HUBSPOT INC
For the period ended Dec 31, 2023. Filed Feb 14, 2024.
View on SEC.govAbout this filing
A company's yearly report to the SEC, with audited financial statements. It is the fullest account a company gives of its business, its finances and the risks it sees.
FY2023 · Filed Feb 14, 2024
Extracted filing text, with the paragraph anchors used by the comparison.
See the whole filing, with its images and exhibitsContents
Item 1. Business
ITEM I. BUSINESS
Overview
We provide a customer platform that helps businesses connect and grow better. We deliver seamless connection for customer-facing teams with a unified platform that includes three layers: AI-powered engagement hubs, a Smart customer relationship management product (“CRM”), and a connected ecosystem supporting the customer platform with a marketplace of integrations, templates, and expert partners, a community network, and an academy of educational content.
Our engagement hubs include Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, Operations Hub, content management system (“CMS”) Hub and Commerce Hub, that enable companies to attract, engage, and delight customers throughout the customer lifecycle. The Smart CRM is the foundational layer that combines customer data with AI to power the entire customer platform with unified customer profiles and tools to manage and govern your team and business processes.
We focus on selling to mid-market business-to-business (“B2B”) companies, which we define as companies that have between 2 and 2,000 employees. We sell our customer platform on a subscription basis. In 2023, our total revenue was $2.2 billion and we incurred a net loss of $176.3 million. As of December 31, 2023, we had 7,663 full-time employees and 205,091 Customers, as defined in our Key Business Metrics in Item 7, of varying sizes in more than 135 countries.
Our company was formed as a limited liability company in Delaware on April 4, 2005. We converted to a Delaware corporation on June 7, 2007. Our principal executive offices are located at Two Canal Park, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and our main telephone number is 888-482-7768. Our website address is https://www.hubspot.com. Information contained on or that can be accessed through our website does not constitute part of this Annual Report on Form 10-K, and inclusions of our website address in this Annual Report on Form 10-K are inactive textual references only.
The HubSpot Approach
Our customer platform features a central database of lead and customer interactions and integrated applications designed to help businesses attract visitors to their websites, convert visitors into leads, close leads into customers, transact with those customers, and delight them so they become promoters of those businesses.
Designed to Help Companies Grow Better. Our customer platform was architected from the ground up to enable businesses to transform their marketing, sales, services, operations, commerce and content management playbook to meet the demands of customers today. Our customer platform includes a system of record for maintaining a unified view of the customer experience, a system of engagement for efficiently engaging customers through search engine optimization (“SEO”), web content, social, blogging, email, marketing automation, messaging, support ticketing, knowledge base, commerce, conversation routing, video hosting, deal progression, prospecting, data enrichment, and an end-to-end payment solution which enables customers to streamline their billing and payment process with fewer tools.
Ease of Use of a Single, Extensible Platform. We provide a set of integrated applications on a common platform, which offers businesses ease of use and simplicity. Our customer platform has one login, one user interface, one database, and one team for support. Our customer platform starts free and grows with our customers. It is designed to scale its power and technical sophistication without losing its ease-of-use. In addition to being a comprehensive suite itself, our customer platform seamlessly integrates with hundreds of external applications, making it easy to extend the functionality of our customer platform and customize it for any business.
Power of a Unified Customer View. At the core of our customer platform is a unified data platform for each business that captures its lead and customer activity throughout the customer lifecycle – this is our Smart CRM. Our Smart CRM creates a unified timeline incorporating all the interactions with a particular customer. In contrast to many CRM suites which are cobbled together, we have crafted a set of core functionalities, including reporting, content, messaging, data, AI assistance and automation, which runs across our product lines, which we refer to as engagement Hubs.
Scalability. Our customer platform was designed and built to serve a large number of customers with demanding use cases. Our customer platform currently processes billions of data points each week, and we use leading global cloud infrastructure providers and our own automation technology to dynamically allocate capacity to handle processing workloads of all sizes. We have built our customer platform on modern, scalable distributed technologies. We built the infrastructure to support hundreds of microservices and can easily add new features and capabilities to the customer platform. We utilize a variety of open-source distributed systems including HBase, Kafka, Vitess, and Elasticsearch to scale our data collection and processing. Our scalability gives us flexibility for future growth and enables us to service a large variety of businesses of different sizes across different industries.
