UNITED STATES

SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION

Washington, D.C. 20549

 

FORM 10-K

 

(MARK ONE)

FOR THE FISCAL YEAR ENDED DECEMBER 31, 2015

OR

FOR THE TRANSITION PERIOD FROM                      TO                     

Commission File Number 001-36680

 

HubSpot, Inc.

(Exact name of registrant as specified in its charter)

 

 

 

25 First Street, 2nd Floor

Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02141

(Address of principal executive offices)

(888) 482-7768

(Registrant’s telephone number, including area code)

Securities registered pursuant to Section 12(b) of the Act:

 

 

Securities registered pursuant to Section 12(g) of the Act: None.

 

Indicate by check mark if the registrant is a well-known seasoned issuer, as defined in Rule 405 of the Securities Act.    YES   x     NO   ¨

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant is not required to file reports pursuant to Section 13 or Section 15(d) of the Act.    YES   ¨     NO   x

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant (1) has filed all reports required to be filed by Section 13 or 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the registrant was required to file such reports), and (2) has been subject to such filing requirements for the past 90 days.    YES   x     NO   ¨

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant has submitted electronically and posted on its corporate Web site, if any, every Interactive Data file required to be submitted and posted pursuant to Rule 405 of Regulation S-T (§232.405 of this chapter) during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the registrant was required to submit and post such files).    YES   x     NO   ¨

Indicate by check mark if disclosure of delinquent filers pursuant to Item 405 of Regulation S-K is not contained herein, and will not be contained, to the best of registrant’s knowledge, in definitive proxy or information statements incorporated by reference in Part III of this Form 10-K or any amendment to this Form 10-K.   ¨

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant is a large accelerated filer, an accelerated filer, a non-accelerated filer, or a smaller reporting company. See the definitions of “large accelerated filer,” “accelerated filer,” and “smaller reporting company” in Rule 12b-2 of the Exchange Act. (Check one):

 

 

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant is a shell company (as defined in Rule 12b-2 of the Exchange Act).    YES   ¨     NO   x

The aggregate market value of common stock held by non-affiliates of the registrant, based on the closing price of the registrant’s common stock on June 30, 2015, as reported by the New York Stock Exchange on such date was approximately $1,049,025,000. Shares of the registrant’s common stock held by each executive officer, director and holder of 5% or more of the outstanding common stock have been excluded in that such persons may be deemed to be affiliates. This calculation does not reflect a determination that certain persons are affiliates of the registrant for any other purpose.

On February 12, 2016, the registrant had 34,707,673 shares of common stock outstanding.

DOCUMENTS INCORPORATED BY REFERENCE

Portions of the registrant’s definitive Proxy Statement for its 2016 Annual Meeting of Stockholders are incorporated by reference in Part III of this Annual Report on Form 10-K. Such Proxy Statement will be filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission within 120 days after the end of the fiscal year to which this report relates. Except with respect to information specifically incorporated by reference in this Form 10-K, the Proxy Statement is not deemed to be filed as part of this Form 10-K.

 

 

 

---

HUBSPOT, INC.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

 

 

 

i

---

SPECIAL NOTE REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS

This Annual Report on Form 10-K contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws, and these statements involve substantial risks and uncertainties. Forward-looking statements generally relate to future events or our future financial or operating performance. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements because they contain words such as “may,” “should,” “expects,” “plans,” “anticipates,” “could,” “intends,” “target,” “projects,” “contemplates,” “believes,” “estimates,” “predicts,” “potential” or “continue” or the negative of these words or other similar terms or expressions that concern our expectations, strategy, plans or intentions. Forward-looking statements contained in this Annual Report on Form 10-K include, but are not limited to, statements about:

We caution you that the foregoing list may not contain all of the forward-looking statements made in this Annual Report on Form 10-K.

You should not rely upon forward-looking statements as predictions of future events. We have based the forward-looking statements contained in this Annual Report on Form 10-K primarily on our current expectations and projections about future events and trends that we believe may affect our business, financial condition, results of operations and prospects. The outcome of the events described in these forward-looking statements is subject to risks, uncertainties and other factors described in “Risk Factors” and elsewhere in this Annual Report on Form 10-K. Moreover, we operate in a very competitive and rapidly changing environment. New risks and uncertainties emerge from time to time, and it is not possible for us to predict all risks and uncertainties that could have an impact on the forward-looking statements contained in this Annual Report on Form 10-K. The results, events and circumstances reflected in the forward-looking statements may not be achieved or occur, and actual results, events or circumstances could differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements.

The forward-looking statements made in this Annual Report on Form 10-K relate only to events as of the date on which the statements are made. We undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statements made in this Annual Report on Form 10-K to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this Annual Report on Form 10-K or to reflect new information or the occurrence of unanticipated events, except as required by law.

We may not actually achieve the plans, intentions or expectations disclosed in our forward-looking statements and you should not place undue reliance on our forward-looking statements. Our forward-looking statements do not reflect the potential impact of any future acquisitions, mergers, dispositions, joint ventures or investments we may make.

 

 

1

---

PART 1

ITEM I. BUSINESS

Overview

We provide a cloud-based marketing and sales software platform that enables businesses to deliver an inbound experience. An inbound marketing and sales experience attracts, engages and delights customers by being more relevant, more helpful, more personalized and less interruptive than traditional marketing and sales tactics. Our software platform features integrated applications to help businesses attract visitors to their websites, convert visitors into leads, close leads into customers and delight customers so that they become promoters of those businesses. These integrated applications include social media, search engine optimization, blogging, website content management, marketing automation, email, CRM, analytics and reporting.

People have transformed how they consume information, research products and services, make purchasing decisions and share their views and experiences. Today, customers are blocking out the tactics from the traditional marketing and sales playbook, such as cold calls, unsolicited emails and disruptive advertisements. Customers are taking more control of the purchasing process by using technology, including search engines and social media, to research products and services. Despite this transformation, most businesses are using an outdated marketing and sales playbook that is essentially the same today as it was 10 years ago. To compete effectively, we believe businesses need to deliver an inbound experience by adopting new strategies and technologies to attract, engage and delight customers.

We designed our all-in-one platform from the ground up to enable businesses to provide an inbound experience to their prospects and customers. At the core of our platform is a single inbound database for each business that captures its customer activity throughout the customer lifecycle. Our platform uses our centralized inbound database to empower businesses to create more personalized interactions with customers, such as personalized emails, personalized social media alerts, personalized websites and targeted alerts for sales people. We provide a comprehensive set of integrated applications on our platform, which offers businesses ease of use, power and simplicity. We designed and built our platform to serve a large number of customers of any size with demanding use cases.

While our platform can scale to the enterprise, we focus on selling to mid-market businesses, which we define as businesses that have between 10 and 2,000 employees, because we believe we have significant competitive advantages attracting and serving them. We efficiently reach these businesses at scale through our proven inbound go-to-market approach and more than 2,900 marketing agency partners worldwide. Our platform is particularly suited to serving the needs of mid-market B2B companies. These mid-market businesses seek an integrated, easy to implement and easy to use solution to reach customers and compete with organizations that have larger marketing and sales budgets. As of December 31, 2015, we had 18,116 customers of varying sizes in more than 90 countries, representing almost every industry.

We have a leading brand in the cloud-based inbound marketing and sales software industry. Our brand recognition comes from our thought leadership, including our blogs, which attract more than 2.5 million visits each month, and our commitment to innovation. Our founders, Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, wrote the best-selling marketing book Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media and Blogs. We also have one of the largest social media followings in our industry and our INBOUND conference is one of the largest inbound industry events, with over 14,000 registered attendees in 2015.

We sell our platform on a subscription basis. Our total revenue increased to $181.9 million in 2015, from $115.9 million in 2014, and from $77.6 million in 2013, representing year-over-year increases of 57% in 2015 and 49% in 2014. We had net losses of $46.1 million in 2015, $48.2 million in 2014, and $34.3 million in 2013.

Industry Background

People Have Changed How They Interact with Businesses

We believe an effective way to illustrate how people have transformed the way they consume information, research products and services, make purchasing decisions and share their views and experiences is by describing two hypothetical people—Traditional Ted and Modern Meghan.

2

---

Traditional Ted is an executive at a 300 person company in 2005. He keeps up to date on his industry by attending trade shows and reading the monthly industry print publication, often scanning the ads to see the vendors’ new products. He gets a fair amount of unsolicited emails from salespeople and marketers and sees an increasing number of ads on websites he visits. He also takes sales calls from vendors to stay current on industry developments. Ted opens his mail daily, and when his phone rings, he answers it because it is a critical communication tool. When Ted is looking for a new vendor, he will try to recall the ads he has seen recently or go through the brochures he has been mailed which he keeps in a file in his desk. If Ted is frustrated with a vendor, he calls the vendor and tells a couple of his colleagues about his bad experience. To relax, Ted watches TV and reads the newspaper, both of which contain advertisements.

Modern Meghan is an executive at a 300 person company in 2015. She keeps up to date on her industry by reading a number of industry blogs, following key companies and influencers on Twitter and LinkedIn and listening to podcasts in her car during her commute. She has an ad blocker running in her web browser and an email filter to block out unwanted messages. She rarely checks her mail because it is mostly “junk.” Meghan does not have a landline phone because “only salespeople call me there,” and she never answers her smartphone unless she recognizes the number. Meghan spends much more time on her phone using apps and the web than she does talking on it. If she is looking for a vendor for something her company needs, she starts by searching on Google and then asking her peers in her LinkedIn network about their experiences with different vendors. She does not even bother to talk to any of the vendor’s salespeople until she has narrowed the list and has already completed most of her decision-making process. When Meghan has trouble with one of her vendors, she contacts the vendor, but if she is not satisfied with the response, she sometimes writes a negative review online and posts a link to it on Twitter. In her free time, Meghan relaxes by watching TV shows she has previously recorded on her DVR so she can fast forward through the commercials.

We believe all of us are becoming more like Modern Meghan and less like Traditional Ted. Yet, most businesses are still doing marketing, sales and service as if everyone is like Ted. To be effective today, businesses need to transform to attract, engage and delight customers like Meghan.

The Traditional Business Playbook is Broken

Traditionally, most businesses have followed the same marketing and sales playbook to generate leads, close sales and provide support to their customers. Today, however, customers are increasingly selecting their own communication channels and expecting personalized experiences. They are blocking out traditional marketing and sales tactics, such as cold calls, unsolicited emails and disruptive advertisements, and instead, they are using search engines and social media to research products and services before they contact a vendor. Customers are increasingly taking more control of the purchasing process and influencing the purchasing behavior of others.

Customers are blocking out traditional marketing and sales tactics. Customers are ignoring traditional marketing and sales tactics, often by using technology to block them out. For example:

Customers are taking control of the purchasing process. Customers can now get the information they need on their own terms. Using search engines, social media and websites, customers can research vendors and actively seek recommendations from members of their social networks. As a result, customers no longer need to talk to a salesperson until they have completed most of their purchasing decision. This limits the amount of influence businesses can have on purchase decisions when using the traditional business playbook.

3

---

Customers are influencing the purchasing behaviors of others. Customers are relying less on the promotional material from businesses and instead using online reviews and input from other purchasers to make their purchasing decision. Such social behavior is self-reinforcing: social buyers themselves are social sellers who influence others’ purchasing decisions. According to a survey conducted by Dimensional Research in 2013, 88% of respondents said that online reviews influenced their buying decisions.

Businesses Need a New Playbook—The Inbound Experience

Businesses need a more effective way to attract, engage and delight customers who have access to an abundance of information and an ability to block traditional marketing and sales tactics. To do this, businesses need to deliver an inbound experience, which enables them to be more helpful, more relevant and less interruptive to their customers.

To deliver an inbound experience, businesses need to transform how they market, sell and serve customers.

Existing Applications are Not Adequate for an Integrated Inbound Experience

Today, businesses often use a variety of point applications for their marketing and sales efforts, including advertising, marketing automation, content management, blogging, social media management, analytics, sales management and CRM. Most of these point applications were not designed to deliver an inbound experience. Typically, they do not provide a central view of all customer interactions across channels, are difficult and expensive to implement and use together, and make it hard to measure results. We believe that these existing point applications were not designed with the platform, architecture and functionality necessary to deliver a seamless integrated inbound experience.

Not Designed for an Inbound Experience. Traditional marketing applications rely on advertising and cold calling for lead generation instead of inbound methods. These applications are not designed to personalize and optimize every interaction with customers on websites, in social media and by email across devices, and do not typically allow sales and service teams to see the signals their prospects are sending in real time.

No Centralized Inbound Database of Customer Interactions. Businesses typically need to use one point application for website content management, a different point application for blogging, another point application for social media management, another point application for email and marketing automation, another point application for content personalization, another point application for analytics, another point application for sales management and CRM, and yet another point application to alert salespeople of key customer signals in real time. This disparate collection of point applications makes it difficult to get a 360-degree view of a customer’s interactions and use that data to provide a better customer experience and drive a more effective marketing and sales process. In addition, existing point applications are typically not designed to manage, process and analyze all of the customer data created by these various touchpoints because they use older technologies, not big data technologies such as HBase and Hadoop that are designed for massive scale.

Difficult and Expensive to Implement and Use. Using a collection of disparate point applications means a separate implementation process for each. Often businesses will need to use outside consultants or hire new employees with specific technical expertise to implement and use these different applications, resulting in significant additional costs. This collection of disparate point applications also requires that businesses manage a variety of different log-ins and user interfaces, as well as get support from different vendors, often just to do something the business sees as one process, such as running a marketing campaign. While ease of implementation and use are important for businesses of all sizes, they are critical for mid-market businesses.

Hard to Measure Results. Because all the customer touchpoints through the marketing, sales and service processes are typically stored in different disconnected point applications, it is very difficult to get a 360-degree view of a customer’s interactions and measure the effectiveness of marketing and sales programs. Businesses will often purchase yet another application to try to measure results across their multiple applications, adding even more expense and complexity to an already complex collection of different point applications.

