really impressive. And it's hard to believe that 18, you start this business well, start up by yourself, right? And slowly, slowly you start to grow your business and expand and start to bring on people. You start off with maybe a pen, paper pad. How did you end up with HubSpot? How did you know that something like this was going to be like, helpful for your business?

So I had the idea in 2016. In 2018, I went through an accelerator program called Techstars in New York City, which is where I learned some of those business fundamentals, unit economics. How do you make this idea into a real business? And when I went through this Techstars program, they helped me integrate HubSpot. And so from 2018 to today, we have actually been a user of HubSpot. And I was sharing. I loved early days going door to door and learning everything about my customers. I knew their first name, last name, marital status, all of their information. And that was really important to me. And I still want to know that even though we have over 2,500 customers across all 50 states and three countries and HubSpot actually allows me to do that. We pulled up an account today when one of one of your team members said, hey, what's going on with University of Tampa? And I said, oh, I can look at HubSpot and know exactly what's happening. And that really empowers me to feel connected with our clients.

That's beautiful. And speaking of growing your business, Sarah Howard, she is the VP of marketing, she really came in in 2021 to really build, build out the marketing function with HubSpot. So I'd love to know about your B2B strategy and what you really built with HubSpot.

Yeah, absolutely. So before we jump in, I just want to say I've been using HubSpot for about eight years and this is my first inbound. Yay. I'm super happy to be here. And I think what really drew me to amp flow is the mission. And as marketers, we know that working for a brand that, that has a strong mission really makes our job a lot easier. And it makes it fun, actually. We take such a fun and creative approach to marketing. We call our team the marketing magic team. And so I would say, like before we even had a robust strategy, we had a great team and we had great tools. And I came in and HubSpot was already implemented, so I could really hit the ground running coming in. And then a lot of our strategy that I helped develop was focused on B2B working with Claire. That takes up the majority of our marketing budget. And about 40% of our budget today actually goes to trade shows and events. And so we got to get an ROI on that spend. And so where that really starts is making a strong first impression. And we do that by our pre event campaigns. We create these beautifully branded marketing emails in HubSpot and you click through, you go to a nice landing page. You can kind of see up on the screen. We have some fun, playful GIFs that we incorporate depending on the type of industry we're talking to. So if it's airports, we'll put like some fun travel gifs in there. And what we've seen is you. When we go to the show, I'll let you all in on our best kept secret. How we stand out is by taking that branded digital experience. And then when we're in person, we are dressed in our coral jumpsuits, everybody recognizes us and we really stand out. Our competitors have been around for over 100 years, which actually blows my mind. Claire came in and innovated in the space, which is great. And so, you know, it's so important really when you're going in to make that impression. And then proof of that actually is when I started, the first event that we went to was a stadium managers conference. And we're meeting with all these different stadium managers from all over the US it was funny because we only had one stadium account at the time that was a client. So shout out to the Columbus crew we love lower.com stadium and they're still a fantastic customer to this day. But now actually through the campaigns and through those in person conversations turning into conversions and customers, we now work with over 50 stadiums, arenas, entertainment venues, Live Nation venues and for those local to Boston might be familiar with Gillette Stadium. So really excited to see that growth there on the D2C side. This is a newer space for us. So we actually were getting a ton of feedback from people that found our dispensers in the wild at their workplace, at their school and they wanted to have our high quality organic cotton period products for at home and we started selling on Amazon. Actually one of my favorite comments that we got was a student asking when our products would be available for normal people sale which was so adorable. And now here they are. So we're innovating in this space with kind of how we're going to market and I'd say from our content we're really testing what content works on organic and we schedule our posts in HubSpot social media, we schedule blogs and are able to see what content resonates on an organic basis and then we double down on what's working and create like a paid strategy behind it. So that's been really awesome that we can track both our D2C and our B2B marketing campaigns in one spot.

I love that. It's so phenomenal everything that you're doing within Marketing Hub. I think the other thing too is you talked about email marketing a little bit and you're obviously also reacting to, you know, regulation changes and trends and stuff like that. So how does Marketing Hub allow you to sort of be proactive in addressing some of those maybe new trends or concerns that are coming up on a day to day basis?

