Brian Halligan: Grow Better By Moving From The Funnel To The Flywheel

Okay. Welcome. Inbound 19. Just kidding. Okay. I have been thinking a lot, a lot about how do you grow your business in 2019 and 2020? I've come up with a whole new model for describing how you grow in. The model is based a lot in physics. You see, when I was in university, I spent a tremendous amount of time following the Grateful Dead around. In between Grateful Dead concerts, I squeezed in an electrical engineering degree. When you take electrical engineering, you take a ton of physics. Physics was my favorite class in college. I love physics. I love physicists. Physicists. What's cool about them is they love models. No, no, not those kind of models. These kind of models. Now, what physicists do that's super cool is they study our world. They study it very carefully, and they'll come up with a model to describe the way it works and a bunch of math to back that model up. Then they'll publish it out into the wild. When they publish it, the physics community will study it, they'll test it, they'll put the bright light on it, and they'll look for cracks in the model. If they find a crack, they'll publish a new model that better describes how our world works. Like in these cases. Now, all of us in the inbound community, we're kind of like growth physicists, and we've all got a model we've been using our whole careers. We have a model. I call it ye old funnel clap. If you've ever used the funnel. Of course you have. Of course you have. Now, I've been using the funnel for 28 years, my whole career, and I'm starting to see a couple cracks in ye old funnel. I want to talk about those cracks. There's two. I want to share them with you. Maybe you're seeing the same cracks. Let's talk about the first one you see. Once a week, my dog Romeo and I, we have a very good habit that we've gotten into. Once a week, we interview a HubSpot customer. And Romeo, he's like a dog on a bone. In these interviews and during the interviews, what Romeo is trying to get at is what is the. What's the most influential voice in your head when you make the decision to buy HubSpot? And here's how the conversation goes. Romeo will say, well, what was the most influential voice in your head when you bought HubSpot? And the answer will be, well, Romeo, that's a good question. There's a couple things. We were subscribed to your blog and liked your content. And then we Were talking to your sales rep. He was very helpful. And we decided to buy HubSpot. And that's the answer we've been getting for 10 years that we've been doing this. The same answer. And that tells me that inbound marketing and selling is working as advertised. Marketing and sales are in their head when they're making the decision. But the last two years, the answer's changed dramatically. And here's how the Q and A works. Romeo will say, well, why'd you buy HubSpot? And the customer will say, well, that's a good question. You know, our friend Meredith talked us into it. You see Meredith, she's been using HubSpot her whole career. She started her career. Where was she working? Bubba Gump shrimp and then she left. Bubblegum shrimp. She used HubSpot there and she went to a new company. What's the name of that company she worked at? Dunder Mifflin. I love HubSpot at Dunder Mifflin. And she talked us into it. You see, the answers changed. It went from being sales and marketing being the loudest voice in their head to being word of mouth being the loudest voice in their head. It strikes me that's a sign of the times these days. Whether we all like it or not, trust in sales and marketing is at an all time low. It's about 5% on the trust index. Now there is some good news for all of us sales and marketers in the room. Two pieces of good news. The first piece of good news is we get those goddamn politicians beat, don't we? Yep. The second piece of good news is when they put the trusted index together this year, they didn't include CEOs on there. Perfect. Okay. This is a sign of the times. Nobody trusts anybody anymore. They don't trust marketers, sellers, vendors. They don't trust the government for sure. They don't trust media, social media. Who do they trust? They trust your customers. That's the only people they trust these days. And that's at sort of the end of the buying process. Romy and I were interested in what happened at the beginning of the buying process. How did our best customers find us in the first place? Once again, it was word of mouth. Word of mouth is becoming a more powerful channel, whether I like it or not, than sales and marketing. And here's the thing, for you sales and marketers out there, I don't think this is the end for sales and marketing. I have some ideas on how we can tweak how we market and sell to really make this happen for all of our businesses. This, my friends, this is the first crack, of course, in the funnel. The funnel shows customers as an output when we all know that customers are actually an input to our business in today's day and age. Okay, the second crack. Well, I want to tell you a story about an old boss of mine. She was a great boss. She ran marketing for a company I worked in back in 2001, 2002. And she had an expression. What she would say to me is, brian, the sun rises and sets on the quarter. And what she meant was, by the end of the quarter, she had wrung every ounce of energy out of marketing. And you start the next quarter on the first day from a standstill with no momentum and no leverage. Right. I don't think that's true anymore. All of you are doing a fabulous job of inbound marketing. You have assets, you have content, you have