Angela, thank you very much for your thoughtful response. I love you do this for the community.
This is what I agree with the most:
"3) HubSpot is naive in thinking rank is dead.
Interestingly, I agree with this. I help a couple friends and family with their small businesses, one of which is run via HubSpot. I understand very deeply the rush that comes from seeing your rank improve over time, and I understand the validation you get from seeing your domain gain traction with a specific term."
We see every day this validation turning into actual money. However, this is where I think the following text gets unnecesarily condescending and disregards the prior:
“I also realize that can get very, very dangerous. Solely focusing on rank as a measure of success”
That has nothing to do with the tool per se… Theoretically, every tool within Hubspot could be “dangerously” seen as a sole measure of success. That’s not a valid reason for taking it out.
I remain feeling pretty strongly about these facts and assumptions:
- Hubspot for years stopped investing in making this tool better for its users while other vendors thrived in innovation and usefullness.
- The prior most likely impacted Hubspot’s own marketing and sales communications and new Hubspot users didn’t buy in based on that feature.
- Probably because of the prior two reasons user engagement dropped.
- Hubspot is currently justifying low usage as one of the primary reasons to sunset this tool.
- Most likely, Moz and Semrush will keep innovating and remain relevant for years to come. I certainly see Hubspot contributing to that possibility.
On a side note, I also perceive a strong similarity with another sunsetting: killing the ability to post multi-account social messages on mobile:
- Hubspot stopped innovation around this feature while other vendors thrived (hootsuite, buffer). These are vendors —I must say— Hubspot openly criticizes when talking about platform fragmentation in its marketing communication and sales.
- People stopped using the feature.
- The feature didn’t make the cut to the new app.
When pointing out missing this feature, Daria Axelrod from Hubspot recently responded @ the Facebook Agency Partners Group: “In the old mobile app, social functionality was not used very frequently which is why it isn’t in the current one”
Now see what happened at our agency:
- We were forced to become Buffer customers to continue having this ability (for something we used to get bundled within the Hubspot License). The business / team version is not a cheap solution.
- Since it is messy to do mobile and non-mobile posting with two different tools in terms of scheduling, we stopped using Hubspot altogether for posting on social.
- Probably social posting usage (for non-blog auto-published content) is going down on the desktop web app for many users.
Under this logic, what should I think will happen next regarding this feature?
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Look, we are your partners and we really like working with you. As a company, Hubspot has contributed a great deal to our growth and success. That is precisely why I am investing so much precious time insisting in killing this feature is just a decision that even with your lengthy explanation holds no ground for us. We feel you dropped the ball for too long and now you don’t want to play this game anymore in favor of a new one we could’ve played simultaneously.
However, this is just our opinion. We can definitely be mistaken and only time will tell if this was the right call or not. Let’s just hope for the best again. See you at partner day @ Cambridge HQ if you want 