Yeah, we love to track data and diving into the data and I'd say some of the top things that I'm looking at on a regular basis includes like how many leads we're generating and if they're quality leads, which I'm super pumped about all the new features coming out that allows us to automate that. And so that's a big piece of it. The second piece is attribution and really showing because Claire is always asking me what marketing channels are driving the most growth from a dollar perspective. And we leverage a lot of the HubSpot tools for attribution reporting and I'd say one of the other areas of spend that we have that is one of our biggest is Google search campaigns. And so we're regularly checking that in the campaign section of HubSpot. And what I love about HubSpot is that we're not only getting those amazing metrics from our Google Ads, but we're marrying that data with the CRM so we can see what customers are, are converting on those ads and what other content are they going to. And that really helps us make smarter decisions. And then I'd say on the D2C side, something that we've learned from leveraging forms, which I love the HubSpot forms. So much data that we can tap into is our newsletter. Actually by implementing a pop up on our website, we saw a 15x percent or 15x growth in subscribers and the majority of those subscribers were coming from paid search and organic search. And what I love about that is sometimes you're not ready to buy when you land on the website, but we're still keeping you in our funnel and we're able to give you content to keep you interested in what we're doing.

Really, really fantastic. And I think you mentioned a lot of features that are super, super awesome for the stuff that you're doing. And also I'm sure many of the audience can take advantage of. You know, one of the other things too is you are also again talking about like things happening in the news. There was a study that came out recently which is a good example about having to, you know, pivot or you know, react fast. Tell us about that study that came out and how you handled it.

Yeah, so many people probably heard the news about a study that came out recently by an academic research group that found a lot of large unnamed tampon brands actually had heavy metals identified in their tampons. So obviously this is a very, you know, unsettling news story that came out in the industry. And we took it very seriously. And the first thing we did is, you know, dropping, drop everything to meet with our suppliers and really understand the impact of this study. And in that moment we were able to understand that like our products have such rigorous health and safety certifications, but we didn't necessarily always communicate that to our customers. So this was a moment to remind them that they're in good hands with AMP Flow. Our products don't contain these harmful steps in the and we have all these certifications. And so we were able to send out an email, a social post. Claire had a social post on her LinkedIn. And what surprised us is because we were proactively reaching out, we saw a bump in sales and reorders which was not expected at all. We just wanted to reach out and communicate to our customers. But clearly, in those moments when there's uncertainty and panic in the industry, if you're there for your customer, they're gonna appreciate that. And so I would encourage anyone, you know, not reaching out to their customers when the news gets a little crazy, like, take that opportunity to build a closer relationship and I think you'll really see, like, stronger relationships with your customers as a result of that.

So important. And speaking of customers and speaking of sales, I'm gonna turn it over to Sarah. Sarah Rose Garden Head of Revenue Ops So clearly, lots of leads happening. You're coming all these leads from the marketing initiatives that Sarah Howard is running with her team. How is your team and this sales team managing all of those leads? How are they using all of the cool tools within Sales Hub to close deals faster?

Yeah. So marketing magic gives us so many leads, it's actually a little insane. And one of the tools we've implemented to make sure we're reaching out to those leads very quickly and making sure we're targeting them with the right information is the prospecting workspace. It's so great for us to see all of our leads that one rep is working at the same time. Do they have too many? Do they need more? What sequences are they enrolled in? Do they have a lot of calls coming up the next day? That data is just invaluable. And it's so nice to see, you know, next steps too, that they need to take. So this is something we've been going on in all of our one on ones going over and it's really been fantastic for us. Wow.

Amazing. And you know, talking about prospecting workspace, there's also the sequences. Right. So keeping those leads in in the know, tell us about the sequences and how you're using them. And also, obviously you also have been at inbound. This is your first inbound as well, and you've learned some stuff. So tell us about, like all the new tools that you're learning about and what you're planning to implement.

Yeah, Well, I got to see the demo of the new prospecting workspace and I'm so excited for the leads to tab that's going to tell us how quickly our reps are replying to a lead. I'm definitely going to be checking that probably hourly at first and making sure our time is good. But one of the other tools we love and have been playing around a lot with this year is a B testing and sequences. I think we've all seen that sales is getting harder since 2020. And you need to make sure you're hitting your audience with the right information at the right time. So I think we're always told that don't put images in your emails, it's going to affect your open rate. We actually found the opposite. And so we have our new product, a disposal bag, and we put an image of it in our sequences and we found that it increased our open rate and our meeting rate. So this year we've actually seen a 5% increase in our meeting rate from sequences. So we've. That's hundreds of more meetings our team is getting essentially for free just because we tried something new.

I know that Claire has something to say about this product, so I'm going to give her a minute to explain why this is so awesome.

