Hubba for Builders
Okay, time to write it down. I’ve had this conversation a lot lately, with developers and designers and product people who are excited to understand what Hubba is about. You can read our website and get the pitch for the rest of the world, but usually the people I’m talking to want more detail about how and why. Here’s how I talk about Hubba, when I’m talking to people who build software for a living.
Come for the Tool, Stay for the Network
Our product strategy today is nicely sketched out by Chris Dixon, because it’s a pattern that works. The tool, in our case, makes it easy for businesses to share product information. This turns out to be harder and more complex than you’d expect, but the basic concept is simple enough: people who make things spend a huge amount of time managing requests for information about those things:
- product photos that are out of date or the wrong resolution
- missing shipping weights and box sizes for shelf layouts
- specific ingredient and manufacturing details like country of origin and gluten-free status
- distribution details like global availability, willingness to drop-ship, white-label options
I know. You’re thinking “This isn’t hard to build — this is a key/value store and some UI” and you’re mostly right. But no one else has done this well, and it matters. A small business today can have hundreds of stores carrying their stuff, and right now the best tools they have are email, dropbox, and usb keys shipped by FedEx. Seriously, that happens. Building a beautiful and easy tool for people who don’t have a lot of time, or a lot of tech savvy, is rewarding work for us. We have competitors who try to charge for their tools, and leave small businesses who can’t afford it out in the cold. We give it away.
We give the tool away because we are building the network. For Hubba to help your business, you need to give us two things: 1) A catalog of your products and all their associated information, and 2) the network of people you deal with who want that information. This is where Hubba gets really interesting. That network — of all the people who make things and all the people who buy things — hasn’t been captured before. These connections aren’t captured as Facebook friends, or as LinkedIn connections, or Twitter follows. This is a graph of global product commerce.
Think, product person, about the good you can do when you see all the buyer/seller relationships in an industry, as well as having a complete catalog of their product information, authoritative and maintained by the brands themselves. You can help a tiny baby toy company get their first international distribution. You can connect a struggling business with a community of people who can help. You can power a thousand ecommerce merchants and services organizations by building a shared platform they can all pull from, and build on.
When you get the network right, you can make a world of new introductions and discoveries happen, and help a bunch of 2 person businesses grow into 20 person businesses. LinkedIn grew through the promise that it could connect you with a recruiter in that moment when you need a new job, but its benefit is rate-limited since people don’t need those connections weekly. Businesses love making new connections weekly. We get to make that happen.
How We Do
So maybe you understand why we get excited about this stuff, but you wonder whether we do it in a way that you’d want to be a part of. Fair enough. Obviously you’re welcome to come in and take a look for yourself, but if it helps: we try to build like grown ups. We run node microservices on AWS auto-scaling fleets. We use KMS to keep secrets out of source control, Jenkins auto-enforcement of test coverage levels to ensure they keep climbing, and we try hard to look for existing solutions before we NIH ourselves to death. We have segment warehouse all our activity in redshift with periscope for self-serve analytics, and we run lunch & learns to make sure everyone in the company knows how to ask questions and get answers.
As for culture, it can be a bit of a gross word sometimes. It can be code for “people who think like us because they look like us” and that’s not what we want it to mean. We want to build a diverse, world class team. So if you are self-taught, if you’ve had to work disproportionately hard to get where you are, or if you’ve had some idiot tell you that you don’t “look like a developer,” we definitely want to talk to you. The only people we rule out, as early in the process as possible, are assholes. If you’re a brilliant rock star who’s sick of how stupid all your colleagues are, then we don’t care about your github resume. Best of luck to you, but we don’t want that in our house.
That’s what we do, and how we do it. If you’re interested in learning more, let us know. We’re hiring.
J Nightingale
Chief Product Officer
@johnath
