The challenge: A research gap that endangered growth
Editor's note: Aaron Cannon is the co-founder and CEO of Outset, the leading AI-moderated research platform enabling best-in-class enterprise research teams at companies like Microsoft, Uber, Bain, Google and Nestle to be more in-tune with their customers and transforming how product teams and businesses gather insights.
Combining years of product leadership with deep industry experience, Cannon and Outset are building a comprehensive research platform that empowers teams to uncover more actionable global insights at scale through AI-moderated interviews, instant synthesis and analysis, built-in security and fraud detection, visual intelligence and live translation to 40+ languages.
Hubspot unites marketing, sales and customer service in one platform for companies around the world, and its north star is Growth Gabby – the target persona that fuels Hubspot's product, marketing and sales strategies. A clear understanding of her needs isn't a nice-to-have; it's mission critical.
But as AI began reshaping customer needs at lightning speed, trends that once developed over quarters were emerging in weeks. Being behind created critical consequences: product features that miss the mark, marketing campaigns that don't speak to the customer and a company optimizing for yesterday’s problems.
Keeping pace with Growth Gabby is how Hubspot de-risks decisions, aligns cross-functional teams and speaks in the customer’s voice. Yet the existing approach – a handful of interviews once or twice a year – couldn’t keep up. Hubspot needed a current signal on Growth Gabby that was fast enough for the AI era.
"We needed to understand how our customers' needs were changing over time so that we could adapt to change with them," said Jessica Davis, senior manager of customer insights.
But with only two researchers, this simply wasn’t feasible. Focus groups were too slow. Surveys lacked depth. Outsourcing was expensive and resource intensive. While they had access to live interviews, sales call recordings and small focus groups, none of those had a wide enough sample to surface meaningful patterns. Adding to the pressure was manual synthesis. Analyzing open-ended questions one-by-one was too time-intensive to do on a regular basis.
“We just didn’t have the bandwidth to run qualitative research regularly,” said Davis. “But we needed to keep a pulse on our most important persona.”
That's why they turned to Outset.
The solution: From research bottleneck to AI-powered breakthrough
Hubspot used Outset to launch the "Growth Gabby Listening Post," a quarterly, AI-moderated qualitative program that rapidly runs dozens of customer interviews and turns them into actionable themes, quotes and other insights that are shared company-wide.
“We were skeptical at first,” said Davis. “But after our first trial, we couldn't believe how quickly we got 100 responses – and they were good.”
Instead of writing lengthy guides or handholding a junior researcher, they gave the AI a few simple instructions. The AI interviewer did the rest: running the sessions, following up in real time and delivering insights that would’ve taken weeks to surface manually.
“It was really easy to get good interviews with just a little bit of guidance. It was honestly easier than training an intern. We didn’t have to babysit it.”
And analyzing the results was just as easy. What used to be manual, time-consuming topic analysis and sifting through endless open-ended questions became instant synthesis.
"It's easy to see the data really quickly," remarked Davis. "One feature that is a game changer is transcript-wide analysis. You just type in a question, and Outset will analyze all of the transcripts across the survey for that question."
The results: Road map-changing insights
In just a few days, Hubspot was able to conduct over 100 in-depth interviews – something that previously would have taken weeks. The speed and scale of Outset’s platform gave the team quick visibility into their target persona’s evolving needs without sacrificing quality.
The insights were anything but surface level. In fact, the interviews uncovered problems that Hubspot didn't even know existed. The team has taken that information and run with it, creating new solutions to gain a competitive advantage. "It's pretty exciting when you can go to one of your co-workers and say, 'Here's a challenge we can solve, and I think we can solve it better than our competitors,'" said Davis.
Feedback from these interviews helped influence Hubspot’s AI product road map and shaped the messaging for brand campaigns. Capturing customer language in their own words has given marketers a clear advantage in multiple go-to-market initiatives. For example, when interviews revealed unexpected pain points and language around unified data, it changed the focus and wording for an entire campaign.
“We pull out the exact phrases customers use and give them to marketers,” explained Davis. “It’s their voice, not ours.”
The research quickly gained visibility across the company, and multiple teams began requesting access to the Outset platform. “Eventually, I had to tell them to get their own seat. We needed ours back,” Davis explained with a smile.
Outset has given Hubspot the ability to:
- Run in-depth research continuously, not just once or twice a year.
- Start with quant research and then seamlessly expand to qual insights.
- Immediately see trends over time with auto-generated bar charts.
- Influence cross-functional teams with fast, clear, customer-driven insights.
“It opened up a Pandora’s box, in a good way,” said Davis. “We have all of these options for different types of research that our team couldn't do before. Now we can.”