Extensible and Open Architecture. Our customer platform features a variety of open application programming interfaces (“APIs”) that allows easy integration of our platform with other applications. We enable our customers to connect our platform to their other applications, such as ecommerce, event management and videoconferencing applications. By connecting third-party applications, our customers can leverage our centralized inbound database to perform additional functions and analysis.
Our Competitive Strengths
We believe that our market leadership position is based on the following key strengths:
Leading Platform. We have designed and built a world-class customer platform. We believe our customers choose our customer platform over others because of its powerful, integrated, and easy-to-use applications. We built HubSpot on a single, unified, and intuitive platform, which we believe contrasts positively with many other CRM suites. We are also investing in powerful AI capabilities in order to strengthen the customer platform even further, ensuring that customers can work smarter by drafting content, streamlining workflows, and enhancing data analysis.
Customer-centric DNA. We have a company culture that prioritizes serving customers and meeting their needs to help them grow better. This informs the product features we offer, the way we go-to-market across marketing, sales, and customer service, and also how we price and package our offerings. This customer-centricity is a key differentiator and enables us to continuously innovate.
Market Leadership and Strong Brand. We are a recognized thought leader in the cloud-based marketing, sales, customer service, operations, and content management software industry with a leading brand. Our founders, Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, wrote the best-selling marketing book Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media and Blogs. Our marketing, sales, service, operations, and content management experience attracts, engages, and delights customers by being more relevant, more helpful, more personalized, and less interruptive than traditional marketing and sales tactics. Our INBOUND event is one of the largest inbound industry conference events. In 2023, we had over 11,000 registered attendees.
Large and Growing Solutions Partner Program. A Solutions Partner is a service provider that helps businesses with strategy, execution, and implementation of go-to-market activities and technology solutions. Our Solutions Partners promote our brand and offer our customer platform to their clients. Solutions Partners and customers referred to us by our Solutions Partners represented approximately 31% of our Customers as of December 31, 2023, and approximately 46% of our revenue for the year ended December 31, 2023. These Solutions Partners help us to promote the vision of the inbound experience, efficiently reach new mid-market businesses at scale, and provide our mutual customers with more diverse and higher-touch services.
Freemium Pricing Strategy. Our freemium model attracts customers who begin using our customer platform through our free products and then upgrade to our paid Hubs. Through our freemium products, our customers are able to receive value from HubSpot before converting to a paid product or engaging with sales.
Mid-Market Focus. We believe we have significant competitive advantages reaching mid-market businesses and efficiently reach this market at scale as a result of our inbound methodology, freemium pricing strategy, and our Solutions Partner channel.
Powerful Network Effects. We have built a large and growing ecosystem around our customer platform and company. Tens of thousands of our Customers integrate third-party applications with our customer platform. We believe this ecosystem drives more businesses and professionals to embrace the inbound playbook. As our engaged audience grows, more Solutions Partners collaborate with us, more third-party developers integrate their applications with our customer platform, and more professionals complete our certification programs, all of which generate increasing value to our customers and help to drive more businesses to adopt our customer platform.
Our Growth Strategy
The key elements to our growth strategy are:
Grow Our Customer Base. The market for our customer platform is large and underserved. Mid-market businesses are particularly underserved by existing point application vendors and often lack sufficient resources to implement complex solutions. Our all-in-one customer platform allows mid-market businesses to efficiently adopt and execute an effective inbound marketing, sales, customer service, operations, and content management strategy to help them expand and grow. We will continue to leverage our inbound go-to-market approach, freemium pricing strategy and our network of Solutions Partners to keep growing our business.
Increase Revenue from Existing Customers. With 205,091 Customers in more than 135 countries spanning many industries, we believe we have a significant opportunity to increase revenue from our existing customers. We plan to increase revenue from our existing customers by expanding their use of our customer platform by upselling additional offerings and features, including our end-to-end payment solution, adding additional users, and cross-selling our marketing, sales, service, operations, commerce, and content management products to existing customers through touchless or low touch in-product purchases. Our scalable pricing model allows us to capture more spend as our customers grow, increase the number of their customers and prospects managed on our customer platform, and offer additional functionality available from our higher price tiers and add-ons, providing us with a substantial opportunity to increase the lifetime value of our customer relationships.
