HubSpot's founders explain how the company shifted from chasing cheap customer acquisition to obsessing over product quality and customer delight. They discovered referrals drove most growth, so they moved budget from sales to product and engineering. The P&L changed to match.
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There's one— HubSpot's lived many lives and we've gone through many transformations and pivots within HubSpot. But one of them was HubSpot initially was obsessed with the relationship between our company and a prospect and converting that prospect to a customer. And we got really good at it and kept our CAC low. We could really sell. Mark Roberge was our head of sales, and at some point we just woke up and just like started asking customers why they bought. And largely the reason they bought was word of mouth. And so we switched our focus to the relationship between HubSpot and a customer and turning that customer into a delighted customer with word of mouth. And you can see that change in our P&L. We started moving money from sales and marketing into product. We started hiring heavily in engineering and product and in design and got quite, quite serious about just— we're in the customer delight business, not in the customer acquisition business. And that was a massive shift for us. So sort of we flipped it overnight on it.