Today, I'm excited to have on our show Scott Brinker, famous @chiefmartec, who is mapping the marketing technology ecosystem and its growth from 100 products 10 years ago to 10,000 products today, which is incredible.
On top of that, Scott is VP of Platform Ecosystem in HubSpot. HubSpot is an amazing company, which transformed itself into a platform over the last five years and Scott has been leading this transformation.
📍 In this episode:
3:00 – Key trends in MarTech Landscape
9:00 – What is driving 10X growth in MarTech over the last decade?
14:00 – Turning HubSpot into a platform: seizing an opportunity
18:00 – Three lessons from transforming HubSpot into platform
22:30 – How HubSpot’s grew its ecosystem in the last 5 years
25:00 – What is the platform mindset shift and why is it so hard?
27:30 – How to explain SaaS explosion: 500 million apps by 2023 (IDC)
32:30 – Data collaboration between companies
34:30 – Will Big Data lead to a Big Ops challenge?
36:00 – What will be the next chapter in MarTech platforms and ecosystems?
Hi, Scott, you are one of the global experts in marketing technology. You've been mapping marketing ecosystems since it was a little bit more than 100 marketing tools. And now, you just announced a new landscape which is 100 times that.
You're also VP of Platform Ecosystem in HubSpot. You started at a time when the ecosystem was really not an understood term, and now everyone is talking about ecosystems. You also led the transformation of HubSpot, which was a marketing tech suite, into a genuine platform, and it's really exciting.
Finally you are probably one of the few people who can clearly explain what is happening in technology in simple terms. And this is what I really hope we're going to be doing in the next half an hour. Let's start with the marketing landscape.
Key trends in MarTech Landscape
You just announced 10,000 MarTech Landscape. Why is it still growing 20% year over year, and what do you see as the key trends? Where's consolidation and where is energy in marketing stock today?
Every year that we've done this and the landscape keeps expanding. I think one of the most common questions people have is, "Well, wait, I don't understand why this is still growing?" Because all the time in the news, I'm reading about these acquisitions, and this company acquires this other one. It would seem there is consolidation happening in martech. So why does this landscape keep growing? And what makes things interesting is both things are true. There is consolidation happening in the industry. The way I think of it is the martech landscape is a long tail.
It would seem there is consolidation happening in MarTech. So why does this landscape keep growing? And what makes things interesting is both things are true.
And so the head of the tail has some very large companies - Salesforce, Adobe, Microsoft, Oracle, HubSpot, making our play in there. But then, you quickly go down this long tail, there are all these new startups. Whether they are companies that someday hope to challenge the leaders and become part of the head themselves. Or some of them are micro SaaS, but these are really specialized tools, they do something very specific, either for a specific industry, or a specific channel or a specific geographical region. And that's where we see this just incredible diversity.
So, yes, the landscape has a lot of apps, a lot of vendors that are in it, but if you were to look at the distribution of the size of those different companies, it would start to feel a little bit like, "Oh, okay, now I get it." There are these very large companies. There are some relatively large companies, and then there's a whole string of small companies.
I think this is one of the perennial challenges in the marketing technology industry is how do we make this work? And this is what led me to the work I do at HubSpot with platform ecosystem. It's almost, if you think of things like the iPhone or Android, these are highly consolidated platforms. In fact, you could say there's really only two mobile platforms out there. But because of the consolidation of those two platforms, they've enabled this just incredible blossoming of millions of specialized apps that plug into those platforms. And while I don't think the B2B Martech industry is quite there, we will probably maybe never get to that scale. It feels like that's the similar pattern that we're looking for. We want to have these very common stable large platforms. But then we want to be able to plug into those a range of highly specialized apps for things that are a little bit more unique to our business.
Previewing something in where we’re going to jump later on. Do you see the biggest growth happening within some ecosystems like HubSpot or Salesforce ecosystem, for example, like companies sort of building on other platforms? Or do you see it elsewhere?
There are certainly some apps that are built for a specific platform. Like there are some companies who have built apps specifically for HubSpot. There are numbers of companies that have built apps specifically for Salesforce. But I would say the most common pattern we see is companies that are building almost like a standalone app. They think of it like, ‘Oh, this is the particular problem we're solving’. And previously, when they built that app, they were all thinking about, ‘Okay, well, this is the functionality of my app, and what it does, and I'm not going to worry about the other things out there’. And the problem that created was, “Yeah, it's great that your app does this very specific thing really well. But if it doesn't connect to the rest of the tools that an organization is using, it's actually hard for people to really get the full value out of it”. And so what you've now seen is more and more of these startups, more and more of these software companies, when they're building their app, they now think about integrating to platforms like HubSpot and Salesforce, as one of the core features of their product.
what you've now seen is more and more of these startups, more and more of these software companies, when they're building their app, they now think about integrating to platforms like HubSpot and Salesforce, as one of the core features of their product.
