Relentless curiosity, radical accountability, and HubSpot’s winning growth formula | Christopher Miller (VP of Product, Growth and AI)

Podcast: Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career
Source: whisper-tiny
URL: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/135727143/d0c507b507393119e179a43e00b1246e.mp3
Fetched: 2026-03-05 01:42:57

like the actual really small initial growth team. We really had an aggressive mentality and aggressive approach. And what that looked like was at the time, a very small percentage of I think HubSpot's subscription revenue would be described as self-service. So we approached a team who owned it and were like, are y'all working on this, right? And they were like, nah, we're working on a bunch of other stuff. We were like, can we take this? And they were like, sure, if you want it. And so we took it and like immediately blew it up. And so that attitude of sort of saying that like every problem is our problem and like radical accountability and like ownership mentality helped us find opportunities that maybe the business wasn't explicitly asking us to solve, but we were able to triangulate why it might be important for the business force to solve it. And when you do that, we look hungry. So let's keep feeding us, right? Welcome to Lenny's podcast where interview world class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-win experience as building and growing today's most successful product. Today, my guest is Chris Miller. Chris is VP of product for growth and AI at HubSpot. Chris started as an ICPM at HubSpot where he helped create their early growth team. And as you'll hear, shifted HubSpot towards one of the most successful product led growth businesses in history. Seven years later, he leads both their growth and AI teams and advises founders on product like growth and growth strategy in general. In our wide-ranging conversation, we cover what it takes to become a successful product leader in tech, what skills the most successful PMs need to build, how to find mentors, why you need to scrape your knees as an early camp, also a lot of great stories and insights about what HubSpot figured out about growth across content, sales, product, market segments, and growth loops. I so enjoyed this conversation and we could have gone for another hour if I didn't cut myself off. And so I'm really excited for you to listen to this conversation. With that, I bring you Chris Miller after a short word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Vanta helping you streamline your security compliance to accelerate your growth. Thousands of fast-growing companies like Gusto, Com, Chora, and modern treasury trust Vanta to help build, scale, manage, and demonstrate their security and compliance programs and get ready for audits in weeks, not months. By offering the most in-demand security and privacy frameworks such as SOC2, ISO2711, GDPR, HIPAA, and many more, Vanta helps companies obtain the reports they need to accelerate growth, build efficient compliance processes, mitigate risks to their businesses, and build trust with external stakeholders. 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With Sidebar, senior leaders are matched with highly-betted, private, supportive peer groups to lean on for unbiased opinions, diverse perspectives, and raw feedback. Everyone has their own zone of genius, so together we're better prepared to navigate professional pitfalls, leading to more responsibility, faster promotions, and bigger impact. Guided by world-class programming and facilitation, Sidebar enables you to get focused, tactical feedback at every step of your journey. If you're a listener of this podcast, you're likely already driven and committed to growth. A Sidebar Personal Board of Directors is the missing piece to catalyze that journey. Why spend a decade finding your people when you can meet them at Sidebar today? Jump the growing weight list of thousands of leaders from top tech companies by visiting sidebar.com, slash Lenny to learn more. That's sidebar.com slash Lenny. Chris, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. I'm so excited to be on the podcast. Thank you, Lenny, for having me. Let's be a lot of fun. A huge thank you to Kyle Poir for introducing us. I've heard so many great things about you from so many great people, and so I'm really excited to be chatting. And I wanted to start with your very unique role that you're in now at Upspot, and it feels like it might be a sign of things to come for product leaders. Your title, as far as I can tell, is VP of Product of Growth and AI. Can you just talk about what that is and how growth and AI relate in the context of Upspot? I've been leading PLG at Upspot for several years now, and I recently took on the AI leadership role, a special place to be in and that I get to help lead Upspot in terms of how we should be thinking about building the foundational technology to create AI powered experiences, and then also lead the strategy of how we leverage those experiences to help that B2B business builder, be way more successful using our platform than they might have been in years pass. So it's a really cool intersection point between those two things. There's a lot we can do there. One thing I took away from what you just shared is that you are given these two teams to lead, which aren't necessarily connected, but I think it tells me that you're doing a great job at Upspot, and I'm gonna try to pierce through your modesty, and I'm curious, what is it that you think you've done really well or been successful at that God, the leaders at Upspot, to decide to give you this other team that feels like an incredibly important initiative in this time of AI. So when I joined Upspot in 2016, it was definitely like an element of timing that really worked in my favor. It was maybe like a year or so after Upspot had launched their free CRM, which was like a big, you know, strategic play for them and for us to use the time. And it was meant to be disruptive, but I don't think that there was a fully firm perspective on what was gonna happen after that, right? Like how are we actually going to get leverage and enterprise value out of this sort of big enormous piece of free software we just put into the universe, right? And I think the pedigree of product manager at Upspot at that time was also a bit different. Like there are folks who maybe started their time at Upspot and support. And so intimately familiar with the product and with customers, you know, some of these people had closed thousands of support tickets. And my background was a bit different. I was actually less of a future PM and I was sort of more of a growth PM in my DNA. And so I sort of looked at this through completely different lens. And I just like understood that what we were trying to actually do was product-led growth, but we didn't really have the share vocabulary to call it that, right? And so I think to answer your question, I think I was just willing to take some risks and really push for the things that I believed made sense, even maybe based on the titles that I had at the time, I wasn't sort of inherently given a seat at the table and so I really pushed my way into so many conversations. And then was eventually invited to them, right? And so I was always had an interest in driving a strategy that was a quicker, too higher than maybe what my immediate team was focused on. And it was always curious about how other parts of the business function, like I used to spend a lot of time sitting on the sales floor, just going into the other buildings and talking to other folks working on different parts of the business and that's part of maybe the serendipity that I miss about being a person, which is that you might just discover something from having a casual conversation with someone at the water cooler, like, oh, that's an interesting problem. I think my team could help with that. So you absorb a bunch of context around how pieces of the business are connected and you can start to really widen your aperture in terms of the size of opportunities that might be in front of you that maybe you would have missed if you would have been so heads down on execution work. And so I think that if I had to guess how people might talk about that if I wasn't in the room, maybe they would cite that, but it's set to set. Hard to do those serendipity water cooler chats in these remote hybrid times, huh? Yeah, everything's so scheduled and tightly scheduled than you're bouncing from zoom in the zoom. And obviously, I'm spot is embraced hybrid and there's a ton of benefit to it. In fact, I was a new dad when I came back to work and my son was in a daycare. And so it was so cool to be able to pop out in between meetings and play with him for a few minutes just to go back and you don't get that when you're in the office all day. So definitely a lot of upside, but certainly, it's, you gotta be a little creative in terms of the, that's earned up at his knowledge sharing, the osmosis learning and just context sharing that happens more organically when everybody's sharing the same physical space. You talked about how some of your early success was taking risks and being in meetings maybe you shouldn't be in. Is there an example or a story that comes to mind of doing that where you kind of took a risk early on being kind of in your P.M. at HubSpot or something that worked out really well? Surprising. This is a funny story. If anybody it helps about listening, I apologize and retrospect for this, but there was a time where we were having a lot of debates around pricing and packaging. And you know, we'll get into this, but our good-a-market model and sort of, where we play in the dressable market. Creates in complexity in the sense of, we're serving different parts of the market, simultaneously, with the connected unified platform. And so how do you think about packaging and go to market? And we were trying to figure out how to simplify simplify simplify and at the time I was an I.C. individual contributing P.M. So who am I to sort of have a coin of pricing and packaging? But you know, the person I was working with, my designer, her name's Mariah Mascado. She's a, she's a product master's excellent. We were part of a triad and we sort of both had a similar school of thought in terms of what the pricing and packaging could be. And we were over in Dublin where we have our European headquarters and there was a party happening at the Guinness sort of storehouse. And I don't know that we were exactly on the guest list. We figured out a way to get into the party and we ran into the COO at the time. And out of the blue, I think he had asked us what we thought about pricing and packaging. It was sort of one of those funny you should ask moments, right? And so we ended up kind of pitching in the midst of pint's being sort of handed up, you know, every which way you turn this vision for a completely different way we might approach pricing and packaging. And he was, he was pretty intrigued. And he said, why don't you come to the next executive meeting and and pitch us on it? I think that meeting was maybe a couple weeks away. And so we looked at each other. We were like, oh, no, not exactly what we expected. In terms of, I think people welcoming made a contrarian point of view at that moment in time. And so we sort of were invited into this meeting with folks that we generally don't get to spend a lot of time with to pitch this thing that swam a little bit upstream. And we ultimately didn't go full steam ahead down that