4

---

Market Opportunity

We believe there is a large market opportunity created by the fundamental transformation in marketing and sales. Businesses of nearly all sizes and in nearly all industries can benefit from delivering an inbound experience to attract, engage and delight their customers. We focus on selling our platform to mid-market businesses. As of December 31, 2015, we had 18,116 customers, and our average subscription revenue per customer for the year ended December 31, 2015 was $10,419. According to AMI Partners, in 2014, there were 1.6 million of these mid-market businesses with a website presence in the United States and Canada and 1.4 million in Europe. According to a January 2014 study by Mintigo of 186,500 U.S.-based B2B companies of varying sizes, only 3% of those companies had implemented any of the most common marketing automation applications.

We believe our platform addresses several segments of existing marketing, sales and services software and that spending in each of these segments will increasingly shift to platforms that enable an inbound experience. According to a May 2014 report by IDC, worldwide spending on CRM applications, including marketing automation, sales automation, customer service and contact center, is expected to grow to $31.7 billion in 2018.

Advantages of Our Solution

We provide a cloud-based, all-in-one inbound marketing and sales software platform that helps businesses attract, engage and delight customers throughout the customer lifecycle. Our platform features a central inbound database of customer interactions and integrated applications to help businesses attract visitors to their websites, convert visitors into leads, close leads into customers and delight customers so they become promoters of those businesses.

Designed for an Inbound Experience. Our platform was architected from the ground up to enable businesses to transform their marketing and sales playbook to meet the demands of today’s customers. Our platform includes integrated applications to help businesses efficiently attract more customers through search engine optimization, social media, blogging and other useful content. In addition, our platform is designed to help businesses personalize and optimize interactions with their customers through websites, landing pages, social media and emails, and across devices.

Ease of Use of All-In-One Platform. We provide a set of integrated applications on a common platform, which offers businesses ease of use and simplicity. Our platform has one login, one user interface, one inbound database and one number to call for support: 888-HUBSPOT. Our platform is designed to be used by people without technical training, does not require an expert or technical system administrator and was built to make it easy to get started. Because of its ease of use and integration, our platform enables businesses to focus on attracting, engaging and delighting customers, instead of spending time and money coordinating their marketing and sales efforts across multiple point applications.

Power of All-In-One Platform. At the core of our platform is a single inbound database for each business that captures its customer activity throughout the customer lifecycle. For example, our platform creates a unified timeline incorporating all the interactions with a particular person. If a business’s customer visits its website, comments on its blog, opens an email it sent, interacts with the business on Twitter, watches one of its videos, fills out a form, or is marked as a sales opportunity by its salesperson, all of that activity is centrally managed and presented on the timeline for that contact and is available for use across our applications. Our platform also makes it easy to use the customer data to empower more personalized interactions with the customer, such as personalized social media alerts, personalized content on a business’s website, personalized emails and targeted alerts to its sales people.

Clear ROI for Customers. Our platform delivers proven and measurable results for our customers. Our customers often experience significant increases in the volume of traffic to their websites, the volume of inbound leads and the rate of converting leads into customers.

Scalability. Our platform was designed and built to serve a large number of customers of any size and with demanding use cases. Our platform currently processes billions of data points each week, and we use leading global cloud infrastructure providers and our own automation technology to dynamically allocate capacity to handle processing workloads of all sizes. We have built our platform on modern technologies, including HBase and Hadoop, which we believe are more scalable than traditional database technologies. Our scalability gives us flexibility for future growth and enables us to service a large variety of businesses of different sizes across different industries.

Extendable and Open Architecture. Our platform features a variety of open APIs that allows easy integration of our platform with other applications. We enable our customers to connect our platform to their other applications, including CRM and ecommerce applications. By connecting third-party applications, our customers can leverage our centralized inbound database to perform additional functions and analysis.

5

---

Our Competitive Strengths

We believe that our market leadership position is based on the following key strengths:

Leading Platform. We have designed and built a world-class, inbound marketing and sales software platform. We believe our customers choose our platform over others because of its powerful, integrated and easy to use applications. Independent customer reviews and ratings of our platform compared to other applications show that we have high customer satisfaction. As of December 31, 2015 on G2Crowd (an independent business software and services review website), the features and functions of our platform were ranked #1 in customer satisfaction in the following categories: marketing automation, email marketing, and search marketing.

Market Leadership and Strong Brand. We are a recognized thought leader in the cloud-based inbound marketing and sales software industry with a leading brand. Our founders, Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, wrote the best-selling marketing book Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media and Blogs. More than 90,000 copies have been sold and is available in nine languages. There are more than 150 self-organized HubSpot user groups. We also have over 1.8 million followers and fans among Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn as of December 31, 2015, including approximately 133,000 members of LinkedIn who belong to our inbound marketers group. Our INBOUND conference is one of the largest inbound industry conference events with attendance increasing from 1,100 in 2011 to over 14,000 registered attendees in 2015. We currently hold the world record for the largest online marketing seminar with 10,899 live participants. We believe that it is inherently hard to replicate the number of websites that link to us, the volume of useful content we have published, our large social media following, the breadth of our search engine rankings and our overall brand strength because these assets cannot be easily purchased or built.

Large and Growing Agency Partner Program. More than 2,900 agencies partner with us for the value of our platform to their business including being able to offer new inbound marketing and sales services to their clients which can grow their revenue per customer, attract new customers and increase the portion of their clients on a retainer relationship. We believe that the wide adoption of our platform in the marketing agency industry is evidence that we are becoming an industry standard. Marketing agency partners and customers referred to us by our marketing agency partners represented approximately 49% of our customers as of December 31, 2015 and approximately 39% of our revenue for the year ended December 31, 2015. These marketing agency partners help us to promote the vision of the inbound experience, efficiently reach new mid-market businesses at scale and provide our mutual customers with more diverse and higher-touch services.

Mid-Market Focus. We believe we have significant competitive advantages reaching mid-market businesses and efficiently reach this market at scale as a result of our proven inbound go-to-market approach and our agency partner channel. In 2015, over 83% of the new leads we generated and over 90% of our new customers were from inbound marketing and did not have any advertising costs associated with them. We believe our large inbound marketing footprint and agency partner program provide competitive advantages in reaching mid-market businesses.

Powerful Network Effects. We have built a large and growing ecosystem around our platform and company. We have built what we believe is the largest engaged audience in our industry, which now comprises more than 4 million people between visitors to our blogs, Twitter followers, Facebook fans, LinkedIn connections. We have attracted more than 2,900 marketing agency partners worldwide who promote our brand and extend our marketing and sales reach. Thousands of our customers integrate third-party applications with our platform using our built-in connectors and third-party developer partners. We have trained and certified more than 27,000 marketers on inbound marketing. Our annual INBOUND conference attracted more than 14,000 registered attendees in 2015. We believe this ecosystem drives more businesses and professionals to embrace the inbound playbook. As our engaged audience grows, more agencies partner with us, more third-party developers integrate their applications with our platform, and more professionals complete our certification programs, all of which drive more businesses to adopt our platform.

Our Growth Strategy

The key elements to our growth strategy are:

Grow Our U.S. Customer Base. The market for our platform is large and underserved. Mid-market businesses are particularly underserved by existing point application vendors and often lack sufficient resources to implement complex solutions. Our all-in-one platform allows mid-market businesses to efficiently adopt and execute an effective inbound marketing strategy to help them expand and grow. We will continue to leverage our inbound go-to-market approach and our network of marketing agency partners to keep growing our domestic business.

6

---

Increase Revenue from Existing Customers. With 18,116 customers in more than 90 countries spanning many industries, we believe we have a significant opportunity to increase revenue from our existing customers. We plan to increase revenue from our existing customers by expanding their use of our platform, selling to other parts of their organizations and upselling additional offerings and features. Our scalable pricing model allows us to capture more spend as our customers grow, increase the number of their customers and prospects managed on our platform, and require additional functionality available from our higher price tiers and add-ons, providing us with a substantial opportunity to increase the lifetime value of our customer relationships.

Keep Expanding Internationally. There is a significant opportunity for our inbound platform outside of the United States. As of December 31, 2015, approximately 27% of our customers were located outside of the United States and these customers generated approximately 24% of our total revenue for the year ended December 31, 2015, and we sell to those foreign customers from our U.S., European, and Asia Pacific based operations. We intend to grow our presence in international markets through additional investments in local sales, marketing and professional service capabilities, as well as by leveraging our agency partner network. We opened our first international office in Dublin, Ireland focused on the European market in January 2013 and our second and third international offices focused on the Asia Pacific market in Sydney, Australia in August 2014 and Singapore in October 2015, respectively. We already have significant website traffic from regions outside the United States and we believe that markets outside the United States represent a significant growth opportunity.

Continue to Innovate and Expand Our Platform. Mid-market businesses are increasingly realizing the value of having an integrated marketing, sales and service platform. We believe we are well positioned to capitalize on this opportunity by introducing new products and applications to extend the functionality of our platform. For example, in 2013, we launched our Sidekick product designed to empower sales professionals to benefit from real-time interaction data to engage with their most relevant prospects. In 2015, we launched two new add-ons to the marketing platform:  HubSpot Reporting, which enables marketing and sales users to explore the data within their marketing platform using custom analytics and reports; and HubSpot Ads which was launched in partnership with Google and LinkedIn and enables customers to manage their ad spend from within the HubSpot product.  We launched a freemium marketing product in 2015 called Leadin, enabling customers to analyze their website traffic and generate more leads from their website.  We also launched a new paid sales product in 2015 called Sidekick for Business, which is an expansion off our Sidekick product line and enables Sales reps to identify, connect, and engage with new leads. Finally, we added significant functionality to our core marketing, sales and CRM products throughout the year, launching updates that include a redesign of our core content management system, a new predictive lead scoring application, and a new integrations platform called HubSpot Connect.

Selectively Pursue Acquisitions. We plan to selectively pursue acquisitions of complementary businesses, technologies and teams that would allow us to add new features and functionalities to our platform and accelerate the pace of our innovation.

Our Products

All-in-one Marketing and Sales Platform

Designed from the ground up to deliver an inbound experience, our software platform enables businesses to attract, engage and delight customers. At the core of our platform is a single inbound database of customer information. This allows a complete view of customer interactions across all of our integrated applications, giving our platform substantial power. This integration makes it possible to personalize web content, social media engagement and email messages across devices, including mobile. The integrated applications on our platform have a common user interface, are accessed through a single login and are based on our inbound database.

Content Optimization System (COS). Our COS applications are part content management system and part personalization engine, enabling businesses to create new and edit existing web content while also personalizing their websites for different visitors and optimizing their websites to convert more visitors into leads and customers. Features include:

7

---

Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Our SEO applications are tightly integrated into all of the content applications on our platform, making it easy to select the right keywords and optimize content to attract more visitors from search engines. Features include:

Social Inbox. Our social media applications allow businesses to monitor, publish and track social media across Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+, leveraging the personalized information about each contact stored in the inbound database. Features include:

Marketing Automation and Email. Businesses can execute, manage and analyze sophisticated email marketing campaigns and segment and personalize emails using sophisticated triggers such as viewing a video, completing a form, or interacting via social media. Features include:

Sidekick. Our Sidekick product enhances the productivity of sales representatives. Businesses can track the signals being sent by potential customers including email engagement and website visits, and easily discover new contacts and connections with other businesses enabling sales representatives to focus on prospects who have demonstrated interest. Features include:

Sidekick for Business. Our Sidekick for Business product enhances the productivity and effectiveness of sales representatives. Businesses can empower their teams with tools that deliver a personalized experience for prospects with less work for sales

8

---

representatives. Sales professionals can track the signals being sent by potential customers, including email engagement and web-site visits, and easily discover new contacts and connections with other businesses. Features include:

CRM Sync. Businesses can synchronize information from our inbound database with their CRM application, enabling seamless transition from marketing to sales. Our native and third-party CRM integration features include:

HubSpot CRM. Businesses can track their interactions with contacts and companies, manage their sales activities and report on their pipeline and sales.

Reporting and Analytics . Businesses can use our reporting and analytics functionality built into our platform to measure which activities are attracting the most new leads and customers, develop a deeper understanding of their customers and measure the effectiveness of campaigns across the customer lifecycle.

9

---

Product Packaging

In 2012, we began pricing and packaging our products based on product plans, number of contacts and add-ons. We sell three product plans, each of which includes key functionality of our core platform but also includes different applications to meet the needs of the various businesses we serve.

HubSpot Basic is our entry level plan starting at $2,400 per year. This plan includes our platform with applications such as blogging, landing pages, Social Inbox, email marketing, and analytics and reporting.

HubSpot Pro is our plan for professional marketers starting at $9,600 per year. This plan includes the platform with all the applications included in HubSpot Basic plus more advanced applications such as CRM integration, marketing automation and smart content.

HubSpot Enterprise is an advanced plan for marketing teams starting at $28,800 per year. This plan includes our platform with all the applications included in HubSpot Pro, plus more sophisticated applications such as A/B testing and optimization, tracking custom events and advanced reporting capabilities.

Pricing for all plans is on a subscription basis and customers pay additional fees above the starting prices based on how many contacts will be stored and tracked in the inbound database. We generate additional revenue based on the purchase of additional subscriptions and applications and the number of account users, subdomains and website visits.

Add Ons. We also sell applications that are not included in any of our three plans on an add-on basis.

Our Services

We complement our product offerings with professional services and support. The majority of our services and support is offered over the phone and via web meeting technology rather than in-person, which is a more efficient business model for us and more cost-effective for our customers.

Professional Services. We offer professional services to educate and train customers on how to leverage our software platform and inbound marketing methodology to transform how their business attracts, engages and delights customers. Depending on which product plan and professional services a customer buys, it either receives group training and education in online or in-person classes or one-on-one training and advice from one of our implementation specialists by phone and web meeting. Our professional services are also available to customers who need additional assistance on a one-time or ongoing basis for an additional fee.

