Simone Cicero:
Hello everybody. Welcome back to the Boundaryless Conversations podcast. In this podcast, we meet with pioneers, thinkers, doers, and entrepreneurs and we explore the future of business models, organizations, markets, and society in this rapidly changing world we live in. I’m Simone Cicero, and today I’m joined by a returning but unusual co-host, one of my partners in crime at Boundaryless, the lead of our Platform Design Micro-Enterprise, Luca Ruggeri. Ciao Luca. Great to have you.

Luca Ruggeri:
Hello everyone.

Simone Cicero:
Today we are also joined by Scott Brinker. Scott is VP Platform Ecosystem at Hubspot, where he is in charge of nurturing the incredible community of technology partners that revolves around one of the most iconic marketing technology products around. He’s also a writer on his blog Chiefmartec.com, where he covers marketing, technology management and is also the author of a fantastic bestselling book called Hacking Marketing. Previously, Scott was co founder and CTO of Ion Interactive. Scott also holds degrees in computer science from Columbia University and Harvard University and an MBA from MIT. Scott, it’s amazing to have you here. I hope you will enjoy the conversation with us.

Scott Brinker:
Hello, great to be here.

Simone Cicero:
I’ve been following Scott’s work in marketing and marketing technology for ages now. And I know, Scott, you also are a follower of our work, which has been amazing to discover. And I must say I also felt like this because of some of the concepts you have been using in some of your interviews and even in your job description, right. The idea to use platform and ecosystem in a job description, I think it’s kind of resonant as well with our research. The role of marketing is sometimes underestimated, because if we consider the Darwinian competition which exists in markets today, marketing is really a driving force of development for organization. It’s the key practice of bringing products in front of customers, essentially. How has the practice of marketing changed and evolved in the last couple of decades, especially the last one, as we have been transitioning from a market of monolithic products into this crazy market made of platforms, ecosystems, infrastructures. Also, it would be interesting to know what do you see moving forward with things such as web3, AI? So what have you seen in the last couple of decades and what do you see moving forward for marketing and marketing technology?

Scott Brinker:
Yeah. In the larger world, marketing is underestimated in its role and its impact. There’s that famous quote of saying that a business has two functions: innovation and marketing. You create and then you help the world discover and access. It’s fascinating. So when I really started getting into this intersection between marketing and technology in the early two thousands, these were opposite ends of the spectrum. I got into this because I was running the technology practice of a web development agency and we would get hired by the marketing team that wanted to get out into the world through this wonderful new thing called the web, all these grand visions of what they wanted their website to do. And then it would be my team’s role to basically take that marketing vision that they had and then go talk to their IT department about, “okay, well, how will we actually implement this? How is this going to run on the right infrastructure? How do you have the security, the data?” And it was fascinating because, yeah, these were just opposite ends of the universe.

Sometimes in the early days would frame it as some sort of hostility between IT and marketing. But I don’t think it was really hostility. I think it was just they just came from such completely different places. The language they use, the objectives they were trying to optimize for were just very different. But that being said, right, you know, that was 20-25 years ago. It became very clear that, you know, as the world was going digital, these two universes were going to not only collide, they were going to have to merge, they were going to have to synthesize. And so that’s really what got me fascinated.

I started my blog, ChiefMartec.com, in like, 2008, frankly, mostly focused on the professionals. We were starting to see this emerging class of hybrid professionals who both understood technology and understood marketing, and they were helping to make these connections. What caught me a little bit by surprise was the intersection of marketing and technology became a thing, is the explosion that happened in the vendor landscape. So in 2011, I did a map of all of the Martech vendors that I knew at the time, mainly because I was trying to make the case to Chief Marketing Officers, CMOs, that they really needed to be paying. Attention to what was happening here, because so much of their work, so many of the outcomes they were responsible for was becoming dependent on these technologies. And so when I did that first map in 2011, I found like, 150 marketing technologies that I put in different categories. And at the time, everyone, including me, was like, oh, my goodness, 150 marketing technologies. How will we ever keep track of them all? This is huge. And then, yeah, what happened is it doubled, like, year over year over year to the point where, yeah, in the most recent version we produced of this landscape last year, there was nearly 10,000 marketing technology solutions. And this is actually what led me into ecosystems in a very big way because it was wonderful for the marketing industry that all of a sudden there were all these genius startups, software entrepreneurs who were coming up with all these great new capabilities and ways of reaching audiences, engaging audiences, and managing marketing.

