by Dan Lyons
Spinner is in her early thirties and has never worked at a tech company before. She’s married, and has an MBA from Sloan (that’s the MIT business school), and was captain of her college volleyball team. Spinner has a GSD attitude and is a total team player. She is filled with school spirit! “Go HubSpot Go!” she exclaims in emails addressed to the marketing department.
Promoting a new article by our company co-founder by blasting links onto dozens of social media feeds is the kind of thing that HubSpot’s marketing people do all the time. Recently we were all encouraged to vote for HubSpot in some local contest aimed at choosing the best place to work in Boston, and by “encouraged” I mean that HubSpot has been bombarding us with email messages reminding us that if we haven’t voted, we need to go do that right now, because HubSpot really wants to win this thing. If we do, Halligan and Dharmesh will put out a press release saying how grateful and humbled they are to have had this honor bestowed upon them.
To make it easier for us to promote Dharmesh’s LinkedIn post, Spinner has created some “lazy tweets,” Twitter messages that she has written and that we can send out from our personal Twitter accounts, as if we have written them ourselves. All we have to do is click on a link and a tweet will go out from our account, urging our followers to check out this amazing new article about a brilliant management technique. Our tweets will contain a link to Dharmesh’s post on LinkedIn.
The lazy tweets make life easier for us, but having a bunch of people from HubSpot suddenly flood Twitter with exactly the same messages at exactly the same time doesn’t strike me as the smartest way to promote an article. On the Internet, ginning up fake grassroots support is called astroturfing, and the tactic is generally frowned upon. I’m surprised to see HubSpot doing it, because the company touts its expertise at social media marketing and claims it can teach small business owners how to attract attention online by creating unique, “lovable” content and being “remarkable.” But here we are, bludgeoning social media with a barrage of identical tweets, all telling everyone we know to go read this great new article by our boss.
I’m willing to help, but before I post any tweets I take a few minutes to read the article—and what Dharmesh has written nearly knocks me off my chair. The title of the article is “Your Customers Are Not Ignorant, Selfish Control Freaks.” Our company’s “thought leader” claims he has made an innovative breakthrough in management science: He now brings a teddy bear to meetings, and he recommends that everyone else do the same.
That’s right. A teddy bear.
Dharmesh argues that a company should always be “solving for the customer,” or SFTC as people call it at HubSpot. This means that in everything you do, you should be putting the needs of your customers ahead of everything else. To remind his HubSpot colleagues of that, Dharmesh has acquired a teddy bear, and he sits her at the table during meetings as a stand-in for the customer. Her name is Molly.
Dharmesh goes on to say that he started out just placing an empty chair at the conference table and pretending that the chair was a customer. But the empty chair wasn’t enough, he decided. So now he has taken his innovation to the next level and brought in Molly.
Dharmesh’s LinkedIn article even includes a photograph of Molly sitting at a meeting, next to Cranium. In the photo, Cranium is the big guy in the white shirt at the right side, and Molly is the little one next to him, drinking what appears to be a Red Bull and looking like she’s ready to carve someone a new asshole.
I cannot believe this. Here are grown men and women, who I presume are fully sentient adult human beings, and they are sitting in meetings, talking to a teddy bear. And I am working with these people. No: worse! I am working for them. At Newsweek I worked for Jon Meacham, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Andrew Jackson. Here I work for a guy who brings a teddy bear to work and considers it a management innovation.
How do people sit in a meeting and not make fun of this? Who can read this bullshit on LinkedIn about a teddy bear and not burst out laughing? Who could respond to this kind of inanity with anything other than complete and total derision?
Does the teddy bear have a mind of its own? Does she ever disagree with Dharmesh, and if so, what happens then? Does she ever contradict the other members of the management team? How, exactly, does Molly lobby on behalf of customers? If you really want actual customer feedback, you could create a customer advisory panel and ask for their input, which is something that other companies actually do.
People on LinkedIn can post comments under the articles, and I figure that Dharmesh will get savaged. But I’m wrong. In fact people seem to think that Molly the teddy bear is a fantastic idea. People post glowing comments saying what a brilliant idea this is, and vowing that they, too, will start bringing teddy bears, or perhaps different stuffed animals, to their meetings.
I feel like Mugatu, Will Ferrell’s character in the movie Zoolander, when he finally loses his patience and screams out: “Doesn’t anyone notice this? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!”
My colleagues see nothing ridiculous about the teddy bear. Even Zack will not joke about it. This surprises me, because Zack is still sort of new here, and he has worked at other companies, including Google.
I lean around the side of my monitor to get his attention.
“Hey,” I say, in a quiet voice, looking around to make sure no one is listening. “Did you read this essay that Dharmesh just published on LinkedIn?”
“I did,” he says.
“What’d you think?”
“He’s a good writer.”
“But the teddy bear,” I say. “What’d you think of that?”
“I think it’s cool that he’s so serious about solving for the customer. A lot of companies lose sight of that.”
“Okay,” I say. “All right. But the teddy bear. You really think that’s a good idea? That’s a big breakthrough in management? When you were at Google, if you found out that Larry Page was carrying a teddy bear to meetings, would people think that was okay? Because I think people would be afraid that Larry had lost his mind.”