links into your site, you have social media followings, you have keyword rankings, you have all these assets, and you have momentum that swings from quarter to quarter. So the funnel, my friends, I think, is a broken metaphor that we're using. Everybody with me, okay? I've been wallowing a bit of misery over this, And I talked to Romeo about it, and we're very upset about it. And I go to a lot of meetings at HubSpot, as you might imagine, probably 30 a week. And every meeting I go in, there's funnels. There's funnels on the whiteboard, funnels on the slides, with customers, with partners, with employees, funnels. And it's frustrating because I know the funnel is a broken way, an old way to look at the way growth really happens. But I was frustrated because I couldn't think of a better way to describe how growth actually happens in 2018. And then I saw a great presentation by somebody who knows a lot about growth, a guy named Jeff Bezos. The way Jeff Bezos described growth was fascinating. He said, the way we grow is we increase the selection. The more selection we have, the better the customer experience. Of course, the better the customer experience, the more traffic in word of mouth. The more traffic in word of mouth, the more sellers and so forth. And so what really impressed me the most about this presentation, he went through the entire thing. He didn't drop a single F bomb. He didn't say the word funnel. Once he had a new word, a new F word. Very clever one. He referred to this thing as a fly word. Excuse me, as a flywheel. Now, why would he call it a flywheel? It's a circle. It's a loop. Why create some fancy word for it? I don't know about you guys, but I didn't know what a flywheel was, so I googled it. What a flywheel is, is an invention by a guy named James Watt 200 years ago. He was a physicist, and he invented this machine that was very good at capturing energy, storing energy, and releasing energy. And this flywheel was the key part that enabled the steam engine to happen, which enabled the whole industrial revolution to happen. So it turns out Bezos picked a very, very cool word for describing the way a modern business in 20, 18, 19, and 20 really grows. I like this a lot. And I think we, the inbounders, the inbound community, ought to embrace this new metaphor, this new model, the flywheel. I like it so much, I made my own flywheel model. You want to see? I love that thing. Okay, we have some business to take off. We're going to talk a lot about the flywheel today. How to apply it to your business and get your business growing fast in 20, 18, 19, and 20. But before we do that, let's. The Funnel. The Funnel has done terrific work, work for all of us his whole career. Let's throw him a great retirement party. Let's get him the gold watch. Let's get him the new clubs. He's retiring down in Naples, Florida. Please join me in congratulating the Funnel on his permanent retirement from the sales and marketing business. You're good sports. Okay, this right here on the screen, this is HubSpot's flywheel. This is how we run HubSpot, and we've retired the Funnel. And by the way, during this presentation, I'm going to weave in and out a couple of times stories about HubSpot. I hope you'll grant me that privilege today. The reason I do it is HubSpot's got lots of smart people. I learn from lots of smart partners and customers, and it's like a laboratory for new ideas. So I'm going to talk about HubSpot here, and I'm going to talk about our flywheel. But before I talk about our flywheel, I want to show you the impact it's had on me and my life and HubSpot. And to do that, I have to wind the clock back to when I was a little boy. I was six years old. Now, when I was six years old, I was one of those kids that repeated kindergarten. I had a hell of a time tracing those letters and numbers. Those clay snakes were vexing. Couldn't get those snakes. Roll those snakes. You know what I mean? Right. The only good part about staying back in kindergarten is when you're 16 years old, you're first in line to get your license. Freedom. And all your friends are counting on you to get your license. So I'm 16 years old, right? On my birthday, I show up for my learner's permit test, right? I take the written test and I do very well. And then I go and I do the eye test and I put my head in the thing and the woman says to me, oh, Brian, can you read the bottom line? I said, I can't read the top line. Okay, So I failed my test. I went to the optometrist, and he gave me a full workup and he said, you know, Brian, you're a very tricky case. You're right on the edge. You're right on the border. On the one hand, I could give you a pair of glasses. On the other hand, I could give you a seeing eye dog. I was blind as a bat, so I ordered some glasses. Two weeks later, they came. Oh, my God. Blades of grass, birds in the trees, the basketball rim. I finally. That's how I feel about the Flywheel. Really like our Flywheel at HubSpot. There's a couple things I like about it way better than the funnel. First, it's got customers on there, and it's got our happy customers, our promoters on there. And it's a circle. They're inputs to our new customers. The second thing I really like about it is it doesn't just give us credit for what's going on in a given month or quarter. It's got all our leads, all our customers, all our promoters on there. It's got a sense of leverage and momentum. I really like this Flywheel. There's a customer that Romeo and I interviewed a couple months ago that's got this Flywheel thing nailed, and it's a company called Airstream. Let's have a look at the video. These guys are awesome.