I am so excited about this product and it wouldn't be without this team that anybody gets to know about it, right? I make things and thank goodness for them because now people actually know about the things. So when I founded ampflow, my focus was how do we reimagine the bathroom through a lens of a female? Right. Like we have our awesome dispensing, but then a horrible disposal solution for those that don't menstruate. If you need a refresher on what the state of the union is, you're sitting in a stall and once you're done using a period product, you turn to the left and there's this metal bin. You have to touch the lid of the metal bin, put your product into the bag, the brown paper bag that for some reason doesn't fit. I don't understand why it doesn't fit. And then you have to like close it really rapidly. Your hands have been touching all of these surfaces with bloodborne pathogens. And then you have to touch the door and then eventually you get this thing to wash your hands. And I thought that that was crazy. And our team was like, this is just not right. And our customers started to say, hey, we need a better solution. And so we've created these disposal roll bag dispensers. So this goes one per stall. You pull the bag, just like a doggy poop bag, you put your hand in. This is all made out of plant based materials. At Ant Flo, we're really focused on eliminating single use plastic. Put your hand in, you remove the period product, you invert it, tie it up and throw it in the bin. So as a user, right?

I know, I know.

And so as a menstruator, I never have to touch the period product. And as a Janitor. It contains this smell and they are no longer exposed to bloodborne pathogens. And I think all my widgets that I create are really, really cool. But once again, nobody would know about it if it wasn't for Sarah and Rose. So thank you, team, for making sure that the emails are opened. And you all can now get access to these on our website too, because Sarah made the photos really pretty and updated our website.

Really an incredible team. I mean, you can obviously see awesome team Rose talking about back to products like deal scoring, AI forecasting. Tell us a little bit about how you're using those tools for your teams.

Yeah, these are two new tools we implemented this summer, and it's been so much fun. So the big one is the deal scoring. You know, talking about guided selling, this is something that's really helped our team. They get alerts when the score goes down and they can see what actions they can take to get the score up. And then if a score gets to a certain number, it also alerts our sales manager so she can jump in and help if needed and make sure we're closing those deals. We always want to be improving that conversion rate, and this is something that's allowing us to do that. The other tool that we implemented was AI forecasting, and I'm so obsessed with this tool. It allows us to be so proactive. So sales reps don't often know in three months if they're going to hit their sales goal or not. And when you know, when that month happens, it's too late to build the pipeline to make sure they do. And so that's fixing this for us. Our sales reps can now say, see, hey, in November, it doesn't look like I have enough in my pipeline right now to hit my goal, so I'm going to make sure I make some more phone calls and do some more outbound prospecting right now. So I do have the pipeline to hit that goal. So it's really allowed us just to be so proactive.

That's huge. Really. And, you know, jumping into. I know you're also using Service Hub, and before I even get into Service Hub, I'm just curious to ask all of you, and I'll ask you one at a time, starting with you, Claire. Like, what is your favorite customer, your favorite win? If you think about all the years that you've been doing this, I'd love to know from each one of you.

Yes.

Wow. I don't want to choose favorites out of the 2,500, but I will today for Those that are traveling home and you're stuck at Chicago o' Hare Airport, you have one less thing to worry about because Antflo Period products are stocked across Chicago o', Hare, which is really, really special. But one of my personal favorites is actually Apple Antflo is proudly stocked across every Apple retail store across North America. And so my fun life hack for you all, if you are wandering around really needing a bathroom, you can go to your local Apple retail store and get access to a bathroom and amp Flow Period products.

Wonderful.

Yes. So hard to choose. I'm going to pick a company that I just met with this week while I was in town, T.J. maxx. I'm not sure if we have any Maxinistas. I'm definitely one. And amazingly they have Aunt Flow and some of their warehouses available for the people working at the warehouse, which we love. And also they're taking it a step further and we're doing this whole philanthropy initiative together and with their senior leadership team, we're going to have a period party. We're going to pack 2,500 period kits to donate to the local community here in Boston. Super excited. Thank you.

And Rose, I have so many favorites, but I think our education clients just really resonate with me. When you're a 13 year old girl, getting your period sometimes feels like the end of the world. So we're actually in Boston public schools, which is incredible. And then I was just at my high school reunion and aunt Flo is in the bathroom, which was so exciting. Would have saved me a ton of embarrassing middle school and high school memories if we were there sooner.

That's so beautiful to sort of have like your past and your present kind of merged together. So speaking of customers, obviously Service Hub, you've been getting a lot of like, I mean, first of all, your customer experience is incredible. How are you using Service Hub to sort of, you know, support them and, you know, extend their experience?

Yeah. So at the start of the year, we did a really big MPS survey push and dug into that data. We are really happy with our score, but we can always do better. We're not going to stop until it's 100. So what we saw from that is people wanted more ways to reach out to us. So we implemented the OPFLO Chatbot and live chat within HubSpot, which has been so amazing we have some prerecorded answers. So when you reach out, if it's something the bot can help you will with that can help you with it will. And then you also will be Routed to a representative if you have a question about ordering or shipping. And that's been really fantastic. We've seen that reflected in our NPS score. And so something we also worked on was really implementing processes on talking to our customers and starting to use the reporting features and track more because we truthfully weren't using all of the features we could. So I'm really happy to say that we got our average time to get back to a customer to be within one business day. And I actually was just playing, looking at this and it's down to just a couple of hours now. So just this year, using HubSpot tools, we decreased our time by 62% to talk to the customer.