Support. In addition to assistance provided by our online articles and customer discussion forums, we offer phone and email-based support staffed in the United States, Ireland, Australia, and Singapore, which is included in the cost of a subscription for our

10

---

marketing product. We strive to maintain an exceptional quality of customer service. We continuously monitor key customer service metrics such as phone hold time, ticket response time and ticket resolution rates, and we monitor the customer satisfaction of our customer support interactions. We believe our customer support is an important reason why businesses choose our platform and recommend it to their colleagues.

Our Customers

As of December 31, 2015 we had 18,116 customers in more than 90 countries, representing many industries. No single customer represented more than 1% of our revenue in 2015, 2014 or 2013.

Our Technology

We have 18,116 customers that have chosen us as their marketing and sales platform, which we architected and built to be secure, highly distributed and highly scalable. Since our founding, we have embraced rapid, iterative product development lifecycles, cloud automation and open-source technologies, including big data platforms, to power marketing and sales programs and provide insights not previously possible or available.

Our platform is a multi-tenant, single code-based, globally available software-as-a-service delivered through web browsers or mobile applications. Our commitment to a highly available, reliable and scalable platform for businesses of all sizes is accomplished through the use of these technologies.

Modern Database Architecture. We process billions of data points weekly across various channels, including social media, email, SEO and website visits, and continue to drive nearly real-time analytics across these channels. This is possible because we built our database from the ground up using distributed big data technologies such as HBase and Hadoop to both process and analyze the large amounts of data we collect in our inbound database. Using modern database technologies, we can provide actionable insights across disparate data-sets in a manner not easily achievable or cost effectively, at scale or efficiently, with traditional databases or platform architectures.

Agility. Our infrastructure and development and software release processes allow us to update our platform for specific groups of customers or our entire customer base at any time. This means we can rapidly innovate and deliver new functionality frequently, without waiting for quarterly or annual release cycles. We typically deploy updates to our software platform hundreds of times a week, enabling us to gather immediate customer feedback and improve our product quickly and continuously.

Cost leverage. Because our platform was built on an almost exclusive footprint of open-source software and designed to operate in cloud-based data-centers, we have benefited from large-scale price reductions by these cloud computing service providers as they continue to innovate and compete for market share. As our processing volume continues to grow, we continue to receive larger volume discounts on a per-unit basis for costs such as cost for storage, bandwidth and computing capacity. We also believe that our extensive use, and contribution to, open-source software will provide additional leverage as we scale our platform and infrastructure.

Scalability. By leveraging leading cloud infrastructure providers along with our automated technology stack, we are able to scale workloads of varying sizes at any time. This allows us to handle customers of all sizes and demands without traditional operational limitations such as network bandwidth, computing cycles, or storage capacity as we can scale our platform on-demand.

Reliability. Our platform’s uptime during 2015 exceeded 99.9% while we delivered hundreds of product improvements through thousands of software releases in a continuous software delivery cycle. Customer data is distributed and processed across multiple data centers within a region to provide redundancy. We built our platform on a distributed computing architecture with no single points of failure and we operate across data-center boundaries daily. In addition to data-center level redundancy, this architecture supports multiple live copies of each data set along with snapshot capabilities for faster, point-in-time data recovery instead of traditional backup and restore methodologies.

Security. We leverage industry standard network and perimeter defense technologies, DDoS protection systems (including web application firewalls) and enterprise grade DNS services across multiple vendors. Our data-center providers operate and certify to high industry compliance levels. Due to the broad footprint of our customer base, we regularly test and evaluate our platform with trusted third-party vendors to ensure the security and integrity of our services.

Marketing and Sales

We believe we are a global leader in implementing an inbound experience in marketing and sales. We believe that our marketing and sales model provides us with a competitive advantage, especially when targeting mid-market businesses, because we can attract and engage these businesses efficiently and at scale.

11

---

Inbound Marketing. Our marketing team focuses on inbound marketing and attracts over 57,000 new leads per month through our industry-leading blog and other content, free tools, large social media following, high search engine rankings and personalized website and email content. Inbound sources generated over 90% of our new customers and over 83% of new leads during 2015. We believe most companies of our size and scale typically have a far lower volume of lead generation with a much larger share of it coming from traditional advertising methods.

Inbound Direct Sales. Our sales representatives are based in our offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Dublin, Ireland, Sydney, Australia, and Singapore and use phone, email and web meetings to interact with prospects and customers. The vast majority of revenue generated by our sales representatives originates with inbound leads produced by our marketing efforts.

Inbound Channel Sales. In addition to our direct sales team, we have sales representatives that manage relationships with our worldwide network of marketing agency partners who both use our platform for their own businesses and also, on a commissioned basis, refer customers to us. These marketing agencies partner with us not only to leverage our software platform and educational resources, but also to build their own business by offering new services and shifting their revenue mix to include more retainer-based business with a recurring revenue stream.

Employees and Culture

Transforming the business world to embrace the inbound experience requires a truly remarkable team. From the very beginning, our company was founded on a fundamental belief in radical transparency, individual autonomy and enlightened empathy.

To that end, we published our “Culture Code,” a document codifying how we went about building a business that employees, customers and partners alike truly love. Our Culture Code slide deck has been viewed approximately 2 million times on LinkedIn’s SlideShare and become an important element of our recruiting efforts. The seven core principles of our Culture Code are:

 

 

 

 

 

 

We take great pride in recruiting and retaining people with HEART: Humility, Effectiveness, Adaptability, Remark-ability and Transparency, at every level of our company and hire employees passionate about joining our mission to transform the business world with inbound. In 2015, we were recognized by the Boston Globe as the Top Place to Work among large companies, a Best Place to Work for Women, Camaraderie and Technology by Fortune, and in December 2015 it was announced we ranked in the top 5 of Best Places to Work in 2016 by Glassdoor. Our policies on employee autonomy and transparency have been widely profiled in the media and we are incredibly proud of the culture that we have built. But, at the end of the day, we do not just talk about culture, we measure it, just as we do the rest of our business. We survey employees on a quarterly basis, making sure that our founders and executives review all the feedback, respond, and make adjustments when necessary.

As of December 31, 2015 we had 1,157 full-time employees. Of these employees, 960 are based in the United States, 166 are located in Ireland, 22 are located in Australia, and 9 are located in Singapore.

12

---

Competition

Our market is evolving, highly competitive and fragmented, and we expect competition to increase in the future. We believe the principal competitive factors in our market are:

We believe we complete favorably with respect to all of these factors.

We face intense competition from other software companies that develop marketing software and from marketing services companies that provide interactive marketing services. Our competitors offer various point applications that provide certain functions and features that we provide, including:

In addition, instead of using our platform, some prospective customers may elect to combine disparate point applications, such as content management, marketing automation, analytics and social media management. We expect that new competitors, such as enterprise software vendors that have traditionally focused on enterprise resource planning or other applications supporting back office functions, will develop and introduce, or acquire, applications serving customer-facing and other front office functions.

Intellectual Property

Our ability to protect our intellectual property, including our technology, will be an important factor in the success and continued growth of our business. We protect our intellectual property through trade secrets law, copyrights, trademarks and contracts. Some of our technology relies upon third-party licensed intellectual property.

In addition to the foregoing, we have established business procedures designed to maintain the confidentiality of our proprietary information, including the use of confidentiality agreements and assignment of inventions agreements with employees, independent contractors, consultants and companies with which we conduct business.

Financial Information About Segments

The Company operates as one operating segment. Operating segments are defined as components of an enterprise for which separate financial information is regularly evaluated by the chief operating decision makers (“CODMs”), which are the Company’s chief executive officer and chief operating officer, in deciding how to allocate resources and assess performance. The Company’s CODMs evaluate the Company’s financial information and resources and assess the performance of these resources on a consolidated basis. Since the Company operates in one operating segment, all required financial segment information can be found in the consolidated financial statements. See Footnote 7 within the consolidated financial statements for information by geographic area.

Available Information

Our Annual Report on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Current Reports on Form 8-K and amendments to reports filed pursuant to Sections 13(a) and 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, are made available free of charge on or through our website at  www.hubspot.com as soon as reasonably practicable after such reports are filed with, or furnished to, the SEC.

13

---

The SEC also maintains a website, www.sec.gov, that contains reports and other information regarding issuers that file electronically with the SEC. The public may read and copy any files with the SEC Public Reference Room at 100 F Street, NE, Washington, DC 20549. The public may obtain information on the operation of the Public Reference Room by calling 1-800-SEC-0330. We are not, however, including the information contained on our website, or information that may be accessed through links on our website, as part of, or incorporating such information by reference into, this Annual Report on Form 10-K.

 

 

An investment in our common stock involves a high degree of risk. You should carefully consider the risks described below and the other information in this Annual Report on Form 10-K and in our other public filings before making an investment decision. Our business, prospects, financial condition, or operating results could be harmed by any of these risks, as well as other risks not currently known to us or that we currently consider immaterial. If any of such risks and uncertainties actually occurs, our business, financial condition or operating results could differ materially from the plans, projections and other forward-looking statements included in the section titled “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations” and elsewhere in this report and in our other public filings. The trading price of our common stock could decline due to any of these risks, and, as a result, you may lose all or part of your investment.

Risks Related to Our Business and Strategy

We have a history of losses and may not achieve profitability in the future.

We generated net losses of $46.1 million in 2015, $48.2 million in 2014, and of $34.3 million in 2013. As of December 31, 2015, we had an accumulated deficit of $200.4 million. We will need to generate and sustain increased revenue levels in future periods to become profitable, and, even if we do, we may not be able to maintain or increase our level of profitability. We intend to continue to expend significant funds to grow our marketing and sales operations, develop and enhance our inbound platform, scale our data center infrastructure and services capabilities and expand into new markets. Our efforts to grow our business may be more costly than we expect, and we may not be able to increase our revenue enough to offset our higher operating expenses. We may incur significant losses in the future for a number of reasons, including the other risks described in this Annual Report on Form 10-K, and unforeseen expenses, difficulties, complications and delays and other unknown events. If we are unable to achieve and sustain profitability, the market price of our common stock may significantly decrease.

We are dependent upon customer renewals, the addition of new customers and the continued growth of the market for an inbound platform.

We derive, and expect to continue to derive, a substantial portion of our revenue from the sale of subscriptions to our inbound marketing platform. The market for inbound marketing and sales products is still evolving, and competitive dynamics may cause pricing levels to change as the market matures and as existing and new market participants introduce new types of point applications and different approaches to enable businesses to address their respective needs. As a result, we may be forced to reduce the prices we charge for our platform and may be unable to renew existing customer agreements or enter into new customer agreements at the same prices and upon the same terms that we have historically.

Our subscription renewal rates may decrease, and any decrease could harm our future revenue and operating results.

Our customers have no obligation to renew their subscriptions for our platform after the expiration of their subscription periods, substantially all of which are one year or less. In addition, our customers may seek to renew for lower subscription amounts or for shorter contract lengths. Also, customers may choose not to renew their subscriptions for a variety of reasons, including an inability or failure on the part of a customer to create blogging, social media and other content necessary to realize the benefits of our platform. Our renewal rates may decline or fluctuate as a result of a number of factors, including limited customer resources, pricing changes, adoption and utilization of our platform and add-on applications by our customers, adoption of our new products, customer satisfaction with our platform, the acquisition of our customers by other companies and deteriorating general economic conditions. If our customers do not renew their subscriptions for our platform or decrease the amount they spend with us, our revenue will decline and our business will suffer.

We face significant competition from both established and new companies offering marketing and sales software and other related applications, as well as internally developed software, which may harm our ability to add new customers, retain existing customers and grow our business.

The marketing and sales software market is evolving, highly competitive and significantly fragmented. With the introduction of new technologies and the potential entry of new competitors into the market, we expect competition to persist and intensify in the future, which could harm our ability to increase sales, maintain or increase renewals and maintain our prices.

14

---

We face intense competition from other software companies that develop marketing and sales software and from marketing services companies that provide interactive marketing services. Competition could significantly impede our ability to sell subscriptions to our inbound marketing and sales platform on terms favorable to us. Our current and potential competitors may develop and market new technologies that render our existing or future products less competitive, or obsolete. In addition, if these competitors develop products with similar or superior functionality to our platform, we may need to decrease the prices or accept less favorable terms for our platform subscriptions in order to remain competitive. If we are unable to maintain our pricing due to competitive pressures, our margins will be reduced and our operating results will be negatively affected.

Our competitors include:

In addition, instead of using our platform, some prospective customers may elect to combine disparate point applications, such as content management, marketing automation, CRM, analytics and social media management. We expect that new competitors, such as enterprise software vendors that have traditionally focused on enterprise resource planning or other applications supporting back office functions, will develop and introduce applications serving customer-facing and other front office functions. This development could have an adverse effect on our business, operating results and financial condition. In addition, sales force automation and CRM system vendors could acquire or develop applications that compete with our marketing software offerings. Some of these companies have acquired social media marketing and other marketing software providers to integrate with their broader offerings.

Our current and potential competitors may have significantly more financial, technical, marketing and other resources than we have, be able to devote greater resources to the development, promotion, sale and support of their products and services, may have more extensive customer bases and broader customer relationships than we have, and may have longer operating histories and greater name recognition than we have. As a result, these competitors may respond faster to new technologies and to undertake more extensive marketing campaigns for their products. In a few cases, these vendors may also be able to offer marketing and sales software at little or no additional cost by bundling it with their existing suite of applications. To the extent any of our competitors has existing relationships with potential customers for either marketing software or other applications, those customers may be unwilling to purchase our platform because of their existing relationships with our competitor. If we are unable to compete with such companies, the demand for our inbound platform could substantially decline.

In addition, if one or more of our competitors were to merge or partner with another of our competitors, our ability to compete effectively could be adversely affected. Our competitors may also establish or strengthen cooperative relationships with our current or future strategic distribution and technology partners or other parties with whom we have relationships, thereby limiting our ability to promote and implement our platform. We may not be able to compete successfully against current or future competitors, and competitive pressures may harm our business, operating results and financial condition.

