Published: 15 June 2019 | Updated: 11 January 2026
In June 2019, HubSpot CEO Brian Halligan told London HUG attendees that customer experience would become the primary competitive battleground—and that marketers needed to stop thinking in funnels and start building flywheels. Six years later, Gartner confirms 89% of businesses now compete primarily on customer experience rather than product or price. The companies Halligan highlighted as experience disruptors have had divergent fates that prove his thesis in ways even he couldn't have predicted.
Speaking to London's HubSpot community at the June 2019 HUG event hosted by Whitehat, Halligan outlined a fundamental shift in how businesses would need to compete. His central argument: the traditional marketing funnel was broken, and companies clinging to it would lose to those who built self-reinforcing growth engines powered by customer experience.
"The loudest voice in the market is not your blog or your content, it's your customers," Halligan told the audience. This wasn't marketing philosophy—it was a strategic warning about where competitive advantage would come from in the 2020s.
Halligan introduced three interconnected predictions that evening:
What makes this talk remarkable isn't that Halligan was right—it's how dramatically right he was, and how the specific companies he highlighted became case studies in his thesis.
HubSpot's three-stage flywheel—Attract, Engage, Delight—has achieved genuine industry adoption without significant modification. The company itself grew from a $4.8 billion ecosystem value in 2020 to $12.5 billion in 2024, serving 128,000 customers across 120+ countries.
More significantly, the flywheel concept spawned two major evolutions that Halligan's 2019 framework anticipated:
Product-Led Growth (PLG) emerged as the flywheel's B2B SaaS application. According to 2025 market research, 91% of B2B SaaS companies exceeding $50 million in annual recurring revenue have now implemented PLG strategies—and these companies grow 50% faster than traditional sales-led organisations. PLG companies demonstrate 39% lower sales and marketing costs, with product-qualified lead conversion rates of 25-30% compared to just 5-10% for traditional marketing-qualified leads.
Community-Led Growth (CLG) represents the flywheel's social evolution. The CLG platform market reached $1.73 billion in 2024 and is projected to hit $7.72 billion by 2033. Critically, 72% of community-sourced deals close within 90 days—compared to just 42% from traditional channels. Brands with active communities experience 53% higher customer retention.
This aligns precisely with what Halligan argued in 2019: friction in the customer experience creates drag on growth, while delighted customers create momentum that compounds over time. As he put it, "Remove the friction from every stage of the customer experience, and you create a flywheel that spins faster and faster."
For UK businesses implementing HubSpot today, the flywheel isn't theoretical—it's the operational framework that connects marketing, sales, and service into a unified growth engine.
Halligan's 2019 talk featured specific companies as examples of experience disruption. Their divergent fates over the following six years provide the strongest possible validation of his thesis—and critical lessons about what actually constitutes sustainable experience advantage.
Spotify exemplifies Halligan's experience disruption thesis at scale. Monthly active users grew from 217 million in 2019 to 713 million in 2025—a 228% increase. Premium subscribers nearly tripled from 108 million to 281 million. In 2024, Spotify posted its first annual net profit of €1.1 billion, with a market capitalisation exceeding $111 billion and 31.7% global market share (double its nearest competitor). Five-year total returns hit 123.90%.
Uber's transformation is equally dramatic. Revenue grew from $14.1 billion to $43.98 billion—a 212% increase. More remarkably, the company transformed from an $8.5 billion annual loss in 2019 to a $9.86 billion net profit in 2024. US rideshare market share expanded from 68% to 76%, with market capitalisation reaching approximately $196 billion (doubled from its $75 billion IPO valuation).
Both companies won by relentlessly reducing friction and creating experiences that customers actively recommend to others.
Casper appeared to be the poster child for DTC disruption when Halligan spoke in 2019. The mattress company IPO'd in February 2020 at $12 per share with a $575 million valuation—already down from its $1.1 billion unicorn status. The stock lost over 70% of its value. Durational Capital acquired Casper in November 2021 for approximately $308 million. By October 2024, the brand had been absorbed by Carpenter Co. and effectively ceased to exist as an independent company.
The cause? Casper pioneered the mattress-in-a-box experience, but the experience itself was easily replicable. Copycats proliferated, customer acquisition costs became unsustainable, and the company had no defensible flywheel—just a clever delivery mechanism.
Dollar Shave Club's trajectory is equally instructive. Unilever acquired the company for $1 billion in 2016, convinced it had purchased the future of consumer goods. By 2023, Unilever sold Dollar Shave Club to Nexus Capital for an undisclosed (but reportedly massive) loss, retaining only a 35% minority stake. The official diagnosis: "They neutered the voice of the brand." Unilever's corporate integration stripped away the irreverent customer experience that made Dollar Shave Club remarkable—proving Halligan's point that experience can't be separated from operations.