But these hundreds and eventually thousands of different tools, they didn’t talk with each other. And so while marketers might love some of the individual capabilities, all of a sudden this just having a mess of different disconnected tools that weren’t working together. Yeah, that was clearly just not going to be a sustainable path forward. In the early days, some of the major companies tried to say, like, oh, what we will do is we will just consolidate everything for you. Whether we build it or we acquire it, we’re going to put it all into our suite, and the only tool you will need to buy is our suite, and we will do it all for you. And a number of those large vendors actually tried that strategy for many years, but they just couldn’t keep up. Just the pace of innovation, the variety, the diversity, the way in which the industry is changing, consumer expectations were changing. It was like on every single dimension, things were expanding and it was just impossible for one company to do it all. And this is where I was really. Then it became clear the only path forward for this was an ecosystem that these large solutions needed to become open platforms. And instead of like treating all these other tools as the enemy, as like something that, oh no, it’s us or them, no, look at this as an incredible complementary opportunity of how do we help get these things connected together and actually create positive synergies between them.

Simone Cicero:
If you have to say just maybe a couple of directions you see coming up in the coming decade or even less, because now making predictions decades long, it’s a bit tricky in the world that we live in. So what is the direction, right, the direction you see this changing in the coming years? Just a couple of bits that maybe we can use as a reflection point as we move forward with the conversation.

Scott Brinker:
Well, I do think the amount of innovation ahead in marketing and technology is going to be huge. We could go into all these things that are going to happen here with AI, AR and VR is going to become real here at some point. There’s the things around Web3. But I think for the purposes of our conversation, I think two things that I see already happening today, and I expect these trends are only going to accelerate. One of them is, from a technical perspective, this whole evolution around SaaS was a great leap forward in moving from this package software that we used to have floppy disks on and install on physical hardware and these isolated computers and data centers. It’s awesome that we’ve moved so much of this software now into the cloud. The way these things are purchased is in a much more subscription services based manner. But the truth is, a lot of the software out there is still packaged right. It’s still like, oh, this is the boundaries, if I can lean on the Boundaryless conversation we’re going to have here, sort of the boundaries of software, even though it’s in the cloud, it’s kind of still sort of looked like it used to in the on premise world and there’s no reason for that. The beautiful thing about this is everything is adjacent to everything else. And I think what we’re starting to see is it’s not just about products integrating with each other, but it’s increasingly through opening up these APIs and then on top of that, having all these sorts of no code tools. And workflow tools and stuff like this that companies are increasingly able to craft their own software experiences by essentially composing capabilities from multiple different software solutions and services in the cloud and compose the exact experiences they want for customers or the exact processes and flows they want for their business. And I think we’re really at just the beginning of where that trend is going to lead us from a technical perspective. I think there’s a business perspective that mirrors that very nicely, which is again, I say this with a grain of salt, saying it to you as the absolute world experts on this, but the business models that companies are running on, they’ve increasingly recognized. I mean, forget even the technical component of it, just from a business model perspective. We live in an ecosystem world. The entire value proposition to customers, the go to market mechanisms and channels we use for it. It really is increasingly about like, okay, it’s not just us on an island, but it’s us and all of the different other businesses, whether it’s products or services or communities or other things related to our customers in the context of what we do. And this is a huge opportunity, right? I mean, this is changing. Just once you have a business strategy there where you’re really going to lean into the ecosystem. It’s the way you both win customers and deliver value to them, then of course you need your marketing and then your marketing technology to really evolve to be able to support those ecosystem strategies as well.

Simone Cicero:
I think we have three dimensions that we would like to explore and one is product thinking, one is org development and one is strategy, right, in this ecosystemic, framing and starting from the product. You spoke about the idea of a joint customer need, so customer needs that express themselves across different products and you also spoke about, from the perspective of developing one of these products, the idea of extensibility points. And I think these two are very resonant with our practice and with some of the discussions that we’re having around modularity and composibility. So can you maybe speak about how should we approach product design and development with this concept of joint customer needs and extensibility points in mind?