We have experienced rapid growth and organizational change in recent periods and expect continued future growth. If we fail to manage our growth effectively, we may be unable to execute our business plan, maintain high levels of service or address competitive challenges adequately.

Our head count and operations have grown substantially. For example, we had 1,157 full-time employees as of December 31, 2015, as compared with 785 as of December 31, 2014. We opened our first international office in Dublin, Ireland in January 2013, a second international office in Sydney, Australia in August 2014, and a third international office in Singapore in October 2015. We have announced our intention to open an international office in Japan in the second half of 2016. This growth has placed, and will continue to place, a significant strain on our management, administrative, operational and financial infrastructure. We anticipate further growth will be required to address increases in our product offerings and continued expansion. Our success will depend in part upon our ability to recruit, hire, train, manage and integrate a significant number of qualified managers, technical personnel and employees in specialized roles within our company, including in technology, sales and marketing. If our new employees perform poorly, or if we are unsuccessful in recruiting, hiring, training, managing and integrating these new employees, or retaining these or our existing employees, our business may suffer.

In addition, to manage the expected continued growth of our head count, operations and geographic expansion, we will need to continue to improve our information technology infrastructure, operational, financial and management systems and procedures. Our anticipated additional head count and capital investments will increase our costs, which will make it more difficult for us to address any future revenue shortfalls by reducing expenses in the short term. If we fail to successfully manage our growth, we will be unable

15

---

to successfully execute our business plan, which could have a negative impact on our business, results of operations or financial condition.

Failure to effectively develop and expand our marketing and sales capabilities could harm our ability to increase our customer base and achieve broader market acceptance of our platform.

To increase total customers and achieve broader market acceptance of our inbound platform, we will need to expand our marketing and sales operations, including our sales force and third-party channel partners. We will continue to dedicate significant resources to inbound sales and marketing programs. The effectiveness of our inbound sales and marketing and third-party channel partners has varied over time and may vary in the future and depends on our ability to maintain and improve our inbound platform. All of these efforts will require us to invest significant financial and other resources. Our business will be seriously harmed if our efforts do not generate a correspondingly significant increase in revenue. We may not achieve anticipated revenue growth from expanding our sales force if we are unable to hire, develop and retain talented sales personnel, if our new sales personnel are unable to achieve desired productivity levels in a reasonable period of time or if our sales and marketing programs are not effective.

The rate of growth of our business depends on the continued participation and level of service of our marketing agency partners.

We rely on our marketing agency partners to provide certain services to our customers, as well as pursue sales of our inbound platform to customers. Marketing agency partners and customers referred to us by our marketing agency partners represented approximately 49% of our customers as of December 31, 2015, and 39% of our revenue for the year ended December 31, 2015. To the extent we do not attract new marketing agency partners, or existing or new marketing agency partners do not refer a growing number of customers to us, our revenue and operating results would be harmed. In addition, if our marketing agency partners do not continue to provide services to our customers, we would be required to provide such services ourselves either by expanding our internal team or engaging other third-party providers, which would increase our operating costs.

If we cannot maintain our company culture as we grow, we could lose the innovation, teamwork, passion and focus on execution that we believe contribute to our success and our business may be harmed.

We believe that a critical component to our success has been our company culture, which is based on transparency and personal autonomy. We have invested substantial time and resources in building our team within this company culture. Any failure to preserve our culture could negatively affect our ability to retain and recruit personnel and to effectively focus on and pursue our corporate objectives. As we grow as and continue to develop the infrastructure of a public company, we may find it difficult to maintain these important aspects of our company culture. If we fail to maintain our company culture, our business may be adversely impacted.

If we fail to maintain our inbound thought leadership position, our business may suffer.

We believe that maintaining our thought leadership position in inbound marketing, sales and services is an important element in attracting new customers. We devote significant resources to develop and maintain our thought leadership position, with a focus on identifying and interpreting emerging trends in the inbound experience, shaping and guiding industry dialog and creating and sharing the best inbound practices. Our activities related to developing and maintaining our thought leadership may not yield increased revenue, and even if they do, any increased revenue may not offset the expenses we incurred in such effort. We rely upon the continued services of our management and employees with domain expertise with inbound marketing, sales and services, and the loss of any key employees in this area could harm our competitive position and reputation. If we fail to successfully grow and maintain our thought leadership position, we may not attract enough new customers or retain our existing customers, and our business could suffer.

If we fail to further enhance our brand and maintain our existing strong brand awareness, our ability to expand our customer base will be impaired and our financial condition may suffer.

We believe that our development of the HubSpot brand is critical to achieving widespread awareness of our existing and future inbound experience solutions, and, as a result, is important to attracting new customers and maintaining existing customers. In the past, our efforts to build our brand have involved significant expenses, and we believe that this investment has resulted in strong brand recognition in the business-to-business, or B2B, market. Successful promotion and maintenance of our brands will depend largely on the effectiveness of our marketing efforts and on our ability to provide a reliable and useful inbound platform at competitive prices. Brand promotion activities may not yield increased revenue, and even if they do, any increased revenue may not offset the expenses we incurred in building our brand. If we fail to successfully promote and maintain our brand, our business could suffer.

16

---

If we fail to adapt and respond effectively to rapidly changing technology, evolving industry standards and changing customer needs or requirements, our inbound platform may become less competitive.

Our future success depends on our ability to adapt and innovate our inbound platform. To attract new customers and increase revenue from existing customers, we need to continue to enhance and improve our offerings to meet customer needs at prices that our customers are willing to pay. Such efforts will require adding new functionality and responding to technological advancements, which will increase our research and development costs. If we are unable to develop new applications that address our customers’ needs, or to enhance and improve our platform in a timely manner, we may not be able to maintain or increase market acceptance of our platform. Our ability to grow is also subject to the risk of future disruptive technologies. Access and use of our inbound platform is provided via the cloud, which, itself, was disruptive to the previous enterprise software model. If new technologies emerge that are able to deliver inbound marketing software and related applications at lower prices, more efficiently, more conveniently or more securely, such technologies could adversely affect our ability to compete.

We rely on our management team and other key employees, and the loss of one or more key employees could harm our business.

Our success and future growth depend upon the continued services of our management team, including our co-founders, Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, and other key employees in the areas of research and development, marketing, sales, services and general and administrative functions. From time to time, there may be changes in our management team resulting from the hiring or departure of executives, which could disrupt our business. We also are dependent on the continued service of our existing software engineers and information technology personnel because of the complexity of our platform, technologies and infrastructure. We may terminate any employee’s employment at any time, with or without cause, and any employee may resign at any time, with or without cause. We do not have employment agreements with any of our key personnel. The loss of one or more of our key employees could harm our business.

The failure to attract and retain additional qualified personnel could prevent us from executing our business strategy.

To execute our business strategy, we must attract and retain highly qualified personnel. In particular, we compete with many other companies for software developers with high levels of experience in designing, developing and managing cloud-based software, as well as for skilled information technology, marketing, sales and operations professionals, and we may not be successful in attracting and retaining the professionals we need. Also, inbound sales, marketing and services domain experts are very important to our success and are difficult to replace. We have from time to time in the past experienced, and we expect to continue to experience in the future, difficulty in hiring and difficulty in retaining highly skilled employees with appropriate qualifications. In particular, we have experienced a competitive hiring environment in the Greater Boston area, where we are headquartered. Many of the companies with which we compete for experienced personnel have greater resources than we do. In addition, in making employment decisions, particularly in the software industry, job candidates often consider the value of the stock options or other equity incentives they are to receive in connection with their employment. If the price of our stock declines, or experiences significant volatility, our ability to attract or retain key employees will be adversely affected. If we fail to attract new personnel or fail to retain and motivate our current personnel, our growth prospects could be severely harmed.

If we fail to offer high-quality customer support, our business and reputation may suffer.

High-quality education, training and customer support are important for the successful marketing, sale and use of our inbound platform and for the renewal of existing customers. Providing this education, training and support requires that our personnel who manage our online training resource, HubSpot Academy, or provide customer support have specific inbound experience domain knowledge and expertise, making it more difficult for us to hire qualified personnel and to scale up our support operations. The importance of high-quality customer support will increase as we expand our business and pursue new customers. If we do not help our customers use multiple applications within our inbound platform and provide effective ongoing support, our ability to sell additional functionality and services to, or to retain, existing customers may suffer and our reputation with existing or potential customers may be harmed.

We may not be able to scale our business quickly enough to meet our customers’ growing needs and if we are not able to grow efficiently, our operating results could be harmed.

As usage of our inbound platform grows and as customers use our platform for additional inbound applications, such as sales and services, we will need to devote additional resources to improving our application architecture, integrating with third-party systems and maintaining infrastructure performance. In addition, we will need to appropriately scale our internal business systems and our services organization, including customer support and professional services, to serve our growing customer base, particularly as our customer demographics change over time. Any failure of or delay in these efforts could cause impaired system performance and reduced customer satisfaction. These issues could reduce the attractiveness of our inbound platform to customers, resulting in decreased sales to new customers, lower renewal rates by existing customers, the issuance of service credits, or requested

17

---

refunds, which could impede our revenue growth and harm our reputation. Even if we are able to upgrade our systems and expand our staff, any such expansion will be expensive and complex, requiring management’s time and attention. We could also face inefficiencies or operational failures as a result of our efforts to scale our infrastructure. Moreover, there are inherent risks associated with upgrading, improving and expanding our information technology systems. We cannot be sure that the expansion and improvements to our infrastructure and systems will be fully or effectively implemented on a timely basis, if at all. These efforts may reduce revenue and our margins and adversely affect our financial results.

Our ability to introduce new products and features is dependent on adequate research and development resources. If we do not adequately fund our research and development efforts, we may not be able to compete effectively and our business and operating results may be harmed.

To remain competitive, we must continue to develop new product offerings, applications, features and enhancements to our existing inbound platform. Maintaining adequate research and development personnel and resources to meet the demands of the market is essential. If we are unable to develop our platform internally due to certain constraints, such as high employee turnover, lack of management ability or a lack of other research and development resources, we may miss market opportunities. Further, many of our competitors expend a considerably greater amount of funds on their research and development programs, and those that do not may be acquired by larger companies that would allocate greater resources to our competitors’ research and development programs. Our failure to maintain adequate research and development resources or to compete effectively with the research and development programs of our competitors could materially adversely affect our business.

Changes in the sizes or types of businesses that purchase our platform or in the applications within our inbound platform purchased or used by our customers could negatively affect our operating results.

Our strategy is to sell subscriptions to our inbound platform to mid-sized businesses, but we have sold and will continue to sell to organizations ranging from small businesses to enterprises. Our gross margins can vary depending on numerous factors related to the implementation and use of our inbound platform, including the sophistication and intensity of our customers’ use of our platform and the level of professional services and support required by a customer. Sales to enterprise customers may entail longer sales cycles and more significant selling efforts. Selling to small businesses may involve greater credit risk and uncertainty. If there are changes in the mix of businesses that purchase our platform or the mix of the product plans purchased by our customers, our gross margins could decrease and our operating results could be adversely affected.

We have in the past completed acquisitions and may acquire or invest in other companies or technologies in the future, which could divert management’s attention, fail to meet our expectations, result in additional dilution to our stockholders, increase expenses, disrupt our operations or harm our operating results.

We have in the past acquired, and we may in the future acquire or invest in, businesses, products or technologies that we believe could complement or expand our platform, enhance our technical capabilities or otherwise offer growth opportunities. For example, in June 2011, we acquired Performable, a marketing automation provider. We may not be able to fully realize the anticipated benefits of these or any future acquisitions. The pursuit of potential acquisitions may divert the attention of management and cause us to incur various expenses related to identifying, investigating and pursuing suitable acquisitions, whether or not they are consummated.

There are inherent risks in integrating and managing acquisitions. If we acquire additional businesses, we may not be able to assimilate or integrate the acquired personnel, operations and technologies successfully or effectively manage the combined business following the acquisition and our management may be distracted from operating our business. We also may not achieve the anticipated benefits from the acquired business due to a number of factors, including: unanticipated costs or liabilities associated with the acquisition; incurrence of acquisition-related costs, which would be recognized as a current period expense; inability to generate sufficient revenue to offset acquisition or investment costs; the inability to maintain relationships with customers and partners of the acquired business; the difficulty of incorporating acquired technology and rights into our platform and of maintaining quality and security standards consistent with our brand; delays in customer purchases due to uncertainty related to any acquisition; the need to integrate or implement additional controls, procedures and policies; challenges caused by distance, language and cultural differences; harm to our existing business relationships with business partners and customers as a result of the acquisition; the potential loss of key employees; use of resources that are needed in other parts of our business and diversion of management and employee resources; the inability to recognize acquired deferred revenue in accordance with our revenue recognition policies; and use of substantial portions of our available cash or the incurrence of debt to consummate the acquisition. Acquisitions also increase the risk of unforeseen legal liability, including for potential violations of applicable law or industry rules and regulations, arising from prior or ongoing acts or omissions by the acquired businesses which are not discovered by due diligence during the acquisition process. Generally, if an acquired business fails to meet our expectations, our operating results, business and financial condition may suffer. Acquisitions could also result in dilutive issuances of equity securities or the incurrence of debt, which could adversely affect our business, results of operations or financial condition.

18

---

In addition, a significant portion of the purchase price of companies we acquire may be allocated to goodwill and other intangible assets, which must be assessed for impairment at least annually. If our acquisitions do not ultimately yield expected returns, we may be required to make charges to our operating results based on our impairment assessment process, which could harm our results of operations.

Because our long-term growth strategy involves further expansion of our sales to customers outside the United States, our business will be susceptible to risks associated with international operations.

