Long Strange Trip: CEO to CEO with Brian Halligan
00:24:28 · Brian Halligan, Mati Staniszewski, Anton Osika
[00:24:28] S2: These are like things are out. It's very different than [00:24:31] S1: You don't know. You need to stay nimble that the moment it comes out. That's why the small teams, I think, helps so much as well. Because the moment something comes out, either internally from our research team or from other teams, you know that you have twenty four hours to start integrating that into your product. That's the most important time to really be ahead. [00:24:50] S2: Okay. Speaking of planning, I remember in the early days of HubSpot, before we were CRM, we were a marketing app. And every year I would go to the salesforce.com conference called Dreamforce, and I'd sit in the audience. And our pitch, by the way, at that time was salesforce.com is to sales as HubSpot is to marketing. And we would always think in the back of our head, until salesforce.com wants to become salesforce.com marketing. And so we'd sit in the audience every year, hoping they didn't announce a marketing product. And sure enough, 2012 was their, that was the marketing year. They bought four marketing companies and they really went for it. We ended up pivoting and going to CRM. I would imagine you have a similar feeling when Anthropic's doing a big announcement or OpenAI's having a big announcement. Even HubSpot is like, we don't know. Is OpenAI going to be a platform company like Google was? Or are they going to go build vertical apps? Are you as paranoid as I was? Or are you not that worried? [00:25:48] S0: Yeah, I mean, they do have a lot of distribution out of the box, so that's... It would hurt.
00:25:48 · Anton Osika, Brian Halligan
[00:25:48] S0: Yeah, I mean, they do have a lot of distribution out of the box, so that's... It would hurt. [00:25:56] S2: Or do you sit there like worried when they're doing their announcements? [00:26:00] S0: Are they gonna... Not really, no. Like, I have so many things to think about. I catch up on, like, on the recent announcement, and I'm I'm sure they will announce something. I would imagine that it [00:26:09] S2: will be [00:26:10] S0: It will be inferior. Yes. You've got [00:26:13] S2: a head start. [00:26:14] S0: Yeah. And [00:26:15] S2: that's But you the closest kind of like, I kind of think it would be an obvious thing for them to build. [00:26:18] S0: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Something like, what we're building is this full platform where you're serving most of the product needs for the entire product engineering organization. And that takes lot of iteration steps to get And to the full unless they're like building that out completely in the dark and then launching it, I don't think it's going to be a threat from the first launch. [00:26:42] S2: Okay, I'm very impressed with your lack of paranoia. Are you paranoid, nervous about what's going on?
00:26:42 · Brian Halligan, Mati Staniszewski, Anton Osika
[00:26:42] S2: Okay, I'm very impressed with your lack of paranoia. Are you paranoid, nervous about what's going on? [00:26:49] S1: Definitely a little, always nervous and watching closely. I mean, have great research teams. So we know that they will be pushing into the voice space. At the same time, given the spread of work that you just mentioned, the corollary is they lack focus and we are fully focused on voice, whether that's creating the research or products for creating voice agent or creating creative workflows, which does take a lot of iterations to actually bring that to the user to make the best experience that they require to solve their problems, solve their integrations. So I do think it's going to become increasingly competitive, especially on the research side, but that's where the product platform, brand, the design, the taste will matter a lot more. Something we speak a little bit with Anton every so often. And that will be the big piece where companies going deep into that space will win. [00:27:42] S2: Okay. Speaking of taste, one thing I really like about both of you is I think you have taste, particularly in your marketing. Like, you guys do some interesting stuff. You are fantastic on Twitter. Fantastic on Twitter. You're one of my favorite follows. How much time are you spending doing it? Do you do it all yourself? You're you're you're out there on stuff. Just talk about your Twitter strategy. [00:28:09] S0: Yeah. Sure. No, sure. Are you, like, did [00:28:11] S2: you tweet just before we got in here? Like, what's the deal?
