If I were to start HubSpot again, I would implement a freemium model to attract users more naturally before converting them to paying customers.

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.

We sold our service to one company for $250 a month, even before we had any code developed.

In the early days of HubSpot, we wrote two blog articles a week and competed to see who could generate more leads from them, emphasizing the importance of high-quality content and effective titles. We built our audience on a blog before we even started writing the first lines of code for our startup, which took us a couple of years to be seen as experts in our space.

In the early days, I used email to experiment with pricing by sending different offers to customers, which helped us find the best price for our market.

We realized we needed to charge businesses a few hundred dollars a month instead of just $20-$30 to make our business model viable.

During a call with a former colleague, I pitched Optimizely, and he immediately saw its value, suggesting a price of $1,000 a month, which was significantly more than we made with our previous ventures.

We decided to offer our product as a fully functional free beta for 30 days, with a commercial price of $299 for companies and $99 for hobbyists, trusting users to pay based on their usage.

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.