Purchasing an Airstream can be a lifelong dream for some people.

We affectionately call people who own Airstreams streamers and that don't own an Airstream today. Dreamers.

Having a large database allows us to build a community that gets us to conversations around the campfire, connecting that digital space with the real world and using Airstream Dreamers to promote the brand for free.

I have yet to meet someone who owns an Airstream who doesn't want to talk about it or tell you their story. And in my past, I'D had to pay people for those stories or I'd had to go out and not make them up. But you had to work a lot harder to try to get people to.

Interact, even if they may never buy one because they're all influencers. For us, that would cost us millions to reproduce if we did it in a more traditional way.

Okay, the Airstream folks are here. Let's give them a big hand. All right. They're fantastic. Okay. Every time in college I had a physics lecture, the professor would give me a back breaking set of problems. Today, you're sitting through a bit of a physics lecture, and I'm going to give you a back massagingly easy set of problems. Here we go. Here's your first problem. There'll be three. The first little exercise I'd like you to do is just like these two folks in the video. During the break, when you're back in the office, draw your flywheel, right? Take elements from your funnel, add all your customers and promoters in there, include all your leads, everything you've ever sort of created, all your asset there, and go ahead and draw it on the fly on the board. If you'd like me to grade your homework, I put a hashtag on there, rflywheel. Go ahead and post it on Instagram or Twitter. I spend way too much time on those platforms. I'll take a look, give you a grade, give you some feedback. The person who does the best job on their homework, I'll give two free VIP tickets to Inbound next year. Okay, you don't have a funnel. You've got a flywheel. How do we put that flywheel to work for you, folks? How do we think about your business differently? Where do we invest in 19 and 20? How do we really grow? Well, to build a flywheel, James Watt, the physicist, would say there's three important things. The first is you need, of course, to apply a force to your flywheel. Very simple idea. Apply a force to the flywheel and it spins. The more force you apply, the faster it spins. The more place along the flywheel you apply a force, the faster it spins. Now, one of the things I find most fascinating about selling and marketing these days is where the best return on investment is. Where should you apply your force in your business to get the biggest return? Because I think it's shifting a lot and it impacts everybody in this room. When I started my career, the best place to invest the biggest return on force was in the engage stage. That's where the sales reps come into play and you rack mounted sales reps. Now why did that make sense back then in the 1990s? My theory is back in the 1990s, customer or sales reps had a lot of information. Customers had relatively little. And the sales reps leveraged that information gap to create a lot of trust. So it made a ton of sense to hire sales reps back then. The reason we started HubSpot is we saw this shifting back in 2005, 2006, and it shifted, of course, to attract to marketing. Now why did it shift? It shifted because the sales rep and the prospect had the same information at the same time. And so it behooved you as a marketer to create as much information as possible and pull people in with that. What about today? Well, it's shifting again, right? Of course, today the loudest channel in the market is delight. Now I'm going to talk a little bit about how you increase delight in your business. But this is where the biggest return on your investment is today. Now, there's a company that I love that's doing this really well that my son Luke educated me about. And I want to tell you about it a little bit. This is Luke and I. We were horsing around in New York City one day and it was getting dark, as you can see. The picture's getting dark. We didn't have jackets on. And Luke said to me, it's getting cold, dad, we should get some jackets. And I said, luke, I am your father. You're right. Jacket. There's a Gap right around the corner. Luke, perfect. And Luke gave me one of these emojis, no emoji. And I said, what's wrong with the Gap? He said, the Gap's fine, but we gotta go to Patagonia. What's the big whoop about Patagonia? He said, patagonia is fabulous. I got a Patagonia jacket last two Christmases ago. I trash all my clothes. You cannot rip this jacket. I beat it to shreds. It is a tank. It's so comfortable. It's the most comfortable piece of clothing I own. And by the way, if I ever did rip it, the zipper breaks. Anything happens to the jacket? You know what, dad? No. Do you bring it back to the store? They give you a brand new one for free. Okay, let's see. What Patagonia. We're not going to patagonia. It's a 30 minute Lyft ride. Luke, we're not going to Patagonia. Here's Luke with his new Pataguchi jacket. You see Patagonia's got it right. They've got all of their force on delight, right? They've got it all here. They're not trying to close Luke. They're trying to delight Luke. All