I mean, whatever functionality, they're adding that new but making sure that they integrate to HubSpot, Salesforce, Microsoft. So that their customers, their prospective customers, if they like that functionality, it can plug into their stack and actually be a part of, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. And then, that is a change. Five years ago, a lot of these apps thought of integration as an afterthought, if they thought about it at all. And I think you're seeing now people treat that as a sort of a core requirement of being successful.
I agree with you because we see on our side as well, we integrate with others like HubSpot as well. And customers just refuse to use it otherwise, right? Whatever nice value you try to provide, unless you plug into the place where the entire company data lives and HubSpot has become one of the great players in this regard.
What is driving 10X growth in MarTech over the last decade?
Double clicking on the nature of this growth, because the space is still growing. Trying to understand core drivers of growth of different apps. I'm sure you were surprised yourself, right? 10 years ago, if somebody would tell you that Martech would be 100X of what you just mapped, you would probably would say, that's just insane. And now it's a new normal. What are the underlying drivers?
You're absolutely right. If someone had told me when I was starting out mapping martech that like, "oh, well, you're mapping 100 of them now, but you better be prepared to map 10,000 of them." I'm like, "I'm not so sure I want to do this." The project definitely got much larger. But anyways, the way I look at it is basically about supply and demand. In order to have growth, you need to both be able to have a large supply and the forces to support that. But you also need there to be enough demand to provide revenue and economics for that.
on the supply side, the big thing that changed over the past couple of decades is, there are basically no barriers to entry to creating software at this point.
And so on the supply side, the big thing that changed over the past couple of decades is, there are basically no barriers to entry to creating software at this point. I mean, you can sign up with Amazon or Azure or Google Cloud. They've got all these API's, all this cloud infrastructure that is super cheap, it's all price based on usage, so you don't pay until you actually have growth. We have all these digital channels now by which we can reach our prospective customers. Once upon a time, when you bought software, you had to go through this very difficult process of actually installing software on a physical computer with a data center. I mean, there were just all these things.
And now, if someone likes a piece of software in the cloud, very often they can sign up for freemium or a free trial account. For a bunch of the software the pricing model as a subscription as a service, they can put it on a credit card. And so this ability to build software quickly and cheaply, and then also be able to distribute and sell it with relatively low friction, at least compared to where we were two decades ago, is why on the supply side, we've seen this incredible explosion.
But you still need the demand side, and this is where things have just been really interesting. Because marketing and how businesses engage with their audiences, has just been going through such tremendous change. I mean, you think about marketing, once upon a time, there were only a handful of channels, it was like, "Okay, well, we might run some advertising on TV, we might have a trade show, put an ad in a magazine." I mean, don't get me wrong, marketers did a lot of creative things in those channels, but sort of the scope of things they had to build or channels they would use was relatively simple. Versus in today's world, right? I mean, you think about just all the different digital channels of what's happening on our website, and how people engage with it there and what's happening on these different social media channels. And the way in which we reach advertising through like “oh, is it podcast? what's happening in a walled garden here, and some other walled gardens?” and it just been this explosion of all these new ways to engage with customers.
And they're still changing, right? I mean, what's one of the hot things people have been talking about recently is the metaverse. Again, I think we're probably a little bit more hype than reality with the metaverse at this point. But that is clearly another channel that's changing and evolving, and marketers are going to have to think about, "oh, okay, how would we reach people through that channel? How would we engage them?" And anytime you have all these new changes in this new innovation and consumer patterns are shifting, all of those things create opportunities for marketers to say, "Oh, well, okay? How can I do that?" And so the software providers who are creating things, "okay, we can create this app to help you do this. And to do that." This is what keeps that industry so fluid. There is both the supply side that you can get, you can build a lot of software and get it into the market. And there's this demand side of there's just so much variety, and so much change, and so much demand to differentiate our brand in this complex global digital market that those two forces combine to just create a lot of continuous fluidity to the martech industry.
There is both the supply side that you can get, you can build a lot of software and get it into the market. And there's this demand side of there's just so much variety, and so much change, and so much demand to differentiate our brand in this complex global digital market that those two forces combine to just create a lot of continuous fluidity to the MarTech industry.