Scott Brinker:
One of the things that actually makes HubSpot relatively unique among the large Martech companies out there is: many of the other large Martech companies, the portfolio of the suite that they have to offer has mostly been acquired by different pieces. Oh well, we got this piece for marketing, we built this piece for sales. We acquired this other piece over here for data management. This other thing, that’s one strategy you can take, and it has certain advantages and certain disadvantages. HubSpot took a very different strategy in how it grew. It created a foundational platform, its underlying CRM platform, and then it organically built, extended the marketing tools capabilities on that, the sales tools, the service tools, actually, yeah, a whole suite of tools, but they were all built by essentially the same engineering and product team on the same common underlying platform. And that’s important, because before you even think about the externalization of a platform and how you make it accessible to third party developers to even have baked into the way you architect your products this notion of extensibility, reusability, standardization, modularization. We can say all the words we want about the strategies, but at the end of the day, this stuff still actually lives on. Technical foundations. And so I think HubSpot has had just a good advantage having an internal platform strategy from the very beginning. That being said, now you start to bridge out to the world of, okay, other third party developers. And one of the things about every platform is a little bit unique. You have to look at it through the lens of what is its audience, what is its mission it’s serving. The iPhone or Android are very different kind of platforms than a customer relationship management CRM platform. But that’s what HubSpot is. HubSpot is a CRM platform. And if there’s one thing you want more than anything else in a CRM platform, you want it to serve as that system of record for what do we understand about our relationship with this customer? And that’s something that has to bridge across marketing, sales service. But when you recognize that mission is massive, right, and it has enormous variation from one business to another, now there’s some things that we know are universal. Yes, we’re going to want to do email marketing. Yes, we’re going to publish content on the web like, yes, we’re going to have salespeople, have deals and manage them in certain flows. And so there are certain capabilities that a company like HubSpot can build that are very universal for a large number of our customers. But then when you start to get into the specific businesses, there’s just so much variety of like, oh, well, if I’m running a subscription business, what sort of subscription management capabilities do I need? If I’m running something that’s like an ecosystem oriented business, what sort of partner relationship management or second party account data mapping tools do I want to bring in? And all these things can add so much value to the customer’s technology, marketing, sales, customer service, technology capabilities. But you need those things to be able to connect the dots across them through that shared CRM platform. And so that was really when I joined HubSpot. Founders Brian Allergan and Dharmesh Shah already knew that was very much where they wanted to take the company for the next step. One of the reasons they brought me in was to help usher the company in the direction of like, okay, we’ve got this internal platform. How do we now start to expose this? Certainly from a technical level, but then also from a business ecosystem programs perspective, expand it to let these other software providers plug into that platform, plug into that infrastructure. And as you know, when we were talking earlier and, you know, saying, like, oh, these poor marketers, you know, like, yes, there’s thousands and thousands of innovative products. But, oh, my goodness, when they first all exploded on the market here, it was up to the poor marketer to figure out how I get these things to work together. The marketers shouldn’t have to worry about that as much. This really should be something that between the platform company and the app companies that are building integrations here. We should be able to solve a fair amount of that ourselves behind the scenes. And B to B software isn’t quite at the same level that adding an app to your mobile phone is, but asymptotically, aspirationally that’s kind of where we want it to go. And so, yeah, that’s really been the focus on expanding HubSpot’s platform strategy.

Luca Ruggeri:
The concept is really interesting. The more we can reduce the intermediaries between the manager and the entrepreneur and the content with the customers, so through marketing tools, through marketing technology, the better it is, no, because they can access to fresh information, fresh dashboards, fresh analytics, and this improves a lot the capability to make decisions on. But on the other hand, exposing your customers to such a big marketing overload of marketing tools could be problematic now because it’s very challenging for the user to select all the tools, integrating all the tools in a tool chain that they can use in order to monitor, finance converts and do the marketing magic. So how do you guide, how do you help your customers and everyone that basically can use and needs marketing tools to navigate this complexity?

Scott Brinker:
So you’re absolutely right, just because we’re integrating more and more of that incredible landscape of marketing technology out there. Yeah, there’s still an incredibly large landscape of marketing technology and that integration aside, still has its challenges of, okay, well, what capabilities I need? What product is going to be the best fit for that, how do I actually implement that? But even if we simplify the technical implementation there’s, how do I actually implement this from the way I’m going to leverage it inside my organization and my strategy? And to be honest, where most of that expertise comes from is the other half of the HubSpot ecosystem. The HubSpot ecosystem? Yes. We have all these technology partners and all these integrations and apps and themes and very much products, if you will, that are available through our marketplace. But the other half of the ecosystem is all of our solution providers, our service providers, our consultants, the folks who have all sorts of different expertise, not just in like HubSpot, but also increasingly the different surrounding tools. And they specialize, they can specialize in okay, for companies in this particular region there might be certain channels or ways of engaging with those regional audiences that require a different approach or a different capability than the other side of the world. There’s differences within industries, there’s difference within the maturity of the business themselves. Marketing is always, I mean, every discipline has a distribution curve and there are those who are on the far end of the most advanced and sophisticated, but there are other businesses that are just at different stages in either their life cycle as a business or the talent and capability they have. And so, yeah, they also need very different kind of guidance. If you are a startup company or if you’re a company that has not been relatively sophisticated yet in what you’ve been doing in digital marketing, then, yeah, you don’t want to jump into the deep end of the pool, right? You want a service provider who’s going to be able to help coach you and guide you and say, okay, well, where you’re at right now, this is the tool set that you can get the most value out of. And frankly, keeping it as simple and as streamlined as possible is great. Then, yeah, as you get more and more advanced, as you grow, as the use cases become more sophisticated, you’re going to want different sorts of advice and insight on like, okay, what is a more advanced tool that I might use for this? But this is what makes ecosystems great. And again, I know I feel like again talking to the ecosystem experts, but ecosystems aren’t just technology integrations. This whole universe of the people who bring the expertise and can help make the connections across different technologies to the actual strategies and operational implementation that makes this stuff work, that’s great.