Keep Expanding Internationally. There is a significant opportunity for our customer platform outside of the United States. As of December 31, 2023, approximately 53% of our Customers were located outside of the United States and these Customers generated approximately 47% of our total revenue for the year ended December 31, 2023. We sell to those international Customers from our U.S., European, Asia Pacific, and South American based operations. We intend to grow our presence in international markets through additional investments in local sales, marketing and professional service capabilities, as well as by leveraging our Solutions Partner network. We have significant website traffic from regions outside the United States, and we believe that markets outside the United States represent a significant growth opportunity.
Continue to Innovate and Expand Our Customer Platform. Mid-market businesses are increasingly realizing the value of having an integrated marketing, sales, customer service, operations, commerce, and content management platform. We believe we are well positioned to capitalize on this opportunity by introducing new products and applications to extend the functionality of our customer platform. As data is becoming more important to our customers’ success and a differentiator for our business, there is a need to move quickly on data enrichment. Our acquisition of Clearbit, which we completed in December 2023, will allow us to build enriched B2B records directly into our customer platform.
Selectively Pursue Acquisitions. We plan to selectively pursue acquisitions of complementary businesses, technologies and teams that would allow us to add new features and functionalities to our customer platform and accelerate the pace of our innovation, while continuing to stay focused on the customer experience.
Our Customer Platform
Our customer platform, with engagement Hubs, our Smart CRM, and connected ecosystems enable companies to have a unified customer profile and connect with their customers at every part of their customer relationship lifecycle. Each Hub can be used standalone, with our Smart platform, a third party CRM, and/or in conjunction with any version of the other Hubs. Our Hubs are available in both free and paid tiers (i.e., Starter, Professional and Enterprise) with gradually increasing levels of functionality that support the needs of our customers as their businesses grow.
Businesses that want to use software outside of our customer platform can leverage our ecosystem of third-party integrations from our platform application partners to have a single, integrated stack. We make it easy to find and install new or existing software solutions that complement our customer platform. Over 1,500 integrations and applications are available for our users, across a wide range of categories, including integrations with leading social media, email, sales, video, analytics, content and webinar tools. Customers can build custom applications and integrations on top of our customer platform themselves, or through third party developers in our ecosystem.
Smart CRM
The core of our customer platform is our Smart CRM: a single, unified, data platform of lead and customer information that allows businesses to track their interactions with contacts and customers, manage their customer activities, report on their pipeline and sales, and manage and govern their team and business processes. This allows a complete view of lead and customer interactions across all of our integrated Hubs, giving our customer platform substantial power. This Smart CRM makes it possible to personalize every aspect of the customer interaction across web content, social media engagement, and email messages across devices, including mobile. The integrated Hubs and Smart CRM on our customer platform have a common user interface and are accessed through a single login.
Marketing Hub
Marketing Hub is an all-in-one toolset for marketers to attract, engage, and nurture new leads towards sales readiness over the entire customer lifecycle. Features include: marketing automation and email, social media, SEO, and reporting and analytics.
Sales Hub
Sales Hub is designed to enhance the productivity and effectiveness of sales teams. Businesses can empower their teams with tools that deliver a personalized experience for prospects with less work for sales representatives. Features include: email templates and tracking, conversations and live chat, meeting and call scheduling, lead and website visit alerts, lead scoring, sales automation, pipeline management, quoting, forecasting, and reporting.
Service Hub
Service Hub is our customer service software designed to help businesses manage, respond and connect with customers. Features include: conversations and live chat functionality, conversational bots, tickets and help desk, automation and routing, knowledge base, team emails, feedback and reporting tools, and customer goals.
CMS Hub
Our CMS Hub combines the power of customer relationship management and a content management system into one integrated platform. Our content tools enable businesses to create new and edit existing web content while also personalizing their websites for different visitors and optimizing their websites to convert more visitors into leads and customers. Features include: website pages, business blogging, smart content, landing pages and forms, SEO tools, forms and lead flow, web analytics reporting, calls-to-action, and file manager.
