HubspotIn October 2013, HubSpot's Chief Product Officer David Cancel asked me and Andy Cook to create "startup within a startup" after HubSpot acquired Andy's company, Rentabilities. He gave us just three guardrails:
build something that helps small businesses do marketing
make it free or cheap
use orange in the logo.
The rest was up to us.
Over the next two years we built Leadin, a free lead-generation and CRM Wordpress plugin that tens of thousands of people came to genuinely love. I worked closely with an engineering team based in Dublin and it taught me product and design skills I couldn't have gotten anywhere else.
Leadin was announced on stage in front of thousands of people at HubSpot's Inbound conference in 2015 by Dharmesh Shah, one of the founders. Leadin grew to over 100,000 plugin installs and eventually transitioned to become "HubSpot Marketing Free", HubSpot's first freemium marketing product.
Leadin was the capstone of that HubSpot chapter that gave me th confidence to leave and co-found my own company, Tettra, in 2015.
