Ground Up Podcast

How HubSpot Instilled a Culture of Growth That Expanded Well Beyond Marketing

On this episode of Ground Up, Kieran Flanagan talks about the early days of freemium at HubSpot, instilling a growth discipline that expanded well beyond the marketing team, managing cross-functional teams, and more.

Rachael Bassey on October 21, 2019 (last modified on October 20, 2019) • 1 minute read

Growth was pissing everybody off.

It was 2016 and Kieran Flanagan was running marketing and growth for HubSpot’s freemium tools.

But, growth as a discipline, was new to HubSpot at the time.

So product managers, engineers, salespeople, and marketers were suddenly collaborating on projects where there were competing goals and probably more importantly, overall methods for doing things.

Kieran says it was chaos. But, that it was great because these teams were all finding new and innovative ways of working together.

(Not) spoiler: freemium has worked pretty well for HubSpot.

So well, in fact, that as the freemium model was merged into all of HubSpot’s core product sets.

And you know what else? So too has that growth discipline that Flanagan helped usher in.

Growth, as a discipline, is now embedded into the day-to-day process of not only marketers at HubSpot, but also PMs, engineers, designers…everyone.

It’s chaos. And it’s working.

About the author

Rachael Bassey is a community development specialist at Databox. She believes our silenced stories can change the world if shared. She loves to travel, volunteer and capture moments with her camera.

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