their forces, their quality policy, their return policy, their ads, everything are designed around delight. And what they want to do and they're succeeding is they want to turn Luke into a walking, talking Patagonia flywheel. They've done a nice job of that. Okay, this is what HubSpot's flywheel looked like in 2015. For better or worse, HubSpot is very much a reflection of its CEO, probably similar to your company. And I'm a sales and marketing person. I grew up in sales and marketing. I'm passionate about sales and marketing, and we really focused on this. All of our energy at HubSpot was sales and marketing, really wanted to close as many customers as possible. And frankly, Delight was an afterthought. But I've been influenced. I've been influenced by Romeo, by Patagonia, by Luke, by Airstream, and I've come to see the light. And so what we're trying to do is shift our center of gravity and shift our forces to. From down here to up here. We're making progress. We're by no means perfect. We're making mistakes, but we're on our way to creating a flywheel that looks more like this. Now, I've made some mistakes along the way. One mistake I made along the way is I just said, hey, we're going to be a delight company. And it was lip service. And no one listened to me. The second mistake I made was they assigned this to the service department. I said, the service department. You gotta fix this problem. We need to delight our customers. Neither of those things work. What really works is getting your whole darn organization behind it. And the most important part of your organization to get behind it is sales and marketing. Let me give you an example of how sales and marketing can shift its focus from down here and closing. Sorry. That thing spins really well. Hello, up there. To Delight. It's our commission plan, of all things. So our commission plan in 2015 was very simple. If you're a sales rep, you get commission on everything that closed. We made two important tweaks to it. We added a carrot and a stick. The stick was very unpopular. What the stick was, if a sales rep closed a new account and that account canceled within eight months, well, the company would. Would claw back that commission. Painful but useful. The carrot, also useful. The sales reps who do the best job at setting expectations and have the highest retention rates and the happiest customers, well, they get paid at a kicker, a higher rate. That carrot and the stick has moved that force from sales over to delight. And our sales reps now are focused not on closing customers, but on delighting customers. This is the key, by the way, to growing your business. This is the key in sales and marketing. Sales and marketing. You want to continue to invest in it, but how do you get your sales and marketing focused not on closing, but on the lighting? That's the key to growing your business in 2019 and beyond. Okay, two more small homework assignments. Really easy, just like these folks in the video. Take that flywheel you built and draw your forces on it. Okay? Put your commission plan. Where does that really sit? Put your best people on there. Put your pricing plan. Is your pricing plan designed to close or to delight? Do your customers pay you as they gain more value or do they pay up front? Put everything on there, all the forces you can think of, and then redraw the darn thing with your forces up in the top, right, like HubSpot's trying to do. Again, the person who does the best job. Two VIP tickets to Inbound. I'll look at all of them that are submitted on Twitter and Instagram and give you some feedback on. Really looking forward to seeing what you come up with. Okay, now, if you ask James Watt how to build that flywheel, first thing is force. What's the second thing Watt would say? Watt was a smart guy. He would say, you want to put a force on it, but you really want to lower the friction in your flywheel so that if you just barely touch it, it spins and spins and spins. You get a big return on investment. What I want to tell you about is my low friction morning. I had a very low friction morning. I woke up on my new mattress I bought from Purple. And then I put my Warby Parker glasses on. You all know I'm blind. And then I picked up my phone and I put on Spotify and I put my favorite Grateful Dead song on the wheel. Danced my way into the bathroom. I shaved with my dollar shave club razor. And then I went in my closet and I got my new outfit from Trunk Club. Now, by the way, I'll give you a little non sequitur before we do this big presentation in front of all you. We do a dry run inside of HubSpot with about 30 people, and 29 of the people gave substance feedback. But one person decided to give me style feedback and so the remark, it was from someone named Andy. It said, oh, really? I liked the presentation this year. Da, da, da, da, da. He said, but the problem you're going to have is you're wearing dad jeans. He said, the problem you've got is your jeans are too wide at the bottom. He said, what you need are skinny jeans when you're up there on stage. So what do you think of my new skinny jeans? I love them. I love them. And then I got in the lift and I came over here. These six companies have woven their way into my daily life and a lot of yours. Fascinating