A component of our growth strategy involves the further expansion of our operations and customer base internationally. As of December 31, 2015, approximately 27% of our customers were located outside of the United States and these customers generated approximately 24 % of our total revenue for the year ended December 31, 2015. We opened our first international office in Dublin, Ireland in January 2013 and we opened additional international offices in Sydney, Australia in August 2014, and in Singapore in October 2015. We have announced our intention to open an additional international office in Japan in the second half of 2016. These international offices focus primarily on sales, professional services and support. We also have a development team in Dublin, Ireland. Our current international operations and future initiatives will involve a variety of risks, including:

Our limited experience in operating our business internationally increases the risk that any potential future expansion efforts that we may undertake will not be successful. If we invest substantial time and resources to expand our international operations and are unable to do so successfully and in a timely manner, our business and operating results will suffer. We continue to implement policies and procedures to facilitate our compliance with U.S. laws and regulations applicable to or arising from our international business. Inadequacies in our past or current compliance practices may increase the risk of inadvertent violations of such laws and regulations, which could lead to financial and other penalties that could damage our reputation and impose costs on us.

Interruptions or delays in service from our third-party data center providers could impair our ability to deliver our platform to our customers, resulting in customer dissatisfaction, damage to our reputation, loss of customers, limited growth and reduction in revenue.

We currently serve the majority of our platform functions from third-party data center hosting facilities operated by Amazon Web Services and located in northern Virginia. In addition, we serve ancillary functions for our customers from third-party data center hosting facilities operated by Rackspace located in Dallas, Texas, with a backup facility in Chicago, Illinois. Our operations depend, in part, on our third-party facility providers’ abilities to protect these facilities against damage or interruption from natural disasters, power or telecommunications failures, criminal acts and similar events. In the event that any of our third-party facilities

19

---

arrangements is terminated, or if there is a lapse of service or damage to a facility, we could experience interruptions in our platform as well as delays and additional expenses in arranging new facilities and services.

Any damage to, or failure of, the systems of our third-party providers could result in interruptions to our platform. Despite precautions taken at our data centers, the occurrence of spikes in usage volume, a natural disaster, an act of terrorism, vandalism or sabotage, a decision to close a facility without adequate notice, or other unanticipated problems at a facility could result in lengthy interruptions in the availability of our on-demand software. Even with current and planned disaster recovery arrangements, our business could be harmed. Also, in the event of damage or interruption, our insurance policies may not adequately compensate us for any losses that we may incur. These factors in turn could further reduce our revenue, subject us to liability and cause us to issue credits or cause customers to fail to renew their subscriptions, any of which could materially adversely affect our business.

We are dependent on the continued availability of third-party data hosting and transmission services.

A significant portion of our operating cost is from our third-party data hosting and transmission services. If the costs for such services increase due to vendor consolidation, regulation, contract renegotiation, or otherwise, we may not be able to increase the fees for our inbound platform or services to cover the changes. As a result, our operating results may be significantly worse than forecasted.

If we do not or cannot maintain the compatibility of our inbound platform with third-party applications that our customers use in their businesses, our revenue will decline.

A significant percentage of our customers choose to integrate our platform with certain capabilities provided by third-party application providers using application programming interfaces, or APIs, published by these providers. The functionality and popularity of our inbound platform depends, in part, on our ability to integrate our platform with third-party applications and platforms, including CRM, CMS, e-commerce, call center, analytics and social media sites that our customers use and from which they obtain data. Third-party providers of applications and APIs may change the features of their applications and platforms, restrict our access to their applications and platforms or alter the terms governing use of their applications and APIs and access to those applications and platforms in an adverse manner. Such changes could functionally limit or terminate our ability to use these third-party applications and platforms in conjunction with our platform, which could negatively impact our offerings and harm our business. If we fail to integrate our platform with new third-party applications and platforms that our customers use for marketing, sales or services purposes, we may not be able to offer the functionality that our customers need, which would negatively impact our ability to generate revenue and adversely impact our business.

We rely on data provided by third parties, the loss of which could limit the functionality of our platform and disrupt our business.

Select functionality of our inbound platform depends on our ability to deliver data, including search engine results and social media updates, provided by unaffiliated third parties, such as Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and Twitter. Some of this data is provided to us pursuant to third-party data sharing policies and terms of use, under data sharing agreements by third-party providers or by customer consent. In the future, any of these third parties could change its data sharing policies, including making them more restrictive, or alter its algorithms that determine the placement, display, and accessibility of search results and social media updates, any of which could result in the loss of, or significant impairment to, our ability to collect and provide useful data to our customers. These third parties could also interpret our, or our service providers’, data collection policies or practices as being inconsistent with their policies, which could result in the loss of our ability to collect this data for our customers. Any such changes could impair our ability to deliver data to our customers and could adversely impact select functionality of our platform, impairing the return on investment that our customers derive from using our solution, as well as adversely affecting our business and our ability to generate revenue.

Privacy concerns and end users’ acceptance of Internet behavior tracking may limit the applicability, use and adoption of our inbound platform.

Privacy concerns may cause end users to resist providing the personal data necessary to allow our customers to use our platform effectively. We have implemented various features intended to enable our customers to better protect end user privacy, but these measures may not alleviate all potential privacy concerns and threats. Even the perception of privacy concerns, whether or not valid, may inhibit market adoption of our platform, especially in certain industries that rely on sensitive personal information. Privacy advocacy groups and the technology and other industries are considering various new, additional or different self-regulatory standards that may place additional burdens on us. The costs of compliance with, and other burdens imposed by these groups’ policies and actions may limit the use and adoption of our inbound platform and reduce overall demand for it, or lead to significant fines, penalties or liabilities for any noncompliance or loss of any such action.

20

---

We are subject to governmental regulation and other legal obligations, particularly related to privacy, data protection and information security, and our actual or perceived failure to comply with such obligations could harm our business. Compliance with such laws could also impair our efforts to maintain and expand our customer base, and thereby decrease our revenue.

Our handling of data is subject to a variety of laws and regulations, including regulation by various government agencies, including the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, or FTC, and various state, local and foreign agencies. We collect personally identifiable information and other data from our customers and leads. We also handle personally identifiable information about our customers’ customers. We use this information to provide services to our customers, to support, expand and improve our business. We may also share customers’ personally identifiable information with third parties as authorized by the customer or as described in our privacy policy.

The U.S. federal and various state and foreign governments have adopted or proposed limitations on the collection, distribution, use and storage of personal information of individuals. In the United States, the FTC and many state attorneys general are applying federal and state consumer protection laws as imposing standards for the online collection, use and dissemination of data. However, these obligations may be interpreted and applied in a manner that is inconsistent from one jurisdiction to another and may conflict with other requirements or our practices. Any failure or perceived failure by us to comply with privacy or security laws, policies, legal obligations or industry standards or any security incident that results in the unauthorized release or transfer of personally identifiable information or other customer data may result in governmental enforcement actions, litigation, fines and penalties and/or adverse publicity, and could cause our customers to lose trust in us, which could have an adverse effect on our reputation and business.

Some proposed laws or regulations concerning privacy, data protection and information security are in their early stages, and we cannot yet determine the impact these laws and regulations, if implemented, may have on our business. Such laws and regulations may require companies to implement privacy and security policies, permit users to access, correct and delete personal information stored or maintained by such companies, inform individuals of security breaches that affect their personal information, and, in some cases, obtain individuals’ consent to use personal information for certain purposes. In addition, a foreign government could require that any personal information collected in a country not be disseminated outside of that country, and we are not currently equipped to comply with such a requirement. Other proposed legislation could, if enacted, impose additional requirements and prohibit the use of certain technologies that track individuals’ activities on web pages or that record when individuals click through to an internet address contained in an email message. Such laws and regulations could require us to change features of our platform or restrict our customers’ ability to collect and use email addresses, page viewing data and personal information, which may reduce demand for our platform. Our failure to comply with federal, state and international data privacy laws and regulations could harm our ability to successfully operate our business and pursue our business goals.

In addition, several foreign countries and governmental bodies, including the European Union and Canada, have regulations dealing with the collection and use of personal information obtained from their residents, which are often more restrictive than those in the United States. Laws and regulations in these jurisdictions apply broadly to the collection, use, storage, disclosure and security of personal information that identifies or may be used to identify an individual, such as names, email addresses and in some jurisdictions, Internet Protocol, or IP, addresses. Such regulations and laws may be modified and new laws may be enacted in the future. Within the European Union, legislators are currently considering a revision to the 1995 European Union Data Protection Directive that would include more stringent operational requirements for processors and controllers of personal information and that would impose significant penalties for non-compliance.

We have in the past relied on adherence to the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Safe Harbor Privacy Principles and compliance with the U.S.-EU and U.S.-Swiss Safe Harbor Frameworks, which established a means for legitimating the transfer of personally identifiable information by U.S. companies doing business in Europe from the European Economic Area, or EEA, to the U.S. As a result of the October 6, 2015 European Union Court of Justice, or ECJ, opinion in the Schrems v. Data Protection Commissioner case, the U.S. – EU Safe Harbor Framework is no longer deemed to be a valid method of compliance with restrictions set forth in the Data Protection Directive (and member states’ implementations thereof) regarding the transfer of data outside of the EEA. In light of the ECJ opinion, we are offering other methods to our customers to enable compliant data transfers from the EEA to the U.S.

We may be unsuccessful in establishing a means for the transfer of data from the EEA that is acceptable to our customers.

In addition, data protection regulation is an area of increased focus and changing requirements. Data protection regulations are currently being reviewed and are expected to change in the future. There is no assurance that we will be able to meet new requirements that may be imposed on the transfer of personally identifiable information from the EU to the US without incurring substantial expense or at all. We may experience reluctance or refusal by European or multi-national customers to purchase or continue to use our services due to concerns regarding their data protection obligations. We may find it necessary to establish additional systems to maintain EU-origin data in the EEA, which may involve substantial expense and distraction from other aspects of our business. In addition, if our privacy or data security measures fail to comply with current or future laws and regulations, we may be subject to claims, legal proceedings or other actions by individuals or governmental authorities based on privacy or data protection regulations and our commitments to customers or others, as well as negative publicity and a potential loss of

21

---

business. Moreover, if future laws and regulations limit our subscribers’ ability to use and share personal information or our ability to store, process and share personal information, demand for our solutions could decrease, our costs could increase, and our business, results of operations and financial condition could be harmed.

New interpretations of existing laws, regulations or standards could require us to incur additional costs and restrict our business operations, and any failure by us to comply with applicable requirements may result in governmental enforcement actions, litigation, fines and penalties or adverse publicity, which could have an adverse effect on our reputation and business.

If our or our customers’ security measures are compromised or unauthorized access to data of our customers or their customers is otherwise obtained, our inbound platform may be perceived as not being secure, our customers may be harmed and may curtail or cease their use of our platform, our reputation may be damaged and we may incur significant liabilities.

Our operations involve the storage and transmission of data of our customers and their customers, including personally identifiable information. Our storage is typically the sole source of record for portions of our customers’ businesses and end user data, such as initial contact information and online interactions. Security incidents could result in unauthorized access to, loss of or unauthorized disclosure of this information, litigation, indemnity obligations and other possible liabilities, as well as negative publicity, which could damage our reputation, impair our sales and harm our customers and our business. Cyber-attacks and other malicious Internet-based activity continue to increase generally, and cloud-based platform providers of marketing services have been targeted. If our security measures are compromised as a result of third-party action, employee or customer error, malfeasance, stolen or fraudulently obtained log-in credentials or otherwise, our reputation could be damaged, our business may be harmed and we could incur significant liability. If third parties with whom we work, such as vendors or developers, violate applicable laws or our security policies, such violations may also put our customers’ information at risk and could in turn have an adverse effect on our business. In addition, if the security measures of our customers are compromised, even without any actual compromise of our own systems, we may face negative publicity or reputational harm if our customers or anyone else incorrectly attributes the blame for such security breaches to us or our systems. We may be unable to anticipate or prevent techniques used to obtain unauthorized access or to sabotage systems because they change frequently and generally are not detected until after an incident has occurred. As we increase our customer base and our brand becomes more widely known and recognized, we may become more of a target for third parties seeking to compromise our security systems or gain unauthorized access to our customers’ data. Additionally, we provide extensive access to our database, which stores our customer data, to our development team to facilitate our rapid pace of product development. If such access or our own operations cause the loss, damage or destruction of our customers’ business data, their sales, lead generation, support and other business operations may be permanently harmed. As a result, our customers may bring claims against us for lost profits and other damages.

Many governments have enacted laws requiring companies to notify individuals of data security incidents or unauthorized transfers involving certain types of personal data. In addition, some of our customers contractually require notification of any data security compromise. Security compromises experienced by our competitors, by our customers or by us may lead to public disclosures, which may lead to widespread negative publicity. Any security compromise in our industry, whether actual or perceived, could harm our reputation, erode customer confidence in the effectiveness of our security measures, negatively impact our ability to attract new customers, cause existing customers to elect not to renew their subscriptions or subject us to third-party lawsuits, regulatory fines or other action or liability, which could materially and adversely affect our business and operating results.

There can be no assurance that any limitations of liability provisions in our contracts for a security breach would be enforceable or adequate or would otherwise protect us from any such liabilities or damages with respect to any particular claim. We also cannot be sure that our existing general liability insurance coverage and coverage for errors or omissions will continue to be available on acceptable terms or will be available in sufficient amounts to cover one or more large claims, or that the insurer will not deny coverage as to any future claim. The successful assertion of one or more large claims against us that exceed available insurance coverage, or the occurrence of changes in our insurance policies, including premium increases or the imposition of large deductible or co-insurance requirements, could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition and operating results.

If our inbound platform fails due to defects or similar problems, and if we fail to correct any defect or other software problems, we could lose customers, become subject to service performance or warranty claims or incur significant costs.