Luca Ruggeri:
So I was thinking that, in this case, in this way you can cover different layers. Now of course the top tire, most complex activities needs to be of course supported by real experts or real marketers. Maybe companies at different stages, they probably have the same recurring problems or needs and then you can cover them with patterns or with some certain degree of automation like something like that. There can be also other solution present on your market.

Simone Cicero:
If I’m understanding what integrations you should optimize for or maybe what templates or teams you develop. Is it something that comes more like from the outside or is it something that you actually actively research? Do you, for example, run user experience research or customer discovery research to understand how people use your product together with other products to get suggestions on how the products should be evolved to create these extensibility points? Or is it something that is maybe more organic? You maybe see, I don’t know, other type of signals that point you to say we should be integrating with this new capability or this new product that is growing in use in the ecosystem and so it needs to be compatible with us.

Scott Brinker:
It’s a little bit of both, and I can explain it this way. So since we are a CRM platform company, it is a big part of our overall UX research and customer research to understand how customers think of it as a platform. And so HubSpot, on the spectrum of do whatever you want to something where we have a relatively opinionated structure of how we think things should work inside HubSpot, we’re probably on that end of the spectrum where we tend to be fairly opinionated. Our UX team does a lot of work to make sure that when people are going to be extending capabilities on top of the HubSpot CRM, they’re doing that in a way that doesn’t lose the coherence of the platform experience overall. Again, this is a little bit like the Apple philosophy of like, yes, we have an ecosystem, millions of apps, but they have to fit into a certain set of UX standards because what Apple tries to optimize for, right, is the end experience of an iPhone user. HubSpot is philosophically in that direction of like, we want to make sure that when people plug in these other integrations into HubSpot, that the experience for that customer, that user still holds together. So a lot of opinion about that and then that shows itself in both, like the way we expose extensibility to third party developers and the requirements we put around is we’re reviewing apps into the marketplace. And so I think that’s useful. But that being said, when we talk about the actual capabilities, like, what are the things that people are going to want to integrate into HubSpot now? We do a lot of research. This is a big part of what my team does, is to make sure that we’re always reaching out to the partners that we know customers want to have integrations with so we can make sure they’re available to them. But the thing I love about ecosystems is, just as I’d started earlier, saying it’s impossible for one company to build it all, in today’s world, there is no one super company. I feel like the advantage of ecosystems is you’re not trying to be Nostradamus, you’re not trying to like, oh well, we’re the organization that knows everything about what the customer wants. And here’s the blueprint. And it’s this recognition that opening up an ecosystem to hundreds, thousands of other entrepreneurs and innovators and creators allows the ecosystem to, in a very organic sense, to run all these experiments on the edge of, like, oh, well, these customers want this. Or when the customers use this other new thing, like, do they start to become really successful? Do they tell other customers? Does that start to grow and become this new cluster of capability. Or sometimes it goes the other way. People experiment with like, oh, we have this really wild idea of how you could engage with customers this way, and they try it and all right, well, that doesn’t work. But then those entrepreneurs go off and they try something else. And it’s like that creative energy is what makes ecosystems so remarkable. It’s that collective intelligence that is just really hard to replicate or control. And so I think with HubSpot, what I’m trying to get at here is we’re trying to balance. Yes, we want to keep the experience of the platform coherent, but at the same time, we really do want to lean into as much openness as possible to let that innovation, that collective intelligence of the ecosystem, really bring its magic to bear.

Simone Cicero:
When you are very opinionated and you tend to keep coherence, which is of course very important strategically, it’s a little bit of a double-edged sword. Because you want to design for disobedience, right? You want the ecosystem to be a bit provocative so that you can capture these new signals coming from the ecosystem. So how do you capture innovation signals from the ecosystem? Simon Wardley once said ecosystems are future sensing engines. So how do you use your ecosystem as a future sensing engine in product design?