path. I think a lot of elements of what we pitched have made their way over time into HubSpot's pricing and packaging. But it's certainly, I think, opened the door for us and for me, feeling for myself, certainly for me to be welcome back into that room in the future and to be able to contribute ideas towards important decisions, you know. I love that it's another example of certain deputy and just running into people. Yeah. Also, I think it's a really good example of just how important it is for PMs to be proactive. And I think I had a not just kind of reliant like people coming to you asking you for your advice and like getting invited to rooms. I feel like so much of a success in the product leadership role is just like suggesting great ideas being ahead of where people are and having the answers. Like you have the answer right there in the moment, right? And it's because you did the work ahead of time. Is that something you find as well that that ends up being really important? Yeah. One of the traits that I look for in PMs that I hire onto my teams. And also, when I think back to the people that I've learned a lot from working with over the years, one of the common behaviors or traits is like relentless curiosity. It's like insatiable desire to understand things and a lack of fear in admitting when they don't understand things and being uncompromising and getting the answers so that they do understand. I think if you can bring that to the table, it's much easier to have an outsized impact on whatever or your part of, but whenever mission you're working on, or whenever team, you know, you maybe a number of. Are there any other traits? And that list of traits you look for that you think are really important. And maybe other people don't focus on? Yeah, relentless curiosity is probably my number one. My number two would probably be resilience, specifically if you're working in growth, I think. If you're doing growth right, right? Like if you're doing product-led growth the right way, then you're trying to balance the science of, you know, and sort of taking like, somewhat hygienic approach to validating assumptions and hypotheses with being really ambitious and really pushing for the things that are gonna have massive impact for your customers at the end of the day. And when you're doing that, you're gonna fail more than you're gonna be successful along the way, right? And if you're not resilient, that can be really demotivating, right? Like I think there's a stat that some, you know, growth person put out there years ago, which is that like, on average, only 20 to 30% of experiments a growth team runs might be successful. So that means like, 70 to 80% of the time, you're not putting numbers on the board and you're extracting learning so hopefully that you can apply to the future. But I think if you're not resilient, what I've seen happen is you end up sort of grasping for a win, which can sometimes look like making bets that are too small and too insignificant to matter, right? If you're sort of primary modality of product like growth work is experiment, driven product development, and you're hitting more than like 30% of the time, you're thinking too small, right? And so that resiliency piece is certainly important in my mind. I think coachability is another one. In the sense that I still think that like the sort of subcategory of like growth product management is still like fledgling compared to PM's working on like platform features. And so even when I'm interviewing folks, I'm not necessarily looking for 10 years of experience doing PLG, I think that's mostly an unreasonable ask, but it can certainly be taught. And even if you do have some experience doing PLG work, it's important to know that what that work is going to look like is going to potentially vary in a meaningful way from shop to shop. And so being coachable and adaptable to whatever the context is of the business or problem space that you're working on, I think is an important trade that I look for in PM's. And then creativity is so important too. Value-ing simple solutions to really hard problems. I think it building the next like super sophisticated widget is a thing that gets you out of bed in the morning, like growth might not be for you, right? Like I think the best growth like product leaders and growth minds that I've worked with over the years or have had the the poofage of learning from over the years. Like I think the thing that I noticed about them is they are almost like ambivalent to the solution. And certainly ambivalent to like how complex solution may or may not be and sort of taking like little to no pleasure or pride in the complexity of a solution. So long that it delivers the outcome that the business and your customers need, I think is a really cool trait. And I kind of like categorize that under creativity. You mentioned this phrase of relentless curiosity and made me think about a story I read about you where the way you got into product management was you're at some startup. And the founder was just like, I've read that the cure to all our problem is going to be hiring product manager. And you heard that and you Googled what does product management? And then you asked them, can I do that? And that's how you got into the role. So first of all, is that true and second of all is what's your advice to people trying to get into product management and what any lessons from that experience? So first, yes, that is 100% true. That is how I stumbled into product management. So I appreciate all the folks who took a shot on me back then. But yeah, I mean, and this was at a time where I would say product management has a function was definitely not ubiquitous across tech. There was a lot more, at least in the world that I was in, a lot more of a standard waterfall approach to building product with a lot of middle layers and engineering managers and really knowing who had the job of owning the problem from a customer's point of view. And so there wasn't a ton of content out there. And we're even a ton of people in the city at the time that I could really talk to to sort of learn. And so a lot of what I did was scrape my knees through the first years and a lot of like painful trial and error. And then eventually I think there's a lot more energy and interest around the trade craft and the function. And so I think it's much easier today for someone to learn the fundamentals of product management without necessarily needing to do it via like trial by fire. My advice to folks who are interested in like breaking into product management specifically is focus, a few things. One focus on structure, right? I think like there's usually a lower barrier to entry to do product management at like a smaller shop, which they might not have as much access to the best talent out there, right? But I think what you may often give up in those instances is structure to your own sort of professional development and formal training and education. And potentially even the opportunity to work for people who are like truly dial tested and have seen the movie several times and can actually like wisdom share it. It's truthfully, it looks different in every company. And so it is one of those functions I do believe that taking like a truly like academic approach towards you know, upscaling has like fairly diminishing returns because it's tough to feel curveballs in a classroom, right? And so choosing where you want to break in is almost as important as choosing that you want to break in in the first place. Like thinking about who you're going to be reporting to, thinking about what's a track record of success for people with that company breaking in the product management, trying to think five years in advance of work backwards, I think are all sort of important thought exercises along the way. I would also say that if you're already at a shop, you know, where you are working in a different function and you're sort of like product curious, right? That go, go, talk to the PN and look a little bit when I say it's like, go reach out to a PN and ask how you can make their day easier. Figure out what you can do in your spare time that they can offload to you and do a little bit of volunteer labor even if that's just shadowing, right? Because I think just getting that context and understanding the sort of rhythm of how a team ideates and defines problems and prioritizes and ships software is the experience that's going to be the most important because a lot of product management is also managing personalities and figuring out how people want to work with you and figuring out how you work for them. And so, you know, just getting that hands-on experience or at least direct sightline into sort of the day-to-day of a team is really important because the extent to which you can understand their problems space and understand the things that keep them up at night you can be valuable and then, you know, at the very least, which would get out of it is hopefully an advocate, right, or a sponsor at the end of the day, who is willing to gamble some professional and, you know, political capital on you to get your foot into the door, even though you might not have any formal experience on your resume. There's so much stuff that's super-resonates. There, one is that I always think of, like, the bare minimum job of a PM is just to be useful to people on the team and help them do better work. And if, like, if you do that alone, people are... Bring the donuts, right? Bring the donuts, exactly. Yeah. I've got shit on the... I must be old. I don't know that anybody uses bringing the donuts but now we have, can on the podcast, we talked about it. We asked to, like, what is the digital version of that when everyone's working for MOOC? I think that's something that, even if you're a brand EPM, you come across soon enough. And then the other piece that I really love this metaphor of scraping your knees because I find that to be so important to becoming a PM is you think you could just, like, read these things, take some courses and it's gonna go, you gotta, you got this and you're not gonna mess up. But I find that messing up is so important in helping to learn, to do the job, because, like, you said there's relationships and people and changing plans and leaders and that's just, like, you're not gonna get it right and you learn how to deal with all these things that might be messing up. So, it's like, super agree with that. And even though you said it's easier now to learn to be a PM, it's still a think important to scrape your knees a number of times for you to actually learn to do the job. Along those lines, what did you find was most helpful to you to learn the craft or product management in the first few years? What do you think back to, like, oh, that was really helpful other than just doing it, messing up, sometimes getting it right? Yeah. So, my first product management sort of, like, job slash mission was working on a B to B to C products and there's a lot of unique challenges that came with that, you know, our customer was not the end user of our product. We sold into institutions who then white-labeled our product and then resold it to the end customer. And so, at the end of the day, our customers own the relationship with the end user and not us. And so, the challenges that that created were that there was a lot of distance between us and the voice of the customer, or the voice of the end user. And we ended up building a lot of things to satisfy the buyer and the customer but not necessarily the end user. And that's