The HubSpot App Marketplace: A $4.2 Billion Opportunity For You | Developer Day 2021

Hey everybody. Hope you're all doing really well. Really, really well. I'm Hugh Durkin. My pronouns are he, him and I am part of the App Partner Program team here at HubSpot. I have dark hair, dark beard to match, and I'm proudly sporting my dark gray HubSpot t shirt and dark gray HubSpot hoodie. I'm a lifelong Formula One fan, which is why I've got a couple of model Formula One cars. Ayrton said it was my childhood hero on a shelf here in the background. I'm Udurkin H u g h D u r K I n on Twitter if you'd like to DM me with any questions at any time. And we're gonna have questions at the end too. So thanks for joining us today. We really appreciate it and we're excited to share more about the opportunities that the HubSpot App Marketplace provides. But first, some context on the journey that we're on and that we'd love you to join. We're on a path to becoming the number one CRM platform for scaling companies and we'd love to bring you on that journey with us. Our journey started with Marketing Hub, but has since evolved to a full suite of products including marketing, sales, service, CMS and our new Operations Hub, all backed up by HubSpot CRM. Our credentials as a CRM platform are solid with Sales, cms, Marketing and Service Hubs all recognized as leaders in their respective fields, and we're here to help you become leaders in our platform ecosystem. And not just leaders leaders in a fast growing economy. The economy around HubSpot is large and has grown a lot over the last few years. When I joined just over three years ago, I believe we had just north of 50,000 customers. Today that's at 128,000 customers from over 120 countries worldwide. We're a truly global CRM platform company. App Partners are building apps and integrations that resonate with HubSpot customers. Over 900 apps and integrations are available today in the app marketplace, with seven or more apps installed by HubSpot customers. On average, over 95% of customers use at least one app. So it's pretty amazing growth and it's a big addressable market. In fact, the global HubSpot partner ecosystem is projected by IDC to grow from $4.8 billion in revenue in 2020 to $12.5 billion in revenue in 2024. Add on software being a significant part of that number. The market isn't just large in terms of numbers. With our free Starter Pro and Enterprise Hubs and tiers, we're serving a wide variety of customers across a wide range of ve varying company sizes, levels of maturity and geographically. There's a lot of variety too. From ebay to the World Wildlife Fund to startups like Hopin and Calm, the types of organizations that lean on HubSpot is increasingly diverse. The HubSpot app marketplace is where developers like you and customers like these meet. It's a place to connect and transact and to help each other grow better. When you list your app or integration in the App Marketplace, you'll be in good company. When customers get to the App Marketplace, they're greeted with a wide variety of apps and integrations built by familiar names and some not so familiar names you're likely familiar with. Most of these companies, Chargebee, Monday.com, aircall, Pendo, PandaDoc and Wistia are just some of the fantastic companies that have joined us on our platform journey over the years. But recently we've seen growth of built for HubSpot Products org ChartHub timeline visualizer that you'll see a little bit later and