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HubSpot for Startups (HSFS)
Key Takeaways
- PushPress is a gym management software that enables gym owners to "systemize, automate, and grow their businesses." PushPress helps gym owners to get clarity on their business metrics, automate repetitive tasks, increase their revenue, and provide gym members with a superior experience. The company was established in 2013 by CEO and co-founder Dan Uyemura, a fitness enthusiast and gym owner. It is headquartered in El Segundo, California.
- HubSpot for Startups has helped PushPress to grow from a new company to one that currently has over 2,000 active customers around the world. PushPress's annual revenue has grown to an estimated $3.9 million and the company has 27 employees currently. As of September 2021, PushPress had "achieved a lifetime net promoter score (NPS) of 56 on a scale of -100 to 100." The company frequently finds mention as one of the top-rated gym management software in the market and has been rated very highly by G2, Software Advice, and Capterra, among others.
- Breezeway is a "property care, operations, and messaging platform" in the property management space. The Breezeway platform enables property managers to "coordinate, communicate, and verify detailed work, and deliver the best service experience to clients." The company was established in 2017 by founder and CEO Jeremy Gall and is headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts.
- HubSpot's deal board has enabled Breezeway to closely monitor "conversion rates from SQL through close." Since the amount of revenue generated by the company is dependent on the number of deals created in the preceding month, the sales funnel is monitored carefully each month. Filtering by deal property enables the Breezeway sales team to identify stagnant deals, track pipeline growth, and improve the accountability of each team.
Introduction
PushPress and Breezeway are two startups that have managed to scale up their business and improve their sales and revenue by leveraging the HubSpot for Startups platform. Case studies and success metrics of these companies are presented in the research brief.
PushPress
- PushPress is a gym management software that enables gym owners to "systemize, automate, and grow their businesses." PushPress helps gym owners to get clarity on their business metrics, automate repetitive tasks, increase their revenue, and provide gym members with a superior experience. The company was established in 2013 by CEO and co-founder Dan Uyemura, a fitness enthusiast and gym owner. It is headquartered in El Segundo, California.
- PushPress's journey started in 2008 when Dan Uyemura enrolled in a crossfit gym and realized that their gym management platform was too slow, difficult to use, and detrimental to the customer's experience. He then conducted a deeper competitive analysis of the existing gym management software in the market and realized that they did not offer anything different. Intending to disrupt the market, Dan Uyemura created a team of fellow fitness-loving tech entrepreneurs (comprising product director and co-founder Chris McConachie and COO and co-founder Brian Aung) and started a gym.
- The team then bought the "commercial rights to an open-source payment gateway" and started building the gym management platform that eventually became PushPress. The team also engaged Stripe Connect as the "payments platform instead of building on top of more established platforms of the time (Authorize.net)."
- PushPress was launched in early 2013 using Dan Uyemura's gym as the first client. According to Mr. Uyemura, the co-founders started out "as gym-owning product-first founders who were 100% ignorant to the level of tooling that was available in a HubSpot type platform." They initially tried using the CRM, sales and marketing automation tool called Infusionsoft (later renamed to Keap) to create the PushPress platform but did not have much success with the tool and found it confusing, complicated, and overbearing.
- The team's lack of success with Infusionsoft led them to try the freemium model of HubSpot for Startups. HubSpot CRM helped the co-founders achieve the following:
- Organize their internal sales efforts, create a uniform sales process, and "made the sales process more identifiable" to their customers.
- Organize the deal flow, both visually and structurally.
- Collaborate on sales by helping individual members seamlessly conduct the sales process by "using the deal notes and listening to recorded calls."
- Hire competent salespersons.
- Using HubSpot CRM workflows and other features enabled them to automate their sales and optimize their understanding of sales positioning and efficiency. This helped the co-founders to understand who their "best clients were in terms of close rates" and allowed them "to focus on meeting their needs better, in marketing, sales, and product direction."
- HubSpot's deal board and uniform communications platform enabled the co-founders to manage and track all deal flows from a single platform and leverage it to make calls/emails.
- As PushPress grew its business and became a marketing-focused company, the HubSpot platform enabled the co-founders of PushPress to keep track of all inbound metrics and leads seamlessly.
- According to Dan Uyemura, PushPress is currently using HubSpot's Marketing Pro software and is likely to purchase the Marketing Enterprise software in the near future. He says, "We are slowly shifting to moving more and more of our marketing efforts on top of the HubSpot platform to get greater benefits from the unified platform."