Our platform and its underlying infrastructure are inherently complex and may contain material defects or errors. We release modifications, updates, bug fixes and other changes to our software several times per day, without traditional human-performed quality control reviews for each release. We have from time to time found defects in our software and may discover additional defects in the future. We may not be able to detect and correct defects or errors before customers begin to use our platform or its applications. Consequently, we or our customers may discover defects or errors after our platform has been implemented. These defects or errors could also cause inaccuracies in the data we collect and process for our customers, or even the loss, damage or inadvertent release of such confidential data. We implement bug fixes and upgrades as part of our regular system maintenance, which may lead to system downtime. Even if we are able to implement the bug fixes and upgrades in a timely manner, any history of defects or inaccuracies

22

---

in the data we collect for our customers, or the loss, damage or inadvertent release of confidential data could cause our reputation to be harmed, and customers may elect not to purchase or renew their agreements with us and subject us to service performance credits, warranty claims or increased insurance costs. The costs associated with any material defects or errors in our platform or other performance problems may be substantial and could materially adversely affect our operating results.

Risks Related to Intellectual Property

Our business may suffer if it is alleged or determined that our technology infringes the intellectual property rights of others.

The software industry is characterized by the existence of a large number of patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets and other intellectual and proprietary rights. Companies in the software industry, including those in marketing software, are often required to defend against litigation claims based on allegations of infringement or other violations of intellectual property rights. Many of our competitors and other industry participants have been issued patents and/or have filed patent applications and may assert patent or other intellectual property rights within the industry. Moreover, in recent years, individuals and groups that are non-practicing entities, commonly referred to as “patent trolls,” have purchased patents and other intellectual property assets for the purpose of making claims of infringement in order to extract settlements. From time to time, we may receive threatening letters or notices or may be the subject of claims that our services and/or platform and underlying technology infringe or violate the intellectual property rights of others. Responding to such claims, regardless of their merit, can be time consuming, costly to defend in litigation, divert management’s attention and resources, damage our reputation and brand and cause us to incur significant expenses. Our technologies may not be able to withstand any third-party claims or rights against their use. Claims of intellectual property infringement might require us to redesign our application, delay releases, enter into costly settlement or license agreements or pay costly damage awards, or face a temporary or permanent injunction prohibiting us from marketing or selling our platform. If we cannot or do not license the infringed technology on reasonable terms or at all, or substitute similar technology from another source, our revenue and operating results could be adversely impacted. Additionally, our customers may not purchase our inbound platform if they are concerned that they may infringe third-party intellectual property rights. The occurrence of any of these events may have a material adverse effect on our business.

In our subscription agreements with our customers, we generally do not agree to indemnify our customers against any losses or costs incurred in connection with claims by a third party alleging that a customer’s use of our services or platform infringes the intellectual property rights of the third party. There can be no assurance, however, that customers will not assert a common law indemnity claim or that any existing limitations of liability provisions in our contracts would be enforceable or adequate, or would otherwise protect us from any such liabilities or damages with respect to any particular claim. Our customers who are accused of intellectual property infringement may in the future seek indemnification from us under common law or other legal theories. If such claims are successful, or if we are required to indemnify or defend our customers from these or other claims, these matters could be disruptive to our business and management and have a material adverse effect on our business, operating results and financial condition.

If we fail to adequately protect our proprietary rights, in the United States and abroad, our competitive position could be impaired and we may lose valuable assets, experience reduced revenue and incur costly litigation to protect our rights.

Our success is dependent, in part, upon protecting our proprietary technology. We rely on a combination of copyrights, trademarks, service marks, trade secret laws and contractual restrictions to establish and protect our proprietary rights in our products and services. However, the steps we take to protect our intellectual property may be inadequate. We will not be able to protect our intellectual property if we are unable to enforce our rights or if we do not detect unauthorized use of our intellectual property. Any of our trademarks or other intellectual property rights may be challenged by others or invalidated through administrative process or litigation. Furthermore, legal standards relating to the validity, enforceability and scope of protection of intellectual property rights are uncertain. Despite our precautions, it may be possible for unauthorized third parties to copy our technology and use information that we regard as proprietary to create products and services that compete with ours. Some license provisions protecting against unauthorized use, copying, transfer and disclosure of our offerings may be unenforceable under the laws of certain jurisdictions and foreign countries. In addition, the laws of some countries do not protect proprietary rights to the same extent as the laws of the United States. To the extent we expand our international activities, our exposure to unauthorized copying and use of our technology and proprietary information may increase.

We enter into confidentiality and invention assignment agreements with our employees and consultants and enter into confidentiality agreements with the parties with whom we have strategic relationships and business alliances. No assurance can be given that these agreements will be effective in controlling access to and distribution of our products and proprietary information. Further, these agreements may not prevent our competitors from independently developing technologies that are substantially equivalent or superior to our platform and offerings.

23

---

We may be required to spend significant resources to monitor and protect our intellectual property rights. Litigation may be necessary in the future to enforce our intellectual property rights and to protect our trade secrets. Such litigation could be costly, time consuming and distracting to management and could result in the impairment or loss of portions of our intellectual property. Furthermore, our efforts to enforce our intellectual property rights may be met with defenses, counterclaims and countersuits attacking the validity and enforceability of our intellectual property rights. Our inability to protect our proprietary technology against unauthorized copying or use, as well as any costly litigation, could delay further sales or the implementation of our platform and offerings, impair the functionality of our platform and offerings, delay introductions of new features or enhancements, result in our substituting inferior or more costly technologies into our platform and offerings, or injure our reputation.

Our use of “open source” software could negatively affect our ability to offer our platform and subject us to possible litigation.

A substantial portion of our cloud-based platform incorporates so-called “open source” software, and we may incorporate additional open source software in the future. Open source software is generally freely accessible, usable and modifiable. Certain open source licenses may, in certain circumstances, require us to offer the components of our platform that incorporate the open source software for no cost, that we make available source code for modifications or derivative works we create based upon, incorporating or using the open source software and that we license such modifications or derivative works under the terms of the particular open source license. If an author or other third party that distributes open source software we use were to allege that we had not complied with the conditions of one or more of these licenses, we could be required to incur significant legal expenses defending against such allegations and could be subject to significant damages, including being enjoined from the offering of the components of our platform that contained the open source software and being required to comply with the foregoing conditions, which could disrupt our ability to offer the affected software. We could also be subject to suits by parties claiming ownership of what we believe to be open source software. Litigation could be costly for us to defend, have a negative effect on our operating results and financial condition and require us to devote additional research and development resources to change our products.

Risks Related to Government Regulation and Taxation

We could face liability, or our reputation might be harmed, as a result of the activities of our customers, the content of their websites or the data they store on our servers.

As a provider of a cloud-based inbound marketing and sales software platform, we may be subject to potential liability for the activities of our customers on or in connection with the data they store on our servers. Although our customer terms of use prohibit illegal use of our services by our customers and permit us to take down websites or take other appropriate actions for illegal use, customers may nonetheless engage in prohibited activities or upload or store content with us in violation of applicable law or the customer’s own policies, which could subject us to liability or harm our reputation.

Several U.S. federal statutes may apply to us with respect to various customer activities:

24

---

Although these statutes and case law in the United States have generally shielded us from liability for customer activities to date, court rulings in pending or future litigation may narrow the scope of protection afforded us under these laws. In addition, laws governing these activities are unsettled in many international jurisdictions, or may prove difficult or impossible for us to comply with in some international jurisdictions. Also, notwithstanding the exculpatory language of these bodies of law, we may become involved in complaints and lawsuits which, even if ultimately resolved in our favor, add cost to our doing business and may divert management’s time and attention. Finally, other existing bodies of law, including the criminal laws of various states, may be deemed to apply or new statutes or regulations may be adopted in the future, any of which could expose us to further liability and increase our costs of doing business.

We may be subject to additional obligations to collect and remit sales tax and other taxes, and we may be subject to tax liability for past sales, which could harm our business.

State, local and foreign jurisdictions have differing rules and regulations governing sales, use, value added and other taxes, and these rules and regulations are subject to varying interpretations that may change over time. In particular, the applicability of such taxes to our inbound platform in various jurisdictions is unclear. Further, these jurisdictions’ rules regarding tax nexus are complex and vary significantly. As a result, we could face the possibility of tax assessments and audits, and our liability for these taxes and associated penalties could exceed our original estimates. A successful assertion that we should be collecting additional sales, use, value added or other taxes in those jurisdictions where we have not historically done so and do not accrue for such taxes could result in substantial tax liabilities and related penalties for past sales, discourage customers from purchasing our application or otherwise harm our business and operating results.

Changes in tax laws or regulations that are applied adversely to us or our customers could increase the costs of our inbound platform and adversely impact our business.

New income, sales, use or other tax laws, statutes, rules, regulations or ordinances could be enacted at any time. Any new taxes could adversely affect our domestic and international business operations, and our business and financial performance. Further, existing tax laws, statutes, rules, regulations or ordinances could be interpreted, changed, modified or applied adversely to us. These events could require us or our customers to pay additional tax amounts on a prospective or retroactive basis, as well as require us or our customers to pay fines and/or penalties and interest for past amounts deemed to be due. If we raise our prices to offset the costs of these changes, existing and potential future customers may elect not to continue or purchase our inbound platform in the future. Additionally, new, changed, modified or newly interpreted or applied tax laws could increase our customers’ and our compliance, operating and other costs, as well as the costs of our platform. Any or all of these events could adversely impact our business and financial performance.

We are a multinational organization faced with increasingly complex tax issues in many jurisdictions, and we could be obligated to pay additional taxes in various jurisdictions.

As a multinational organization, we may be subject to taxation in several jurisdictions around the world with increasingly complex tax laws, the application of which can be uncertain. The amount of taxes we pay in these jurisdictions could increase substantially as a result of changes in the applicable tax principles, including increased tax rates, new tax laws or revised interpretations of existing tax laws and precedents, which could have a material adverse effect on our liquidity and operating results. In addition, the authorities in these jurisdictions could review our tax returns and impose additional tax, interest and penalties, and the authorities could claim that various withholding requirements apply to us or our subsidiaries or assert that benefits of tax treaties are not available to us or our subsidiaries, any of which could have a material impact on us and the results of our operations.

25

---

Failure to comply with laws and regulations could harm our business.

Our business is subject to regulation by various federal, state, local and foreign governmental agencies, including agencies responsible for monitoring and enforcing employment and labor laws, workplace safety, environmental laws, consumer protection laws, anti-bribery laws, import/export controls, federal securities laws and tax laws and regulations. In certain jurisdictions, these regulatory requirements may be more stringent than those in the United States. Noncompliance with applicable regulations or requirements could subject us to investigations, sanctions, mandatory recalls, enforcement actions, disgorgement of profits, fines, damages, civil and criminal penalties or injunctions.

We may not be able to utilize a significant portion of our net operating loss carryforwards, which could adversely affect our profitability.

As of December 31, 2015, we had federal and state net operating loss carryforwards due to prior period losses, which, if not utilized, will begin to expire in 2027 for federal purposes and began to expire in 2014 for state purposes. These net operating loss carryforwards could expire unused and be unavailable to offset future income tax liabilities, which could adversely affect our profitability. In addition, under Section 382 of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986, as amended, which we refer to as the Code, our ability to utilize net operating loss carryforwards or other tax attributes, such as research tax credits, in any taxable year may be further limited if we experience an ownership change. A Section 382 ownership change generally occurs if one or more stockholders or groups of stockholders who own at least 5% of our stock increase their ownership by more than 50 percentage points over their lowest ownership percentage within a rolling three-year period. Similar rules may apply under state tax laws. Future issuances of our stock could cause an ownership change. It is possible that an ownership change in connection with a future offering, or any future ownership change, could have a material effect on the use of our net operating loss carryforwards or other tax attributes, which could adversely affect our profitability.

The standards that private entities use to regulate the use of email have in the past interfered with, and may in the future interfere with, the effectiveness of our inbound platform and our ability to conduct business.

Our customers rely on email to communicate with their existing or prospective customers. Various private entities attempt to regulate the use of email for commercial solicitation. These entities often advocate standards of conduct or practice that significantly exceed current legal requirements and classify certain email solicitations that comply with current legal requirements as spam. Some of these entities maintain “blacklists” of companies and individuals, and the websites, internet service providers and internet protocol addresses associated with those entities or individuals that do not adhere to those standards of conduct or practices for commercial email solicitations that the blacklisting entity believes are appropriate. If a company’s internet protocol addresses are listed by a blacklisting entity, emails sent from those addresses may be blocked if they are sent to any internet domain or internet address that subscribes to the blacklisting entity’s service or purchases its blacklist.

From time to time, some of our internet protocol addresses may become listed with one or more blacklisting entities due to the messaging practices of our customers. There can be no guarantee that we will be able to successfully remove ourselves from those lists. Blacklisting of this type could interfere with our ability to market our inbound platform and services and communicate with our customers and, because we fulfill email delivery on behalf of our customers, could undermine the effectiveness of our customers’ email marketing campaigns, all of which could have a material negative impact on our business and results of operations.

Existing federal, state and foreign laws regulate Internet tracking software, the senders of commercial emails and text messages, website owners and other activities, and could impact the use of our inbound platform and potentially subject us to regulatory enforcement or private litigation.

Certain aspects of how our customers utilize our platform are subject to regulations in the United States, European Union and elsewhere. In recent years, U.S. and European lawmakers and regulators have expressed concern over the use of third-party cookies or web beacons for online behavioral advertising, and legislation adopted recently in the European Union requires informed consent for the placement of a cookie on a user’s device. Regulation of cookies and web beacons may lead to restrictions on our activities, such as efforts to understand users’ Internet usage. New and expanding “Do Not Track” regulations have recently been enacted or proposed that protect users’ right to choose whether or not to be tracked online. These regulations seek, among other things, to allow end users to have greater control over the use of private information collected online, to forbid the collection or use of online information, to demand a business to comply with their choice to opt out of such collection or use, and to place limits upon the disclosure of information to third party websites. These policies could have a significant impact on the operation of our inbound platform and could impair our attractiveness to customers, which would harm our business.

