I think HubSpot made a HUGE mistake. They never should have backpedalled on their decision to create the greatest data co-op in the world.
Here is the simple reality. People would have whined about it on LinkedIn for two weeks, a handful of customers would have left, then everybody would have moved on to the next thing, and HubSpot would have been left with the single greatest data co-op that has ever been created.
This would have been INCREDIBLE for every HubSpot user. What do I mean? Guess who knows the best contact information for every single business contact in the world??? The 1.4m active HubSpot CRM users, plus a handful of data scientists.
This could have been an EPIC UNLOCK for HubSpots customers … and now it’s … GONE … and HubSpot is stuck trying to figure out how to keep the data fresh they got in the Clearbit acquisition, when the best source of data they could EVER IMAGINE is … you guessed it … right in front of their nose.
I think they just executed this poorly. Having people opt-in to a co-op has worked REALLY well in the past, even with enterprise companies (Abacus was an enterprise catalog purchaser data co-op that Double Click bought for $1b in 1999, as one example). In the US, if results are demonstrably better from giving up data, and the only way they can get those results is from joining a co-op, people will join co-ops.
My good buddy Nick Weldon at 5x5 made a killer data co-op against all odds, and the largest publicly traded company in the data space is their largest customer.
I recognize that I am not HubSpot, my market cap is 1/100th of theirs, and I pride myself on taking an aggressive stance on issues like this. But I do believe that A) it was stupid to pull this back, because B) nobody would have cared after a couple weeks, and C) it would have REALLY helped their customers.
It’s a sad day for the small founder. We need all the help we can get.
Bring back the co-op, HubSpot, but make it opt-in.
It will crush.
Adam
P.S.
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