HubSpot’s Pledge to its Integration Partners
I was meeting with one of our long time integration partners the other day. Good conversation, they’re excited about ways we can work together. Then we got to one point in the conversation and they flat out asked me, “Are you going to build a product in our space?”
It shook me in the moment, but thinking back, it shouldn’t have. I’ve had those thoughts before myself.
I’ve sat in the audience at a company’s event and wondered, is this the year? Is this the year they’ll launch something that will end our partnership? What would we do if that happened?
Pretty nerve racking.
It got me thinking about HubSpot’s integration partners.
We’re expecting over 20,000 attendees at this year’s INBOUND event, and many of them will be technology partners that integrate with our platform. To those integrators sitting in the audience, I want you to know, I’ve been where you are. We want to make this easier for you.
The thing is, it’s no secret that APIs and integrations can create better customer experiences. Customers often have a variety of tools they use and having those tools work deeply together just makes sense. For SaaS companies lucky enough to have other organizations build on their APIs, this ecosystem can help the platform reach new users, extend to new use cases, and become more valuable to its customers.
The challenge comes when some of those new users, and new needs are best served by the SaaS company directly.
The reality is that sometimes HubSpot will build a product that competes with our technology partners. That’s difficult for everyone involved, and not a responsibility we take lightly.
We want to share our approach to those moments. This is HubSpot’s pledge to our integration partners.
HubSpot’s pledge to our integration partners
We will…
1.Solve for the customer (SFTC) first. This is our foundational principle. First and foremost, we are going to do the right thing for our customers. Our entire approach is based on the founding principle to help our customers grow and solve for their needs first.
Most often this means creating a thriving and diverse ecosystem of integration partners for our customers to work with. It’s the customer’s prerogative to choose the best solution for their needs. We are solving for the customer’s preference without forcing them to adopt one specific solution.
At times SFTC also means we are going to build directly for the customer. We won’t restrict our product team from building something simply because a partner offers a similar feature. Our platform must evolve to meet the changing needs of customers in order for our larger ecosystem to thrive for the long term.
Solving for the customer and supporting our partners are almost always mutually reinforcing missions, but when we must make a trade-off, we will solve for the customer first. This is probably the scariest fact our partners face. We understand that and it’s not a responsibility we take lightly.
2.Invest in our integration partners’ success. We won’t artificially restrict our partners’ ability to make remarkable, even competitive integrations. We will strive to develop an all-inclusive network for our integration partners that not only grants technical access, but marketing, community, and event access as well. Each benefit offered to our partners has a purpose — whether it’s generating leads, exposure, brand awareness, or installs, we’ve designed each to help our integration partners succeed.
This also means we’ll invest in the platform technically. Our goal is to encourage innovation by expanding access to our APIs, creating reliable documentation and making it easy to work with us. We will take periodic developer NPS and speak directly with partner developers to understand the good and the bad of building on our platform. This feedback informs our platform roadmap, which we’ll share openly as much as possible.
Occasionally, we’ll financially invest in partners in our ecosystem. Our approach is to help partners succeed on our platform and with our customers.
When our partners succeed, so do our joint customers. That’s something we will invest in.
3.Strive to share information early and openly with our partners. Even if it needs to be under NDA. We will be transparent with our partners and play ‘cards up’. This has served us well in the past and something we’ll continue to do as often, and early as possible. We will share our perspective as plainly and simply as possible.
There will be moments where HubSpot is launching a product, or starting a new partnership that our existing partners deserve to know about. In those cases, we will let our partners know what’s happening. Sometimes that might be under NDA or only the information we can share, but we have no interest in surprising those partners who have put their time, effort, and faith in working with us.
4.Treat partners equally. Our aim is to create a level playing field for our partners, giving our customers the power to choose the best fit for them — even if that ends up not being a HubSpot product.
That means we won’t artificially restrict access to APIs or our platform, unjustly restrict the visibility of partners, or deliberately use our size to push a partner out.
That also doesn’t mean that we will work with every partner in the exact same way. Our partnership will be a meritocracy built on a level playing field.
Our partners are vital in extending our platform functionality and I’m grateful for all who have been with us along the way. I’m excited to watch the HubSpot ecosystem evolve and do my part to do right by any partner that chooses to work with us.