26

---

Many of our customers and potential customers in the healthcare, financial services and other industries are subject to substantial regulation regarding their collection, use and protection of data and may be the subject of further regulation in the future. Accordingly, these laws or significant new laws or regulations or changes in, or repeals of, existing laws, regulations or governmental policy may change the way these customers do business and may require us to implement additional features or offer additional contractual terms to satisfy customer and regulatory requirements, or could cause the demand for and sales of our inbound platform to decrease and adversely impact our financial results.

In addition, the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003, or the CAN-SPAM Act, establishes certain requirements for commercial email messages and specifies penalties for the transmission of commercial email messages that are intended to deceive the recipient as to source or content. The CAN-SPAM Act, among other things, obligates the sender of commercial emails to provide recipients with the ability to opt out of receiving future commercial emails from the sender. The ability of our customers’ message recipients to opt out of receiving commercial emails may minimize the effectiveness of the email components of our inbound platform. In addition, certain states and foreign jurisdictions, such as Australia, Canada and the European Union, have enacted laws that regulate sending email, and some of these laws are more restrictive than U.S. laws. For example, some foreign laws prohibit sending unsolicited email unless the recipient has provided the sender advance consent to receipt of such email, or in other words has “opted-in” to receiving it. A requirement that recipients opt into, or the ability of recipients to opt out of, receiving commercial emails may minimize the effectiveness of our platform.

While these laws and regulations generally govern our customers’ use of our platform, we may be subject to certain laws as a data processor on behalf of, or as a business associate of, our customers. For example, laws and regulations governing the collection, use and disclosure of personal information include, in the United States, rules and regulations promulgated under the authority of the Federal Trade Commission, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 and state breach notification laws, and internationally, the Data Protection Directive in the European Union and the Federal Data Protection Act in Germany. If we were found to be in violation of any of these laws or regulations as a result of government enforcement or private litigation, we could be subjected to civil and criminal sanctions, including both monetary fines and injunctive action that could force us to change our business practices, all of which could adversely affect our financial performance and significantly harm our reputation and our business.

We are subject to governmental export controls and economic sanctions laws that could impair our ability to compete in international markets and subject us to liability if we are not in full compliance with applicable laws.

Our business activities are subject to various restrictions under U.S. export controls and trade and economic sanctions laws, including the U.S. Commerce Department’s Export Administration Regulations and economic and trade sanctions regulations maintained by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control. If we fail to comply with these laws and regulations, we and certain of our employees could be subject to civil or criminal penalties and reputational harm. Obtaining the necessary authorizations, including any required license, for a particular transaction may be time-consuming, is not guaranteed, and may result in the delay or loss of sales opportunities. Furthermore, U.S. export control laws and economic sanctions laws prohibit certain transactions with U.S. embargoed or sanctioned countries, governments, persons and entities. Although we take precautions to prevent transactions with U.S. sanction targets, the possibility exists that we could inadvertently provide our solutions to persons prohibited by U.S. sanctions. This could result in negative consequences to us, including government investigations, penalties and reputational harm.

Risks Related to Our Operating Results and Financial Condition

We may experience quarterly fluctuations in our operating results due to a number of factors, which makes our future results difficult to predict and could cause our operating results to fall below expectations or our guidance.

Our quarterly operating results have fluctuated in the past and are expected to fluctuate in the future due to a variety of factors, many of which are outside of our control. As a result, our past results may not be indicative of our future performance, and comparing our operating results on a period-to-period basis may not be meaningful. In addition to the other risks described in this Annual Report on Form 10-K, factors that may affect our quarterly operating results include the following:

27

---

We may not be able to accurately forecast the amount and mix of future subscriptions, revenue and expenses and, as a result, our operating results may fall below our estimates or the expectations of public market analysts and investors. If our revenue or operating results fall below the expectations of investors or securities analysts, or below any guidance we may provide, the price of our common stock could decline.

If we do not accurately predict subscription renewal rates or otherwise fail to forecast our revenue accurately, or if we fail to match our expenditures with corresponding revenue, our operating results could be adversely affected.

Because our recent growth has resulted in the rapid expansion of our business, we do not have a long history upon which to base forecasts of renewal rates with customers or future operating revenue. As a result, our operating results in future reporting periods may be significantly below the expectations of the public market, equity research analysts or investors, which could harm the price of our common stock.

Because we generally recognize revenue from subscriptions ratably over the term of the agreement, near term changes in sales may not be reflected immediately in our operating results.

We offer our inbound platform primarily through a mix of monthly, quarterly and single-year subscription agreements and generally recognize revenue ratably over the related subscription period. As a result, much of the revenue we report in each quarter is derived from agreements entered into during prior months, quarters or years. In addition, we do not record deferred revenue beyond amounts invoiced as a liability on our balance sheet. A decline in new or renewed subscriptions or marketing solutions agreements in any one quarter is not likely to be reflected immediately in our revenue results for that quarter. Such declines, however, would negatively affect our revenue and deferred revenue balances in future periods, and the effect of significant downturns in sales and market acceptance of our platform, and potential changes in our rate of renewals, may not be fully reflected in our results of operations until future periods. Our subscription model also makes it difficult for us to rapidly increase our total revenue and deferred revenue balance through additional sales in any period, as revenue from new customers must be recognized over the applicable subscription term.

We are exposed to fluctuations in currency exchange rates.

We face exposure to movements in currency exchange rates, which may cause our revenue and operating results to differ materially from expectations. Our operating results could be negatively affected depending on the amount of expense denominated in foreign currencies, primarily the Euro. As exchange rates vary, revenue, cost of revenue, operating expenses and other operating results, when re-measured, may differ materially from expectations. In addition, our operating results are subject to fluctuation if our mix of U.S. and foreign currency denominated transactions and expenses changes in the future. Although we may apply certain strategies to mitigate foreign currency risk, these strategies might not eliminate our exposure to foreign exchange rate fluctuations and would involve costs and risks of their own, such as ongoing management time and expertise, external costs to implement the strategies and potential accounting implications. Additionally, as we anticipate growing our business further outside of the United States, the effects of movements in currency exchange rates will increase as our transaction volume outside of the United States increases.

28

---

Risks Related to Our Common Stock

Our stock price may be volatile and you may be unable to sell your shares at or above the price you purchased them.

The trading prices of the securities of technology companies, including providers of software via the cloud-based model, have been highly volatile. Since shares of our common stock were sold in our initial public offering in October 2014 at a price of $25.00 per share, our stock price has ranged from $25.79 to $59.55, through December 31, 2015. The market price of our common stock may fluctuate significantly in response to numerous factors, many of which are beyond our control, including:

In addition, the stock markets have experienced extreme price and volume fluctuations that have affected and continue to affect the market prices of equity securities of many technology companies. Stock prices of many technology companies have fluctuated in a manner unrelated or disproportionate to the operating performance of those companies.

In the past, stockholders have instituted securities class action litigation following periods of market volatility. If we were to become involved in securities litigation, it could subject us to substantial costs, divert resources and the attention of management from our business and adversely affect our business.

We will incur increased costs and demands upon management as a result of complying with the laws and regulations affecting public companies, particularly since we no longer qualify as an “emerging growth company,” which could adversely affect our business, operating results and financial condition.

As a public company, and particularly since we no longer qualify as an “emerging growth company,” we will continue to incur significant legal, accounting and other expenses. We are subject to the reporting requirements of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, or the Exchange Act, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, or the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, or the Dodd-Frank Act, and the rules and regulations of the New York Stock Exchange, or NYSE. These requirements have increased and will continue to increase our legal, accounting and financial compliance costs and have made and will continue to make some activities more time consuming and costly. For example, we expect these rules and regulations to make it more difficult and more expensive for us to obtain director and officer liability insurance, and we may be required to accept reduced policy limits and coverage or incur substantially higher costs to maintain the same or similar coverage. As a result, it may be more difficult for us to attract and retain qualified individuals to serve on our board of directors or as our executive officers.

29

---

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act requires, among other things, that we assess the effectiveness of our internal control over financial reporting annually and the effectiveness of our disclosure controls and procedures quarterly. In particular, Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, or Section 404, requires us to perform system and process evaluation and testing of our internal control over financial reporting to allow management to report on, and our independent registered public accounting firm to attest to, the effectiveness of our internal control over financial reporting. Our compliance with applicable provisions of Section 404 requires that we incur substantial accounting expense and expend significant management time on compliance-related issues as we implement additional corporate governance practices and comply with reporting requirements. Moreover, if we are not able to comply with the requirements of Section 404 applicable to us in a timely manner, or if we or our independent registered public accounting firm identifies deficiencies in our internal control over financial reporting that are deemed to be material weaknesses, the market price of our stock could decline and we could be subject to sanctions or investigations by the SEC or other regulatory authorities, which would require additional financial and management resources. We have in the past identified control deficiencies, including a material weakness during the quarters ended June 30, 2015 and September 30, 2015. While we have remediated this material weakness and continue to seek improvements to enhance our control environment, we may identify additional material weaknesses or other deficiencies in the future.

Furthermore, investor perceptions of our company may suffer if deficiencies are found, and this could cause a decline in the market price of our stock. Irrespective of compliance with Section 404, any failure of our internal control over financial reporting could have a material adverse effect on our stated operating results and harm our reputation. If we are unable to implement these requirements effectively or efficiently, it could harm our operations, financial reporting, or financial results and could result in an adverse opinion on our internal controls from our independent registered public accounting firm.

Our ability to raise capital in the future may be limited, and our failure to raise capital when needed could prevent us from growing.

Our business and operations may consume resources faster than we anticipate. In the future, we may need to raise additional funds to invest in future growth opportunities. Additional financing may not be available on favorable terms, if at all. If adequate funds are not available on acceptable terms, we may be unable to invest in future growth opportunities, which could seriously harm our business and operating results. If we incur debt, the debt holders would have rights senior to common stockholders to make claims on our assets, and the terms of any debt could restrict our operations, including our ability to pay dividends on our common stock. Furthermore, if we issue equity securities, stockholders will experience dilution, and the new equity securities could have rights senior to those of our common stock. Because our decision to issue securities in any future offering will depend on market conditions and other factors beyond our control, we cannot predict or estimate the amount, timing or nature of our future offerings. As a result, our stockholders bear the risk of our future securities offerings reducing the market price of our common stock and diluting their interest.

Anti-takeover provisions in our charter documents and Delaware law may delay or prevent an acquisition of our company.

Our amended and restated certificate of incorporation, amended and restated bylaws and Delaware law contain provisions that may have the effect of delaying or preventing a change in control of us or changes in our management. Our amended and restated certificate of incorporation and bylaws include provisions that:

30

---

These provisions, alone or together, could delay or prevent hostile takeovers and changes in control or changes in our management.

In addition, because we are incorporated in Delaware, we are governed by the provisions of Section 203 of the Delaware General Corporation Law, which limits the ability of stockholders owning in excess of 15% of our outstanding voting stock to merge or combine with us in certain circumstances.

Any provision of our amended and restated certificate of incorporation or amended and restated bylaws or Delaware law that has the effect of delaying or deterring a change in control could limit the opportunity for our stockholders to receive a premium for their shares of our common stock, and could also affect the price that some investors are willing to pay for our common stock.

 

 

None.

 

 

We occupy approximately 180,000 square feet of office space in Cambridge, Massachusetts pursuant to lease agreements that expire through 2027. We also maintain offices in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Dublin, Ireland, Sydney, Australia and Singapore. We believe that our current facilities are suitable and adequate to meet our current needs. We intend to add new facilities or expand existing facilities as we add employees, and we believe that suitable additional or substitute space will be available as needed to accommodate any such expansion of our operations.

 

 

From time to time we may become involved in legal proceedings or be subject to claims arising in the ordinary course of our business. Although the results of litigation and claims cannot be predicted with certainty, we currently believe that the final outcome of these ordinary course matters will not have a material adverse effect on our business, operating results, financial condition or cash flows. Regardless of the outcome, litigation can have an adverse impact on us because of defense and settlement costs, diversion of management resources and other factors.

 

 

Not Applicable.

 

 

31

---

PART II

 

 

Market Information for Common Stock

Our common stock has been listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “HUBS” since October 9, 2014. Prior to that date, there was no public trading market for our common stock. Our initial public offering was priced at $25.00 per share on October 8, 2014. The following table sets forth for the periods indicated the high and low sales prices per share of our common stock as reported on the New York Stock Exchange:

 

 

As of February 12, 2016 we had 102 holders of record of our common stock. The actual number of shareholders is greater than this number of record holders, and includes shareholders who are beneficial owners, but whose shares are held in street name by brokers and other nominees. This number of holders of record also does not include shareholders whose shares may be held in trust by other entities.

Dividends

We have never declared or paid any cash dividends on our common stock. We currently anticipate that we will retain future earnings to fund development and growth of our business, and do not anticipate paying cash dividends in the foreseeable future.

Performance Graph

This performance graph shall not be deemed “soliciting material” or to be “filed” with the Securities and Exchange Commission for purposes of Section 18 of the Exchange Act or otherwise subject to the liabilities under that Section, and shall not be deemed to be incorporated by reference into any filing of the company under the Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the “Securities Act”) or the Exchange Act.

32

---

The following graph shows a comparison from October 9, 2014 (the date our common stock commenced trading on the NYSE) through December 31, 2015 of the cumulative total return for our common stock, the NASDAQ Computer Index and the S&P 500 Index. Such returns are based on historical results and are not intended to suggest future performance.

 

 

Recent Sales of Unregistered Securities

None.

Purchases of Equity Securities by the Issuer and Affiliated Purchasers

None.

Securities Authorized for Issuance Under Equity Compensation Plans

See Item 12, “Security Ownership of Certain Beneficial Owners and Management and Related Stockholder Matters” for information regarding securities authorized for issuance.

 

 

You should read the selected consolidated financial data below in conjunction with “Management’s discussion and analysis of financial condition and results of operations” and the consolidated financial statements, related notes and other financial information included elsewhere in this Annual Report on Form 10-K. The selected consolidated financial data in this section are not intended to replace the consolidated financial statements and are qualified in their entirety by the consolidated financial statements and related notes included elsewhere in this Annual Report on Form 10-K.