associate to unique products solving the unique needs of HubSpot customers. App partners lean on a wide variety of capabilities and innovation surface area to create delightful experience for HubSpot customers. Capabilities like custom objects, workflow integrations, E Commerce bridge, and webhooks make it easy for developers to build integrations to Sync data between HubSpot and other systems. Features like calling integrations, Media Bridge and CRM cards make it easy to connect daily user workflows with HubSpot to save time and eliminate work and CMS assets help connect customers customers to HubSpot CRM, a magical combination that brings HubSpot customers closer to their customers. For example, here's how Spreadsheet Web leveraged CRM cards to embed interactive excel calculations within HubSpot. The integration is part of the HubSpot experience. Meeting HubSpot users where they already are and Sakari help HubSpot customers automate reactive outreach to prospects and existing customers over sms. No more copy and paste or jumping between systems. It's a huge time saver. And speaking of saving time, we've started to embed the HubSpot Marketplace across the platform in contextually relevant ways. This helps customers connect the apps and integrations they need as quickly as possible without leaving their current workflow within the App Marketplace itself. We like to think of each app listing as a storefront or product. Imagine if the owner of a shopping mall gave you the opportunity to set up a store rent free. You probably wouldn't dress the window once and leave it at that. Instead, you tend to your storefront on a regular basis, changing the layout, messaging and more. App partners can quickly and easily create and maintain their listings in a self serve way and make their listings truly rich with content information to case studies and demo videos. There's so much you can do to optimize your storefront and of course the journey towards building an app is made easy through the excellent developer support HubSpot offers app partners From a free developer portal to get up and running quickly to detailed API documentation and client libraries you'll be building quickly. Our team of developer advocates and active community will help guide you on your journey. And last but not least, last year we launched the first HubSpot app accelerators. We run these a few times a year and invite partners to join to build solutions for customers in opportunity areas. We identify a kickoff is followed up by follow ups on your progress to set timelines, all coming together with a demo day at the end. We've seen partners build really successful and unique to HubSpot apps in this environment, from sales enablement solutions to vertical solutions for real estate and education across almost all our hubs and we've heard fantastic feedback from partners. More on this later. If you're interested in applying for future app accelerators, we will be sharing a link to the information and application within the chat. So hopefully this is helpful context to give you a sense of the scale of the HubSpot App Marketplace and the ways in which we can help you build apps and integrations to help organizations using HubSpot grow better. But it's worth remembering customers don't just care about the quantity of apps and integrations available to them, they care about the quality too. So with that in mind, I'd love to introduce you to Steve Laham on the app certification process.

