Ops Cast
Ops Cast, by MarketingOps.com, is a podcast for Marketing Operations Pros by Marketing Ops Pros. Hosted by Michael Hartmann, Mike Rizzo & Naomi Liu
Ops Cast
Exploring the Possibility of Alphabet's Acquisition of HubSpot
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Could the acquisition of HubSpot by Alphabet spell a revolution or a step back for marketing automation? Join Naomi Liu, Mike Rizzo, and myself, Michael Hartmann, as we tackle this burning question. We dissect the ripple effects of such a corporate shake-up, drawing from historical tech giant acquisitions and project what it could mean for the innovative landscape of marketing tools. We don't just stop there; we also weigh in on the shifting tide towards bespoke marketing stacks, questioning whether the allure of customization outweighs the convenience of an all-in-one platform.
Strap in as we venture into the high-stakes realm of artificial intelligence and machine learning, and their profound impact on the tech world. Amidst discussions of composability and the democratization of development, we're bringing you firsthand insights into the complexities of creating custom solutions within large corporations. We consider the potential risks and rewards, from grappling with maintenance to protecting intellectual property, and ponder the scenarios that might compel a company to radically rethink its technological backbone.
Wrapping things up, we shift gears to the grassroots level, sharing a fascinating chat with a startup founder who crafted a nimble, homegrown tech solution during the lockdown era. We invite our hands-on listeners to share their tales of tech tinkering and celebrate the art of simplicity in technology. Your feedback is the heartbeat of our conversation, and we eagerly anticipate the diverse viewpoints and experiences you'll bring to the table. Tune in for an episode that's set to challenge and refine your approach to technology in marketing and sales.
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We've got the three amigos. Naomi, mike and I are here. I'm Michael Hartman, it's Naomi Liu, mike Rizzo. Hey, we wanted to get together. It's now I don't know almost about two weeks since the buzz that came around about Google potentially buying HubSpot, which seems to have died down, and I think we were just going to sort of chat about like what would that? What are some of the implications of that? Is it a good maybe? I don't even know if we could say if it's a good thing or a bad thing. I think it really depends on perspective, but what it may mean for the future of marketing automation. So I don't know. We can open up the floor. I can start. Does anyone want to jump in and take a shot at this, or do you want me to? To, uh, take the take the first arrows well, I think go ahead, naomi, real quick.
Speaker 3:I was just saying. I just googled on my phone. I googled google buying hubspot on my phone and just to see if there's been any new chatter coming about. And yeah, it definitely has died down, but there still are some people talking about it. There's some videos that have been posted to YouTube, some articles, but a day, a day ago, three days ago, it's definitely not as prevalent as it was. I'm just reading here. But yeah, it's. It's interesting that there was definitely a ton of chatter and now it's just kind of died down.
Speaker 2:So I'm curious what going to happen. Yeah, and I think it's important for us. You know, we anchor on google, which I mean, of course, because it's a brand we know, but, like, at the end of the day, it's the holding company, it's alphabet alphabet.
Speaker 1:Yes, which is you?
Speaker 2:know, but I mean, but everybody says that, right like, everybody's like, oh, google, google's gonna buy, you know, or could buy hubspot or whatever. I think that's an important distinction, not just for the market and the investors, but also for the way we think about how it fits into the broader let's call it ecosystem that is Alphabet, because Google is so heavily B2C focused on, like reach to consumers, that that would probably feel even more strange. It was Google proper.
Speaker 1:Yeah, at the same time, things like Gmail are used by a lot of businesses as their email platform.
Speaker 2:Yeah, right yeah.
Speaker 1:It's not just, I mean, it's like that. And outlook, I would guess. I have no idea, so I'm talking out of my you know what. I would suspect outlook is still the big behemoth in that, but it wouldn't surprise me if gmail's got a big chunk of that these days yeah, yeah, the g suite like google for work products, right, um, yeah, those are.
