PeerfoldSign inAcademy was one of three legs. The second was community. HubSpot's INBOUND conference launched the same year as Academy. Below the conference, HubSpot User Groups ran in hundreds of cities, hosted almost entirely by agency partners. The partner who hosted got local authority and pipeline. HubSpot got advocacy in every market without the headcount to staff it.
The third leg is older. The partner program launched in 2009 under Pete Caputa. It recruited marketing agencies living on project work and taught them a different business: monthly retainers built on inbound methodology, executed on HubSpot software. Partners earned a 20% share of the software revenue they sold, paid over 36 months, but only while the customer kept paying. HubSpot's churn risk became the partner's income.
Three legs
The joint is the CRM
Every interaction, from a paused video to a forum reply to a partner-registered deal, landed in HubSpot's CRM. Without the record the three legs are three vendors.
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