Steve thank you Hugh hey everyone, I'm Steve Laham. My pronouns are he, him, I have dark hair and a beard and I'm wearing my amazing HubSpot black hoodie and standing in front of a wood backdrop with the HubSpot logo over my shoulder. I'm Head of Marketplace certification here at HubSpot and I'm super excited to talk to you all today at Developer Day 2021. We just heard from Hugh about the enormous opportunity inside the HubSpot app marketplace. One of the questions I hope to answer today is how to stand out and earn your share with such an expansive and growing ecosystem. What tools or programs exist to help developers build on HubSpot? We think a big part of standing out has to do with trust. Trust is a critical building block to unlocking long term app adoption. The way I see it, there are two types of trust inside the HubSpot ecosystem. There's the trust that HubSpot builds with all of you, our developers, our partners, by creating a rich and solid platform in which to build on. Secondly, there's the trust you built with our collective customers who rely on your apps and HubSpot's platform. So back to answering that question about how to stand out. What then builds trust? We think it all starts with quality. As you discussed, being listed in our marketplace is the first signal of trust. It is further enhanced by getting your app certified. And so if you walk away with anything today, let it be the relationship between quality, trust and the App Marketplace. There's a bunch of ways to build trust within an app. There's security, there's privacy, there's accessibilities, there's many more. And as we all know, there are themes and best practices that are persistent across software development organizations. And they apply to apps in our marketplace. Our customers, your customers, expect these earmarks of good software in the apps you are building. You can start to build trust by building a robust and useful app above all else. This is where trust begins by solving a problem. We're on a mission. We're on a mission to help anyone elevate, Accelerate and celebrate the quality of their work inside the HubSpot ecosystem. This is the certification team's mission. And when we say elevate, what we're talking about is the ability to provide a framework to validate solidly built apps. When we talk about Accelerate, we mean to provide a clear and transparent path for certification. And when we talk about Celebrate, we want to highlight the successes of the apps through the partner benefits only available to certified app partners. Let's chat about the program a bit. The App Certification program relaunched in July of 2020 and has been steadily growing ever since to support our developers and customers with high quality. 8 out of the 10 most successful and highest grossing apps in our marketplace are in fact certified. The equation for success clear is clear and contains a certification badge. Getting your app certified is a powerful signal to your customers that you have achieved a higher level of quality as defined by HubSpot. We offer two ways to get certified though. We offer standard certification and we offer an accelerated certification. And let's talk quickly about those differences. Our standard certification requires an app to be listed for at least six months and to have more than six active installs before we invite the app to apply for certification. Once the application is started over the next 60 days, we'll work with you to help meet the certification requirements and award you your new batch. Accelerated certification is similar, but however, we offer an alternative way to earn that badge. If you participated in the Accelerator program, as Hugh outlined earlier, we will offer half the standard waiting period before you can apply for certification. That means only waiting three months as opposed to the standard six. You still get the same 60 day window and dedication from the certification team as we review your app for quality. Once approved, you get your certification badge, but along with that badge comes some pretty great benefits. Let's talk about those. In addition to the listed benefits, you are included in the certified filter inside the marketplace. That means user can now filter specifically only for certified apps. You're eligible for inclusion and curated collections. And in addition, you're eligible for early access to new features, new betas and APIs. So those are the benefits that HubSpot provides, the ones I just spoke about. And there are those that you earn yourself by creating a high quality app. Our data clearly shows that on average, those apps that have achieved certification have four distinct advantages. They have a higher security rating, on average, they have higher active installs, on average, they experience lower error rates and they have longer installer retention rates. These aren't given by us, these are earned by you, our developers, in creating a high quality app. This is another big signal of the connection between quality and success in our marketplace. I'd like to leave you with four things HubSpot is doing and four things you can do to help take advantage of this billion dollar opportunity. Firstly, continue to grow the certification team. We're going to be adding amazing people to support the certification across HubSpot's growing partner base and we'll continue to add more as our programs and our users scale. Secondly, we'll continue to enhance our programs. Since launching last year, we've already introduced several program updates like Accelerator certification and recertification. We'll continue to have program transparency. We're committed to clear and timely responses from our team. We strive to provide meaningful feedback and insights as early as possible in the application process. And finally, we'll continue to elevate our security and our privacy. This year we've upped our security validation for all apps in our marketplace listed and certified and will continue security assessments as part of our certification process going forward. So that's what HubSpot's doing, but here are four things you can do. I encourage you to review the certification guidelines. Make sure you are assessing your app in the most current guidelines available before you apply. Stay up to date as HubSpot rolls out new features and enhances the vast set of APIs. Stay current. Use the recommended versions. Sign up for the change log. See what updates are being rolled out soon. Thirdly, monitoring, Review and measure your apps regularly for errors or issues. Recertification will happen once a year once you're certified and we want that to go as smoothly as possible. So know the state of your app prior to the recertification process. And lastly, apply when you're ready. After you've achieved six months in the Marketplace and have at least six active installs, an Apply for Certification button will appear in your developer account. We want your application to go smoothly and once you apply, we'll be supporting you at every step of the process. So make good use of the HubSpot developer docs, understand what to look out for and apply when you're ready. We'll be putting some links into the chat if you want to find out more ways and more about certification or any of the topics discussed today. Thank you so much for listening and with that I'll pass it back to Hugh to introduce our next speaker.