Speaker 2:those are certainly more oriented towards businesses, but I, you know, I think I don't know. You know, you were talking a little bit at the before we hit record, just about executives sort of speculating on what it might mean, and I think we were everybody in the market was talking about like speculation on the pace of innovation or lack thereof, when things like this happen uh, well, I think I think, like in my I'll tell, just go out there.
Speaker 1:Like I think I could see pretty strong arguments for investors of both alphabet, and maybe hubspot, that this could be a good thing for them, assuming trajectories of things stay the same, etc. Etc. What I'm not convinced of is that it would be a good thing for HubSpot's customers. Part of that's just based on what we've seen with Oracle buying Eloqua and Salesforce buying Pardot and then Adobe buying Marketo and what has happened with those platforms. I know from my experience. I was working with Eloqua actually right before the acquisition by Oracle. I left and was working with Marketo and then came back to another place where I was using Eloqua and I was about a four year span in between and I couldn't have told you any significant changes that I saw within the platform in four years. Were there changes? Probably. So my fear is that for customers that there's going to be real or perceived lack of innovation compared to what they were we were talking about before this. Right I? I see hubspot posting about things on a pretty regular cadence. I don't know if it's weekly, but it's feels pretty close to them. I don't know how significant those are because I'm not familiar with hubspot and the details of it, but I can see that real.
Speaker 1:The other thing that I told you guys is I feel like I've heard a little more chatter lately about people thinking well, can I solve my need for what these martyring automation platforms do by putting together my own stack of sort of piecemeal components that I need at a lower cost cost. There's trade-off of. It might be more expensive to I'm going to have to build and maintain it. I may have to have people to do it, but the costs of these platforms have also tended to get higher and higher. In platforms you get the platform, you only use a portion of it. So I don't know where that lands me on this. I'm not sure I'd be a fan of this from a customer standpoint. If I was a HubSpot customer, sure I'd be a fan of this from a customer standpoint, if I was a HubSpot customer, yeah, I can speak a bit about this.
Speaker 3:Before we went on to Marketo, we were on a platform called Neolane. Some of you may have heard it, most of you probably have never heard about it. It was acquired by Adobe and rebranded to Adobe Campaign and it essentially just certain feature sets of it were end of life right. And so at that point the decision was made during our renewal to look at other vendors and we decided to go with Marketo. And just as we're about to sign our contract, it was announced that Adobe acquired Marketo.
Speaker 3:I was like, oh okay, which ended up working in our favor because we were able to negotiate, you know, more favorable terms for ourselves. But, um, you know, I think I. For me it's interesting because I did see kind of the the stalling or the lack of innovation happen with the acquisition of Neolane into Adobe campaign, with the Marketo piece, because I jumped into the tool right when the acquisition happened. I didn't have that historical knowledge necessarily of what life used to be like prior to the acquisition, so for me everything was new right. So I feel like it also depends on who you talk to and what the end use business case is for why they're using the platform right? Did they come in pre, during post or you know? And what are the use cases that they're trying to solve with the tool?
Speaker 1:So just real quick, because I'm not familiar with the platform you mentioned. Was it primarily just an email platform?
Speaker 3:No, it was closer to an Eloqua than it is to a Marketo. So it was. You could do everything right Campaign management, lead management, scoring, hygiene. I would say it was closer to an Eloqua interface and capability than in terms of, like, how you would use the platform. It's very visual as opposed to kind of a stacked smart list and things like that.
Speaker 2:I had never even heard of that.
Speaker 3:It's a French. It was a French tool Interesting. It originated in France, yeah.
Speaker 1:I see I was using Exact was exact target at one point, which was basically, which is also still now kind of around Salesforce bought them too.
Speaker 2:It's marketing cloud exact target and part were the same, right like they were like all one sort of entity, but then, like that acquisition turned into exact target, became the cloud, whatever SFMC.
Speaker 3:And then there's the other one.
Speaker 1:I can't tell you what it's called anymore.
Speaker 2:Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement. Sfmcae is now Pardot, or whatever.