Operations Hub
Operations Hub is designed to help businesses unify customer data in a connected platform, automate business processes, and eliminate time-consuming data cleanup, and query and transform data to enable customer insights and connections. Features include: programmable automation, data sync, data curation, and data quality tools.
Commerce Hub
Commerce Hub is an easy-to-use B2B commerce suite that helps streamline the opportunity-to-cash process for businesses to get paid faster, increase revenue and save time. It includes an end-to-end payment solution, Payments, which enables customers to accept payments from their customers in less time and with fewer tools. With Payments, customers can buy and pay directly on a website, an email, or chat and native integration with the quotes feature in Sales Hub allows our customers to get paid immediately when a quote is accepted. Features include: payment links, invoices, quotes, subscription management, automation and revenue reporting.
Our Services
We complement our product offerings with professional services, customer success and support, which we view as critical elements of ensuring the long-term retention of our customers. The majority of our services and support is offered over email, phone, chat applications and via web meeting technology rather than in-person, which is a more efficient business model for us and our customers.
Professional Services. We offer professional services to educate and train customers on how to leverage our customer platform to transform how their business attracts, engages and delights customers. Depending on which Hubs and services a customer purchases, they receive onboarding guidance or one-on-one training from one of our on-boarding, inbound consultants, or technical consultants by web meetings. They can purchase additional group training and education in online or in-person classes (when offered). We also offer in-app training modules that customers can use as part of their on-boarding. Our professional services are also available to customers who need additional assistance on a one-time or ongoing basis for an additional fee. Depending on the scope of work and the services a customer needs help with, we might recommend they work with our Solutions Partner ecosystem.
Customer Success. Our customers have access to a Customer Success Manager (“CSM”), Channel Consultant ("CC"), Partner Development Manager ("PDM") or Customer Success Team (“CST”) which are responsible for our customers’ long term success, retention and growth on our customer platform. Depending on the customer spend, they will either have a dedicated CSM, or be serviced by a CST in a team based approach. Our CSMs or CST address the unique needs and goals of our customers through a series of ongoing interactions and strategy calls on how to best use our customer platform. Our CCs or PDMs play a similar role as our CSMs and CST, but focus on the growth and success of our Solutions Partners. The Solutions Partner’s customers have oversight through CSM and work collaboratively with the CC or PDM to help the Solutions Partner’s customers get the most value from our platform and the Solutions Partner’s services.
Support. In addition to assistance provided by our online articles and customer discussion forums, we offer phone and/or email and chat based support, which is included in the cost of a subscription for our Hubs. Phone, email and chat support is available starting at the Professional product level for all Hubs while email and chat based support is available for Starter Hubs. We strive to maintain an exceptional quality of customer service. We continuously monitor key customer service metrics such as phone hold time, ticket response time and ticket resolution rates, and we monitor the customer satisfaction of our customer support interactions. We believe our customer support is an important reason why businesses choose our customer platform and recommend it to their colleagues.
Our Customers
As of December 31, 2023, we had 205,091 Customers in more than 135 countries, representing many industries. No single customer represented more than ten percent of our revenue in 2023, 2022, or 2021.
Our Technology
Our Customers have chosen us as their customer platform, which we architected and built to be secure, highly distributed and highly scalable. Since our founding, we have embraced rapid, iterative product development lifecycles, cloud automation and open-source technologies, including big data platforms, to power marketing, sales, service, operations, commerce, and content management programs and provide insights not previously possible or available.
Our customer platform is a multi-tenant, globally available software-as-a-service delivered through APIs, web browsers or mobile applications. Our commitment to a highly available, reliable, and scalable platform for businesses of all sizes is accomplished through the use of these technologies.
Platform Approach. We built HubSpot on a single platform with reusable and composable libraries, allowing us to rapidly address new feature areas and bring new products to market that have a consistent user experience and data model. We have built this platform with scale in mind, supporting thousands of components including hundreds of microservices,
Modern Database Architecture. We process billions of data points weekly across various channels, including social media, email, SEO and website visits, and continue to drive nearly real-time analytics across these channels. This is possible because we built our database from the ground up using distributed big data technologies such as HBase, Elasticsearch and Kafka to both process and analyze the large amounts of data we collect. We also utilize Vitess to operate MySQL at scale, allowing our engineers to choose the best datastore for each task.
