Jason M. Lemkin explains how HubSpot's free tier forces the product to stay simple and easy to use, which helps both free users and paying customers. The company cycles between focused efforts on different markets every 6 to 12 months, alternating between improving go-to-market and product marketing.
6, 9, 12 months
So it benefits the fact that we're in the kind of upmarket market. Yes, benefits our lower end customers because they get access to a set of features over time that they wouldn't have gotten access to. It helps that we're in the kind of free and starter tier on the lower end because what happens is we are forced by constraint to make the product easy. Because if it were not easy, if it were purely upmarket. Yes, we wouldn't be able to support it. We wouldn't just have to. And so both modes kind of benefit each other. It makes us relatively rare because very few people try to do it that way. And yes, it is hard. And we're constantly balancing. When we have what we think of as the HubSpot spotlight, it's like, okay, yeah, we're doing both. But in any given period of time, it's like, okay, we're really going to focus on the velocity on this market right now and try to fix that go to market motion. Okay, that's doing pretty well. Let's shift it and let's now for the next 6, 9, 12 months, kind of focus on that upmarket, make that go to market better. Make sure our product marketing is working. It's not a perfect science, but it's worked for us so far.
