By bhalligan@hubspot.com (Brian Halligan)

This week marked an important milestone for HubSpot. The company Dharmesh and I founded over 14 years ago welcomed its 100,000th customer and passed $1 billion in annual recurring revenue.

We’ve come a long way since we began banging the drum about inbound marketing, and yet, it feels like HubSpot is just getting started.

In many ways, it feels like the whole world is just getting started … or re-started.

The events of the past year have transformed entire industries, upended the way we work, and re-shaped human behavior en masse. The technologies we embraced and new habits we formed during the pandemic will not retreat when the coronavirus eventually does. Rather, they will come to define “the next normal.”

This represents one of the most profound outcomes of these times: that never before have companies, and the products and services they provide, had a greater capacity to influence human behavior.

When gyms re-open, people will still workout from home, facilitated by fitness apps. When offices re-open, people will still work from home, facilitated by work productivity and communications tools. When theatres re-open, people will still watch live concerts and new movies from home, facilitated by streaming services.

Without these products and services, many of which have gone from being novel to necessary in the past year, life during the pandemic would look very different. And it would be much more likely to snap back to the way it was in 2019.

Instead, we’ve witnessed countless companies urgently pivoting their plans to meet new customer needs. They’ve innovated, they’ve adapted, and they’ve re-shaped their products.

I’ve been inspired to see many of HubSpot’s 100,000 customers adapt and innovate in the face of uncertainty, and in doing so, play an instrumental role in defining the new ways in which we live, travel, work, and build a better future.

Mindfulness for the Masses

Take mindfulness apps, for example. One unequivocally positive outcome of these turbulent times has been the increased importance we all place on our mental wellness. Over the past year, HubSpot customers like Calm, Talkspace, and Headspace have gone from being helpful tools for people looking to practice mindfulness to vital services that millions of people use in their daily lives.

When Headspace was founded in 2010 — at a time when meditation was still largely the preserve of religious and spiritual organizations — the key question its founders asked was: “How do we put Headspace in places you wouldn’t expect to find it?” Now, 10 years later, it is a multi-media organization with a podcast division, a partnership with Sesame Street, and a recently announced Netflix series.

This progress would not have been possible without the level of scale the company has been able to achieve in the past 12 months. On the eve of the pandemic in February 2020, the app reached two million paid subscribers, and since then, its rate of downloads has increased by 20%. And when …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog

Author: Aaron