Speaker 1:Our listeners can't see me just shaking my head and rolling my eyes Comes up with these stupid names.
Speaker 2:It's the mouthful product. Yeah, yeah, Like, obviously I come from the HubSpot camp. I guess, Like I came up through that ecosystem and I I as ecosystem and as someone who has a minuscule number of shares in HubSpot I was like, oh, this is interesting, Maybe that means something, I don't know. And so from that perspective, I thought, okay, let's see what happens there. From the user side of things, I think, like everybody else, I was a little, a little leery of like, well, what does that really mean? I think it depends on, you know, with it being the parent company. Um, you know, I don't, I I think it just feels a little different from a MarTech-first organization, right, Like a Salesforce buying an ExactTarget or a Adobe buying a Marketo. Those are marketing technology solution providers and CRMs and they sit inside of this business tech ecosystem and they're acquiring these other tools to bolster their offerings.
Speaker 2:Alphabet is not like out of the box a company. That just is like a MarTech first company, necessarily, Right, they own lots of different things, and so I actually don't know if it would be necessarily the same result. The same result. It might literally just be a play around. Look, we're going to buy you just to bolster our revenue and use up the $111 billion of cash we have sitting around right now and put something that looks good and is growing in our portfolio and then therefore let you continue to run the way that you run, Like um.
Speaker 2:You know that's maybe dreamer speak, but but it just feels very different because it's not um. It's not like we're going to now try to maybe. I mean, I know they have other products, right? I'm not super well-versed in the entire ecosystem of what Alphabet and Google have, but you know there's infrastructure there that they might want to try to fold it into. It might be really good for that future vision of how do you build products on top of data lakes and data warehouses and sort of that warehouse native model. It could be really good for that. You know HubSpot isn't a warehouse product first right. They have their own technology underlying.
Speaker 1:I think it's interesting you bring up that, like Google sorry, alphabet is a different kind of entity compared to the others. In fact, it made me think that if someone had asked me before this sort of rumor stuff started going around who would, who would likely be a candidate to buy hubspot, I probably would have not picked alphabet or google, probably would have gone to something like microsoft. Yeah, I think they would have made a whole lot more sense before that because of what you described right, which is they're already in that sort of marketing and sales crm ecosystem and they have other tools, that kind of work with it with. So, yeah, it's, it's interesting, who knows?
Speaker 2:maybe it won't happen maybe it will happen someone listening to this that is like smarter than like there's many people. But someone out there is like, who's well versed in the alphabet lore and information, is like mike, you're an idiot. Like they're totally a like tech company or something like I'm like quickly googling, like all right, well, what is what is alphabet like? What do they have? According to investopedia, alphabet has become one of the world's largest technology conglomerates, with a market cap of 1.78 trillion. As of feb 3 2024, they posted a net income of 73.8 billion dollars on revenue of 307.39 billion for 2023. The majority of alphabet's revenue is generated from advertising. So there's I mean, yes, it's in marketing, I suppose, but they're a holding company for these other assets, right, and so they're in the marketing world, but on the ad tech side, because of their the, the entities that they hold. But I guess it says like below is a look at seven of the company's major acquisitions. So mandiant was a cyber security business, fitbit, wearable fitness device, look, business intelligence software and data analytics. So Looker's come up a few times recently in conversations I've been having with folks. Of course they have Nest, they've got Waze, doubleclick, youtube and then Google. Oh wait, sorry, yeah, so that's just. The article continues. So you know it is in this realm of these technologies, but, like, even where we started, this was. You know, google, sort of leading B2C alphabet, has products that help reach consumers to service the businesses right on the ad side, but they also have apps that are end user applications where they have business components to them, usually in service of their ad business. Right, youtube, double click ways, ways definitely has a bunch of like ad revenue that can come through there, but these are all things that are used by end consumers. Fitbit, right like mandiant, as a cyber security business, is probably the the most b2b focused thing. Um, so I you know it's, it's just interesting. I think it feels different in general than than some of these other things.