Agility. Our infrastructure and development and software release processes allow us to update our platform for specific groups of customers or our entire customer base at any time. This means we can rapidly innovate and deliver new functionality frequently, without waiting for quarterly or annual release cycles. We typically deploy updates to our software platform thousands of times a day, enabling us to gather immediate customer feedback and improve our product quickly and continuously.
Cost leverage. Our customer platform was built on an almost exclusive footprint of open-source software and designed to operate in cloud-based data centers. As our processing volume continues to grow, we continue to receive larger volume discounts on a per-unit basis for costs such as storage, bandwidth and computing capacity. The shared infrastructure across our products also drives operational efficiencies. We believe that our extensive use of open-source software will provide additional leverage as we scale our customer platform and infrastructure.
Scalability. By leveraging leading cloud infrastructure providers along with our automated technology stack, we are able to scale workloads of varying sizes at any time. This allows us to handle customers of all sizes and demands without traditional operational limitations such as network bandwidth, computing cycles, or storage capacity as we can scale our platform on-demand.
Reliability. Customer data is distributed and processed across multiple data centers within a region to provide redundancy. We built our customer platform on a distributed computing architecture with reduced single points of failure and we operate across data center boundaries daily. In addition to datacenter level redundancy, this architecture supports multiple live copies of each data set along with snapshot capabilities for faster, point-in-time data recovery.
Security. We leverage industry standard network and perimeter defense technologies, distributed denial-of-service, protection systems (including web application firewalls) and enterprise grade domain name system and services across multiple vendors. Our data-center providers operate and certify to high industry compliance levels. Due to the broad footprint of our customer base, we regularly test and evaluate our platform with trusted third-party vendors to ensure the security and integrity of our services.
Marketing and Sales
We believe we are a global leader in implementing an inbound experience in marketing and sales. We believe that our marketing and sales model provides us with a competitive advantage, especially when targeting mid-market businesses, because we can attract and engage these businesses efficiently and at scale.
Inbound Marketing. Our marketing team attracts new leads and users each month through our industry-leading blog, podcast network, email newsletter and other content, free tools, large social media following, high search engine rankings and personalized website and email content. In addition, we are generating leads for new and add-on product purchases through content and offers delivered through our customer platform to existing customers.
Inbound Direct Sales. Our sales representatives throughout the world use phone, email, and web meetings to interact with prospects and customers. The majority of revenue generated by our sales representatives originates with inbound leads produced by our marketing efforts. In addition, our freemium products and in-product cross-sell offerings help close new business with little or no interaction by our sales representatives.
Inbound Channel Sales. In addition to our direct sales team, we have sales representatives that manage relationships with our worldwide network of Solutions Partners who both use our platform for their own businesses and also, on a commissioned basis, refer customers to us. These Solutions Partners collaborate with us not only to leverage our software platform and educational resources, but also to build their own business by offering new services and shifting their revenue mix to include recurring revenue streams.
Governmental Regulations
We operate globally and are subject to numerous U.S. federal, state, and foreign laws and regulations covering a wide variety of subject matters. Our compliance with these laws and regulations may be onerous and could, individually or in the aggregate, increase our cost of doing business, impact our competitive position relative to our peers, and/or otherwise have an
adverse impact on our business, reputation, financial condition, and operating results. For information about governmental regulations applicable to our business, refer to “Risk Factors” in Item 1A.
Human Capital Management
Helping millions of organizations grow better requires a truly remarkable team. We take a thoughtful approach to talent attraction and retention in order to build a company culture where people can do their best work. That’s why our culture is rooted in what we think employees want from employers today: autonomy, flexibility, transparency, and a commitment to diversity.
HubSpot is proud to be named a Best Place to Work by the Glassdoor Employees’ Choice Awards for the past nine years. Based on employees’ reviews and feedback, this recognition is a strong testament to the innovative culture we are building. We have also been recognized as a top workplace in 2022 and 2023 by Great Place to Work, and we have been named to many notable lists such as Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For and Fortune’s Best Workplaces for Women. Additionally, we’re honored to be mentioned in a number of categories by Comparably's workplace awards in 2022 and 2023 including Best CEO for Women, Best Global Culture, and a Best Company for Employee Happiness.