challenging because you don't necessarily know whether you're building something to get a contract signed or you're building something that's gonna delight, the person using it the end of the day or provide sort of like, magical value. And so, I think I probably shipped a lot of bad product those years. I'm being completely honest, like, I don't know that I would look back at what I shipped back then, or what we shipped back then and sort of, say, you know, they were the best possible solutions or the best possible product. It wasn't until I got my second product management job where it really was an inflection point where I was like, oh, God, this is what this is supposed to look and feel like. Where was that? I was working on a fitness technology company and the person who really, I would say, changed my entire paradigm of what product management is supposed to be someone I know you know, three most about who I believe was on the pod. Oh, absolutely. Last October, shout out to three to feel listening. Three to sign a good friend and mentor and he's like, really helped me level up. And what was interesting about those years is it was the first time I'd really gotten to work on a product where it was a premium B2C run tracking app. And so we spent a lot of time talking to users directly and like a lot of like guerrilla user research techniques, like literally sometimes going outside and just like talking to runners and passing to understand sort of like what were the challenges in finding motivation and sort of why do they choose running assistance, running applications in the first place and you know, so just that, that having that deep connection to the customer and not feeling like you're being kept at arm's distance was high opening. I was like, oh, I didn't know that it could be like this. And then the second thing that we had at our disposal that was changed the game for me was access to a huge user data set. And so having data at scale to drive decisions, being able to know that if we make a change, we can prove causation from like a business impact standpoint or a customer delight or engagement standpoint. And so it was almost like I didn't realize I was blind until or you didn't realize you weren't seeing in colors like that. Seeing in the Wizard of Oz where, you know, they land on us and I'm saying everything's in technical and you're like, oh my gosh, I can actually make and form decisions about what I'm shipping, right? And having like a level of rigor around that and really being forced to articulate a hypothesis and have a point of view on what the outcomes might be before you actually build something. We're all sort of, I would say behaviors and just like philosophy around product discipline that I learned from three to not like, creep of folks that I worked with closely during those years. And that was I think though, I consider that to be when I really became a product manager. There's two things I want to highlight there that again, super-resignate. When it's just, whenever I talk to customers, I always like, I'm like, why don't I do this more often? Yeah, because every time it's like, wow, I had no idea how big a problem that was. Why didn't I do that? Why don't I do this all the time? And then you don't again. And then you do it once later. Oh my gosh, I learned so much again. And so I think it's just if you're listening, you're just like, maybe just go talk to a customer today. Off the customers and, you know, we also learned a lot from talking to people who we wanted to be customers, but we're not, right? And people who either broke it up with our product or evaluated it and never fell in love with it in the first place. And so I think every PM struggles with time management and it feels like you need 60 hours in a day to get through your weekly checklist or 60 hours in a week, excuse me. But finding time to just talk to people, like even today, like I have a lot of friends who are entrepreneurs or small business owners and some use house bot, some don't. But I usually tend to really enjoy my conversations with people who decide not to use house bot and to really try to unpack what drove that decision. Was it as calculated as I think sometimes we can all, maybe assume that some of these decisions are and then you often learn it. Like, there's sometimes kind of emotional, like, like, really instinctual and visceral and maybe connected to brands more than they're even connected to the product and there's a lot of things that I think when you're in the proverbial like digital conference room at your team trying to understand what makes your users tick. You're just like, where he logical humans at the end of the day at our core, right? And that all rides on decisions, people make in the day-to-day and it doesn't change necessarily when they're engaging with your product as much as we love it to be perfect science so that we can, you know, money ball the system, if you will. And it reminds me of a story where we were doing some user research on a booking feature with an Airbnb and we went to Paris to do these really in-depth user research studies where like, behind one of my mirrors and all that stuff. And we were trying to figure out why hosts were in connecting Facebook to their account. This is like, you know, five, six years ago because they gave them so much access to where their friends are traveling and reviews and all these things and especially in France, they were just like, I don't trust Facebook. And this was before it became a big thing in the US, they're just like, I don't trust, I don't want them to have any of my data. But like, look at all this power you get. And I'm like, no, I don't care. I don't trust it. And yeah, that's why taking customers is so, like, you could have all the usage data in the world. That's gonna tell you what's actually happening in your product, but that doesn't tell you why, right? Like, it will never explain the why behind a behavior that you can track through with inspiring. And so that's why that sort of proximity to the customer and that directing that sort of relentless curiosity towards the sort of qualitative stuff is so, so important because you just learn things that just sometimes really unintuitive for our blind spots because we're often not the people who are building product for it. Absolutely. I wanna shift talking about how to spot the business, but one more last thing I wanted to highlight from what you just shared, which is a really good insight is you shared that your biggest inflection in your career was a manager for you, in this case, who helped you kind of learn the craft and develop your skills. And that's the exact experience I had, too. Just like one specific manager changed everything for me. And that feels like a recurring theme to a lot of people, just having one person that really spends the time to help you learn and correct you when you're making mistakes and all that. So if folks are wondering maybe why am I not learning enough or why is my career stagnating? See if you can just find, you know, easier said than done, but oftentimes just takes the one person to change everything. It gets into sort of a conversation about, you know, the difference between a manager and a mentor, versus a sponsor and an advocate, mentors are great. They'll get me wrong. I have a ton of people that I would consider to be mentors, but I think about the people in my life who, the time that they donated to me, the time that they volunteered to me and for me, calling them mentors, I think, sells what they were very short. And I would actually describe those folks as being like sponsors and advocates, people who are willing to put up capital, right? Whether that's professional, social capital to bet on you. I mean, truth be told, when I interviewed with Freed that first time, I think back to the interview, and I think I bombed it. I don't think I actually don't think I would have hired me back, but I actually think, and I remember the answers I gave to some of those questions, and I don't think that, I think they were good, but I don't think they were certainly great. And I imagine that there was something in there where the decision maker who was Freed, said, I think I can make something out of this, right? And I think being willing to invest in someone and finding people who are willing to invest in you is what really matters. And finding people who are willing to, again, put something up for you. Whether that be, whatever kind of capital it is, what I think about true gasoline on the career fire, it's finding mentors, but it's also finding sponsors and advocates. Is there anything that you think you did right to help find mentors and sponsors and advocates for people that are thinking about like, hey, I want, I need this, how do I help myself in the same way? Is there something you did that help people get excited to help you? Something I think I certainly can see to work on, but really putting ego aside and embracing not knowing stuff and embracing not being good at stuff, and not feeling like self-conscious about that and letting the desire to be the best at something, or at least be graded something over power, the fear of being an adequate at something. And I played sports growing up. And so I like being coach, like I can take hard feedback and I like it because if I get better feedback than the people and competing against, I think I can beat them, right? Over time, if I work hard enough. And so I think just like taking that mentality with me into product management, I think has helped me build bridges with people who don't owe me anything, right? People who don't necessarily need to be invested in me at all, but who might get delight out of it somehow. And I don't know exactly how that works. And the calculus that goes on at folks' brains, but at least that's what's within my control is like, how I can show up in the context of those relationships and sort of really embrace even the hardest, like ugly speedback. And hope that I can extract something from it, that'll make me better at the end of the day. I love that advice. Makes me think about Jules Walters advice, which I've referenced many times on this podcast now, where his tip is when people are giving you feedback, just be like, thank you so much for that feedback, even though you're melting inside and just sort of complete this degree with what they're telling me. Yeah, shout out to Jules. Jules is also someone who has been generous with me in the past in terms of giving time when I need to help those stuff. So I'm also a great episode to do with Jules. So many people have said what you just said about Jules, about how helpful he's been to them. So clearly a class act to that guy, maybe we'll have to bring him back with love that. Yeah, be too Jules. So let's shift to help spot the business, which is a pretty incredible success story from what my notes, it's worth something like $30 billion now as a business has been around for 17 years. Still growing, if think something like 30% year-to-year, and most interestingly, Octa put out this really interesting report. We suddenly, where they looked at their data of what tools people are using to authenticate with. And they show that basically, help spot is maybe the fifth fastest growing software product in the world. I don't know if it's true, but feels true because all the other companies make sense there. So you don't have to confirm or deny this, but clearly things are going great, it helps spot. I'm curious just what makes helps spot so special and unique and successful. It's