Speaker 2:And, and you know, I guess, like going back to one of the other comments you were making around sort of tech stack consolidation or maybe like piecemealing things together. I think we're going to see more of that over the next decade. For sure, I think it does require some risk takers, right, like, as you think of that, that, what is it? The adoption, uh, life cycle of, like new products? Right, there's going to be these like early adopters. Um, there's gonna be some folks that are going to have to be, or like not folks, but well, people, professionals, that are willing to put their um reputation and, you know, expertise on the line on behalf of a company who's willing to take a risk and trust them to go figure out the new architecture of those frameworks. Because it's like it's not a, you know, here's a box that has a bunch of functionality in it, like it's literally here's a bunch of parts. Put them together, it's very different. You know no directions and and so I think I think that will will be interesting to see unfold over the next few years.
Speaker 2:And you were talking a little bit about like the pace of innovation too. Right, like, yes, hubspot releases things on a pretty regular cadence. There's a really well, you know, they've done a really good job of like letting you tap into the sort of the beta and alpha features sort of right within the product. So you're sort of like in there, you feel done a really good job of like letting you tap into the sort of the beta and alpha features sort of right within the product. So you're sort of like in there, you feel like you're a part of their ecosystem and contributing to the voting and what features they build and all that stuff. Like when people talk about you know I think you were mentioning some CMOs or conversations, you were having Hartman pre-recording that there's folks that are feeling like there's just this, like lack of newness that's happening right, like innovation in general and like something changing and it just feels expensive.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I think I don't know. My take on this is like innovation from like a technology perspective is is really taking shape in the form of how does like AI actually change? You know, change everything for us, the way we use these tools and all this stuff. Right Like that's. That's where all the innovation is these days, because at this point, once you have these computational ML, ai systems, that's where all the energy is going to be put in. So, from go-to-market tactics perspective, we've seen PLG and ABM and inbound and all of these things that got spun up over the last handful of you know decade or whatever. I think that stuff's gone right, like like. I don't like maybe someone's going to come up with a new model, that's like a new buzzword or framework or whatever.
Speaker 1:And I know we've had this ongoing series of conversations with people who are for for the leading edge of some, at least in name right, newer, newer go-to-market approaches, and one of the things that feels it to me that is interesting about it is it feels a little bit like they're actually kind of older models like pre-internet, where it required like a lot of building trust and, you know, building relationships, and now there are tools and technologies that enable to do that in different ways, but fundamentally it's, it's a kind of a similar thing. Right, that's yeah, so that's interesting. You know, the thing that's bouncing around my head about this idea of sort of custom made stack for go to market is I'm thinking about the I don't want to put words in scott's mouth because I'm certainly doing this but this, the idea of composability, right, and the democratization of being able to to develop, you know, applications to me. I mean, you mentioned AI and ML. Sure, that's a part of it, but I think the ability for people to sort of build things on their own is, to me, more likely to be a driver on pushing change if the pricing on these things doesn't change and the innovation slows down or continues to slow in some cases, depending on what your perception is, I don't know.
Speaker 1:I mean I don't know. I mean, I mean I don't know what you think. Like I've worked in bigger companies, like it would be in most places I've been right. It would have been really hard to build a case, I think, to say, take out an existing sort of platform or set of tools that are there and build a case like we actually can solve this for, quote, less money by doing it on our own. But that also implies we have to do our own maintenance and support right. So there's an there's there's implications on the long run too. Like would do you think that you would ever get to a point where you could see that happening in kind of a bigger organization like you're at I mean I I never want to say never, because it just really depends on the use case.
Speaker 3:Like my whole mantra with a lot of the tools that I bring into our ecosystem is low code, no code, very low support. That is needed a large user base where you can tap into Mindshare, a good community where you're able to get access to information fairly quickly. I personally would shy away from trying to build something myself just because we've done that in the past and I've tried to like leave that and you know it's a bit of PTSD there.
Speaker 1:No, I feel that I would be on the same side. I think I would lean that way too.
