Brian Halligan
Analyst · Canaccord. Your line is open
Thanks, Lisa and welcome everyone to our fourth quarter 2014 call. Let me start by apologizing for my voice. I’m a bit under the weather, not sure why but I might have something to do with all the snow we’ve gotten here in Boston. 2014 was big for HubSpot and our Q4 performance was a great cap to the year. We’re really pleased and really proud of the results. HubSpot had a board meeting a couple of weeks ago and we kick off our board meeting for the session we called Chairman’s remarks, so it’s the chance for me to get the broader view of what’s going on inside my head. I thought basically just reply those Chairman remarks for you today on this call. I pretty much every measure, I feel like 2014 was a great year for HubSpot. I have a hammer [ph] of pealing through amounts of data on a monthly, quarterly and yearly basis and pretty hovering numbers having in the right direction. There are few of the highlights. First, revenue growth accelerated all year. Revenue growth started 2014 at 44% in Q1 accelerating to 48% in Q2, 51% in Q3 and 53% in Q4. Next, our operating leverage improved all year. Non-GAAP operating margins in 2014 started a loss of 34% in Q1 and finished the year with a non-GAAP operating margins loss of 21% in Q4, that’s 13 percentage points of improvement through the year. Our retention rates really improved throughout the year. Our dollar retention rates have grown from the high 80s in Q1 to the high 90s in Q4. Finally, our customer acquisition machine is really cranking. Customer count started 2014 at 10,111, by the end of ’14 our customer count have grown to 13,607, 35% increase. I think much of our success in 2014 is actually a result of decisions we made in 2012 and 2013. As a great philosopher, Warren Buffett likes to say, “Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.” I think that applies HubSpot 2014 results. I like to highlight some of those seeds we planted over the last couple years that cause the 2014 results to happen. The first seed was an explicit decision to make big R&D investments and become a product centric company like so of the West Coast brands we admire like Google, LinkedIn and others. When your product improves, it helps you cross virtually every metric like what is happening with HubSpot, new customer ads, attention, gross margin, operating margin et cetera are all improving at the same time. The second seed we planted was the new pricing model we put in place three years ago on our core marketing product where pricing increasing along two axis. We had addition basic pro and enterprise as our first axis and then added contact with site as a second axis. This change allowed us to align and senses over the customers and grow away alongside them. We grab other our existing customers in, so it took a while for the new models to really take effect. But we’re seeing improved overall retention rates driven especially by better up sell in a port pricing change cohort. The third seed was a go wide instead of go high decision. We made a big call to build a very broad solution for the midmarket instead of a relatively narrow solution for the enterprise. The alternative of the HubSpot is via website from one vendor, search engine optimization tools from another, social media tools from a third, marking automation tools from yet another and then sales tools from somewhere else. If you are a big company, you might be able to pull this off, but in our part of the market there is tremendous value to having all these systems together with one user interface, one login, one bill-to-pay and one number to call to get start. A great example of the midmarket company leveraging HubSpot Houston, there are Texas based companies that sells industrial and graving products and services the big, big equipment manufactures like Caterpillar and [indiscernible] all the way down to small manufacturing Fabiani [ph] shop. And Graven adopted the entire HubSpot platform the website, blog, search engine optimization, analytics suits now, in fact there also customer of our new sales tool. Since adoption HubSpot in the summer of 2013, Graven had seen their revenues increased by 85%. A lot of stories like this can’t get enough of them. Final seed was a sister decision to the widen set of high choice, geographic go-to-market strategy that was customer fit for our target market as opposed tying to shrink down the old enterprise sales model. Specifically we go to market through two channels, partners and then through direct inbound model. Our partner channels are really powerful way to reach this midmarket. We have over 2,200 partners who use HubSpot to deliver marketing serviced to their midmarket clients. In many cases, these clients are completely outsourcing their marketing through our partners. And great example of our partner I absolutely love is, SmartBug Media, they are really being growing us. They generated revenue growth 1,691% over the last three years of HubSpot. At the same time, they transform from a product based agency with typical margin to retain a based agencies with really high margins. If fact 83% of SmartBug’s revenue now comes from long term contracts as opposed to short term project work. There are up to 22 people and plan to add another 11 this year. And I love about this is that HubSpot goes to market arm and arm at 100s of first like these that help us unlock the midmarket in a uniquely powerful way. Now, those are some of the seeds we planted over the last few years. You might be asking about seed we’re planting. Today that will provide a shade in the coming years. One big one is our new sales product cycle. Still early days, we are getting excellent traction with our product. December, we had over 300,000 monthly active users. Today there is a free edition and a $10 dollar edition, you can expect us add a new more powerful version of site at a higher price point, we are not ready to talk about those details quite yet. We look forward to enjoying some shade in 2016 and 2017 from our sales products. Now before I hand to call over to John, I’d like to point on few recognitions HubSpot received in the fourth quarter. HubSpot was ranked number 15 out of all U.S. SMBs like Glassdoor and their Employee Choice Awards in 2015. And I love about this award is that is determined by own employees and not by a third part evaluation. Glassdoor to employees’ company reviews help us to heat us rest of the year. HubSpot was also recognized as the top marketing automations suite for a customer satisfaction by G2 Crowd. Like Glassdoor, this award is determined by 1,000s of our customers not by a single analyst like a [indiscernible]. G2 Crowd is just offer review as the rest [ph] of review. Now to conclude, you can see from today’s result that our business is going great. You can also see from Glassdoor and G2 Crowd’s recent awards that our employees are happy and our customers are delighted. At this time, I’d like to turn the call over to John Kinzer, who will dive deeper into our results. John?