It is a great explanation. Obviously, over the last two years, we've had a lot of investments moving into technology markets and obviously, it's accelerated to some degree. But what is interesting as well, I was looking at the pace of growth in your graph, it's reasonably steady. It's growing with a steady pace over the last decade and it is astonishing and exciting, really. Somewhere in the middle of mapping this marketing landscape you met Brian Halligan (co-founder & CEO of HubSpot), and you both saw an opportunity, right? I love this HubSpot inception story, how HubSpot transformed into a platform. Can you share more about that?
I was lucky to know Brian and Dharmesh when they were first starting HubSpot., Because we were all in the Boston community, I got to watch them build that company. And, to their credit, they always had the intention of HubSpot becoming a platform, it's just there's certain steps you have to take. I mean, the number one thing that actually creates momentum for a platform is you need to have a fairly large scale. You need to have a large install base, because if you don't have a large install base, there just isn't an incentive for other companies to build things to that ecosystem. And so I think HubSpot has spent the first decade of its life very much building these really useful products that then lots of marketers adopted, they expanded that into sales and service. Once it reached a certain scale, then it started to make sense to say, “okay, this is a large enough install base, that there should be incentive for other developers to either build or integrate products to it”. And that's when HubSpot was ready to make that shift and say like, okay, let's actually start putting the pieces together from a technical level from a program level, to become a platform. And that's when I joined in 2017.
One of the things, I'll share this anecdote, because to me, this was really telling. Over the years, as I kept doing iterations of that marketing technology landscape, I would very often find myself either in an interview or on stage with a leader in one of the large tech companies. And I would show them the landscape and I'd be like, "Okay, what do you see? When you look at this, what's your reaction?" And I would say, almost always, the answer was pretty negative. It was like, "Oh, this is the bad world. Yeah. What we're trying to do is get rid of all that. So you can buy our thing. And you don't have to worry about that." It's almost like the classic fear, uncertainty and doubt, sales technique. I think, actually, a lot of sales reps from these other companies would use my landscape in their sales deck as a way of saying, "Yes, this is the bad world. You just want to buy our stuff". That strategy clearly did not work because the software just continued to multiply.
I brought the landscape along and I'm like, "okay, Brian, when you look at this, what do you see?" And without a moment's hesitation, he said “opportunity”. It was like this recognition that all these other companies who are innovating and creating and building things, we shouldn't be trying to get rid of them all.
I remember when I showed the landscape, it was the very first interview I had with Brian, when they were considering who they would want to help with this mission. I brought the landscape along and I'm like, "okay, Brian, when you look at this, what do you see?" And without a moment's hesitation, he said “opportunity”. It was like this recognition that all these other companies who are innovating and creating and building things, we shouldn't be trying to get rid of them all. I mean, don't get me wrong, there's competitive overlap, and all of these things, but instead of trying to get rid of them, is there a way we can actually harness that energy and get more value by working together? Which is the whole dynamics of platforms. And when he said that answer. I'm like, “Okay, if you want me to join, I'm in”. That is my opinion, the right way to look at it.
Very famous and beloved professor in London Business School, Costas Markides, loves this phrase “is this a threat OR an opportunity”. And he's always saying “this is a threat AND an opportunity”. And I think it's so true. And I think you did an amazing job transforming HubSpot into a platform.
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Three lessons from transforming HubSpot into platform
Can you share a few things that you learned over the last five years, if you would explain to another CEO, what are the top three things to keep in mind when transforming tech products into a platform. And this tech product should already have some very strong following, like you mentioned, but what things should be true for this project to be successful?
First and foremost, you want to make sure that your customers, or as you have more and more partners, and integrators, your mutual joint customers, that the customers are winning, that you're solving for the joint customer need because that is the engine
You really do have to look at this as a two sided market. First and foremost, you want to make sure that your customers, or as you have more and more partners, and integrators, your mutual joint customers, that the customers are winning, that you're solving for the joint customer need because that is the engine that keeps these things growing. But it's equally important to recognize that your partners, they're almost a kind of customer as well, too. You really need to care for them, you really need to be in the mindset of how do I make my partners successful?