Zack just shrugs. “Start-ups are eccentric,” he says.
So that’s that. Zack isn’t going to dish on the boss. No one is. This in itself is amazing to me. In any place I’ve ever worked, if the boss started bringing a teddy bear to meetings, he would be a laughingstock, forever. There would be stuffed animals everywhere. Mean questions would be asked at all-hands meetings. The teddy bear would be kidnapped and hung from a noose, photographed in flagrante delicto with other stuffed animals, dressed in bondage gear and sodomized by a Smurf. You get the idea.
Here at HubSpot there is none of that. Dharmesh is our Dear Leader. A HubSpotter mocking his teddy bear would be akin to a Scientologist making fun of L. Ron Hubbard’s cravat, or his kooky captain’s hat.
But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe after spending all those years in the news business I have become overly cynical. Maybe bringing a teddy bear to meetings is the big new thing and everybody is going to do it. Maybe the world has changed, and I’ve been left behind, back in that outdated, old-fashioned era where people don’t bring stuffed animals to meetings. I check with my friend Chuck, a guy who once worked in marketing at a really big tech company. I send him a link to the teddy bear article, asking him if this is really what life is like in the corporate world. “Are all companies like this?” I ask.
Chuck assures me they are not. “Any place with a founder who brings a teddy bear to meetings,” he writes, “is a step away from Jonestown.” He tells me to run out of this place as fast as I can.
Another friend, Mike, is a former Microsoft executive who now does some angel investing and works with start-ups. He agrees that the teddy bear is nuts, but he says that quitting would be a huge mistake.
“You’ve only been there for three months. If you leave now, it’ll look like you got fired,” he says. “And they’ll do nothing to dispel that impression. In fact, they’ll probably tell people they fired you. T
hey’ll do everything they can to make you look bad.”
If I quit now, all the reporters and bloggers who wrote stories about me going to HubSpot are going to start asking questions. No way will HubSpot let the stink land on them when they’re getting ready to do a billion-dollar stock offering.
“Stick around through the IPO,” Mike says. “Even if you have nothing to do with the IPO, if you’re working there when they go public, it will look good for you. Then once the offering is over you can get another job.”
In fact, Mike says, once the IPO takes place I may have no choice but to find a new job—because I’ll probably get fired. Mike’s theory is that HubSpot hired me as a kind of publicity stunt. All they wanted was to get a little bit of good PR by bringing me on board. The downside of that is that once the IPO takes place they won’t need me.
“Don’t take it personally,” he says. “This happens all the time. The company goes public and then they clean house. As soon as they register for an IPO, start looking for a new job.”
Mike is a smart guy, and he spent years in the corporate world. I don’t know if he’s right about why HubSpot hired me, but in all the years I’ve known him, I can’t remember a time when he has been wrong.
The funny thing is that I consider myself a pretty cynical person. But apparently there is a level of cynicism that I didn’t even know existed, a world occupied by guys like Mike and the people who run HubSpot, where I might be way out of my depth.
Seven
We Need to Make the Blog a Lot More Dumberer
What exactly is my job? What am I supposed to do? After three months this remains unclear. I thought I would be working with Cranium, the CMO. But I rarely even see Cranium. I run into him in the hallway once in a while, and I see him at the weekly marketing department meeting, which he runs. One morning, when I get to work early, I sit with him in the kitchen, and we chat over a bowl of Cheerios. But that’s it. He never sets a meeting with me, never sits down and tells me what my job is supposed to be. He’s friendly, but he has no instructions or guidance. Just: Hey, glad you’re here. I’m starting to think that Mike, my buddy the former Microsoftie, might be correct about my hiring.
It turns out that Cranium rarely speaks to any of the people in the sixty-person marketing department. He spends four days a week in the office. On Friday he works from home. He talks to Wingman and apparently to a few other people who are his direct reports, but that seems to be it. He never takes the gang to lunch, never pulls people aside to ask how they’re doing, never sets up a one-on-one just to check in or give you feedback.
Instead, he conducts anonymous online surveys. Constantly. Are you happy? How happy are you? On a scale of one to ten, with ten being the happiest day in your entire life, how happy are you? What if anything could make you happier? How could HubSpot be better? “More surveys,” I suggest once.
Since Cranium is not in contact with me, I am left to get direction from Wingman. But Wingman is equally tuned out. One day he sets a meeting with me to ask how things are going. I tell him I’m not sure what they want me to do. He says I should just write articles for the blog. “Just write about anything you want,” he says.
I thought I had been hired to help make the blog better. Apparently not. All Wingman wants me to do is write two articles a week. So that’s what I do. I write articles about anything I want, and I send them to Jan, the grumpy editor, and she publishes them.
Day to day, I deal with Zack. Zack has lots of energy. He loves to send out long memos bursting with enthusiasm and peppered with phrases in ALL CAPS about some half-formed idea that he believes will enable us to “conquer the world” and “blow up the Internet.” People at HubSpot love that phrase about blowing up the Internet. They use it all the time.