specifically unique to helps spot versus other companies. There's a lot in there. I can speak to the things that have resonated most deeply with me in my time there. Yeah. The first is legitimate customer obsession. It's not marketing. It's legitimate, right? Like I've witnessed fierce and passionate debates internally that the root of what the people in the debate were really trying to unpack was what was the best thing for the customer. And so really having that be central to our dogma and now we think about the business and why the company exists in the first place, like really walking the walk there is something that I don't know that that's true everywhere, right? I mean, I've certainly worked at places where that hasn't been true and there's a lot of factors that can lead to those trade-off decisions at times. Like it's just the right thing for the business, we'll right think for the customer being really challenging. I think just sort of having that customer centricity really baked into the DNA of the company makes those decisions make that easier, but at least you can have more conviction around the why behind the decision at the end of the day. Another thing that I think makes Hubspot before you actually move on to the next one, I want to spend a little time on this one because I think people hear this and they're like, yes, okay, we're going to be customer obsessed. And then you have to make these hard decisions. Look at this experiment. It's going to grow things or have any 1% but it's not like really going to make the customer's life easier. How do you actually make this real? And is there maybe an example where you have to trade off growth versus like we need to make sure the customer is getting what they need or making the customer happy to make it a little more real even? One, I think that's a really fantastic, maybe not counterpoint, but think to call out. My point of view here is that often times it's a function of what's the time horizon that the company uses as their sort of baseline for assessing decisions, right? And typically when you're making decisions that could be described as like hostile towards the customers, but a net positive for the business, you're probably not thinking long-term enough, right? Because there's no possible way unless you are completely cloned to market and there is no competition whatsoever that you could continually be hostile towards your customers and grow, right? Like at some point that's going to catch up. And so oftentimes, I think it's the tension of what do we need to do in the short term to survive versus long-term, where are we going? What's the path that we're actually charting is I think the true tension, but if you're making decisions that might have lasting impact that our customer hostile, I think that's a really dangerous path to kind of go down. And so having the discipline or the bravery or the courage, whatever, to I think focus on not necessarily tomorrow the day after and really think about, you know, two, three, four years from now, like what would be outcomes you're trying to drive? And what other decisions we need to make in the interim that are going to lead to that outcome? If you stick to that sort of framework or first principle is a better way to describe it. And I think you'll often end up arriving at the conclusion that doing the thing that's right for customers at the end of the day is the right decision. Is there something in the way you operate that helps you systemize that in your experiment plan or product specs or experiment results? Or is there a story of something where you just like ship something that shows the customer obsession to make it even more concrete for listeners? There's definitely a structure you could put around customer's interest and I think a lot of it for growth at HubSpot and the teams that I lead, it's around like forcing specificity of language. And so, for example, you look at a lot of standard documentation for features or experiments, whatever. And when the first things, it's like outline the problem. I don't know that we even talk about problems without a qualifier. Are we talking about a business problem? Are we talking about a customer problem? Are we talking about an efficiency problem? Like describe the nature of the problem and parse it out because if there's generally speaking, there's a business problem, right? You might do the thought exercise of asking like, well, why hasn't that problem solved itself? Like, what's the actual customer problem that is leading to the downstream, like negative thing that's happening to the business? And if we can actually create some daylight between those two things conceptually, we can avoid making them a stake of trying to solve a business problem in a way that leads to a bad outcome for the customer at the end of the day. And I think also creating a system that makes it easy for PMs to call out assumptions that they might be making. So if we do this, like, what would you predict to be some of the derivative sort of downstream things? And if you can call those things out and just keep asking like, why, why, why, to sort of justify some of the direction you want to go in and then keep asking what, what, what, in terms of what's the sort of like true blast radius and domino effect of these decisions is the approach that we take at HubSpot in my teams at least? Awesome, okay, so I cut you off in this one. Bullet point so far, so let's keep going. Yeah, so we're talking about the things that make HubSpot special, so customer obsession was definitely one. I think what we play in the market too, like, you know, being a company that has been comfortable, sort of staying in the mid-market SMB mid-market space and resisting the temptation to try to crawl up and to enterprise software? I think makes us special. And one of the things is actually like really straightforward, which is that a lot of enterprise software companies, a lot of your revenue is tied up in like, a small subset of customers and I think what can happen there is if those customers decide that they want you to build something and they're willing to sort of threaten their business over it, then you'll end up building it and is that necessarily the thing that is going to serve all your customers? Best, probably not. Are you going to end up having the build and maintain the spokes software for one customer, probably? And don't get me wrong. I think there's a lot of product folks out there who enjoy that modality of work. I'm not one of them. And so by playing in the mid-market, it means our revenue is distributed more evenly across our entire install base, which means that there's no single customer who can hold us hostage really. But what that does is, you know, with great power, it comes great responsibility, I think, with that does is a forcing function of ensuring that the decisions that we make are a net benefit for the largest swath of customers possible. And I think it really is a guiding light behind some of our decisions around like connected experience and usability and user experience. And so playing in the mid-market, I think a force us to be able to do that. So I think that's another thing that makes us special for a company of our size. Culture is another one, and I will get into the culture code. I think a lot of folks have probably read it, it's not go check it out, but I don't know if people have heard of that, what is that? Yeah, Darmesh, you know, our co-founder, one of our fearless leaders, Darmesh, one of the things he most famously did early on is he published the HubSpot Culture Code externally and Google it and find it anywhere. I think a lot of companies sort of replicated that over the years, but by being sort of like really open and transparent about the culture, both internally and externally, I think one internally creates like alignment. And it gives everyone something to sort of enforce like why do we, why do we choose to work with each other the way that we work with each other, right? I think it also helps in attracting the right type of candidates because we put it out there, we're sort of really open about it. If you don't like that culture, chances are you probably won't be super excited to work here, but if that's something that you're craving, and I think a lot of quality people crave a lot of the things that are sort of codified in our culture, humility, empathy, adaptability, the marketability, transparency, our sort of all things I think people take quite seriously. And so being really open and honest about that and being willing the sort of pressure test to on a regular basis, is still a company we want to be. We're growing really fast, what has changed, what conditions are still able to be supported with the culture we have codified today? What amendments might we need to make in terms of who we want to represent ourselves to be to our customers and how we want to work with each other? And investing in that, like hiring really good people that can help us scale that, I think, is something that makes us not really special. Amazing, I'm reading the culture code on this side here. And there's these little quotes that are really sweet, like I really like this one. Solfer the customer, not just they're happiness, but also their success. Yes. Why is? This episode is brought to you by Merge. Every product manager knows how slow product development can get when developers have to build and maintain integrations with other platforms. Merge's unified API can fully remove this blocker from your roadmap. With one API, your team can add over 180 HR, accounting, ATS, ticketing, CRM, file storage, and marketing automation integrations into your product. You can get your first integration into production in a matter of days and save countless weeks building custom integrations, letting you get back to building your core product. Merge's integrations speed up the product development process for customers like RAM, Drata, and many of their fast growing and established companies allowing them to test their features at scale without having to worry about never ending integrations roadmap. Save your engineer's countless hours, hit your growth targets and expedite your sales cycle by making integration offerings your competitive advantage with Merge. Visit Merge.dev slash Lenny to get started and integrate up to three customers for free. Is there anything really fun about the culture that like a fun thing that you all do? That's like, or he helps spot ritual? Yeah, there's a ton. Although, you know, I think like, we definitely a very legitimate school thought around how like culture can both contribute to inclusion? But also be a headwind to inclusion, right? Like I think a lot of the things that I might have so see with like hubs.culture are very much rooted in a specific period of hub spot, right? And it's probably a pre-pandemic period it was probably a period where we were all sort of working in the same physical space. And so there's a lot of like inside jokes. And sometimes the things are rooted in very specific quirks of specific individuals who may not even be at the company anymore. And so if you have someone who's joined the company in the past like two or three years and that flies over your head, I think we have to ask ourselves like, what's the value of continuing to embrace these things, right? And so I think we've been doing over the years as sort of taking inventory of the things that like might have been considered part of like hub spot like a sea culture and really trying to, again, pressure tests that