There's this famous quote from Bill Gates, I think it was a few years ago, but someone had asked Bill Gates, what's your definition of a platform? And his answer was, "oh, well, you're a platform, when the people around you are making more money than you are, that there's more economic value that's being generated in the total ecosystem than from the core platform company itself." And that's a big shift from when a company's going from just selling its own products and this is all “our focus is our customer, our revenue, that's it”. To be like, "Oh, well, this isn't just our customer. It's now mutual customers in the ecosystem”. And it's really important that the rest of the ecosystem be generating enormous economic value for themselves. Because in the absence of that, nobody actually wants to be in the ecosystem, right? The incentive has to be there. So that's the super big lesson.
I think the second lesson is you need to be comfortable with what Dharmesh uses this phrase “co-opetition”.
I think the second lesson is you need to be comfortable with what Dharmesh uses this phrase “co-opetition”. Which is the idea that there usually aren't black and white lines in this crazy software environment we're in. Like “Oh, are we strictly a compliment? Or are we strictly a competitor?” Very often you have software that overlaps in different ways. It complements on these things, and then it competes on these others. And so when you're just doing your own product, you tend to look at everything as competition like, "Okay, well, if it isn't us, then it's not us" and that's competitive.
In a platform, you really have to be comfortable with, like “listen, it's okay to have some of these competitive overlaps in an ecosystem", because part of what they're doing is, they're providing enough choice and enough flexibility to customers, that they're able to pick and choose what are the best solutions combined in that ecosystem for their needs. And if you try and squeeze out the competition, or shut it out, at the end of the day, you're only hurting yourself. You're limiting how your customers are going to be able to get the most value out of your platform. So you have to be comfortable embracing a certain amount of competition in the ecosystem.
Changing the mindset of a company from being purely a product or suite, to being a company that really thinks throughout its entire organization, from product to sales, to marketing, partnerships, to change that worldview, to have a platform ecosystem mindset - it's a big change.
And then the third lesson, which is definitely not unique to the platform journey, but it's worth stating - change is hard. Changing the mindset of a company from being purely a product or suite, to being a company that really thinks throughout its entire organization, from product to sales, to marketing, partnerships, to change that worldview, to have a platform ecosystem mindset - it's a big change. Even if you strategically decide, “we can spend a few months and we can strategically decide this is what we want to do”, I think you really have to be prepared to invest a multi-year journey in how you shift the way the company thinks, the way the company operates, to embrace this new life as a platform ecosystem.
That's an amazing insight. You’re now five years in, you started with dozens of partners, I guess. And now, how big is your ecosystem today? I know that you are tracking the average number of integration, how does it look like today?
We have over 1,000 apps that are now integrated with HubSpot and that momentum is continuing to grow. When I think of an ecosystem, there's these two dimensions. One is just quantity, what is that diversity of solutions that are available in the ecosystem. But the other dimension that's super important is the quality. When people say, the two pieces of software integrate with each other, it's a little bit of a trick question these days. Because there's almost always some way in the cloud, that you can get product A and product B to talk to each other. But there's an enormous difference in how rich and good and stable and the use cases that can be solved from that integration. And one of the things we did early on was sort of map out “Okay, well, how do we even think about what makes an integration deep?” And it starts with understanding at the data layer, is it just passing data blindly one way or the other? Or is it a two way sync? What's the range of data that you're integrating? And then on top of that, you start to think about workflow? How do we get things so that from a process perspective can flow across multiple apps seamlessly? There's a level of the user interface for someone who's actually trying to use multiple products together. Do they have to keep switching between five different browser tabs or can you start to embed key UI elements in the core platform? And then even at a level above that, when you think about governance, if I'm buying apps or integrations in a particular ecosystem, do I have the assurance that, okay, these things have been vetted, they're high quality, they meet certain compliance standards? And so when you look at that entire range, I think there's a lot of opportunity to not just have a large number of integrations, but to really make sure that those integrations are very high quality and the value they give customers.
Platform mindset shift
A thousand products on the platform, that is phenomenal. You mentioned that the company mindset changed. I want to quickly double-click on that. What are the things that you think are true now about HubSpot within the organization, in terms of how people think versus how it was a few years ago? What was that platform mindset shift?
I think the two big ones are on the product side and on the customer engagement side. So on the product side, yeah, it really comes down to saying, Okay, it's not just about the things we build, but it's how do we provide the right extensibility points, so that there's this open architecture that allows other people to add value on top of our foundation. And just purely from a product management or engineering perspective, this doesn't just automatically happen, you really do have to consciously build that into how you're creating a product. So there's that change. And then on the customer side, again, it's this really interesting shift.
