HubSpot stock pops on IPO, and this is just the beginning, COO says

Cloud-marketing and -sales software company HubSpot went public today, and things turned out great.

The stock opened at $32.95 after the company priced it at $25, giving bankers a handsome return. Executives rang the morning bell at the New York Stock Exchange, with the stock closing at $30.10.

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After the bell-ringing photo op, the wine was flowing for board members and their bankers at a nearby steakhouse, said HubSpot president and chief operating officer JD Sherman in an interview with VentureBeat.

“This has been an incredible process,” said Sherman, who has been with HubSpot for almost three years and previously held executive positions at IBM and Akamai.

Even so, Sherman had much to say about the company’s prospects after it moved more deeply into sales territory this year by launching Sidekick, a service that weaves critical lead information into salespeople’s inboxes.

“We’re thinking about our sales product as potentially the second act for HubSpot,” Sherman said. And in that sense, there’s plenty of room to grow for years to come, all the while avoiding competition from big tech companies with marketing clouds like IBM and Oracle. By aiming at sales teams and not just marketers, HubSpot has found itself a way to considerably expand its total addressable market.

Sherman compared the move to Apple venturing beyond its Mac personal computers and into music devices with the release of the iPod in 2001.

“The interesting thing about the iPod? All Mac users bought it, and so did Windows users,” he said. As for HubSpot, its sales tools have attracted business from companies that weren’t already paying for HubSpot marketing services, Sherman said.

And the company is hardly finished with its development.

“The way we think about it, we’ve been at it for eight years, and we sort of view this point as more of a starting line than as a finishing line,” Sherman said. “We’re on to the next play, you might say.”

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HubSpot first filed for an initial public offering in August, revealing that it was unprofitable but had managed to bring in $51.2 million in the first six months of 2014. Meanwhile cloud software companies like Box and Dropbox could be in a position to go public in the coming months. Cloud financial-services software company Yodlee went public earlier this month.