like, does this continue to serve us today and if not, like, we should be really comfortable of letting it go. But one of the things that I think is like super dope that we do is we do this thing called peer week, which was something that popped up during the pandemic. And the TLDR is that it's kind of like an event for product and engineering where, you know, travel kind of change with the pandemic and you know, people don't get to see each other in person as much, but there's a couple of weeks in the summer in June when we fly everybody and either if you're near North America, we fly you to Cambridge if you were in Europe somewhere then we fly you to Dublin and then we kind of spend a week together. And there's not a focus on just like classic productivity. There's like a ton of focus on building connections and like safety and there's like, I didn't know people and who they are is like, as human beings but also like, I forgot how much I miss whiteboarding and just like, so you need to get in a room with a physical whiteboard of people and work on some stuff. And so this is, I think the second year in a row or second or third on whatever pandemic year is really fogged the brain. We've done it and it's like one of the things I look most forward to every year is get everybody in the same city to just hang out. I love it. I keep peaking at these highlights and they're really interesting. So we're gonna link to this culture coat also in the show notes if you want to check it out. But anyway, let's focus on how up what grows and there's kind of two parts in my mind. There's just like, headed at start and what worked really well. You're actually on the inaugural team, I believe, of HubSpot's growth team and things worked out. Well done. I'm curious maybe just to start what you think you did so right early on in the history of HubSpot to help it grow into the behemoth that has become. Well it was kind of the early success elements that were key. I would say the early years of doing premium. And for the record, there's definitely like an iteration of the growth team before I joined that really like Brian Balfour was the person who I would say injected that first dose of like PLG DNA into HubSpot. So shout to Brian, we'll make sure he gets the credit that he's owed. Yeah, we're going to have him on the podcast at some point. It's in the Horks. Yeah, he's a legend. Brian's great, absolute legend. And so, you know, after Brian had left HubSpot, you know, a bit start and stop. And so when I joined and we sort of took another stab at it, I think there were a few things we did one in the beginning as we really had an aggressive mentality and aggressive approach. I think, and by we I mean the team, like the actual really small initial growth team, we tried not to be pedantic about where we were spending our time. And so we sort of tossed our mission and charter out of the window. We said, cool, maybe on paper, we were like, I think like the sales tool activation team. It's a very like, you know, boutique mission and remit compared to like, I think a lot of the other teams at HubSpot's missions and remit at the time. But even though that's what we were supposed to be working on on paper, we were sort of like, if we find something that looks like an opportunity and no one else in the business is thinking about it, we're just going to try to fix it, right? We're going to ask for forgiveness rather than permission and start to call some plays. And with that looked like was at the time a very small percentage of, I think, HubSpot's subscription revenue would be described as like self service, like people putting in their credit card and buying something, it was predominantly product driven like leads, like PQLs. And so we were literally sending everything to the sales team, which you know, it was laying revenue. But certainly opportunities for efficiency, because it was the first time we had a product at a price point that could be transactional and not a highly considered purchase. And so we were thinking about this and we were like, well, how does this work? Like is there even a pricing page in that in the product that people could, you know, thought like actually buy something and we found it, but it had been neglected. It was sort of like, I think no one was sort of committing any code to that repository. So we approached a team who owned it and we were like, are y'all working on this, right? Like is this an active development? And they were like, nah, we're working on a bunch of other stuff. We were like, can we take this? And they were like, sure, if you want it, take it, like it's one less co-based for us to maintain. And so we took it and immediately blew it up. We redesigned the whole thing, focused on discoverability, like how are people getting in this page, focusing on desirability, like how are we talking about the value props of the things that we're wanting to sell to customers to help them grow better. And then thinking about dual ability or usability, like how do we actually just like remove the friction that's standing in the way? And so we did like a mad dash towards this outcome we wanted to drive. And when we released it, it worked, right? Like it actually, it was actually like a step-function change in the way that the physics of the business in the funnel really looked. I think that was probably a catalyst moment of everyone saying, oh, wow, there might actually be something here. And so that attitude of sort of saying that like every problem is our problem. And sort of being willing to like really take like a mentality of like, I think like radical accountability and like ownership mentality. Help us find opportunities that maybe the business wasn't explicitly asking us to solve, but we were able to triangulate why it might be important for the business for us to solve it. And when you do that, I think the business, a business may get more comfortable putting more on your plate, right? And so we look hungry, so let's keep feeding us, right? And so over time, our remit expands. And there's other things that we think are opportunities to gain leverage for the business or deliver delight to our customers in a more efficient way. And then honestly in a way that they probably expected to engage with us at that point in time. Like it was quite odd that there were so many humans involved in every stage of the customer journey. And some of our customers just like, I just want to be able to try the thing and like buy it if I want to be like, I really don't want to be forced into a sales engagement, right? And so it was really kind of like meeting the expectations of the modern software buyer in many ways. It sounds incredibly important. Basically, your team turned Hubsquat into a very product-led growth business, which feels very important in the history of Hubsquat's growth. Would you consider what was there before, where it was like the beginnings of self-service, but they had to talk to self-person, would you consider that product-led? Yes, first. Okay. And so how would you describe what the shift was in terms of the way the sales motion and growth motion changed? The good market motions that we were working on definitely under, I think, the broad umbrella of PLG, but I don't think the culture of the company was necessarily explicit about like being a PLG company. I don't think that's the way we talked about who Hubsquat was. And trust me, there were a bunch of other factors in here. I definitely, I won't say that, you know, our team were like the sole driving force behind that shift in our strategy and approach, but certainly the data that we were able to collect and the exprimatory would have run and the insights we were able to surface and the research we were able to synthesize and gave us conviction to double down on it for sure. And that was definitely maybe the beginning of that inflection point for the company, but there were certainly a lot of other things that led to us wanting to become more product-led. Again, I think about it, right? I think any company is probably searching for ways to operate more efficiently and if your revenue is so tied to like good market head count. It gets really hard to scale the bigger you get, right? So I think there's an innate desire to be more non-linear in our growth, right? And I think us arriving at the right place at the right time created sort of alignment around what the path forward could look like. Like we won't live in that world, how might we get there? And I think that's where we really fit into the equation. It's like, oh, we invest in this team. If we invest in the type of work this team is doing, that's how we're going to build efficiencies over time. And it's also, we like that because it's in line with what our customers are already expecting from us. And it sounds like you weren't like we need to be more product-led. It was more just, how do we get the sales process more efficient in the motion of growth more efficient and that emerged out of that? Yeah, I mean, don't get me wrong. We were definitely like we need to be more product-led. And I think that's actually the nuance here, right? You asked, you know, would I consider what we were doing product-led growth? And I think the answer is absolutely, but that's because a fallacy that people, a lot of, I think, maybe early stage founders, a folks who are unfamiliar with product growth or maybe only know about it from an academic point of view, maybe fall into the trap of, is assuming that like in order to be a PLG company, that's, that's, you can use that interchangeably with like being a fully self-service business or a fully self-service go to market. And I don't actually think that those things are one and the same. I think that most companies, at least the larger and more successful ones, that have sort of done amazing things and are cornering their market or category, that we would consider to be PLG companies, have a bunch of humans working on really important things at home, they're going to market. And it's more of a hybrid motion. And I think it's less about, again, being sort of like my topic about your approach to PLG and sort of having it being really rooted in like principles that are, I think, very kind of like academic or conceptual in nature, but more sort of being pragmatic and saying, okay, cool, who is our customer? What is the product that we sell? How are our customers used to buying this thing? How would they prefer to buy it in the future that they would like to live in? What's the packaging of our products? How do our customers decide? Is it a top-down decision or a bottoms-up decision? How complex are our building and subscription terms? Is something that's going to be pretty transactional or something that's going to be fairly considered? How comfortable is our target market with the technology in our category? Are they are we competing against non-consumption? Are we competing against competitors in the same category? And if you actually answer those questions, and I think it may be obviously I'm going with this, but based on the answer to those questions, the conditions on the ground might lend them self to be more favorable to product-led growth and be more favorable to self-service, right? It's why there are companies that the value prop is just so like you don't need a person to sell you loom. Like, I use a loom, it's so intuitive that I can just decide on my own, whether I want to buy it, you don't need a person to teach you how to use even slack to some extent, if it likes slack, it's extremely intuitive, right? You