Scott Brinker:
One of the advantages of platforms like HubSpot that differ from, say, like an iPhone. Like an iPhone, it is like a black and white. Either you meet all of the requirements and you integrate perfectly the way they’ve had their opinion, or you’re not available in the App Store at all. With B2B software integration in the cloud, it’s more of a spectrum right now, certainly when we have people who are building things that are going to be in our marketplace and they embed UI components inside HubSpot, yes, that’s where we have the greatest influence and opinions of what that user experience should be like inside our product. But the truth is, right, like a bunch of the integrations in the HubSpot marketplace, they aren’t yet embedded in HubSpot’s UI. A lot of them are, frankly, just doing data integration or perhaps some workflow level integration. And the wonderful thing about that is that means those products have no constraints around the actual experience of their own product. And so there is actually enormous freedom on the outskirts of the HubSpot ecosystem where people can build anything and they can then have a relatively lightweight integration at the data level with HubSpot that makes it very valuable to our mutual customers. I mean, these things get aligned, they get coordinated, but that other company isn’t constrained by our opinions of how software should work. And so that gives you this wonderful thing where you can look across the ecosystem and you can see a very wide variety of not only different products, but like even within a particular category of products, you can see wildly different approaches that companies are taking to that. And as a platform company, yeah, HubSpot and it’s not just us, this isn’t exclusive to us. I mean, because it’s open, the whole world can look at it is you get to see which are the products and the integrations that are becoming popular, what are the things that people are using, what are the ones when you do the case studies, like people are able to talk to the impact it had. And so you start to see over time where these new pockets of growth are really emerging from and yeah, to my point earlier, it’s very hard to anticipate that a priori and that’s the magic of ecosystems is, you don’t have to predict it. You actually let the ecosystem in a very evolutionary manner be able to prove out what actually does work best, what do customers want? And that isn’t a one fixed target that once you hit it, you’re done, right? I mean, we live in a world where everything but certainly marketing just continues to evolve and change and what was desired and hot and useful. This year there’s going to be very different things like three or four years from now.

Simone Cicero:
Is it something that as a platform owner you should think about as part of your growth flywheels? Or it’s more something that this kind of extensibility, something that you have to always keep in mind in a world where there is so much coming up and you want to keep as a blood from your center position in the ecosystem. So it sounds like sometimes you are trying to position yourself a bit as the ontology, the enabling constraint and the system of record, as you said. So how do you feel? It’s more like trying to stay relevant or it’s more like a growth engine or?

Scott Brinker:
Certainly both. The benefit to the customer right at the end of the day, that’s really the thing that matters is what’s valuable to the customer is having some sort of gravitational center to your customer stack what you’re doing in marketing, sales service, web experiences, things like this, having that gravitational center is really, really important. Otherwise you end up with disconnected chaos. And so a CRM platform has become effectively one of the dominant, if not the dominant gravitational centers for these kinds of things. And so that being said, in order to stay relevant as the gravitational center, you have to make sure that the other things people want to orbit that center continue to be able to be connected into that platform. And not just connected in the abstract, but connected in the way the way in which it’s exchanging data, the kind of data exchanging, the way in which the workflow works between the products to the degree there’s UI integration between the two, does it surface the right things in the right way and the right product? All these things are important and you. Do have to keep moving that frontier to make sure that whatever other capabilities people want around the gravitational center of their customer stack, yeah. They can actually get those things together. That being said, from the growth side, yes, it’s a requirement for a business today to have some coherence to their tech stack because if they don’t, their just operations fall apart, customer experience falls apart, and all those things. But even once you have coherence around your customer tech stack yeah, the main mission businesses are doing is like, oh well, how do we grow? And so they are always looking for what is the new strategy or tactic or capability, or the capability I need to enable a new kind of strategy or tactic. And when you have as a CRM platform those products and capabilities in your ecosystem, that becomes both very attractive to new customers who come to your platform. But also more importantly for your existing customers, as they continue to evolve their businesses and their marketing strategies, they have access to these new emerging technologies and capabilities. Yeah, they can actually harness and use to grow their business. And the wonderful thing about being aligned to customer growth with something like the CRM platform is if your customer grows and successful, guess what? They’re going to get more seats of your platform, they’re going to have more employees, they’re going to want more advanced pro tier to enterprise tier. When you get everything aligned around making the customer successful, yeah, things have a nice magical way of fitting together.

Simone Cicero:
It’s like you move from this idea of product market fit into more like a platform ecosystem fit, right? From what you said, it sounds like you have to have a core valued proposition that is solid enough and you also need to be able to evolve it and modularize it internally. But then if you don’t have this grip on the ecosystem, you don’t have this mix of brand recognition and willingness to support. As your customers explore new possibilities and as new technologies, new solutions emerge, you need to keep an eye on them and continuously try to integrate. So you need to be strategic, it seems like, in how you position your company after an initial, maybe success after an initial brand recognition. You need to be open.