- HubSpot for Startups has helped PushPress to grow from a new company to one that currently has over 2,000 active customers around the world. PushPress's annual revenue has grown to an estimated $3.9 million and the company has 27 employees currently. As of September 2021, PushPress had "achieved a lifetime net promoter score (NPS) of 56 on a scale of -100 to 100." The company frequently finds mention as one of the top-rated gym management software in the market and has been rated very highly by G2, Software Advice, and Capterra, among others.
- While PushPress's CEO Dan Uyemura has gone on record praising the HubSpot CRM software, he has not been satisfied with the meeting scheduling functionality of HubSpot Meetings. Hence, PushPress has selected the Acuity Scheduling software for "booking times for sales and customer success calls."
Breezeway
- Breezeway is a "property care, operations, and messaging platform" in the property management space. The Breezeway platform enables property managers to "coordinate, communicate, and verify detailed work, and deliver the best service experience to clients." The company was established in 2017 by founder and CEO Jeremy Gall and is headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts.
- The Breezeway platform contain a set of tools that enable property managers to automate their operations, manage and supervise cleaning, inspection, and repair work across properties, properly communicate and coordinate with guests to offer them customized services and extended stays, "leverage preventative maintenance for robust asset management," monitor inventory levels, share detailed ownership reports, "control property access and security through powerful lock and IoT integrations," and implement robust safety programs across properties.
- The concept of creating a comprehensive property management platform occurred to Jeremy Gall when he was associated with "FlipKey (a company he founded and grew into one of the world's largest vacation rental listing and review sites before TripAdvisor's acquisition in 2013)" and witnessed first-hand the problems thousands of rental managers faced in tracking property details, scheduling teams, coordinating repair, inspection, and cleaning work across multiple properties in several locations, and "monitoring compliance with internal service standards."
- Jeremy Gall founded Breezeway in 2017 to solve the above problems and "to bring hospitality-level service optimization to other property management verticals," including the vacation rental industry.
- According to Ben Firn, Breezeway's Director of Marketing, the company relates growth with market positioning and revenue generation like most other B2B SaaS companies. Breezeway uses metrics to measure how long it takes to convert a lead into a paying customer, find cost-effective ways of acquiring new customers, and find whether it is "optimizing conversion rates through each stage of the sales funnel."
- Breezeway has utilized HubSpot for Startups in all stages of the sales funnel to achieve 3 times annual recurring revenue, 4 times properties on the platform, and maintain a negative net churn. At the top of the sales funnel, Breezeway leverages "HubSpot’s landing page builder, SEO planner, and connected ad accounts to execute content-forward campaigns and capture leads."
- Breezeway then catalogs the captured leads in the HubSpot CRM through a method of dynamic lists, scoring, and workflows. Customized campaigns that match their personality and lifecycle stage are created. The sales team then "qualifies each lead, creates an opportunity with an associated dollar amount, and then leans on calls and reminders to push each deal over the finish line."
- HubSpot's deal board has enabled Breezeway to closely monitor "conversion rates from SQL through close." Since the amount of revenue generated by the company is dependent on the number of deals created in the preceding month, the sales funnel is monitored carefully each month. Filtering by deal property enables the Breezeway sales team to identify stagnant deals, track pipeline growth, and improve the accountability of each team.
- HubSpot for Startups has helped Breezeway to grow from a new company to one that currently manages over 100 million sq.ft property space. Breezeway's software and mobile applications have so far facilitated over 9 million property care tasks, facilitated over 7 million cleaning, inspection, and repairs, and powered over 4 million messages to guests. Breezeway's annual revenue has grown to an estimated $6.1 million. The company has managed to raise a total funding of $24 million and has been rated very highly by Capterra and Operto, among others.
- HubSpot for Startups has been highly recommended by Ben Firn. He says, "For software companies trying to 3x revenue (or more), it’s a no-brainer to quarterback sales and marketing through a CRM. I’ve tried five different solutions, and HubSpot has my vote." Orhan Gazelle, principal of Schooner Capital, has also commended Breezeway's online platform by stating, "Breezeway’s platform is uniquely positioned to redefine what it means to service and manage physical space, and to set new standards for the industry at large."
Research Strategy
For providing case studies of startups that have managed to scale up their business and improve their sales and revenue by leveraging the HubSpot for Startups platform, we have utilized the most reputable sources of information in the public domain, including the "Customer Stories" webpage of HubSpot for Startups, the websites of PushPress and Breezeway, their blogs and press releases, third-party business databases like Datanyze and Growjo (for information regarding their estimated revenue), software review websites like G2, Capterra, and Software Advice, and third-party media publications for articles and interviews featuring the founders of these two startups.