Speaker 3:Because things are fine, you can put together a custom solution to solve a short-term use case. But the more you build onto something like that, then you're dealing with things like okay, well, what if some support teams or IT teams that are there that have helped to like build this? What if they leave? Then that intellectual property leaves with them in their brain. And then what do you do five, 10 years from now when you're kind of stuck? I'm dealing with some of that right now, with a platform that we have. That is okay. Well, no, nobody knows how to export information from this. What do you mean? Right? I, I wouldn't. I don't think I could sit here with a straight face and say that that's something that I would support, you know, yeah no, I mean, I think it would be.
Speaker 1:It would be a challenge. I was trying to in my head, like trying to answer my own question, like what could I? I could imagine a scenario if probably the thing that would drive it is if the scenario like you had right, an end of life on something you've had for a while, or you have an event, your major vendor comes back, or a couple of them come back and they're basically like doubling pricing without any new feature capabilities right in there, or maybe more so. I think that's a likely scenario. No, but I I could see that as being a driver to go okay. Well, should we really consider something so radical because I can't think of a better word like it would be a radical departure from You're essentially going from leveraging these companies that are software companies to being in-house.
Speaker 1:You have to have your own software company inside your company.
Speaker 3:But then that's also taking away the fact that time with people is also worth something. Yeah, right, like yes, it would be a really terrible thing if a vendor came and said okay, on renewal, you have no choice, your contract's now doubled.
Speaker 2:Right, you can't spin something up, you know, depending on how soon your contract's up, but there's also a dollar value that's put to the headcount and resources to support and build something homegrown too absolutely yeah, that's it's interesting it'll be interesting to see if this gets more legs and gets so yeah yeah, I was just like rounding out my thought, which you sort of did for me, hartman, which is cool, because I was like I was like thinking that I think we've reached a point, I guess. I guess where I was trying to go is this idea of like pace of innovation and and sort of going back, like leaning on some of our conversations that we're having with these new go to market ideas, right, like partner-led, community-led, whatever all the leds are right, I think they do. Just go back to your point, some motions that are pretty well established, maybe just with new spin on them, like partners as a business model has been around for a while. But like choosing to architect your go-to-market you know, organization, your systems, your processes around a particular model is just a choice and getting educated on that choice and the either the benefits or the drawbacks or, um, just just purely the like how is your choice right and if you want to use that and pull that lever for your business, like that's, that's the direction you go right. Even our conversation with mark, like I think they've honed in on a particular type of go-to-market and they they branded it and named it.
Speaker 2:But it's just, it's an intentional focus and strategy is really what it boils down to, right, and it's being educated on what that methodology means or could mean to a business. And I think, when it comes to tying it back to the tech side, like tech is, we've exhausted the like fun, sexy levers. We sort of know the art of the possible for those that are using go-to-market technologies. Right To like support some of these methods, whether it's community led or whatever, like there's tooling in place, but at the end of the day, it's it comes down to like leaning in and really trying to understand the art of the possible and how it works.
Speaker 2:And so, from a pace of innovation perspective on the HubSpot side, the thing that I'm seeing them do a lot other than like, yeah, there's some new features and stuff that are kind of cool and stuff that are kind of cool, they're building out features for these practitioners, like marketing and revenue operations professionals. That makes their lives a little bit easier, and you don't see that happening in other MarTech solutions, right, and so I'm not putting HubSpot on a pedestal and say, yeah, rah, rah then. But I think what's interesting about that choice that they're making is that it's sort of a signal to the market that there's, in some ways, there's not a whole lot of sexy new marketing stuff that's going to come out of marketing tools, right, like you've got like yeah, like it's all there, but what does need to happen is we need the practitioners to be able to go implement and manage and scale that choice to invest in our product faster.
Speaker 2:We need to make that adoption easier and that means that you have to have the people and the tooling in place to just like, stay focused on your motion and stop. As an executive that might be thinking like pace of innovation and marketing is gone. Like all this other stuff, yeah, we've sort of invented all the fun things at this point. Now it's about double down, dive in and understand the art of the possible, regardless of your tech stack whether you want to go architect your own or the one you have like.