00:28:11 · Brian Halligan, Anton Osika
[00:28:11] S2: you tweet just before we got in here? Like, what's the deal? [00:28:14] S0: No, but I just spend quite some time on it, and it feels like, oh my god, I'm doing so many things. I'm the CEO, I'm doing so many things, and then I have to sit down every weekend and get some of the posts right. But I do have a team that comes to me with ideas, like every Monday we go through. It's fifteen minutes in the calendar. Usually, it takes more time. [00:28:36] S2: If they bring you, here's the tweet, that would be good. [00:28:37] S0: No, they bring me ideas. Okay. Like, okay, should we do something on this? And I, like, drop a lot of ideas as well in the Slack channel. And but this is not their full time job either. So it's a bit it's it's like it's not the proper function in the company. [00:28:53] S2: It's very, very effective in my opinion. Like your brand is very strong. It is working really well. Are you actually pressing the button when the tweet goes out, or is somebody doing it for you? [00:29:05] S0: It's usually me. Okay. So there's actually a very good company called Typefully that you can draft them in, and then you can collaborate on them. And I usually am the one who schedule them in that. So I do the final presentation. [00:29:21] S2: I would keep going and get even wackier if I were you. [00:29:24] S0: Thank you.
00:29:24 · Anton Osika, Brian Halligan, Mati Staniszewski
[00:29:24] S0: Thank you. [00:29:25] S2: I think you're killing us. You guys are busy. I remember when I was your size, I get I got asked to do so much shit, speak at my conference. Can you interview my daughter? Can you talk to this venture capitalist, this candidate? It's just an endless like of asks and it's chaotic and the firm is asking you to do all that kind of stuff. How do you guys manage, just like kind of tactically manage the chaos, manage your schedule, get shit done in the hurricane of requests, inputs, chaos? Any tricks? [00:30:07] S1: A few tricks. A few tricks for sure. I think we run a lot of the company on Slack. So the Slack is one part and of course the email is especially the external piece. For email, now it's a combination of two. My brilliant assistant Hana is helping and the script is helping to auto classify a lot of emails to effectively P0, P1, P2. P0 is [00:30:29] S2: when Wait, you to somebody else is reading your emails in P0? [00:30:31] S1: Someone else is reading, and now we have a script as well to auto Okay. Classify then P0 is [00:30:37] S2: like That is interesting. [00:30:38] S1: It is super helpful. Same day reply on a P0. P1 can wait for the week. P2, not important, I can take out. And then I have to unblock P's. [00:30:48] S2: So somebody's reading your emails and it's like, Hey, need to respond to this as P0. [00:30:52] S1: Labels. So every email gets a label and then [00:30:55] S2: By a Homo sapiens.
00:30:55 · Brian Halligan, Mati Staniszewski
[00:30:55] S2: By a Homo sapiens. [00:30:56] S1: By a Homo sapiens and a script. So now it's a combination of above. So script does the first pass and then the Homo sapiens does the second. [00:31:04] S2: Second pass. Fascinating. [00:31:06] S1: Hannah, who is, like, great at it too. Okay. And and then you know exactly, okay. This is... Need to reply this day. This is an important customer, partner. [00:31:14] S2: How does she know what's important? Like, I send you an email, she must be like, that's so important you gotta respond. How does she know what's important? [00:31:24] S1: Well, the first thing is sometimes there's, of course, new where you don't, but usually she knows me inside out. And the second thing is for a lot of the people, a lot of the clients, you, Brian, you will be in my contact list, you will have a P0 inbound. So the first moment you hit me with the email, it will auto classify that as a P0. So I know that it's at the top and that I should reply on the same day. So that has worked tremendously across email. Think I'm very good on getting up [00:31:53] S2: to How about all the Slack to Slack must be a firestorm? [00:31:55] S1: Slack is a firestorm. Slack is a firestorm. So it's usually a combination. If I think it's taking more than five minutes, then I will remind myself later. So I'm big on the remind function. And then if it's less than five minutes, I usually try to reply straight away. [00:32:11] S2: Yep. Kind of inbox zero on your Slack. [00:32:13] S1: Inbox zero on the Slack. [00:32:14] S2: Okay. What about your calendar?