Two speakers (HubSpot founders) recount a pivotal founders' dinner where they decided to shift HubSpot from a sales/marketing focus to a product- and customer-centric company. They agreed to stop hiring for sales and marketing until the product reached a subjective quality threshold, began obsessing over NPS, made an acquisition to improve the product, and invested in design and team revamps to change behavior and culture.
Chapters
Yeah. I remember the meeting we had when we had that kind of epiphany that we need to shift from being like a sales marketing focus to kind of product and customer focused. And it was at a founder's dinner, which is usually multi hours, involving multiple bottles of wine. And we made the decision then at that dinner that's like, oh, we can't just keep going down the path. We're going. We're not going to achieve the ambition. Both in agreement. Awesome. So let's decide. We're going to be a product company. Awesome. We've decided we're going to be a product company. It's like the team's not going to believe us. How is that going to change behavior? And to Brian's credit, he's like, okay, well, the way to change behavior is to change the P. And that says we're not gonna spend a dollar on sales and marketing hires until we can get the product to a certain level of subjective quality, essentially.
Subjective. You didn't have a kid.
It was the two of us. We knew it sort. Yeah, it wasn't. We started obsessing over nps.
Yeah, okay. That was your version.
Then we did an acquisition to kind of help to get the product, and the team kind of revamped. Spent a bunch on designers, but you.