When you make the shift to selling as a platform, now you're starting to take a very different view, we're actually part of the value you're selling to the customer, it's not just the capability of the functionality that's in your product. But it's the fact that it works really well with some of these other products.
If you're a salesperson at a company that isn't selling a platform, it's just selling its core product, basically the last thing you want to do is have any conversation with the customer about any other piece of software. “No, no, let’s not worry about anything else. This is our software. Yeah, don't worry about that other thing”. And now you don't need that because anytime you're talking about bringing other things into the conversation, it's like, “Oh, my goodness, is this going to slow down the momentum of this deal. Are we competing for the same budget with this other product?” And so it's almost kind of standoffish - well, it's either our product or their product, I guess, zero-sum game. When you make the shift to selling as a platform, now you're starting to take a very different view, we're actually part of the value you're selling to the customer, it's not just the capability of the functionality that's in your product. But it's the fact that it works really well with some of these other products. And so when a customer brings up another product that they also want to use, rather than trying to push that off the table, you're like, "Oh, you're using that - fantastic! They have a wonderful integration to our platform, here's how these two things work together to get more value out of both of them." Again, it makes sense, but that is when you think about it, that's a pretty significant change in how you approach your go to market.
How HubSpot’s grew its ecosystem in the last 5 years
Amazing job with growing this into a suite of products and also a platform business. Let’s zoom out and talk about the explosion of apps and SaaS in general. We just touched on how it works in MarTech and HubSpots facilitates building a lot of stuff within its ecosystem. But I think you mentioned in one of your talks that IDC is predicting that there are going to be 500 million apps, right? And you have a very clear way to explain how they're going to be built on top of each other. Can you elaborate more on that? How do you see the future unfolding into this tech explosion?
It's kind of wild, I keep going back to a phrase from, 11 years ago, Marc Andreessen, who created the Netscape browser and one of the early pioneers of the internet we have today. He had this editorial in the Wall Street Journal in 2011, where he said, “Software is eating the world”. And it was this idea that, as businesses just become more digital, as we become more digital our lives, all of a sudden now we can create software that either does things for us, or it's helping how we operate in this new world. And he was right, but I think actually we all underestimated just the total scale of what that means.
So yeah, that IDC report, where they said they expected 500 million apps to be created and deployed in the cloud by 2023. Right, so the end of next year, but it's really important to recognize that a relatively small fraction of those are going to be commercially packaged solutions. Take the martech landscape, it's pretty wild that there are 10,000 solutions on that landscape, that's a lot. But I don't think we're going to see that become a million solutions. Economics isn't enough for that. What most of those 500 million apps are going to be, are these custom apps that an individual business builds for some particular process they're using internally. Or frankly, things like their website like a mobile app. Basically we are all creating software as a way to just run our businesses and to run In our lives. That's where you get this incredible explosion of millions and millions of apps, the vast majority of which are custom created.
You mentioned no-code. Before, if you wanted to create an app, you had to be a software developer, you had to develop these skills and learn JavaScript. Well, that's certainly doable, but that's still a pretty big barrier, most people do not want to do that. And so in some ways that became the gating factor in how much software there was in the world. But then these no code platforms or low code platforms that allow non professional software developers to say "oh, here's what I want to have happen." I mean, not something super sophisticated, it's usually these very simple tasks, or very simple websites or apps like that. But I don't have to be a professional software developer to use one of these no code tools to kind of build the specific thing I want, publish it and start using it. And it's like having an exponential explosion in the number of “apps” that now get created.
For one example, there's a bunch of these no code platforms, but one of them from Google is called Google AppSheet and again, it's a very simple tool for letting a power user or business user, an ops person, a non software developer create a little app. They had something like 2 million apps that have been created just with that one AppSheet program alone.
Again, don't get me wrong, a lot of those apps are very simple. I'm sure a lot of those apps are temporary, they come and go for a specific purpose. But still, they kind of count as a piece of software as an app that's out there in the world. That's how this no code revolution is feeding into the great app explosion of just millions, millions of apps out there in the universe.
An argument could be made that in MarTech from 100 to 10,000 is 100X growth. And essentially, from 10,000 to 1 million is another 100X growth. Who knows, maybe we're going to be mapping a million martech tools in 10 years. Wild suggestion of course.
Data collaboration between companies
But I think what is also interesting is that there's this explosion of apps from one hand, and tightening privacy rules and trying to figure out how we do not expose users to such a collection of their data. This will probably lead to collaboration between companies on customer data and all these partnerships and so on. What are your thoughts around that?
