Today I am just thrilled to announce our acquisition of oneforty . We did this acquisition for three main reasons.
1. Talent
I have been admiring oneforty for a couple of years now. Laura Fitton ( @Pistachio ) has been a leading thinker/actor in the social media space for some time now, and I’m looking forward to adding her into the mix with our other thinkers like Dharmesh , Mike Volpe , Dan Zarrella , David Cancel , David Meerman Scott , etc.
As part of the deal, we are picking up some world-class development chops. When I floated the idea of acquiring oneforty internally, I found out that three separate folks at HubSpot had been trying to woo their CTO, Mike Champion, for some time now.
This acquisition is part of an ongoing effort to attract the best and the brightest technical minds to HubSpot. We have very ambitious goals, and we want the R&D talent to be able to deliver on those goals. We have grown our R&D organization from 29 people a year ago to 68 today. Most of this has been organic growth, but we have augmented it by picking up some real rockstars through this acquisition and the earlier Performable acquisition .
2. Social Media Functionality
When Dharmesh and I started HubSpot five years ago, it was to help companies transform their marketing to match the way humans actually bought stuff today. As part of that effort, we have been building social media functionality throughout HubSpot from day one. For example, we have an application for
tracking your reach in social media
over time,
an application for tracking your reach in social media relative to your competitors
over time, an application that helps you
track the shape of your sales funnel
through each social media channel, and
an application that listens in social media
for conversations about your business (and keywords). We have a feature that
social media matches incoming leads
, a feature that allows you to
automatically syndicate your blog article to social media
, and a feature that allows you to put a “follow me” button on your site. We also social media optimize our customers' emails for them, we set up Facebook pages for our customers, etc. As you can see, social media is really throughout the whole system, and that’s probably not including a bunch of stuff that I’ve forgotten.
So, if you’ve got that much social media stuff going on, why buy oneforty? Well, they have two valuable things. First is a marketplace for social media applications that is darn slick. We are going to take that application and merge it with our existing app marketplace (think Apple’s app store for marketers). Second is a marketing project management application that is kind of like 37 Signal’s Basecamp for marketers with a heavy social bend. This application was actually available on our app marketplace where I first played with it. We really like where they are going with this and are going to figure out a way to implement that concept into our new dashboard application and/or our new ToDo List application. The opportunity for HubSpot to “watch” everything that is going on in your marketing world and propose your to-do list or work with you (think Pandora-style training) to figure out your to-do list could be really interesting for our customers.
3. Our Customers
We are up to 5,000 customers now and are thrilled they have entrusted us with helping them grow their businesses. We are investing heavily in the product organically and through acquisitions like this because we feel like the best way to build a historic business is on the shoulders of successful customers who end up spreading the word for us.
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John McTigue 6:16 PM on August 18, 2011
Brian, as usual, a smart move in a period of time where talent is the ultimate asset. Looking forward to working with you and the HubSpot gang and the new HubSpotters from Oneforty on building out the social side of the platform even more.
Jamie Favreau 6:28 PM on August 18, 2011
Congrats. What an exciting time and what a combination for your growing business.
Chad Wiebesick 6:36 PM on August 18, 2011
This is great news. HubSpot is awesome and picking up another awesome company - Oneforty - makes awesome sauce.
janet n aronica 7:59 PM on August 18, 2011
So happy to join :)
Denver Painters 9:28 PM on August 18, 2011
This is exciting, for HubSpot and participants, tying all the loose ends together, making the social media scene much more functional.
Juan Carlos Gomez 1:50 AM on August 19, 2011
I see @ the distance Hubspot starting to buy companies like Google. Cheers!!
Harry 12:41 PM on August 19, 2011
I agree with the work you are doing at Hubspot. But I do disagree for a fact that your tools aren't still performing at the best potential.
You don't hear all the social media conversations. Your software doesn't know and isn't even aware of the links we build.
When one of the businesses I check with have hubspot installed and want to check what we're doing, they get misreported data from your tool.
Even though they are happy with the results I'm producing. It's good that Hubspot is at least proactively investing in the right things.
I don't see any other company doing that. But some of your in-house experts that do the webinars are just geeks who have no clue as to what they are doing.
As a customer, I went through the webinars and came out like, "What the hell?"
You need to take care of your client training well. Because 97% of consultants they work with SUCK to the core.
It's real internet marketers that really understand the process and are aware of all the moves.
And the guys who teach the webinars have got no clue.
As for the software and tracking tool, I like it and it simplifies the business.
Denver Painting Contractors 2:24 PM on August 19, 2011
The only thing I can add to the conversation, responding to Harry's concerns is: Several years ago I thought the term "Geek" was someone more knowledgeable than I in the internet world. That definition has not wavered, although today, I surround myself with those having much more knowledge than the average Joe, and do not see the term Geek stereotype, a least bit negative. Hoping Harry's concerns are given proper attention, as I'm sure they will.
Amber Cebull 3:42 PM on August 19, 2011
Harry has interesting concerns that appear to have been festering. I toured Hubspot yesterday for the first time and see it's growing at a huge rate. Prior to becoming a partner, I spoke with my consultant about a concern that the continual changing product left me feeling a little to be desired as far as, I wanted to make sure that I could evolve my marketing and take advantage of all the features. I think that they've come very far since then in sending out updates and guides that help you excel in your efforts. I see the services marketplace as being the solution to the client concerns. As they evolve, the kinks will work themselves out, I'm sure, as can only be expected from a
Company so closely focused on client education. Congrats on the growth, keep truckin.
Brian Halligan 5:44 PM on August 19, 2011
@Harry --
Thanks for your comment. Would love love love to hear more. I have your email from the blog comment notification, so will reach out to you directly.
I'm personally a very active user of the HubSpot software. I use it for my own company (HubSpot) and for a non-profit I'm involved with. I gotta say, I love it, but its definitely not perfect. I hope you can take solace in the fact that when you hit a speedbump (i.e. it doesn't grab all the right social media stuff), I hit the same one and am working my back off to fix the stuff. In the last 12 months, I've added 39 new software developers and purchased two companies that fill nice gaps for us. I'm working hard and spending hard to make this product and company blow its customers away.
Brian.