can throw someone in slack, and they use a product in a similar paradigm, and they can probably figure out the basics on their own. There are certain products that don't necessarily check those boxes, and so I think what you can do is kind of take a more modular approach to PLG, and it's like based on how a customer in the best-case scenario might go from zero to one when it comes to activation and onboarding, do we need to have a human involved in that process at all or as a backstop? If the answer is yes, then maybe figure out ways to have humans involved where your cost structure is durable, or at least offensively, if that's not the case, then go take a PLG approach to it, and so cross-art entire business, we've never taken sort of like a very pure, everything here is for this line of business, so this product line is going to be self-service without sort of being able to defend and contextualize why across the entire customer journey, this makes sense. And so yeah, we have customers who come in through the product-led front door and kick the tires on the product on their own and activate on the product on their own, but then when it comes time to buy the product, they want to talk to somebody, and there's legitimate reasons why, right? Like there are maybe iTunes security concerns that they need to get somebody on the phone for. Maybe they're coming for a platform where data migration is a huge fear they have, and that's not something that's easy to do in a self-service environment. Yeah, I think that's going to change over time, but today it's still kind of painful when you're doing ripping replaces. And so to try to like brute force that into a sort of self-service motion for every customer writ large would be solving for your businesses, desires, and not necessarily solving for the customer at the end of the day, but we also sell into different segments of customers that are maybe digital natives, but not familiar with products in our category. And maybe they're coming from not a competing product, but they're coming from a more rudimentary system like spreadsheets. I mean, I've seen customers using post-it notes to manage their deal pipeline, the real old school way, and that would sort of their locus of control for their sales team, right? And so there are use cases like that. If you're a smaller team, you kind of have an acute understanding of the pain points that are like today's buyers that you need to put out. You don't have to deal with the burden of a huge data migration and the person who's going to be in the CRM day and in day out is also the person who gets to make the final call and what CRM they're going to use is one of those customers that we never talk to in person, right? And like that's awesome too. And so being comfortable with things not necessarily fitting into like clean boxes and having conviction that a modular approach or a more hybrid approach is actually the way to optimize for the customer and the business at the end of the day is something that I think we embraced really early on. Like one of the first metrics that I had was activation rate, but it was also how much demand am I sending to the sales team. And there was no like turf war about that, right? It's like, oh, that that's net positive for people are able to get helped. And a lot of the questions that they have cannot be answered with the product today. We should absolutely be proud to connect them with one of our awesome people in sales who can like help see if the solutions we offer are good fit for them. And their instances where people just don't want to talk to somebody and our job is to make sure that there's a friction free way for them to make that decision on their own. Amazing. I think on the one hand, this could be a whole podcast is just talking about your PLG learning. Knowing it feels like help spot is one of the biggest success stories of transitioning more and more into PLG, at least at that point. Even though you're saying it was PLG early on, it feels like a huge shift to the business. So I really like this framework. You just shared of if you're trying to become more product-led, just think about this year to one from visit to activation and when to someone really have to talk to someone and how do we help them not have to talk to people in that moment. So either in that direction or just broadly, if someone was trying to explore, how do we become more product-led? What are kind of like the first couple steps and dives you to recommend they do to help them down that road? First, I would ask, why do you want to be product-led? What assumptions are you making in terms of why being product-led are going to be net positive for the business or for your customers? And I might even ask them to define what product-led means to them. We can kind of get on the same page of what we're even talking about. How would you define an idea of like a rough you have an answer to that just so people get a sense of what it probably means? Yeah, at the highest level, it's like taking a go to market approach where your products job is to grow revenue and use humans as a backstop and not the other way around, right? Awesome. And I think the key thing is that humans can be a backstop. There are moments where it's going to make sense for humans to be a backstop, right? One example that like is I think it's really normal like a hardship circumstance where a customer needs to like, and their relationship, right? Like every, every SaaS company deals with this. Some take a fully automated approach, but most usually have some sort of escalation path that will result in a human having to like resolve this. Like as I make the many less product-led, I think every company at its core is like having some humans behind the scenes, interface with customers, on things related to go to market, right? But I think once like defining that and getting on the same page about that, I think you can learn a lot. And, and by the way, these are the normal conversations that I that I have with founders all the time. I'm actually an operator and residents at OpenView. And so I speak to a lot of their poor coes. And this is usually the conversation that we end up having. And I think what's always interesting is like how different the sort of array of answers are when you ask that question. Some are like, oh, it's about top of the phone demand, right? Like we want to be more product-led because we want more leads, we want more signups. You're like, oh, okay, and that's like a very defensible reason, right? Like there's a lot of data that shows that freemium products attract a lot more top of the phone demand. Then sales lead, go to market products do, right? Some it might be a matter of like constrained resources, like we need we we absolutely need to be more product-led in the stage of the company because we simply cannot hire an army of like implementation specialists and folks on the customer's success side of the house to like help every single customer at scale, which is generally a byproduct of having a really large top of the phone. And then there are others that are, it's it's about revenue efficiency, right? And so when you can kind of articulate the outcomes that you want to drive, it helps triangulate where to begin, right? So if you are really focused on top of the phone with demand, trying to do sell service check out is a silly place to start, right? And so just like really doing the phone exercise of articulating like, why do you care about this? Like why are you actually interested in this in the first place? If you do this, what would change about your business? Like what assumptions are you making? And when you can actually list those, you can map them to parts of the customer journey where there may be opportunity to be more product-led at the company's area. Awesome. Maybe a couple more questions along these lines, and then it's just a couple more questions I definitely want to ask. What someone is trying to go in the direction or product-led growth, aka more self-service? And I guess maybe let me just ask, is that sort of how you think about equivalency of those two? Sure. Okay. What are maybe the most common mistakes they make that aren't as obvious, you know? I mean, the number one mistake is like hiring ahead of growth, giving them no resources, and expecting them to pull a rabbit out of their hat. I feel like every, you know, every PLG veteran has some joke that they tell about, you know, the poor had a growth who has no tooling, no engineering, cycles, no designer, no access to data, and then our, you know, handed a really scary big number and told to, to go move it. I think that's a, that's a common mistake that I stood the test of time. Another one is expecting really quick turnaround and thinking of it the same way you might think about hiring a sales, like an incremental sales headcount, which is that you're expecting near-term liquidity from that investment. But when you're doing PLG at, at its court, still are in deep, right? Like you're still sort of planning seeds with the hope that like over time, this is going to play out in the form of like durable, high-efficient growth. But if you're expecting, you know, you put a team on something, and then you want those, that team just sort of have outsized impact, and sure, there's going to be low hanging fruit, but I think just like not having the patience to see the investment through and cutting bait too early is another, I think mistake. Some companies make, and then I also think that that data hygiene is the other one. So not having taken a beat to properly instrument their product, messy data, no real self-service way for people to access that data, like having analyst bottlenecks can be a terrible position to be in. And so eating your veggies, like getting your house in order from a data standpoint, I think is a crucial first step, because if you can't actually measure what's happening, and like why? And then maybe the last one is people giving up because they don't have enough data, right? They're like, we can't do PLG because we don't have this massive data set in the way that ups about as or the way they're in B, Airbnb has, and it's like, you can still do PLG, you just need to use different data, like the way we think about data is that like quant data is just another form of data. The same way experiment results are just another data point. You can learn a ton from just talking to customers, like quality research is super doing for important, right? And so if you don't have data to tell you exactly what every single person is doing in your product and aggregate, you can still talk to 10 customers that probably get a clear sense of what's happening and why it's happening, you wouldn't even get from the quant data. So people sort of like getting demotivated and companies getting demotivated because they think they're too early to do PLG. It's if you can still do PLG, PLG at its core is just having your product sell the value prop of your business does, right? And you can still deliver on that without being able to stand up a very robust and sophisticated experimentation practice. Kind of along those lines of a going even broader, without disclosing trade secrets of how HEPS.Works, how would you describe the loop of growth of HEPS but in the words of you mentioned by Enbel foreign freed, what is kind of the growth loop of HEPS but either now or recently just like a simple way to think about how HEPS.BUT grows. Our loops are less tactical and in fact like if I'm being really honest, right? Like I think