I posted here a little while ago while I was building Renewal Radar, so figured I’d share what the first week in the HubSpot Marketplace actually looked like.
Short version: getting listed definitely does not mean people suddenly find you 
It’s been live for about a week now and so far I’ve had zero installs coming organically from the Marketplace itself.
I kind of expected it to be slow, but I still thought there would be some discovery just from being a new app. Apparently not. The Marketplace feels much more like a place people go once they already know what they’re looking for than a distribution channel on its own.
One of the more useful things actually happened shortly before the app got approved.
Someone let me run Renewal Radar against their real HubSpot portal with 24,077 companies.
It found 95 companies where some kind of renewal date existed somewhere, but only 5 actually needed attention in the coming weeks. Together those 5 represented roughly €35k in contract value.
That was pretty much the exact problem I built it for.
The dates weren’t neatly sitting in one “renewal date” field. They were spread across different properties and records, and most of those 24k companies were just noise.
But that scan also exposed my biggest challenge right now: scale.
It took almost 5 hours.. (fixed and it is taking 11 minutes now
)
It completed all 24,077 companies without failed records, which was nice, but 5 hours is obviously not where I want this to end up.
So weirdly, most of my first week after launch hasn’t been “launch stuff” at all. It’s been reducing API calls, testing different retrieval strategies and checking that every speed improvement still produces exactly the same result.
That last part has become a bigger thing than I expected.
I’m deliberately keeping the detection deterministic instead of throwing AI at it. With renewals I’d rather have the system say “I can’t confidently determine this” than confidently invent a date and create a task for the wrong account.
So after the first week my biggest learnings are probably:
The Marketplace gives you a place to be discovered, but it doesn’t magically give you distribution.
Real HubSpot portals are much messier than test portals.
Performance becomes a completely different problem once you hit 20k+ companies.
And making something reliably boring is a lot harder than making a demo that looks smart.
Still very early. No Marketplace traction to celebrate yet. But I’m learning a lot more from making this work on ugly real-world HubSpot data than I did during most of the build.
Would be interested to hear from anyone else who launched a HubSpot app: did Marketplace discovery also start this slowly for you?