companies. They're all startups. They're all less than 10 years. They're all younger than HubSpot. They all sell commodities, relatively undifferentiated products. You can get skinny jeans at the Gap in Patagonia and anywhere these days. And they're all growing like a weed. How'd they do it? What's the secret? Modern 2018 handshake? Friction. They took all the friction out of their flywheel entirely, removed the friction from their flywheel, and they've reimagined their industries. Now. Let me give you an example of what I'm talking about. Two months ago, I bought that purple mattress. Zero friction in the process. Didn't talk to a single human. It was fabulous. Everything worked. Two years ago, my previous mattress I bought from a store called Bernie and Phil's. Clap, if you've heard of Bernie and Phil's. Okay. A lot of people from that. The best thing Bernie and Phil's has going for it is its jingle. Bernie and Phil's quality, comfort, and price. That's nice. The worst thing they have going for it is they're stuck with a very high friction model. Right. It's full service, but full service means humans, means handoffs between humans and means haggling. And by the way, I want to try the mattress. I want to try it at home. Romeo wants to give it a go, too. We want to give it a try. And so you need to move your model. The key these days all of a sudden, seems to be friction everywhere I look. Companies taking the friction out of the work. Why is that? What the heck is happening on the Internet in the world that that frictions. All of a sudden, the secret handshake. I blame the iPhone. This is my iPhone. Before I used the iPhone, I had the patience of a saint. Now I have the patience of a squirrel on its second espresso. That's my favorite part right there. I can go home now. I love the Squirrel. Okay. All the examples I've given you so far, they're B2C, they're classes, they're music, they're things like that. If you're in the B2C industry, the train is about to leave the station. You need to get 90% of the friction out of your out of your model or you're going to be in trouble. You got to move. If you're in B2B, the train's parked at the station. Station. But it's leaving soon. You want to gain competitive advantage against your competitors. You want to disrupt incumbents. You disrupt it using this low friction play. Now, I had a great professor in business school, and she said this mantra over and over again. Hey, Brian, if you want to build a great company someday, your product has got to be 10 times better than the competition. I think that's terrible advice now. I think it's dated. If you want to build a Great Co. In 2018, your customer experience has to be 10 times lighter than the competition. The rules are really changing. Thank you. It used to be the best product one. Now it's the best customer experience wins. It used to be what you sold really mattered, and now it's how you sell. Right under our feet. Today, everything's changing. It feels to me like 2006 all over again. Everything's shifting under our feet. There's a big opportunity for those of you who want to take advantage of this to build big companies and really grow. Now, I want to give all of you three tips you can take back with you to your headquarters. And they're going to be actionable tips. And I think these are the three most important things I have to say today. The first thing I want you to think about when you go back to get the friction out is your company Today, most likely 80% of the touches with your customers and prospects, well, they happen with your employees and your humans. And I love humans and I love employees. But employees mean friction. And friction is the new enemy. In the future, 80% of your customer interactions have to be self service in 20% with the humans. You need to turn it upside down and turn your model on its head. How do you do it? Today, 80% of your IT resources are invested in making those frontline employees more efficient. In the future, 80% of your IT investment should go to making your customers more efficient. Turn it on its head, what else? One more. Today when you grow, you add humans. And what tends to happen is those humans get specialized. You go from having a sales rep to you have a BDR and a hunter and a farmer and an account rep and all kinds of different roles. And I love specialists, but specialists mean you're getting handed off between them if you're a customer. If you're getting handed off, you're feeling friction. And friction is the enemy. In the future, 80% of this is going to be done with automation. Your humans are going to handle the more complicated cases, the exceptions. Your employees will have to change too. Today your employees are what some people call eye shapes. Very deep in what they know. The BDR is the world's best bdr. In the future, we're going to have to train our employees a little differently so we can avoid the friction. So you have somebody who's very deep like a bdr, but they're T shaped and they have other expertise and they can do more things to avoid those handoffs. Okay, I want to show you of a video, a customer of ours that really rocks and it's headed on the right path. Please pay attention. Close to this video. These guys are awesome. Let's have a look.

