"We grew the company to 1,000 clients and over $1M ARR."

Dan is a seasoned internet professional. Entrepreneurial his whole life, he graduated from college in 2000 and naturally gravitated to working for Internet-based startups. For the next ten years, he worked for startups, until he left to open a CrossFit affiliate. In the process, he realized there was no quality modern gym management platform. So, he built one: PushPress.

What is PushPress?

PushPress is a next-generation boutique fitness management platform helping gym owners systemize, automate, and grow their businesses. PushPress was launched in 2013 and has held true to our mission of being a champion for the boutique gym, even before they became trendy. With a collective 50+ years of gym ownership on the team, we understand the clients and the space that we serve.

How does your company think about growth?

Our growth platform is built on top of the philosophy of client success. Our entire platform and philosophy are designed around helping our gyms build strong, stable businesses. This helps us cultivate a community of raving fans who support our product and our direction as much as we support theirs.

"We truly see our relationship with our clients as a partnership."

What are some of your greatest achievements since founding your company?

Growing PushPress from 0 to where we are today with $0 funding and without any "known" or exited founders required us to be scrappy, know our industry, and above all, focus on our clients' success. We grew the company to 1,000 clients and > $1M ARR. We grew the team to 16 employees. We earned an NPS of 51 (trailing 30 days) and 80% Growth YoY. We also launched a freemium model for smaller, new, and struggling gyms to grow into us.

How did HubSpot help you to achieve those goals? 

We started as gym-owning product-first founders who were 100% ignorant to the level of tooling that was available in a HubSpot type platform.

We tried using Infusionsoft (confusionsoft) and felt it basically encapsulated everything we despised about our main competition: it was confusing, overbearing, and I felt like I was using a 1998 tool in 2015.

"HubSpot CRM was our first step into your platform – the freemium model works!" 

It really helped us do two main things, which were huge at the time:

1. Create a sales process, which organized not only our internal sales efforts but made the sales process more identifiable to our customers (something we didn't realize was a big deal).
   
2. Organize our deal flow, both structurally and visually.

Benefits I can recall that were huge were also allowing us to collaborate on sales. My co-founder could pick up where I left off using the deal notes and listening to recorded calls. It also allowed us to hire our first salesperson to help take that burden off our plates in the same fashion.

We expanded into using workflows and other features, which enabled us to begin creating sales automation and optimizing our understanding of our sales efficiency and positioning. That allowed us to understand who our "best" clients were in terms of close rates and allowed us to focus on meeting their needs better, in marketing, sales, and product direction.

We recently expanded to Marketing Pro – and likely will end up using Marketing Enterprise soon.

"We are slowly shifting to moving more and more of our marketing efforts on top of the HubSpot platform to get greater benefits from the unified platform."

What is the most valuable aspect of HubSpot?

I really think it depends on the stage. Early for us, it was the deal board and having a unified communications platform from a deal. That way we could manage our deal flow from one place, and make calls/emails from it and have them all tracked.

As we matured and become more of a marketing-focused company, the marketing side of HubSpot became massively valuable as we were able to track inbound metrics and leads in one spot and begin nurturing our leads more effectively.

What is your advice to other founders who struggle to prioritize marketing and sales?

OMG DO IT. :)

"The one largest takeaway I have from this venture is 'marketing beats product,' and that's coming from a product-first founder."

All things being equal, if the market does not know about your product, it will not win. I think many product-centric founders believe (naively) that their product will be the next viral sensation because it's so good.

"I've come to believe even the 'viral sensations' have a hidden marketing push to get the inertia to go viral."