The problem is that Zack changes his mind a lot. We’re heading south! No, we’re going north! We’re taking a plane! No, a train! No, bicycles! One of my colleagues compares Zack to Dug, the peppy dog in the movie Up, who is constantly being distracted by squirrels.
Zack realizes that the blog sucks, and he wants to make it better. One day, he asks me to write up a memo explaining what changes we should make. He says he will send the memo to Wingman. Finally, I think, here’s my chance to do something.
I write a long, detailed memo explaining all the problems with the blog. The memo isn’t vicious, but it is pretty critical. This turns out to be a mistake, because in addition to showing the memo to Wingman, Zack shares it with Marcia, Jan, and Ashley, the three women who run the blog.
Now they hate me. Who am I to come in and criticize their work and tell them how to do their jobs? Marcia has been here for five years, which means she’s one of the longest-serving employees in the entire company. Jan has been here for two years, which doesn’t sound like much but at HubSpot this makes her a grizzled veteran. They’re too smart to show their contempt openly, but it’s real, and I can feel it. They’re terse when they talk to me. My articles, which until now would just get published the way I wrote them, now get kicked back with suggested edits. Some articles get held for weeks, or rejected altogether because Jan doesn’t think they’re a good fit for the blog, or because someone at HubSpot already wrote something about the same subject a few years ago.
Marcia and Jan sit across the aisle from Zack and me, about three feet away. They sit facing each other, their monitors back to back, and they communicate by trading instant messages. Marcia types something—tap, tap, tap—and a second later, Jan giggles. Jan types something back—tap, tap, tap—and Marcia bursts out laughing. They’re having a blast over there.
“You know,” I tell Zack, “I think maybe it wasn’t a good idea for you to share that memo with the women on the blog team.”
“What do you mean?” he says.
I can’t tell if he’s playing dumb or if he is actually a simpleton.
“Well I thought the memo was only going to Wingman. If I’d known you were going to show it to them, I might have worded things differently.”
Zack assures me that everything will be all right. I wonder if perhaps he has intentionally set a trap for me. There’s also the possibility that I am not his intended victim. Maybe he showed the memo to the blog women because he wants to make them miserable and push them out. If they leave, we could hire some real journalists. A new guy in another department used this tactic on his boss, Joanna, whose qualifications and experience he deemed to be less than his own. He challenged the quality of her work; she complained to her boss; her boss refused to fire the new guy. Joanna threatened to quit, and they called her bluff. The new guy got her job.
If this is what Zack hopes to do with Marcia and Jan, it’s not going to work. Marcia has been at HubSpot for five years. She was one of Cranium’s earliest hires. She and Jan are deeply entrenched. The blog is their fiefdom. And now I’ve pissed them off with my memo critiquing their work.
There’s nothing to do but soldier on and act like that memo never happened. I put my head down and write my two articles a week. But everything I write has to pass muster with Marcia and Jan as well as other people in the marketing department, and soon I start running into roadblocks. Kim, a 25-year-old who buys ads on Facebook and Twitter, spikes stories that she fears might upset those companies. Spinner, the PR woman, kills posts that she considers controversial.
I argue that a little bit of controversy is good, especially for a small company that nobody has heard of. Isn’t that partly why Halligan hired me—to stir things up, and get HubSpot some attention? It turns out I have failed to understand the mission of the blog. The blog as it turns out has nothing to do with the things Halligan talked to me about. The blog, as Zack explains to me, has one main goal, which is to generate leads for the sales department.
Just like a salesperson, Jan has a monthly quota to hit, a certain number of leads that she is required to produce. Her quota is insane. The blog is supposed to generate 14,000 new leads every month. Leads are defined as people who fill out a form and hand over thei
r name and email address. The blog gets leads by putting a little box at the end of every blog post inviting the reader to download a free e-book and “learn more.” To get the e-book, people need to fill out a form. Hardly anyone goes to all that trouble. For Jan to generate 14,000 leads, the blog has to attract about 1 million visitors a month.
At the end of the month the blog team sends the fresh leads to the sales department, where telemarketers start “nurturing” them, asking them to try a demo of the product. The prospects who look at a demo are handed off to other sales reps who try to get them to buy a subscription. This process is what’s known as the funnel. The blog team sits at the top of the funnel, drawing in new visitors, generating new leads, and starting people off on their “buyer’s journey”—the lovable, nurturing trip down the funnel that we hope will end with them becoming paying customers.
Our ideal reader is a small-business owner who is trying to learn about marketing, or a low-level person inside a marketing department. “Mary the Marketer” is the “buyer persona” HubSpot uses to describe this bread-and-butter target customer. We also have Ollie the Owner, who operates a small business, and Enterprise Erin, a marketing person in a big company, but Mary is our main customer. (The name of Shah’s teddy bear, Molly, is a blend of Mary and Ollie.)
We have conversations about Mary all the time. People talk about her as if she really exists. “Mary is busy,” Wingman will say. “She’s overworked, and stressed out. There are new social media tools coming out all the time. She needs to stay on top of the latest trends. She’s looking for information that can help her get her job done in less time. That’s what we’re trying to give her.” People also use Mary as an adjective, as in, “That’s really good Mary content,” or “That’s an extremely Mary idea.”