Awesome. Thanks so much Steve. So to conclude our discussion, Nicholas from CAX IO Labs is going to discuss his experience and as an App partner. Sorry, an App Accelerator and Accelerated Certification participant. And Nicholas's App Timeline visualizer has earned five star reviews since its launch in the HubSpot app marketplace. Over to you Nicholas.

Hi everyone, my name is Nicholas and I am Technical Director here at Gaxio. So I am here today to talk to you a little bit about App Accelerator. So in the case of Axio we are both a solutions and app partner. So that means that we do consultancy as well as development and often as we all know, billable hours are a priority. Meaning that when we had these do an application for ourselves, not for any client which is non available hours, often it turned out not to be the highest of priority. Then came Accelerator. So thanks to working together with HubSpot we had built much more clearer project structure. We also internally had the support and the resources for this project. We also had open communication with other companies that were part of the App Accelerator so that really helped us during the project and the value actually comes already the first value comes at very early stage. So as we were doing the research on so what do we want to build in App Accelerator we probably sent 10 to 15 ideas that inside the company we had come up with. And I'm not afraid to say that actually a lot of those came back with red pen. This happened because either HubSpot knew that someone else is already building it, so they didn't want Glaxio to invest time in the same thing. Or maybe even that some ideas were not that good as we thought. Anyway, the idea that we ended up then building we called Timeline Visualizer. And we noticed in our own sales operations that especially in deals or with companies with very long sales cycles, when you have more than 100 updates, naturally no one really has time to go through all those updates and some information might be then missing. So what happened then is we saw that of course our salespeople time is money. So we needed to think of a way that how can we show to the sales team how very quickly status of a company so that with one glance you see all the deals that are ongoing or already closed, won, lost or then also in contact level, when was a certain person added, when have we been in contact with a certain person, etc. Etc. So this gave something that instead of scrolling through over 100 updates, we could show a lot of information in matter of few seconds. So this was the idea that for us then HubSpot told us that you know what, there might be something in this. So then the next step was that let's start building it again. App Accelerator provided us a lot of value at this stage because we preemptively were able to avoid certain problems that we would have encountered at the development stage just because, well, we were learning. And thanks to HubSpot they told us like, maybe this is not the best way to do what you want to do. And we would get that technical guidance as well to do things the right way. So this more efficient and it allowed us to learn much faster. One thing that we were not even expecting that this APP accelerate would bring us is actually future commercial potential. So thanks to all the learnings that we had here, what happened was that we had more confidence and we got opportunities to start building applications to actually paying clients. So now with paying clients, this is not something that we were planning that into, but with paying clients we have become more and more migrated in the whole marketplace of HubSpot and more and more interested in in the future as well building more applications. So to wrap it up, the three reasons that I would give my thumbs up to App Accelerator would be the direct support and the guidance you get. And remember that we work together so we get assistance from HubSpot but also feedback from us. So we for example were giving feedback on certain issues that we had With API version 1 vs 2 version 3 and some things that we felt maybe was not structured like it couldn't. So also HubSpot listens to all of us in terms of how can we improve, for example APIs in this case. The second thing is the structured project. So now that we were part of App Accelerator, it was much easier to also at the company level to show that we have commitment to this project and it would have been much more difficult to decide, you know what, let's postpone this task and this deadline because we have a so called paying client that needs something else. No, this was already like planned in the resources that this internal project is equally important as other external projects. And the third point, as mentioned, the commercial potential. So these are like the three pillars, I would say for where we saw the value of App Accelerator. And now, well, that's where we thought that this is where it ended. But no, after we launched in the App Accelerator Build Application Timeline Visualizer, what we did next is of course we start to do our advertising, our marketing for our application because we want installs. So at coxio we used Blog, newsletter, social media, several channels in order to get installations, get more feedback for the application and so forth. What happened as well for a positive surprise is that HubSpot also used their marketing channels such as Social Media Blog to also pitch our application. This naturally provided even more installs, even more feedback, so we could keep improving our application. Then what came next is the accelerated certification program. So normally what happens is that when you launch an application now it's live, it has to be in the marketplace maybe six months or more and then you're looking at getting it certified by HubSpot. But now as you've actually done the whole development project together with HubSpot, they already know the application. You can be enrolled in the accelerated certification program. So this meant that Timeline Visualizer was in the marketplace between one and two months and we were already also certified by HubSpot. And as you know, this brings confidence, this brings more installs and brings much more potential for future. So all in all for us the experience was great and I would really recommend it. And thank you very much for the whole HubSpot team to work together with us. So let's all grow together. Thank you.

Great, thank you all so much to our presenters. Now we are going to move into the Q and A section of this Event. We have about five minutes. So to kick things off, Andre asked, what are the technical skills needed to build a HubSpot app?

Steve, maybe do you want to take that?

