Has the business world gone mad?

I hugely admire and respect the company HubSpot. They defined an entire industry by coining the term Inbound Marketing. Heck they practically defined the idea of category creation itself.

But I have never really admired their product efforts. They acquired and built feature-after-feature rapidly to build an incredibly successful company. They can market and sell like no one else. They've always been strong where I have considered myself quite weak.

To be honest though, I haven't paid a lot of attention to them for a while, and then on an impromptu visit to X today I saw a tweet high up on my timeline from the now-CEO-again Brian Halligan:

And then I was intrigued enough to click through to see his follow-up tweet:

Again, I really admire Brian and Dharmesh and the company they have built.

But, either I have officially entered my "grumpy old man" phase or a significant portion of the business world has absolutely lost their minds. These tweets to me just seem... unhinged.

Perhaps it's the all-caps. Perhaps it's the idea of pouring gas on fires. Perhaps it's the use of "LFG!"

Maybe this is how the CEO of a public company just has to post on X these days.

But most of all, it's the new core proposition that gets me:

The customer relationship harness

I consider myself to be quite a plugged-in, technically minded, forward-thinking person who works full-time in the world of tech, software, and digital marketing.

And when I read that line I feel... nothing. If I feel anything I feel a deep sense of "What?"

What does it even mean?

Yes, skate to where the puck is going. But where is that?

Hubspot has somewhere in the region of 300,000 customers. Mostly small and medium businesses. I would wager, mostly non-technical people who just want to grow their companies through challenging economic times.

How many of them even know what a harness is? Or care? How many of them already have "harness" in their brain with somewhat negative connotations?

And most of all, what on earth does that phrase mean in terms of value for HubSpot’s customers or for the customers of their customers?

My guess: not a lot.