loops are kind of hard to achieve in B2B SaaS, right? Like I think there's some examples of that, but I think like some of the best loops come from like UGC, use a generated content so I think like a lot of B2C and like community focus platforms can do much really well. I think if it's like B2B SaaS, it's hard to find things that get loopy. And you know that this is me going. I think all my reports more means are going to be upset than I said but like I think that's true. When I think about the flywheel of UBSB, I think it's a much like it's more of a macro flywheel, right? And like just to kind of lean into our own language, it's really attracting gauge and delight. And so one of the principles that guides our thinking and our strategy is like give value before you extract value. And I think that was at the core of inbound marketing and its inception, the like outbound marketing was asking for something from customers or prospects before giving anything. And so it's core, it's like yeah, if you give a little for free, people who are interested in sort of hearing the rest of how that album sounds are going to come in stick around for more. And so in our three PLG days it was content marketing and you know white papers and listicles and ebooks and things that people had to download that were really feeling the top of the phone. And that is just taking another form with PLG and so you know we intentionally put on a lot of free software and the idea is that the software is not sort of gimmicky, it's not designed to run out of value on day one. It's actually designed so that our smallest customers can get some value out of it in a sustainable way. But if they're if they're engaging with it deeply enough, they're going to run into the limits of what that value is. And if we've done our jobs and delivered what we believe we were supposed to deliver, then the decision to purchase becomes a no-brainer. And if they're delighted with you the experience of being a customer, they're going to become advocates and they're going to become promoters and they're going to tell their peers because what we also know is that a lot of small business owners, even medium size business owners, take a lot of guidance from their their community of peers, right? And sometimes that's a digital community, sometimes that's not. And so anytime we win an advocate through delivering like an excellent customer experience, they bring more people into the top of the funnel. And so it's a really honest and honest macro look in the sense that that's the way we think about our flywheel. Man, this could be a whole other hour of a podcast just diving into this stuff. This is so good. You share this interesting story that I didn't, I wasn't aware of. So help us with what's kind of known for content in SEO. You search for anything and there's always a help spot article about it. And so is what you're sharing here essentially that was like a big part of the SEO free content that drove people to the site and the product wasn't free is what I'm hearing and then it shifted to now it's a free product that anyone can use and that's what drives the top of the funnel. Yes, correct. Amazing. I can't give a specific number but you know a large percentage of our revenue flows through the product and it's not necessarily like maybe where people ultimately purchased but that's their sort of first conversion event with us, right? Like they were in the product they liked what they saw, they spoke to somebody and then eventually became a customer and that is like now a pretty robust top of the funnel for the company. So I think this was really interesting story of just starting with one growth channel of SEO essentially, content marketing and then shifting to something else. Is there any lessons from that experience for people trying to kick start their growth of SEO versus the streaming approach? Is there anything made that just like this work really well for us and you should probably try this or SEO kind of runs out in this specific type of business? I'll admit I'm definitely not an SEO expert. I've been fortunate to work with some of the best marketers in the world to you know I think are one of five legends at this point in terms of what they've been able to achieve at upspot and building that lead and sign up machine. What I will say is being really aggressive about experimenting with new channels is so important and diversifying your channel mix is so important because things can change overnight and that might disrupt your entire funnel, right? Like a Google algorithm change can have a massive impact. If you're relying on an app store optimization a change in Apple's algorithm might have a massive impact. I mean what we're seeing with generate a AI I think there's a lot of people losing sleep at night because it's unclear how this is going to impact like SEO writ large, right? Like if that's what fuels your entire business. It's like being on Google search results page then like what's going to happen in this new sort of world we're about to enter. So I think to the extent that you can not have your funnel be reliant on a single or a couple of channels is really important. We're always testing new channels like one of the channels that you know we're spending some time experimenting with is this concept of micro apps and it's actually not a new concept or have spot. One of the first micro apps you ever built was a maybe dark mesh built this the original one but it was called website creator, right? And it was you put in your domain and it crawled your site and then gave you a set of sort of recommendations for how you would optimize your site and it was free, right? It was definitely a one trick pony but what it did was it created an interesting conversation which is like okay cool now that you had this information what you're going to do about it, right? And one of the things you could do is you could become a hotspot customer and you could use our product to fix a lot of this stuff, right? And that works for us. I worked really really well. And so we've done that play a few times and it's something that we're probably continuing to do like we have a bunch of these micro apps you think a brand kit generator we have an email signature generator we've experimented with like a build my persona generator there's a couple of ones that I can't talk about right now but we'll learn a little bit about in a few weeks at inbound but yeah micro apps are an exciting new channel for us and you know some will be successes some will flop and will probably sunset them but you know being willing to fail in the pursuit of finding new distribution channels is also really important. That's an awesome insight is there a place people can go to find these micro apps that you all built. There will be soon. Oh mysterious. I also noticed our mesh tweeting about some AI projects he's working on is that related to these micro apps was I just him on his own time just doing fun stuff. Uh, the very related to micro apps you know we have the I would say chat spot is actually and for those we don't know a chat spot is chat spot is a bit of an AI co-pilot that that Darmesh built that has sort of been very positively received by both have bought customers and not have spot customers alike and so that's something that where you know wearing my AI hat spending a lot of time thinking about sort of what direction do you want to go in the chat spot but again it was something that we kind of put out in the universe to see what happens and now it's like getting interesting amount of signups every month like who would have guessed that right I don't think that that that that was that that definitely wasn't on the road map a year ago right and I think being a 17 year old SaaS company that can still operate with that sense of urgency and and and pace helps a lot to like what why wait to you know get consensus on a decision when we can kind of put something out there and then see see what happens and see what the data says. Yeah it's just going to say that it feels like such a win-win win including it's just like a release for people on the team that have been there for a long time just to work on something totally different and they just launched a new product. Yeah 100% I love that because there anything that just like significantly accelerated growth in the last I don't know number of years that was like wow this really changed the game. COVID. I mean COVID was obviously challenging and awful but it was scary like it was super scary right we were all terrified we didn't know what it meant for our jobs like my own sister who also works at Hubsbyt now. She at the time was was transitioning in a hospitality and was two months into her job when she got furloughed because of COVID so who knew what the world was going to look like and sort of how it was going to impact businesses I think we were prepared for the worst and we actually caught a bit of the COVID tailwind and a lot of other businesses did because companies who never had to think about digital marketing all of a sudden had to and it was urgent right it was a burning need for them to figure out how they were going to weather this storm and I think one of the things that Hubsbyt did and this is one of the sort of phrases we use internally is like never wasted good crisis and and so one of the things we leaned into was sort of like goodwill pricing and we wore the price on some of our tools and created some temporary leniency around certain things and just the removal of that friction ended up being like a really interesting tailwinds for for the business and specifically for the business that I run which is our our starter business our free and starter business we really accelerated growth during that period which was not like I think if I think if you would have looked at my bingo card in you know March of 2020 I don't know that I had that on the bingo card I'm looking at the stock price and another window here and I could see I could see what I went with that one great and even you know it came down with their whole market but it's come right back up okay with that we reached our very exciting lightning round I've got six questions for you are you ready yeah what are two or three books they recommended most to other people truthfully I don't read a ton of books got one and a half year old I also probably didn't read me the ton of books before but it's a nice excuse to have so I don't have time to read today but when I think of books that I think about a lot still there's a book called Everybody Lies and it's a book I believe the guy who wrote it was a data scientist at Google and you know part of the message is that everybody's a data scientist and really trying to like democratize the idea of like using data in your everyday lives to make decisions and like diversify in the idea of data science but the way he kind of does this is through comparing Google search data and like you know what we know people to be actively looking for answers for with sort of qualitative survey data and you know people lie on surveys all the time for a variety of different reasons but no one lies to Google because it's transactually if I lie to Google I'm not going to get what I want and so it kind of really explores like what it means to tell the truth and how honest we are with ourselves and with the internet and so I really love that book the other book I really love is um shopwood carry water which is it's it's like a parable about a young boy who wants to become a samurai but the sort of message of the