Impressive. And I'm gonna start back with you, Rose. Looking into the future. I mean, you're first inbound. You're learning a lot. What are you taking with you into the future? Going back to work on Monday. What is it that you're gonna be starting with?

Yeah, I'm so excited about the AI Breeze. We were all playing with it in the speaker room just a little bit ago. You need to do a personalized reach out to your leads now and the fact that it can do that research for you is just so huge. I've been enrolling in so many of the betas every night and I'm also really excited about the dynamic sequences. So we can kind of move them to different steps depending on email opens.

Beautiful. What about you, Sarah?

Yes, I'm going to continue on the AI train and say that we already have a ton of great content and something that I'm taking away from this conference is how to repurpose it using AI for different channels. So that's something I'm super excited about.

Wonderful. And Claire, I'm going to also ask you this. Looking back, you know, what is the thing that, you know, over the last, you know, almost. Almost a decade, I guess, right. That you are looking at highlight, you know, what's the sort of surprise moment? Looking back? And then also what are you looking forward to in the future with. With our flow?

Yes. Wow. Looking back, I truly was able to know every single customer. And today I am so grateful. Because of HubSpot, I still can have that information at my fingertips. And so that hasn't changed over nine years, which is really, really special. And looking for the future. Look, we're in 61,000 bathrooms across three, three countries in all 50 states, which is absolutely insane. But there are 10 million female commercial bathrooms in the United States. So we have a long way to go. And my vision for the future is to ensure no one ever has to worry about getting their period in public because Aunt Flo is in the bathroom. And you all can help with that. So there's like, a few things that we can literally immediately do. If you are fired up, obviously you're going to start using HubSpot and you can go to your employer or you can go to your alma mater, you can go to your high school reunion and ask, why aren't there period products in the bathrooms? And if there are, say thank you. And finally, low cost, no cost. Stop hiding your tampons up your sleeve when you go to the bathroom. That's what we can all do today. Yes.

I love that.

Okay, we have a few minutes to open it up to questions before we close. If you would like to ask a question, you can go up to the mic. And if anyone doesn't have questions, I just want to say thank you. Let's. Oh, yes, please.

Yes, go to that mic. Hi. Thank you.

So it's really exciting to hear all the work that you're doing.

I just wanted to ask the.

Do you have any plans to expand.

Into, like, reusable products like cups and things like that? Love this question. Sustainability is certainly one of the considerations that we have as a company. In fact, last year we removed banding on all of our pads, which reduced. Which eliminated our usage of 96 trees. And as a company, our tampons are cardboard applicator, which I know some people have opinions about. But give ours a try, please, because there is a smooth tip to ensure that there's more comfortable insertion as it pertains to reusable products specifically. We're really designed for that emergency situation. We love when you're using your period underwear or your flex disc, but we're there for that moment when you don't have it. And so for us, we're really focused on those products, on our. Our consumable products for those emergency moments and continuing to support those other more sustainable solutions.

Great. Thank you. Yeah.

Any other questions? Yes.

Come on down.

Come on down to the mic.

This is where there should be music. So I filled in the gap.

Thank you.

Thank you. Hi. First of all, lovely talk.

Thank you so much for being here.

We need more of these talks.

My question to you is. Okay, I love this space. I'm just curious, as a product person, how did you validate that this was ready for B2B markets?

Yes, I guess I'll. I'll take that.

Yeah.

So back in 2016, I was 18 years old and was broke as a joke. And so what I did was I bought tampons off the shelf and I went to small businesses and offered them the opportunity to join the menstrual movement for $250 and would put a 3D printed box in their bathrooms. That's where it started. There was no branded Aunt Flo. There was no fancy dispenser. It was Claire and a few friends that would work for Chipotle, knocking on doors to figure out if people would buy yet another thing to offer for free to their employees, students, and guests. And you know what I learned? I learned that people did want it. In that first year, we did a quarter million in sales with off the shelf tampons in 3D printed boxes. So we can all start with a very simple mvp.

I love that.

Thank you so much for sharing.

Well, thank you so much. This was an incredible session. You guys are amazing. For those of you who want to learn more, we have a QR code to their website. They'll also be on the side of the stage if you want to ask some questions in person. Thank you all so much for joining. Enjoy the last of Inbound and see.

You all next year.