Luca Ruggeri:
Scott, we strongly believe that following the very famous Conway’s Law, that normally companies reflect to the outside, to their customer base, somehow the structure and the internal dynamics they have from the inside to the outside. So, being you undoubtedly a platform company, I’m sure that you have a platform structure that’s basically the engine that’s running the car. So how you structure your teams in relation to this opportunity of being a platform company and also that’s very important if you are resonating the way that you organize internally with your partnership strategy. That of course, as you explain us, is very articulated. It’s not only about extension and apps, but also consulting expertise, large and defensecale companies. So do you have a boundary between the inside of your company, your team structure, or are these boundaries basically disappearing or blurring?

Scott Brinker:
Yeah, it’s fascinating because I was thinking back to the earlier question. Like so many things in life, it feels about like trying to get a balance between two opposing forces. Like when we were talking earlier, I was thinking, right, part of what you’re trying to balance with a platform is this idea of stability, but also change. And you kind of want the best of both worlds. That comes to mind here because yeah, in this context of thinking about an organization, when you have an organization of just thousands of people, you’re now trying to balance on one hand, yes. You want this sort of boundaryless of flow, how possibilities get connected and that sort of underlying fabric that connects the whole thing together. Super important. But at the same time yes. As you have these large organizations yeah, there needs to be some level of structure within that of just yeah, what are the different pieces that people take ownership of that they’re running with? And we know that small teams are incredibly effective and large big committee environments less effective. And so I think HubSpot’s worked really hard. I mean, the founders have been like really intentional about trying to find that balance. And so that would lead here into this structure is within product and engineering, there is very much an underlying platform. Powers everything. It also serves it’s a two way street, right. It’s listening to what are the capabilities that the folks at the level above that need. And then we have essentially a GM structure where different components of the HubSpot platform, like our Marketing Hub has a general manager, our Sales Hub has a general manager, our Service Hub has a general manager. And they’re building on top of that platform. They think about openness and integrations and partners, but they’re also trying to solve for like, okay, for a customer who actually buys our Marketing Hub product, what are also the capabilities that they actually want in that product and that experience? And then we have a developer, an ecosystem and partnerships group that is essentially at that same level. I don’t think we call the head of that the GM because for various reasons there are different parts there. But it’s basically that level of saying, okay, we’ve got this underlying platform. Then on top of that we’ve got some of our own products that build on top of that platform. And then we’ve got this developer and partnership organization that is essentially working with third party developers and third party service providers of them being able to build on that same foundation and trying to find that magical balance where each one of these spaces has the freedom to really run and do what it does well. But at the same time also find organizational and cultural ways to make sure that there is a flow of ideas and alignment on strategy across them. And I would say this gets to one of the things I’m particularly passionate about with the HubSpot ecosystem. And I’m incredibly grateful to the founders for embracing this philosophy, which is if you look at that structure of saying like, okay, HubSpot is an underlying platform, and then we have our Marketing Hub and our Sales hub and our Service Hub inside our Marketing Hub, like, we’ve got a bunch of different features, right? We’ve got capabilities for building landing pages, we’ve got capabilities for managing advertising, we’ve got capabilities for how we think of organizing around account based marketing. But when you look out into our ecosystem, right, we also have partners who are arguably the world leading specialists in, like, landing page capability or we have some incredible companies that their whole mission in life is account based marketing and account based marketing capabilities. And so you end up in this place where, okay, when you look at the ecosystem as a whole, there is overlap between what some of the companies in our ecosystem do and what some of our own hubs do. And that’s okay. In fact, not only is that okay, that is a great thing because this actually makes sure that customers are in a mode where they are not constrained by HubSpot. They have the freedom to choose like, oh, well, for my particular uses and my particular stage of where I’m at, oh, I actually might want to prefer this third party product instead of the HubSpot built version of that. That’s great because again, as long as they’re all doing this around that common center of gravity of the CRM platform, that’s a wonderful thing for HubSpot. And so again, this is a little place where you get into that advantage of keeping a little bit of organizational separation, which means the developer and ecosystem and partnerships group has that independence, freedom to have competitive overlap in the ecosystem and actually treat that as a good thing.

Simone Cicero :
So essentially you have, I would say, is it five, right? Five Hubs. And these are kind of separated product units, right? Yes, as I understand well, and this I recall something very similar from Amazon, right, this interesting idea that once you have kind of is it PNL separated these Hubs, these divisions?