As of December 31, 2023, we had 7,663 full-time employees, or HubSpotters. Of these, 4,971 were in the Americas, 2,164 were in Europe, and 528 were in the Asia Pacific region.
Hybrid Culture and Enablement. We offer a hybrid working model, with employees choosing annually between three options: @home, @office, @flex. @home employees work the majority of the time from home, @office employees go into a HubSpot office three or more days per week, and @flex employees go into a HubSpot office two or fewer days per week. We also provide resources and enablement materials to our managers and employees to help them work more effectively in a hybrid working model. As of December 31, 2023, 5,120 employees selected the @home option, 1,986 @flex, and 557 @office.
Culture and Values. As a company with a hybrid working model, connection is core to our culture. We are focused on fostering authentic connection by offering the tools, resources, and opportunities to help our employees grow both personally and professionally. Our Culture Code underpins our culture and outlines our core company values, including, autonomy, flexibility, high performance, and HEART. HEART is at the center of who we are and represents the five traits we value the most in HubSpotters: Humility, Empathy, Adaptability, Remarkableness and Transparency. A copy of our Culture Code can be found at: https://network.hubspot.com/slides/the-hubspot-culture-code.
Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging. Diversity, inclusion, and belonging (DI&B) is a core part of our mission. We are focused not just on increasing representation, but on striving for equity in systems, resources, and access to opportunities. We have incorporated DI&B into our policies and practices, education and events, and launched various initiatives to further our goal of being a more diverse, inclusive, and equitable workplace. Our DI&B initiatives include, but are not limited to: programs to increase our slate of diverse candidates, anti-racism training for employees and managers, key external partnerships, employee resource groups, and programs and initiatives to enhance the diversity and inclusion experience for candidates and employees. In addition, our annual HubSpot Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging Report is a detailed analysis of our gender, ethnicity, and age data, as well as self-reported identities including parents, military veterans, disabilities, first-generation identity, and those who are gender diverse. A copy of our DI&B report can be found at: https://www.hubspot.com/diversity/report.
Compensation and Benefits. We provide competitive compensation and benefits for our employees globally. Our compensation packages may include base salary, commission or semi-annual bonuses, and stock-based compensation. We also offer unlimited vacation and an annual global week of rest, an employee stock purchase plan, as well as benefit plans, such as employee medical, dental, life and disability insurance, and retirement and pension arrangements, that vary by geography that align with market norms. We evaluate both compensation and benefit offerings on an annual basis and we make adjustments as needed. We are also committed to continuing to make strides in moving from pay opacity to pay transparency. This currently includes providing access to compensation ranges for all of our employees, anchoring compensation to one predefined major city per country and publishing compensation ranges for all job postings in the U.S.
Learning and growth. We believe in life-long learning and invest in employee development at every stage. We offer interactive, regionalized on-boarding, one-on-one mentorship, year-round manager trainings and a mini-MBA Fellows program. We also offer several programs focused on BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, Person of Color) retention and career development, including a stay interview program, a global mentorship program for employees of color, and a structured mentoring and career coaching program for Black employees. In addition, we offer several live, self-paced and asynchronous resources to help employees develop their skill and capabilities through Learn@HubSpot, our internal, online learning management system.
Mental Health and Well-Being. We offer a mental wellness platform as a global benefit for employees. In order to prevent and battle burnout and its root causes, we also offer a company holiday week for all employees to take time off and recharge, and programming for employees to listen, learn, and identify ways to prioritize their mental health at work.
Social Impact. We aim to bring the best of HubSpot to help nonprofits that are committed to improving education and entrepreneurship in our communities around the world. We provide a range of opportunities for our employees to get involved with nonprofit organizations through HubSpot Helps, our community impact program, including: a dedicated employee volunteering platform, dedicated time for employees to give back to their own local communities, financial and in-kind donations, and flagship events. We are also committed to closing the racial wealth gap and developing the next generation of Black business leaders by investing in partnerships and organizations that can drive real change for Black communities.