Speaker 2:Lean in and just try to make it work.
Speaker 1:Stop looking for the silver bullet. But I don't think that's really what it is. I think what you're saying is there's a movement towards making the platforms and the teams that use them more efficient.
Speaker 2:Right, and it's making them more efficient by I guess I sort of plainly said it stop looking for the silver bullet. Yeah Right, there isn't going to be a new piece of email automation and making that easy to send a series of emails over a period of time was amazing for the market. Tying user IDs or cookies or whatever to ads and doing retargeting was amazing for the market. Tying uh, user ids or cookies or whatever to ads and doing retargeting was amazing for the market. Like, all of these things are now just in market right, and so it's like stop looking for the next silver bullet that's going to help you reach and find your customers and start picking a like, create a hypothesis, find like we believe this will be the go-to-market motion that helps us, uh, grow the business by x percent this year in a category or whatever. And then, like, lean in and try to figure out how the tech stack you have today or the things you're missing need to be applied, and and do that thing.
Speaker 2:But stop looking for, like these tech vendors to like, come up with the next magical thing that's going to help you reach your audience, because I think we're past that point. We're just past that sexy innovation stage. That's just my spicy take on pace of innovation. Discussions around MarTech vendors in general is everybody's like I want a faster way to be able to make more money, or I want a more efficient way to be able to reach my customers or acquire new leads or whatever, and I think a lot of that's already in the market. It's really just about like you need a better way to implement your tools and understand what they can do for your chosen path of go-to-market. I did not expect to get that spicy on this today.
Speaker 1:I did not expect to get that spicy on this today, I think what I'm walking away from with, like all these different things, these different approaches that are driven by market pressures, to kind of the vision that Scott Brinker shared at Mopspalooza, this new like. It feels like. It does feel like there is about to be like some significant changes to things that are going on. I don't know what those will be, but it does feel like that. I don't know. Do I, do you guys think I'm just way off my rocker on that?
Speaker 2:no, no, I think you're right.
Speaker 1:We're seeing text at consolidations, right or like just acquisitions in general like no, I think you're right, naomi's considering it.
Speaker 2:We're seeing tech stack consolidations right, or like just acquisitions in general, like this is where the conversation started. There was another acquisition announced this morning. Oh, I didn't see that yet. It was Webflow. Who did Webflow acquire Real-time Google folks? Webflow acquires Intellimize. So Guy I think it was Guy Yalif did I get his last name right again, I met him ages ago, was running Intellimize and so there's an acquisition there. But I think a lot of this has to do with somebody, some, some MarTech company. You know, in these examples where we're seeing these groups come together, someone has a vision for how to make it, make these tools streamlined in a way that helps their customers do something.
Speaker 1:Right Complimentary tools.
Speaker 2:Right and so and so this. You know this acquisition means X for the ability to do Y, but I think that just continues to point back to the fact that, like you know, the technologies have been around, they do what they do, but when you try to stitch them together in a particular manner this, this is another example of like we see an opportunity. Webflow is saying we see an opportunity to do this with intellimize, because of the market landscape that we've identified and the way that people go to market using our tool.
Speaker 1:right, and so now it's their job to educate their customers on the art of the possible with these two pieces of technology, so that they don't, so that they don't let somebody go build it themselves, right yeah, it's gonna be interesting as we're talking about I'm also like I'm I'm surprised there's I haven't seen and maybe it's because I'm not as close to it, but I've not seen anything like this happening on the like. The crm sales automation, sales tech area like it has been in marketing. It feels like it's much. It's a much different place in marketing tech than it is in sales tech.
