In the early days, we avoided free trials to ensure we received feedback only from customers who truly valued our product, which helped us stay focused on delivering real value.

One of our first customers was a comedian who used HubSpot to set up his website, showcasing the diverse range of businesses we served. In the early days of HubSpot, we built a tool called Website Grader that helped users evaluate how well their websites attracted links and were optimized for search engines.

We realized our users loved us because they put up with a website that was half-functional, showing their commitment to our product despite its flaws.

At the time we were writing, there wasn't much content about how to market properly on the internet, which helped us stand out.

When we first launched our product, I was embarrassed about its readiness, but we had to ship it. We learned from our initial customers, who provided valuable feedback that helped us improve.

We provided our product entirely for free across all IDEs, which allowed us to optimize workloads significantly and attract a large user base.

In the early days, we were always scared of not getting it right and being out-executed by competitors, which drove us to focus hard on our early customers and their needs.

After a month, we pivoted to create products we wished we had, leading to the development of Optimizely, which simplifies A/B testing for users without technical resources.

We started with a freemium model, but realized it distracted us; we shifted to a paid model and consistently increased prices over time, which helped us focus on serious customers.