On the Rock and Roll hall of Fame's Facebook page. We have a lot of fan interaction. I knew that Facebook messenger would be a very busy channel for us. I really believe in one to one engagement. Automation does things to prioritize your workflow, but with chat in particular, people are really looking for that answer to their question or that direct interaction at the moment that they're reaching out. You have to be able to deliver the information and respond. Otherwise it's just setting someone up to be disappointed. And that's absolutely what we want to avoid with any pre visitor experience. We were prioritizing conversation and able to balance automation and a real person interaction and conversation. What we found was that there was a lot of common visitor facing questions and we built the first menu to get their answers as they needed them as fast as possible. The fan questions that come in, a lot of them are about the people in the hall of Fame. You can tell that these people are really passionate about these artists. The Rock hall just wants to give these fans a voice. That's why we do what we do and why this organization exists. And we just want everyone to feel like they're part of the conversation with us.

Okay, Rock and Roll hall of Fame's in the house. Let's give him a hand. Great job. Rock and Roll hall of Fame. Okay. I wanted to give them a test, right? I wanted to go to their Facebook page and have a little chat with their bot and see how that went. And so the other day, I went to their Facebook page and I had a little chat with the bot. And here's how the conversation went. Is the Grateful Dead in the hall of Fame? The bot said yes. Is Aretha Franklin in the hall of Fame? Yes. Go, Aretha. Is Fish in the hall of Fame? Yes. Are the Allman Brothers in the hall of Fame? Yes. Are the flywheels in the hall of Fame? No. Wtf? How could the flywheels not be in the hall of Fame? I love the flywheels. They're the best. Man, what kind of idiots working over there? What's wrong with you? My inner squirrel brain took over for a minute there. Fortunately, 30% of the customer interactions on their bot are taken over by humans. The more complicated cases like myself and I was rotated to Ellie from the video. In my sense of Ellie is. She had handled a few flywheel fanatics in her past. She talked me right off the ledge. She was. Ellie is T shaped. Ellie's a content marketer, as you saw in the video, but she is very good at customer service. These guys are fantastic. Now, this was an important chapter, so I'm going to summarize. We're moving. We're in a big era shift. It's similar to the shift that I saw when we first started HubSpot. The Internet has really shifted under our feet. We're moving for an era where the best product almost always won to an era where. Where the best customer experience almost always wins. We're moving from an era where we created a funnel and filled that darn funnel with friction to an era. If you want to win and have a light customer experience, you need to build a flywheel and free it of friction. This is where the world is going, folks, and it's an exciting opportunity for all of us. Okay, one last thing that James Watt would say is, if you want to build a high growth flywheel inside your business, he would say, if you're putting force on your flywheel and you've got low friction, it's going to spin. It's going to spin really fast. If it spins really fast, it will break. You need to build your flywheel of very high quality, scalable materials. Now, I've got some experience with scalable materials, and I want to tell you about these two. That's my mom and my dad back. My mom's here back in the 1980s, and they're on the back deck at our house. And 99% of the time, they were happy with each other, touching each other, smiling. 1% of the time, they fought like absolute banshees. It was always the same issue. They fought about constantly arguing, never stopped. It was exhausting. The ants. Here's how it went. You'd be sitting on the back deck with mom and dad, and my mom's got a very thick Boston accent. I don't do it justice. You'd be sitting on the deck and sure enough, there'd be ants crawling around. And my mother would say, bob, I got ants crawling up and down my leg. You're so cheap. When are you going to get an exterminator around here? We got a wicked problem. So they're very happy here in the 99%. Bam. The ants put them right in the 1%. My dad would say, he's heard this before. He'd go down to Costco and he'd get the giant pack of ant hotels. You know those ant hotels. And then he'd be on the deck and putting the hotels down. And so many ant hotels. It was like an ant Monopoly board up there. Back to the 99% settled down. And then a couple weeks later, my mom had a good idea. She