book is about falling in love with the process especially the most mundane parts of a process of becoming rated something and that's something I kind of it's a good reminder about patients humility and sort of taking things one step at a time and I often like reference chocolate carry water a lot reminds me of the score takes care of itself I think is the name of the book yeah yeah I've heard a bit Jim Belwalsh amazing okay what's a favorite recent movie or tv show oh man on Amazon Prime I'm a Virgo and it's it's a Boots Riley show Boots Riley directed sorry to bother you it was just you know blew my mind you know so it's super surreal and funny and dark and it stars Gerald Jerome who I think he played one of the characters in the the Netflix central part such a part five I think he wanted a couple of words for that too and that was that was a show I watched recently where I didn't had no expectations going into it other than I knew was a Boots Riley show and was just like enthralled because it touches on you know it is a really cheeky way of touching on a lot of like really important topics but often hard to talk about topics and themes and and it's it's kind of delightful to get through it so I'm a Virgo I just I just binge to Barry from season one through four Harry Winkler who's spectacular and then this came off of succession too I the theme here is I like really dark comedies yeah really really dark comedy is a kind of I think and that first one was called I'm a Virgo because I thought you were just saying you're Virgo no no the name of a Virgo yeah amazing I will check that out okay what's a favorite any of your question you like to ask candidates I think it depends on what level of role that they're interviewing for like I don't really interview as many like frontline PMs anymore but I still really like doing case study questions and like really random ones too I'd be like tell me how many people cross the long fellow bridge oh no and like you know a week and I could not care less with the actual number they arrived that was but it's more for me to observe like what's the array of like data points that they can kind of start to collect in their mind to inform their calculus and how close can they get to ballpark and like what's there like what's their defense behind their thinking and then you know it's just like the process of watching people's brains move in those moments is you learn a lot about how they might operate as a product manager I think in those scenarios I try not to overdo them so if you think there's a lot of like inherent bias in some of those types of questions so trying to think of things that are kind of like really relatable to anybody who might be looking to work on a team that I'm leading is I think a requirement there but I would say the other question I really like to ask is if the people that you most recently worked with our interim and you weren't there like how they talk about you one it's because like sometimes like I will reach out and get references and so like the extent to which that might actually be part of the interview process is very legitimate but also I think it's usually very clear whether the person is taking like on the honest and like introspective and self-aware approach to answering that question and I like to see people being really self-aware because I don't think anybody ever comes in any situation perfect right like I have a lot of rough edges to my personality that I think people have just like learned to do with over the years but I try to be self-aware about them at the you know I can do nothing else I can't change them at least like recognize them and and and do what I can to like mitigate the blast radius and so I think just getting that getting a sense of the EQ of a candidate and their self-awareness is is really important for me because at the end of the day if you're in product you can be the smartest person in room but if people don't want to work with you you're probably not going to go very far. Do you have a favorite life motto that you come back to or you share with other people? The details matter and that's both in work in life I imagine. Yeah the details matter the details matter and one of the I read a cool interview with the the product leadership team at stripe and one of the things they talk about is for their product managers they want you to have taste and like it was a really kind of controversial thing to say because like oh that is so subjective like who gets to decide what taste is right like that that maybe that's even biased to some extent and they and I think they had a super defensible answer about how they defined taste and taste in their opinion was to be so interested in something doesn't matter what that thing is where you can go deep enough in it to have a strong set of informed opinions right and that's how they defined it and they were almost in bivalent to what that thing that was right with the subject was but having taste I mean something that you were passionate about that you have spent enough time learning and understanding and appreciating and critiquing and being frustrated with that you have like a point of view that that is potentially even polarizing is taste like writing the fence is usually not taste right and so when I think about the details matter that's almost like a nod to taste right like obsessed with the details of something right with that the art music products film whatever is I care a lot about that I love that and that comes back to a lot of the things we've talked about of talking at customers like give a data like actually having the the first hand information on what people need and what people want from your product. Yeah absolutely okay I'm just gonna ask two more and in a little let you go what is a favor product that you've recently discovered that you love. I fell in love with golf right before the pandemic but the pandemic really is when I lost my mind and it was like obsessed with golf right it was like one of the few safe things that you could do outside that was social and less dangerous than you know getting a drink with your buddy at the bar what's the joke it's like men invented golf so they can go and walks with each other and like that's essentially what kind of drove the interesting golf and I'm also horrible at it when I first started and so I think also is like you get older and maybe you get more establishing your career or you know I've been in a product like growth sort of like lane for a while you almost forget what it's like to be really bad at something until you have a kid and then everything's new and you're failing every day but like golf was like you know a refreshing, consistent experience of frustration and an inadequacy and just like kind of really embracing that and like just waiting in it for a while knowing that like it's just gonna take cycles and time to get better and better it was something I got really and so I try to play golf whenever I can and most recently I bought a Garmin watch and that thing is just like magical like you roll up to the first teabox you look at your watch it knows exactly where you are which golf course sometimes it'll even tell you which you know tease your acts and golf sometimes you're for the back and sometimes you're playing ahead and it tracks your swings until a while distances and it's not saying reads the greens for you and I should just use that watch oh my gosh if you're got you know some of the guys that I got with the couple of them had had one recently and I just was like enthralled by it and I literally went home and ordered it that's the same day and it's been like the coolest product or gadget that I bought in the wild damn I love it and I was also thinking as you were talking about getting into golf connects back to your relentless curiosity and resilience that you look for in people that you hire so clearly you have it yourself final question I believe you have a dog name for me which is short for for net yes okay so on that no what is your favorite current cocktail if it's not just a shot of for net I mean the night cap is always a shot of for that sometimes you might you know miss a little Coca-Cola with that I think what do they do that in that same not heard of that or Argentina I don't know it's it's definitely a country that that's a thing my wife has been really into really high quality market readers like made at home and we're big into apparel spritz in the summer so I would say that but that's usually what dominates the uh the happy hour rotation these days I just had an apparel spritz that apparel apparel spritz right yeah I mean I'm not good at playing the pronunciation I just had that for the first time it's amazing I'm going to be my new go to you that way you had an apparel spritz for the first time recently yes I don't know what that was like the zeitgeist a couple summers ago I mean the minute oh yeah there's the other one too like the the groany spagliados are having a moment to it's like a me groany with prosetto oh that sounds amazing yeah there's so much knowledge to be gained in this podcast episode Chris this was incredible thank you so much for being here to final folks find you online if they want to reach out and maybe ask you a question or two and to how can listeners be useful to you you can pick up me a LinkedIn shoot me a message Chris for Miller there's a lot of Chris for Miller's a little one that looks like me looks for him spot I have a Twitter out it's been a ton of time x I haven't x account but I was been a lot of time on the the app formerly known as the bird app but I'm on Instagram at millsy joe young which is a nod to when my favorite old monster films mighty joe young and so yeah I'm on Instagram a bunch too so yeah that's what you can find me and then I know two other things that you wanted to share one is that you advise on PLG and things like that so maybe talk about that real briefly and then also you're hiring at Hupspot or can people know about that I definitely do a bit of angel investing and advising companies on the side and you know I really enjoyed it I think there's something really cool and awesome about getting to see fresh problems all the time and not necessarily being so laser focused on the sort of categories or verticals or target customers that you're dealing with you know for four plus hours a week and so I it's kind of refreshing to spend time with founders we're working with products in different categories having different challenges and different stages of growth and being able to figure out how I can be a resource to them and so if you're looking for if that sounds interesting to you you're a founder or had a product out there definitely reach out and maybe opportunities for us to collaborate and they can be a resource cool and then on the hiring front and any specific roles you want people to know about that you might be hearing there's definitely more roles opening up in the form but I think most immediately I'll be looking for like a group product manager to work on the AI platform team that I'm going to do. What a role. Yeah it's a great role with the fantastic team in a space that might be a little important these days and so if you go to the Hupspot job site that role should be there by the time this podcast is you know live that that role should definitely be up there. Amazing Chris. Thank you again for being here. Wendy pleasure thank you for having me this is been amazing. Bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lenniespodcast.com see you in the next episode