Why I work at a B2B software company
And why you might want to work at one, too.
A commercial came out a couple of years ago that crosses my mind every now and then.
In the 40-second ad, a young man announces to his friends that he’s gotten a job at General Electric as a programmer. His friend cuts in, announcing that he, too, has gotten a job — at Zazzies, a startup that lets you create pictures of animals wearing fruit hats. The assembled friends ooh and aah over pictures of cats with melons on their heads, while the young man unsuccessfully tries to explain how much of an impact he’ll make at GE helping turbines power cities and making hospitals run more efficiently.
Luckily, none of my friends work at companies like Zazzies. But that commercial stuck with me because, at times, I know exactly how that engineer feels. Over my last few years working at HubSpot, I’ve helped design and build the marketing and sales software that small and medium size companies use to run their businesses. But none of my friends, who for the most part are 20-somethings like me, are marketers or salespeople. None of them have used HubSpot. And when I try to explain what we do here, I almost always get a blank smile or an “Oh, that’s cool” in response.
And that’s because my friends hardly ever use B2B software themselves. Their experience is mostly limited to the B2C (business to consumer) space (think Facebook, Snapchat, Airbnb). HubSpot, however, exists solidly in the realm of B2B (business to business) software — a world that my friends aren’t familiar with, and frankly, a world that I wasn’t familiar with either when I started looking for my first job a few years ago.
I ended up at HubSpot in the friend-of-a-friend type of happy accident. Without that accident I’d have never thought that I’d be content, let alone thrilled, to be working at a company that makes business software. When I started working at HubSpot, it was a job, and a paying one at that, and that was good enough for me. But I’ve stayed at HubSpot because I’ve realized something incredible about the work that I do every day.
Over the course of the past few years as a designer for the HubSpot CRM, I’ve talked to dozens of marketers and salespeople in user interviews and usability tests. As a routine warm-up question, I often ask them how much of their days they spent in HubSpot. The most common answer? All of it. So if they work a normal 8 hour day, 5 days a week? That’s 40 hours of their lives that they spend using HubSpot every week.
For perspective, think of an app that you use a lot. Maybe Facebook? Or Instagram? The New York Times reported last year that users spend, on average, 50 minutes a day on the Facebook platform. What about email? The Huffington Post reported in 2015 that people in the US use email, both for work and in their personal lives, for 6.3 hours a day.
This means that for the many of the people who use HubSpot, the software I create is one of the most — if not the most — used piece of software in their lives.
That’s incredibly humbling.
And that’s why it’s so astonishing to see how soul-sucking most B2B software is to use. Most enterprise software (like CRMs, accounting software, marketing automation apps, and so on) don’t have a reputation for being particularly exciting. They’re too often clunky, slow, and spiritless. But millions of people are using it every single day to get their work done. And if you can make their day in, day out experience using that software seamless, enjoyable, and fun, like the B2C apps that they use every day, it has a huge impact not only in how happy your users are on the job, but how happy they are for an enormous chunk of their lives.
A while back, I was talking to a computer science major at my alma mater about HubSpot, and after listening patiently for a couple of minutes she told me, “No offense, but working on marketing and sales software just seems kind of boring.” And I can totally see where she’s coming from. If you have no shortage of job opportunities, it can seem boring to work for a company that makes business software when all your friends, or your parents, or the media can talk about is Zazzies.
But as a designer here at HubSpot, I’ve worked to shave hours off the time it takes to run your small business. The engineers sitting next to me build interfaces that are seen by tens of thousands of people each day, or keep databases with millions of contacts stored inside of them up and running. We help our customers build their businesses, hire people, and put food on the table. Trust me — there’s nothing boring about that.
So if you’re a designer, software engineer, or product manager and you want to make a big impact on the lives of the people who use the things that you create, consider working at a B2B software company. I know I’m glad that I did.
(And yes, HubSpot is hiring.)