Scott Brinker:
So this is where things get a little bit tricky because in go to market, because these Hubs also happen to work very well with each other because they’re all built on the same platform. We often have customers who are buying multiple Hubs. And so you can buy the whole suite or you can just buy an individual Hub. So, yes, it’s PNL oriented, but slightly more complicated than straight forward separate.

Simone Cicero:
But the core message, I think, is once you have this separation with products, you succeed to give the customer this possibility to say, for example, I want to activate just a few of these hubs and then attach other pieces to this. As you said, your ecosystem also has some vertical feature champions. And so I feel that injecting this type of modularity into your offering that recognizes that the customer could be let free to say, I don’t want to take the 100% of the product. I want to just take maybe 60% and then complement it with other pieces. And there you have your ecosystem unit that is there to one side facilitate that, but also from another point of view, it’s a bit like a down sale for you, right? It’s there to say, okay, you don’t want to use our CMS hub. Maybe you want to use, I don’t know, WordPress, but there is a plug in for that. So we’re not letting you down, right? We are there to kind of resonate with your particular needs and you’re still part of the family, right? This is really a fascinating insight and it’s very resonant if people listen to the podcast. If you go back to the episode where we had Casey Winters on the conversation, we discussed that digital products sometimes create structures internally that replicate the product portfolio, which is this case, but also sometimes replicate strategic needs. That’s the case of your ecosystem and partnership units that kind of reflect your internal the strategicity of your ecosystem orientation in the company. What do you think? Does it sound credible or am I just making this up in my head?

Scott Brinker:
No, you’re saving it much more eloquently than I did. And I think this is a feel like one of the advantages HubSpot has by really embracing that ecosystem philosophy where it counts. I mean, without naming names, I’m sure you’ve seen other examples where platforms, as they build their own capabilities, it can be very tempting to, oh, well, if there’s someone in our ecosystem who competes with that, we’re not going to let them in our marketplace. No, we’re now doing this. You can’t do that. And I understand why that can be very tempting from other perspectives. One of the things I’m just incredibly proud about HubSpot and its executive leadership and its founders is they’ve been adamant from the very beginning, like, listen, to be a platform, it’s going to be open and yes, people are going to compete with us over different things. And that’s a wonderful thing because that is part of what makes an ecosystem healthy and thrive and continue to make sure that it always has that value to an ever changing market and ever changing set of customers. So anyways, yes, you’ve summed it up beautifully.

Simone Cicero:
But I think you said it’s resonant to many other companies. But the way you guys have embodied this with this idea of hubs that are modular, I think it’s fairly unique. Many companies have this idea of we have a huge ecosystem, but then you have to buy a bulk of functionalities that is fairly huge. And in reality, this idea of saying we have a marketing app, sales app, service app and so on, it’s really kind of conducive. It gives an importance to the customers to say, I want to consider each piece of this product as an enabling module and then I can integrate my stuff on it. So I think it’s really interesting. How do you develop this legitimacy towards the ecosystem? How do you create a brand that third parties trust in terms of policies that, for example, you use or in terms of data or technology standards that you use that somehow make you trustable that you’re not going to change the rule from one day to another? Because, I mean, there’s a lot of talking about web3 and blockchain and portable reputation and portable developments. But at the end of the day, we know that it’s really important and we said that in the conversation. It’s really important also that a platform emerges, creates a strong brand and kind of takes this responsibility to ensure a coherent experience for customers. But at the same time, I think we sometimes forget that you also have to be legitimate to be this enabling platform. So how do you guys develop or at least nurture this aspect of be perceived as legitimate by your third party ecosystem?

