In the productverse: HubSpot, Intercom, Beehiiv, and more
A few bits that caught my eye this week in product world… New HubSpot products, Intercom redesign, Beehiiv pricing drama, and more.
HubSpot are launching Commerce Hub.
HubSpot customers can now sell products and accept payments (in partnership with Stripe). Controlling the entire customer lifecycle could be a game-changer for HubSpot and their customers.
They are also hopping on the generative AI trend, allowing customers to generate and illustrate blog posts using AI.
At $2.3bn ARR, HubSpot’s customer growth still hits a staggering 23% year-on-year, which is completely insane. I can't see these new products slowing them down any time soon, either.
If you missed Intercom's website redesign, do yourself a favour and open it up right now (in a new tab pls, I'd like you to keep reading). It's... beautiful. The mix of 'old' (painting style) and new (AI) is *chef's kiss*.
Along with this wonderful redesign, Intercom released Fin AI Copilot, a live chat agent's personal assistant.
Fin AI Copilot helps agents by generating answers, finding supporting documents, and learning from the chat history. All the agent has left to do is double-check the output before answering the customer.
I know what you might be thinking. 'Just answer the damn question already, stupid bot'. This product is aimed at complex customer queries or businesses that want the extra oversight, where a direct answer from the bot may do more harm than good. Best of both worlds!
Beehiiv, the darling of the newsletter industry, launched new pricing plans; and the internet is aghast. How dare they try to make (more) money?
In a straight-from-the-heart blog post, CEO Tyler Denk explains the reasons behind the pricing changes.
TL;DR: Businesses evolve. Businesses spend very little time on pricing early on. Beehiiv is still cheaper than competitors. This pricing is more gradual and flexible.
Speaking of newsletters, Substack celebrated a year of Notes. Notes are Substack's... social network, I guess? Writers use them to write short versions of their posts, promote their writing, and engage with each other.
They reveal that in a 30-day period, Notes have generated ~3,000 paid subscriptions. At an average of $8/subscription/mo and a 10% revenue share, this means Substack added $2,400 in MRR. Considering they're rumoured to make ~22M in 2023, I'm not sure this is moving the needle much.
Either that, or my math is wrong.
Either way, Notes are getting more attention with new features such as images, videos, and embedded content.
This is what caught my eye these last few days. What's been on your product radar?
Notes has always been interesting to me. I follow and am connected to a lot of people that create great content and when I see them post to Notes the engagement is almost non-existent. Between these, the chat feature, and then the inbox it just seems like there's so much going on and a lot of good content getting lost.