Yeah, I mean, I think in terms of building a good app, the things you want to look at are some basic building blocks like we mentioned in terms of quality. You want to make sure you're using the right authentication protocols. You want to make sure that you're building an app that is consistent with the scopes that you're using. That's one of the big pitfalls that we've seen in the certification process is that you're either using too many or too few, using matchup to the APIs that you're needed for your integration. We also like some of the big stumbling blocks with listing or certification have to do with simple basic content of your listing. Make sure you have the right video, make sure you have documentation, make sure you have the support that goes into supporting an integration and app. So I would say, you know, a lot of the technical skills are basic, but it's really the details that are listed in the requirements that are the most important in making sure that you're listed properly and that you eventually get certified. I think John dropped a link in chat that will take you to some of the certification requirements. Certainly you can look at those. There's some detail there around the areas that we'll be looking for.

Great, thank you, Steve. I'm going to combine two of our questions from the chat here. Do most HubSpot apps integrate with some other external service, or is it possible to just build an app that only exists in the HubSpot ecosystem? What's kind of the scale or the scope of what people can build here?

Yeah, I can definitely take that one. Yeah, I think the answer is yes. Developers building integrations between HubSpot and other platforms. So like messaging integrations, integrations that sync data back and forth, things like that. But we're increasingly seeing developers build products basically built HubSpot. So like timeline Visualizer is a really good example of that. Where it lives within HubSpot, it leans on the data within your HubSpot account and kind of makes it makes the insights more valuable and helps your team learn more about how your customer kind of sales and onboarding process is going. So there's a ton of solutions or an increasing number of solutions that are being built on top of HubSpot. Another good example that comes to mind is Org Charthub. So it's a really simple product that helps you create an Org chart and kind of map your customers to that as well. And again, that lives entirely on top of HubSpot. And even like, you know, their pricing and their go to market is aligned with the way that we structure those things as well. So it's definitely a trend that we're seeing more of.

Awesome. Let's talk about maintenance of apps. What should folks be doing to maintain and update their apps? And is there any consequence or, you know, can apps get delisted or removed from the marketplace?

Let me take this one, Hugh. Well, I can tell you that, you know, I talked a little bit about the recertification process that's happening. And while this applies to recertification, we're also looking at apps that are listed. So this applies both to sort of certified and listed apps. We're constantly evaluating, monitoring apps for things like API errors. So like, that's. That's one of the building blocks we make sure we validate as we look at a healthy listed app or certified app. The other thing we're looking for in terms of quality is making sure that an app has the right active installs and user base. That's another thing that's very important when we talk about being a quality app in our marketplace, making sure that it's serving a purpose, that it's serving the customers that are using it. We also have ratings and reviews. That's an indicator of how useful apps are. So I would say having an app in our marketplace is not a set it and forget it. This is something that needs to be watered. This flower needs to be watered and grown. So I'll let Hugh chime in with any other additions there.

That's a really good summary. Yeah, I think it's an ongoing commitment, especially when you start to onboard customers. I think we have a mutual obligation on both sides to make sure that they're having the best experience possible. So, like Steve mentioned, we have certain policies in place in terms of like the app marketplace and certifications as well that help us kind of monitor that quality and make sure that we're on both sides making that ongoing investment.

Awesome. Thank you all so much. I do just want to end with one final question that I think is great from the audience. Are there any areas that are lacking solutions or that you see opportunities for in this potential $4.2 billion opportunity?

Yeah, that's a great question. I think my answer to that would be there's so many, I couldn't list them all off at once. But what I would recommend would be to check out the app accelerator landing page and fill out the form there and tell us a little bit about you and what you're thinking of building. And what we tend to do in the app accelerators is share a little bit of detail around where some of the opportunities are. So that's one of the best ways to kind of get an ongoing changing answer to that question.

Awesome. Thank you so much for joining us and answering some of our community questions, and I will see you all in our next session about using data to build a seamless digital experience. Thanks again to Stephen, Hugh.