The following selected consolidated statements of operations data for the years ended December 31, 2015, 2014, and 2013, and the consolidated balance sheet data as of December 31, 2015 and 2014, have been derived from our audited consolidated financial statements included elsewhere in this Annual Report on Form 10-K. The consolidated statements of operations data for the years ended December 31, 2012 and 2011 and the consolidated balance sheet data as of December 31, 2012 have been derived from our audited consolidated financial statements not included in this Annual Report on Form 10-K. The consolidated balance sheet data as of December 31, 2011 has been derived from our unaudited consolidated financial statements not included in this Annual Report on Form 10-K. The consolidated statements of operations data for the years ended December 31, 2014 through 2011 have been adjusted to reflect the reclassification of credit card fees from cost of revenue subscription to general and administrative expenses. The amounts

33

---

reclassified were $2 million in 2014, $1.5 million in 2013, $1.1 million in 2012, and $748 thousand in 2011.  Our historical results are not necessarily indicative of the results that may be expected in the future.

 

34

---

 

 

 

 

 

 

35

---

The following discussion and analysis of our financial condition and results of operations should be read in conjunction with our consolidated financial statements and related notes that appear elsewhere in this Annual Report on Form 10-K. As discussed in the section titled “Special Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements,” the following discussion and analysis contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties, as well as assumptions that, if they never materialize or prove incorrect, could cause our results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause or contribute to such differences include , but are not limited to, those identified below, and those discussed in the section titled “Risk Factors” included under Part I, Item 1A within this Annual Report on Form 10-K.

Company Overview

We provide a cloud-based marketing and sales software platform that enables businesses to deliver an inbound experience. An inbound marketing and sales experience attracts, engages and delights customers by being more relevant, more helpful, more personalized and less interruptive than traditional marketing and sales tactics. Our software platform features integrated applications to help businesses attract visitors to their websites, convert visitors into leads, close leads into customers and delight customers so that they become promoters of those businesses. These integrated applications include social media, search engine optimization, blogging, website content management, marketing automation, email, CRM, analytics and reporting.

We designed our all-in-one platform from the ground up to enable businesses to provide an inbound experience to their prospects and customers. At the core of our platform is a single inbound database for each business that captures its customer activity throughout the customer lifestyle. Our platform uses our centralized inbound database to empower businesses to create more personalized interactions with customers, such as personalized emails, personalized social media alerts, personalized websites and targeted alerts for sales people. We provide a comprehensive set of integrated applications on our platform, which offers businesses ease of use, power and simplicity. We designed and built our platform to serve a large numbers of customers of any size with demanding use cases.

While our platform can scale to the enterprise, we focus on selling to mid-market businesses because we believe we have significant competitive advantages attracting and serving them. We efficiently reach these businesses at scale through our proven inbound go-to-market approach and more than marketing 2,900 agency partners worldwide. Our platform is particularly suited to serving the needs of mid-market business-to-business companies. These mid-market businesses seek an integrated, easy to implement and easy to use solution to reach customers and compete with organizations that have larger marketing and sales budgets. As of December 31, 2015, we had 18,116 customers of varying sizes in more than 90 countries, representing almost every industry.

Our platform is a multi-tenant, single code-based and globally available software-as-a-service, or SaaS, product delivered through web browsers or mobile applications. We sell our platform on a subscription basis and generated revenue of $181.9 million in 2015, $115.9 million in 2014, and $77.6 million in 2013, representing year-over-year increases of 57% in 2015 and 49% in 2014. We had net losses of $46.1 million in 2015, $48.2 million in 2014, and $34.3million in 2013, primarily due to increased investments in our growth.

We derive most of our revenue from subscriptions to our cloud-based software platform and related professional services, which consist of customer on-boarding and training services. Subscription revenue accounted for 92% of our total revenue for the years ended December 31, 2015 and 2014 and 91% of our total revenue for the year ended December 31, 2013. We sell three product plans at different base prices on a subscription basis, each of which includes our core platform and integrated applications to meet the needs of the various customers we serve. Customers pay additional fees if the number of contacts stored and tracked in the customer’s database exceeds specified thresholds. We generate additional revenue based on the purchase of additional subscriptions, purchases of our add-on products and the number of account users, subdomains and website visits. Substantially all of our customers’ subscriptions are one year or less in duration.

Subscriptions are non-cancelable and are billed in advance on various schedules. Because the mix of billing terms for orders can vary from period to period, the annualized value of the orders we enter into with our customers will not be completely reflected in deferred revenue at any single point in time. Accordingly, we do not believe that change in deferred revenue is an accurate indicator of future revenue for a given period of time.

Professional services and other revenue accounted for 8% of our total revenue for the years ended December 31, 2015 and 2014 and 9% of total revenue for the year ended December 31, 2013. Most of our customers purchase on-boarding and training services which are designed to help customers enhance their ability to attract, engage and delight their customers using our platform.

36

---

Our customer base has grown from 13,607 customers at the end of 2014 to 18,116 customers as of December 31, 2015, which has resulted in rapid revenue growth. As of December 31, 2015, approximately 27 % of our customers were located outside of the United States and these customers generated approximately 24 % of our total revenue for the year ended December 31, 2015. We opened our first international office in Dublin, Ireland in January 2013, a second international office in Sydney, Australia in August 2014, a third international office in Singapore in October 2015, and have announced a fourth international office in Japan. We plan to further grow our international business and expand to other geographies.

We have focused on rapidly growing our business and plan to continue to make investments to help us address some of the challenges facing us to support this growth, such as demand for our platform by existing and new customers, significant competition from other providers of marketing software and related applications and rapid technological change in our industry. We believe that the growth of our business is dependent on many factors, including our ability to expand our customer base, increase adoption of our platform within existing customers, develop new products and applications to extend the functionality of our platform and provide a high level of customer service. We expect to increase our investment in sales and marketing as we continue to expand our sales teams, increase our marketing activities and grow our international operations. We also expect to increase our investment in research and development as we continue to introduce new products and applications to extend the functionality of our platform. We also intend to invest in maintaining a high level of customer service and support which we consider critical for our continued success. We plan to continue investing in our data center infrastructure and services capabilities in order to support continued future customer growth. We also expect to continue to incur additional general and administrative expenses as a result of both our growth and the infrastructure required to be a public company. We expect to use the proceeds from our recent stock offerings to fund these growth strategies and do not expect to be profitable in the near term.

We believe that these investments will result in an increase in our subscription revenue base and improvement in the retention of this base. This will result in revenue increasing faster than the increase in sales and marketing, research and development and general and administrative expenses, exclusive of stock-based compensation, as we reach economies of scale. With this increased operating leverage, we expect our gross and operating margins to increase in the long term. However, we will incur losses in the short term. If we are unable to achieve our revenue growth objectives, including a high rate of renewals of our customer agreements, we may not be able to achieve profitability.

Key Business Metrics

We use the following key business metrics to evaluate our business, measure our performance, identify trends affecting our business, formulate financial projections and make strategic decisions. Our key business metrics may be calculated in a manner different than similar key business metrics used by other companies.

 

 

Total Customers. We believe that our ability to increase our customer base is an indicator of our market penetration and growth of our business as we continue to expand our sales force and invest in marketing efforts. We define our total customers at the end of a particular period as the number of business entities or individuals with one or more paid subscriptions to our marketing platform, either paid directly or through an agency partner. We do not include in total customers business entities or individuals with one or more paid subscriptions solely for our Sidekick product. A single customer may have separate paid subscriptions for separate websites, but we count these as one customer if the subscriptions are managed by the same business entity or individual. For more information about our customers, see the section of this Annual Report on Form 10-K captioned “Business—Our Customers.”

Average Subscription Revenue per Customer. We believe that our ability to increase the average subscription revenue per customer is an indicator of our ability to grow the long-term value of our existing customer relationships. We define average subscription revenue per customer during a particular period as subscription revenue from our total customers during the period divided by the average total customers during the same period. We expect our average subscription revenue per customer to continue to increase over time.

Subscription Dollar Retention Rate. We believe that our ability to retain and expand a customer relationship is an indicator of the stability of our revenue base and the long-term value of our customers. We assess our performance in this area using a metric we refer to as our Subscription Dollar Retention Rate. We compare the aggregate Contractual Monthly Subscription Revenue of our customer base as of the beginning of each month, which we refer to as Retention Base Revenue, to the aggregate Contractual Monthly Subscription Revenue of the same group of customers at the end of that month, which we refer to as Retained Subscription Revenue. We define Contractual Monthly Subscription Revenue as the total amount of subscription fees contractually committed to be paid for

37

---

a full month under all of our customer agreements, excluding any commissions owed to our partners. We do not include in Contractual Monthly Subscription Revenue any subscription fees contractually committed to be paid by business entities or individuals with subscriptions solely for our Sidekick product. Our Subscription Dollar Retention Rate for a given period is calculated by first dividing Retained Subscription Revenue by Retention Base Revenue for each month in the period, calculating the weighted average of these rates using the Retention Base Revenue for each month in the period, and then annualizing the resulting rates.

Key Components of Consolidated Statements of Operations

Revenue

We derive our revenue from two major sources, revenue from subscriptions to our inbound platform and professional services and other revenue consisting mainly of on-boarding and training services fees.

Subscription based revenue is derived from customers using our software platform for their inbound marketing and sales needs. Our software platform includes integrated applications that allow businesses to manage social media, search engine optimization, blogging, website content, marketing automation, email, analytics and reporting. Substantially all of our customers’ subscriptions are one year or less in duration. Subscriptions are non-cancelable and are billed in advance on various schedules. All subscription fees that are billed in advance of service are recorded in deferred revenue. Subscription based revenue is recognized net of consideration paid to marketing agency partners when the agency partner purchases the subscription directly from us, as in these instances our customer is the partner and our remaining obligations are to the partner.

Professional services and other revenue are derived primarily from customer on-boarding and training services. The on-boarding and training services provided to customers typically involves an implementation specialist. An implementation specialist will typically work with our customers to enhance their understanding of how to attract leads and convert them into customers through search engine optimization, social media, blogging and other content. Training is generally sold in connection with a customer’s initial subscription and is billed in advance. The training is also available to be purchased separately following a customer’s purchase of its initial subscription and our marketing agency partners routinely provide the same training to customers.

Cost of Revenue and Operating Expenses

Cost of Revenue

Cost of subscription revenue consists primarily of managed hosting providers and other third-party service providers, employee-related costs including payroll, benefits and stock-based compensation expense for our customer support team, amortization of capitalized software development costs and acquired technology, and allocated overhead costs, which we define as rent, facilities and costs related to information technology, or IT.

Cost of professional services and other revenue consists primarily of personnel costs of our professional services organization, including salaries, benefits, bonuses and stock-based compensation, as well as allocated overhead costs.

We expect that cost of subscription and professional services and other revenue will increase in absolute dollars as we continue to invest in growing our business. Over time, we expect to gain benefits of scale associated with our costs of hosting our software platform relative to subscription revenues, resulting in improved subscription gross margin. We expect to continue to generate negative gross margins related to professional services in the near term.

Research and Development

Research and development expenses consist primarily of personnel costs of our development team, including payroll, benefits and stock-based compensation expense and allocated overhead costs. We capitalize certain software development costs that are attributable to developing new products and adding incremental functionality to our software platform and amortize such costs as costs of subscription revenue over the estimated life of the new product or incremental functionality, which is generally two years. We focus our research and development efforts on improving our products and developing new ones, delivering new functionality and enhancing the customer experience. We believe delivering new functionalities for our customers is an integral part of our solution and provides our customers with access to a broad array of options and information critical to their marketing efforts. We expect to continue to make investments in and expand our offerings to enhance our customers’ experience and satisfaction and attract new customers. We expect research and development expenses to increase in absolute dollars as we continue to increase the functionality of our software platform.

38

---

Sales and Marketing

Sales and marketing expenses consist primarily of personnel costs of our sales and marketing employees, including sales commissions and incentives, benefits and stock-based compensation expense, marketing programs, including lead generation, costs of our annual INBOUND conference, and other brand building expenses and allocated overhead costs. We defer certain sales commissions related to acquiring new customers and amortize them ratably over the term of the corresponding subscription agreement. Sales and marketing expenses also include commissions paid to our marketing agency partners when we are the primary obligor for providing the subscription that has been purchased.

We plan to continue to expand sales and marketing to grow our customer base and increase sales to existing customers. This growth will include adding sales personnel and expanding our marketing activities to continue to generate additional leads and build brand awareness. We expect sales and marketing expenses will increase as a result of hiring net new quota-carrying sales representatives in the United States and worldwide, adding to the marketing staff and expanding our annual INBOUND conference. Over time, we expect sales and marketing expenses will decline as a percentage of total revenue.

General and Administrative

General and administrative expenses consist of personnel costs and related expenses for executive, finance, legal, human resources, employee-related information technology, administrative personnel, including payroll, benefits and stock-based compensation expense; professional fees for external legal, accounting and other consulting services; and allocated overhead costs. We expect that general and administrative expenses will increase on an absolute dollar basis but decrease as a percentage of total revenue as we focus on processes, systems and controls to enable the our internal support functions to scale with the growth of our business. We also anticipate continuing increases to general and administrative expenses as we incur the costs of compliance associated with being a publicly traded company, including audit and consulting fees.

Other Income (Expense)

Other income (expense) includes interest income and expense and the impact of foreign currency transaction gains and losses associated with monetary assets and liabilities. The additions of our international offices in Dublin, Ireland in 2013, Sydney, Australia in 2014, and Singapore in 2015 have increased our exposure to foreign currency fluctuations.

Income Tax (Provision) Benefit

The income tax (provision) benefit consists of current and deferred taxes for U.S. and foreign jurisdictions. We have historically had a taxable loss in our most significant jurisdictions and a full valuation allowance against the majority of our deferred tax assets. We expect this to continue in the near term.

39

---

Results of Operations

The following tables set forth certain consolidated financial data in dollar amounts and as a percentage of total revenue.