That is exactly the right question to be asking, because, yes, there's the upside that we now have all this innovation and all this ability to create. But the other side of that is how do we govern this? How do we make sure that in all this explosion of apps, the things are adhering to the right compliance? That we're able to make sure that we're unifying data and not fragmenting it. These are real challenges.
This goes back to when I was talking about that model of how we think about integrations and we talked about data, workflow, UI, but we also talked about governance. Because I think it's an underappreciated value that an ecosystem can provide. It is really helping to take that responsibility to make sure that if you are building things or buying things in a particular platform ecosystem, that the platform ecosystem has done the work to make sure that these things meet a certain set of standards, they operate in a certain common way, the data is being aggregated in a consistent fashion. That is super important. That is the only way that we are able to get to a future where you can have a really large variety of software, but you're still able to aggregate data and workflow and governance consistently across it.
Will Big Data lead to a Big Ops challenge
I found it really interesting in one of your talks that you mentioned that big data will require big ops. Governance is very important, but also trying to get a sense of this data, trying to facilitate commercial decisions and get some value out of this data. How do you think companies will solve this big ops challenge?
The short answer is I actually don't have all the answers on this. I feel like we're in a very early stage where if we go back 10-15 years when the term big data first started to arise, there were a lot of questions. I mean, we saw this volume, variety, velocity of this explosion of data. That was new, there was no precedent for that, we had no playbook of how to deal with that, because the world just had never had such a situation before.
And so it took us well over a good decade to figure out how do we even manage that? How do we get it into common warehouses or data lakes or how do we deal with that volume cost effectively? And I think that's not been completely solved, we've largely gotten our arms around that. Now, thanks to getting all these cloud services, things like Snowflake or (Amazon) Redshift, or stuff like that, we're actually able to get our arms around the fact that there's big data. But now the challenge is shifted and it's not just about that big data. But it's now all of the things that we're doing, operating on top of that data. And this is that explosion of apps, or automations, all the sort of enterprise automation that's happening right now. And you have different algorithms and analyses, and all these things are running in parallel. And now we've got this challenge of how do we manage this explosion of all these variety and volume and velocity of these operational activities that are now happening here? And I'd say we're very early on that this is only starting to become obvious over the first past couple years or so. I actually think it's probably going to take us a good 10 years to figure out okay, how do we organize that? How do we structure that? What are the best practices? We could dive into a lot of early suggestions on it, but I guess, I just feel we should disclaim to everyone that this is a new challenge. And it's not solved yet. This is what we are all collectively responsible for figuring out for the next 10 years.
Looking at the next few years and thinking in the frame of platform ecosystems and collaboration. What are you most excited about?
I think it's finishing the swing on platform ecosystems in martech. We've made tremendous progress as an industry, particularly over the past 3-4 years. As we were chatting earlier, you now see people who are developing software, they treat integration as a first class feature that needs to be a part of their product. But we've still got further to go with that. It's still not as easy or as deep across all these different products and platforms as we would like it to be, but I think we're making great progress and I think it's just gonna get better year over year over year. So yes, finishing this swing on that, getting to the other side. My aspiration, I don't know if I've ever quite reached this ideal. But if you think about the iPhone or an Android phone, and you just go to the Apple Store or the Play Store, and you're like, "Oh, I think I'd like this app" and you pick it and it just comes on your phone, and it just works. It's going to work, it's not going to destroy your iPhone, it's not going to cause problems with the other apps you have on that phone. We just use it, we like it, if we want something different, we swap it out. It's gotten to a place where people don't even really think about getting a new app on their phone is some sort of big deal. You can send me an email, and I'll click a link and I'll add it in no problem. I think that is the aspiration we would like to get to in business software. And even if we never quite reach that ideal, it should be just much easier. And people should be able to have much greater confidence, when they're plugging in these specialized apps into a platform, it just works for the thing they want and they don't have to worry about all these other aspects of getting the two things well integrated. Previously, we had to do it entirely on our own. Now they happen a little bit better, but they will get better yet.
That is an amazing way to think about the future. And I completely agree with you that all apps should be talking with each other much more natively. Thank you so much for explaining and for all your work you've done as the @chiefmartec and also in HubSpot. HubSpot is a phenomenal product and you've been doing an amazing job in mapping ecosystems. I really appreciate your taking time to speak with us and I look forward to seeing an explosion and you mapping this explosion of different apps and doing a great job in HubSpot.
Thank you so much for having me, Roman. I really enjoyed this conversation.
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