Employee Engagement and Feedback. We administer an employee engagement survey, known as our eNPS, to assess and understand the employee experience and engagement at the company level. The survey also enables us to provide data to leaders across the organization, empowering them to identify, address, and monitor feedback at the department level. Our eNPS process includes a Global Inclusion Index survey which we measure annually, allowing us to track progress and collect feedback on our diversity, inclusion, and belonging efforts over time.
Competition
Our market is evolving, highly competitive and fragmented, and we expect competition to increase in the future. We believe the principal competitive factors in our market are:
vision for the market, product strategy and pace of innovation;
inbound marketing focus and domain expertise;
integrated all-in-one customer platform;
breadth and depth of product functionality;
ease of use;
scalable, open architecture;
time to value and total cost of ownership;
integration with third-party applications and data sources;
use of CRM data to make strategic business decisions;
use of evolving artificial intelligence technologies;
name recognition and brand reputation; and
“freemium” go-to-market motion.
We believe we compete favorably with respect to all of these factors.
We face intense competition from other software companies that develop marketing, sales, service, and content management software. Our competitors offer various point applications that provide certain functions and features that we provide, including:
cloud-based marketing automation providers;
content management systems;
email marketing software vendors;
sales force automation and CRM software vendors
customer service platform vendors; and
large-scale enterprise suites.
In addition, instead of using our customer platform, some prospective customers may elect to combine disparate point applications, such as content management, marketing automation, analytics, social media management, ticketing, and conversational bots. We expect that we will develop and introduce, or acquire, applications serving customer-facing and other front office functions.
Intellectual Property
Our ability to protect our intellectual property, including our technology, will be an important factor in the success and continued growth of our business. We protect our intellectual property through trade secrets law, copyrights, trademarks, patents, and contracts. Some of our technology relies upon third-party licensed intellectual property. We have 18 issued U.S. Patents and 23 patents applications pending. We intend to pursue and are pursuing additional patent protection to the extent we believe it would be beneficial and cost-effective.
In addition to the foregoing, we have established business procedures designed to maintain the confidentiality of our proprietary information, including the use of confidentiality agreements and assignment of inventions agreements with employees, independent contractors, consultants, and companies with which we conduct business.
Despite our efforts to protect our intellectual property, unauthorized parties may still copy or otherwise obtain and use our technology. In addition, we intend to continue to expand our international operations, and effective intellectual property, copyright, trademark and trade secret protection may not be available or may be limited in foreign countries. Any significant impairment of our intellectual property rights could harm our business or our ability to compete.
Financial Information About Segments
We operate as one operating segment. Operating segments are defined as components of an enterprise for which separate financial information is regularly evaluated by the chief operating decision maker (“CODM”), which is our chief executive officer, in deciding how to allocate resources and assess performance. The CODM evaluates our financial information and resources and assesses the performance of these resources on a consolidated basis. Since we operate in one operating segment, all required financial segment information can be found in the consolidated financial statements. See Footnote 10 within the consolidated financial statements for information by geographic area.
Available Information
Our website is located at http://www.hubspot.com, and our investor relations website is located at https://www.hubspot.com/investor-relations. Copies of our Annual Reports on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Current Reports on Form 8-K, and amendments to these reports filed or furnished pursuant to Sections 13(a) and 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, are available, free of charge, on our investor relations website as soon as reasonably practicable after such reports are filed with, or furnished to, the Securities and Exchange Commission, or the SEC. The SEC also maintains a website at http://www.sec.gov that contains our SEC filings and other information regarding issuers that file electronically with the SEC.
We webcast our earnings calls and certain events we participate in or host with members of the investment community on our investor relations website. Additionally, we provide notifications of news or announcements regarding our financial performance, including SEC filings, investor events, press and earnings releases, and blogs as part of our investor relations website. We have used, and intend to continue to use, our investor relations website as means of disclosing material non-public information and for complying with our disclosure obligations under Regulation FD. Further corporate governance information, including our certificate of incorporation, bylaws, governance guidelines, board committee charters, and code of business conduct and ethics, is also available on our investor relations website under the heading “Corporate Governance.” The contents of our websites are not intended to be incorporated by reference into this Annual Report on Form 10-K or in any other report or document we file with the SEC, and any references to our websites are intended to be inactive textual references only.
The text of this filing, as the company filed it with the SEC, without its images or exhibits. This is not investment advice.