Scott Brinker:
Yeah, I love this question. I mean, I could almost step back and say, in my opinion, in a world of software where any piece of software can be recreated by anyone else, right? I mean, ultimately the most companies develop is trust with their customers and trust with their partners. And that’s something that yeah, you can’t create overnight that is a journey of many, many years. It almost doesn’t matter what you say, right? It’s like you just have to consistently demonstrate being trustworthy. It is always a warning in the back of my head that trust is one of those things that takes a really long time to build and you can lose it overnight. And there are certainly plenty of stories in the platform world where, yeah, companies had a great ecosystem and then they did things that violated the trust with their developers and partners and it collapsed around them. I think for HubSpot, the thing that’s most important to us in trust is respecting the partner, the developer almost like a kind of customer. And so what this means is we don’t want to make changes that are going to adversely affect them if at all possible. Sometimes in the nature of platforms, for instance, they evolve technically. So you might have something like, hey, we had the set of APIs. In the next generation of how the platform evolves, those APIs have to be sunset. New ones have to come up. Well, okay, how do you approach that? How much can you deliver backwards compatibility? If there are places where you can’t deliver backwards compatibility, how much effort do you put into helping the companies that have been on the old version of these to be able to get to the new ones? Are the expectations you’re setting of how much time they have to be able to work with you to do that. You treat with great respect the investment that they’ve made in your ecosystem and you don’t take advantage of that. The most challenging aspects of ecosystems like the relationships between platforms and partners is the boundaries are never static. So we are all living in a world where the expectations from customers keep evolving. And so the hardest thing in any platform, in my opinion, is when you have a partner that does something that the platform doesn’t, and then at some point the platform decides we need to have this capability to the core platform because we’re just not going to be able to keep the large customer base that makes the ecosystem possible for everyone. First of all, when HubSpot thinks about these things, we take those very seriously. Our approach to it has been to, as early as possible, reach out to those partners and just be incredibly transparent about like “hey, here’s what we’re thinking of doing, here’s why, here’s the time frame for it”. So first of all, as much as possible, we never want to catch our partners by surprise. We want to treat them with great respect around those changes. But then also as much as possible, everyone is evolving just like as the platform is evolving and it might have to add some of this capability that before was only in the ecosystem. The truth is, for ecosystem companies they need to keep evolving too. And so when you see the boundaries start to shift as much as possible, what you want to do is work with those partners to be able to say like okay, well, this thing you used to do that used to be very unique, it’s now kind of become commoditized. And so as a commodity we almost yet has to come into the platform. But here are some ways we might make it extensible for you to take it to this next level and to work with those partners to help them find the paths to continually evolve and expand as well themselves. It doesn’t always work perfectly that way, but I think if the platform company is genuinely engaging with partners this way, trust is built not just when things are going well. I think trust is built most of all when you find yourself in these situations like okay, well, this thing is changing. It’s probably not great for you that this is changing, but here’s what we’re going to do to work with you through this change. Actually, I think that’s the place where you build some of the truest trust in what an ecosystem can be relied on.

Simone Cicero:
That’s super interesting really. I think you touch really on a very delicate topic which is that of continuous commoditization, right? Because innovation on one side means commoditization on the other side. So it’s a Simon Wardley teaches us this is a continuous cycle, this innovation, leverage and componentize. It so the fact that you actively reach out to partners that are being kind of, I would say, commoditized and integrated in the platform and actively seek developmental opportunities for them, I think this really speaks a lot about the posture that HubSpot has towards its ecosystem. Right. So thank you so much for double clicking on this.

Luca Ruggeri:
Would you kindly leave us with some breadcrumbs? So anything that catches your attention you think is important, you suggest us and our readers and our listeners that absolutely we need to catch to read. It could be a book, a movie, whatever you want.

Scott Brinker:
Awesome. Well, again, thank you so much for having me. You don’t know how much of an honor this is for me to be talking with you. You mentioned at the beginning my blog, ChiefMartec.com, my book Hacking Marketing, of course, certainly invite listeners to check out Ecosystem.Hubspot.com. I think if I was going to leave with, like, one other book, the single most influential book I’ve ever read in the context of ecosystems is Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Anti-fragility, or Anti Fragile. Because to me, this is exactly like the whole value of ecosystems is before ecosystems, businesses and products and all this stuff, they had that inherent fragility where just this change happened in the world. Other things being equal, I tend to be a negative impact on those products and those businesses. The just beauty of an ecosystem is it builds in this inherent evolutionary capability that I think actually platforms get stronger with change. And there are not a lot of things in the world that you find that really truly capture that anti fragility dynamic. But it’s one of the things that just fascinates me about how true platform ecosystems can.

Simone Cicero:
Thank you so much, Scott. And really, that was an amazing conversation. And sometimes when we run this podcast, when we just get one insight, sorry. And I think on this conversation I bring Tree back, which is this idea of actively doing customer research and user research to understand these joint customer needs. This is a very strong message for our listeners that are thinking about building platforms. Then another one is this idea of structuring modularity inside your organization so that you don’t have to be a monolith even if you are a platform. You need to understand that there are monolithic platforms and there are modular platforms. And I think this was a really fascinating insight and also this approach to legitimacy as building these trusted relationships with your ecosystem in a way that you also positively will actively reach out to look for developmental opportunities. I think this is another very fascinating one. So thank you so much. I hope you enjoyed the conversation.

Scott Brinker:
I loved it. It was such a great honor. To be here with you. Thank you again.

Simone Cicero:
Thank you so much. Luca, thank you so much for your always brilliant questions.

Luca Ruggeri:
Thank you both.

Simone Cicero:
And for our listeners, of course, don’t forget to check the show notes on Boundaryless.io/resources/podcast. You will find Scott’s conversation. We catch up here on this channel. And of course, don’t forget to think Boundaryless.