Speaker 1:Like the fact that there really hasn't been a significant competitor to to Salesforce and Dynamics and there's maybe one or two others out there, right, hubspot, crm, like out there, and they're all using pretty much the same model and it's like, yeah, I bet you get, you get you get a hundred people in a room. They're going to get a hundred of them who say or 50 of them who say got to have leads in contacts. The other 50 will say no leads in contacts or no leads, just go to contact, like it's just. But the technology hasn't changed.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think, uh, the technology hasn't changed.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think, if anything, we should just go back to business cards and like a Rolodex.
Speaker 1:A Rolodex. Our young listeners are like what's a Rolodex? They're like actively searching.
Speaker 3:Is that a R-O-L-O-D-E-X?
Speaker 1:Ask your grandparents.
Speaker 2:Yeah, right, yeah, I mean, it's interesting, I agree.
Speaker 1:And how salespeople are traveling. Yeah right, yeah, I mean, it's interesting. I agree with the bar in the back of their car yeah, right, that's how it went.
Speaker 2:I would say I agree with you. Pace of innovation like or just like what's happening there hasn't changed much. Hubspot introduced leads a while ago. I think they did it the right way. It was nice, um, you have a choice to use it. You don't have to, and it's on Orphaned, which is good. I think, when it comes to composability and CRM and sort of that sales tech side of things, probably the biggest opportunity is the companies that want to hone in on these niche markets and understand their unique pain points right, which is like exactly why certain marketing agencies are super successful as they hone in on a niche. They understand exactly like the language, the legal problems and the motions of the business to go build something that is or like service the client in a way that's highly specific to that audience. I think that same thing will. There's probably just a ton of opportunity for, yeah, as the ability to build your own tech stack is easier and more cost effective well, so there's probably much, much more opportunity there, right?
Speaker 1:literally, literally yesterday I was talking to a that with a um a play. That is ad ad. You know, helping with with ad strategy and implementation and managing their inbound leads in different ways and it's like he's just created kind of custom stuff along the way solutions. As he's gone is like he's just wasn't something he was out there planning to do. It just sort of fell in his lap and now he's actually a point where he's like like it's trying to decide do I want to grow this or not? But I don't think that would have been as easy to do five, ten years ago as it is today.
Speaker 2:Yeah and that and that. Yeah, that totally is the point. Right, like you, you start to understand the needs of a particular market and you build services and products around it, especially now that it's a little easier to do so with all these different MarTech solutions. You can integrate via Zaps and Workato and whatever else, and now you've got this bespoke solution for a particular industry, and I think that that's the type of innovation we're going to see is just people leaning in and truly understanding the types of industries and businesses and then building repeatable things that they've seen work over and over again. So agencies can have a heyday, but some MarTech vendors could also do the same, and it's not like there's any shortage of really specific CRMs out there. Right, there definitely are, sure, but I think I don't know. We'll see what happens. I think the way we end this is that we We'll see what happens with no like.
Speaker 1:I think the way we end this is that we have no idea what we're talking about here. We don't know what's going to happen Not whatsoever, but we're curious and interested to see what's going to happen over the next several months and years.
Speaker 2:And we want your thoughts. If you listen to this, message us, because we want your thoughts or if you're building a homegrown solution. Absolutely.
Speaker 1:I would love to actually I would love to talk to people who are doing that. Who's?
Speaker 2:building something. Yeah, yeah, I actually talked to somebody who did that.
Speaker 1:This is probably during the, the, the real peak of the lockdowns and stuff like that. It's a small startup and this guy was like yeah, I'm building using I don't remember what it was like, I don't think it was SendGrid, but something like got email like just rudimentary email, got segment underneath it, got blah, blah, blah, and it was like I was like actually sounds like it would work great, as long as you keep things simple.
Speaker 1:Yep, don't overcomplicate it yep, so don't overcomplicate it. Yeah, yeah, all right. Well, y'all thanks for doing this. I know it's. It's a struggle sometimes to get on everyone's schedule. It's short notice, so fun. It's always fun talking with the three of us that was super fun.
Speaker 2:Thanks for organizing again, hartman all right, all right.
Speaker 1:so everyone will be looking for your feedback and ideas and stories. If you've got them, like Naomi said, bye, everyone, bye.