said, why don't we have a potty on the deck? Cool. Dad said, sure. And so two weeks later, we got a potty and we. And we had about 20 people up on the deck. We were having a great time, drinking beers, listening to music. It turns out as we were having a potty on the top of the deck, the ants were having a potty down underneath the deck. And about halfway through the potty, the whole damn deck just went boom and crashed. We didn't have scalable materials. We had pine. And it wasn't pressure treated all of you these days well, you're building flywheels. Flywheels have humans in them. They have automation, they have software, and they need to scale. What we're working on in HubSpot is trying to build all of you a scalable platform. Let me tell you a little bit about that journey we're on. If you looked at HubSpot 12 months ago on this stage, we had about 44% of your flywheel built. We had three marketing applications and we had one sales starter app or toe in the water there. We've had a huge year. Now. The first way we're scaling is we've got a full flywheel. We've come out with a bunch of new products to really help you grow and build one of these awesome customer experiences. Pretty cool, huh? The second way we've scaled is we're relatively well known for working with entrepreneurs and working with startups and small companies and we love doing that. But we don't just want to work with you as a start, we want to scale up with you. And so today was a big day for us. We came up with a brand new sales enterprise product. That's awesome. We came out with a brand new service enterprise product. That's awesome. We took our marketing enterprise product and it had a big step, step, function improvement in it. And so today we can work with you when you're two people in a garage, all the way up to a giant company. Really proud of that, really psyched about that. The other thing we're psyched about is HubSpot started as an app, really, and we've moved to a suite and we're starting to move to be more of a platform. A year ago, there were 80 companies, software companies, that integrated into our product. Today there's over 200 really cool ones like Slack and Stripe and Shopify. Lots of other ones that began with S2. Okay. If you're interested in HubSpot, and by no means, you don't have to, this isn't a HubSpot conference. It's an inbound event. Come to Christopher o' Donnell's presentation. He's the one after Dharmesh. There's a little break, but he'll be presenting here. He's going to show demos as well. Going to be awesome. Now I think about myself and my personal journey with HubSpot. We started 12 years ago. There was a window of opportunity that the two of us saw. And the window was create content, pull people in the Internet, created this arbitrage opportunity for all of us. And it's been great. The shade's down a hair on that window, but it's still a pretty good window. On the marketing side, it's changed and there's a sliding door new opportunity for all of us to create one of these killer new great customer experiences. That's the business we're in now. We want to help you do that. That's what we're up to at HubSpot. So I'm really excited about that. Okay, one final thought. At the beginning of the presentation, you might remember this slide of famous physicists. Some of these physicists were better at branding than others. Isaac Newton's pretty good branding, right? Every classroom around the world, Albert Einstein. Every university physics class, you talk about Albert Einstein, but who is quantum? Who's atomic? You have to go deep into the bowels of Wikipedia to find these guys. I'VE learned my lesson. I'm going to end on Halligan's growth model. So what's my growth model? Of course my growth model is a flywheel. Throw out your old concept of the funnel, embrace the flywheel. And then my flywheel behaves according to this equation. The equation looks complicated. It's actually quite simple. The numerator at the top says, keep investing in sales, keep investing in marketing. But boy, the investments you make in delighted customers, you get a bigger return on investment. I would also say that take your sales and marketing resources and see if you can move them slightly to not just focusing on closing customers, but delighting customers. A lot of power in the numerator. The denominator, of course, is delight. Sorry. The denominator, of course, is friction. Get the friction out. The lower the friction in your model, the faster you're gonna grow. If you like this kind of stuff, we built a new site for you. Rflywheel.com check it out. Really cool stuff. If you want some help with your homework, go on there. Dharmesh will be up in a minute. I want to thank you all. You've been a great crowd. Thank you very much.