Warby Parker direct-listed in September 2021 at $54.49 with a $6 billion valuation. Current market capitalisation sits at $2.4-2.7 billion—a significant decline, but the company survived where others collapsed. Revenue reached $771 million in 2024, with losses narrowed to just $20 million.
The critical lesson: Warby Parker evolved. Two-thirds of 2024 revenue came from 298 retail stores, not direct-to-consumer digital sales. A $150 million Google partnership announced in May 2025 shows continued innovation. Pure DTC was a channel strategy, not an experience strategy—and Warby Parker adapted when the channel matured.
This distinction matters enormously. By 2025, 82% of DTC brands exceeding $50 million in revenue operate physical retail. The experience disruptors who survived understood that customer experience isn't a channel—it's the entire relationship.
In 2019, Halligan argued that institutional trust was collapsing and that this collapse would fundamentally change marketing. The Edelman Trust Barometer 2025 confirms this prediction with alarming precision.
Business remains the only institution seen as both competent and ethical—but only at 62% trust (down one point year-over-year). Government and media each sit at 52%. More critically, fear of leaders purposefully misleading the public has reached all-time highs:
Additionally, 61% of the population now holds moderate or high grievance against business, government, and the wealthy—creating a 30-point trust gap between high-grievance and low-grievance populations.
What does this mean for marketers? Exactly what Halligan predicted: word-of-mouth has become dominant because it's the only channel people trust.
Nielsen research shows 92% of consumers trust word-of-mouth referrals more than any form of advertising. McKinsey found that 20-50% of all purchasing decisions are primarily driven by word-of-mouth. WOM generates customers with 25% higher lifetime value and 37% higher retention. In B2B specifically, 91% of buyers report their decisions are affected by word-of-mouth.
Trust in independent review sites as the primary information source grew from 13% in 2021 to 31% in 2024. Meanwhile, 84% of referral traffic now comes through "dark social"—Slack, WhatsApp, Discord channels that appear as direct traffic in analytics but represent peer recommendations.
This is precisely why ethical SEO and genuine inbound marketing have become essential. You can't fake trust at scale—you have to earn it through consistent experience delivery.
The data on customer experience as competitive advantage has only strengthened since Halligan's talk:
Watermark Consulting's 16-year CX ROI Study (2024) found that CX Leaders generated total returns more than 260 points higher than the S&P 500—and 5.4 times greater returns than CX Laggards.
Yet here's the paradox Halligan might not have anticipated: CX quality is actually declining. Forrester's 2024 US CX Index showed 39% of brands significantly declined in CX quality—an unprecedented deterioration. Average CX effectiveness fell to 64%, an all-time low. In 2025, 21% of brands declined versus only 6% improving.
This creates enormous opportunity for businesses willing to invest in experience when competitors are cutting back. Qualtrics estimates $3.8 trillion in global sales sits at risk due to bad customer experiences.
In B2B specifically, the stakes are even higher: 86% of B2B buyers say they're willing to pay more for better experience, but 77% describe their latest purchase as "very complex or difficult." 71% are at risk of churn when not fully engaged.
Halligan's own trajectory since the London HUG talk adds context to his predictions. In February 2021, he suffered a serious snowmobile accident that resulted in 20 broken bones and 34 surgical screws. He stepped down as CEO on 4 August 2021 (effective 7 September), with Yamini Rangan taking the role.
Today, Halligan serves as Executive Chairman of HubSpot, Partner at Sequoia Capital, founder of Propeller Ventures (a $100 million climate tech fund), and Senior Lecturer at MIT Sloan. In November 2025, he launched "Long Strange Trip: CEO to CEO," a podcast exploring founder journeys.
His thinking has remained consistent with what he shared in London. In a 2024 interview, he reiterated: "The loudest voice in the market is not your blog or your content, it's your customers."
That continuity matters. Halligan wasn't offering tactical advice that would expire—he was describing a structural shift in how markets work. The evidence from 2019 to 2026 has validated his framework comprehensively.
For marketing directors and demand generation leaders reviewing their 2026 strategy, Halligan's validated framework suggests several priorities:
Audit your flywheel for friction. Map every touchpoint in your customer journey and identify where momentum stalls. The companies that won (Spotify, Uber) obsessed over removing friction. The companies that lost (Casper, Dollar Shave Club) had friction-free acquisition but failed to build ongoing relationship value.
Measure customer experience as a growth metric. If you're tracking leads and conversions but not customer satisfaction, retention, and advocacy, you're measuring the wrong things. HubSpot's flywheel only works when you track momentum across all three stages—attract, engage, and delight.
Invest in word-of-mouth infrastructure. Review programmes, community building, customer marketing—these aren't nice-to-haves. At INBOUND 2024, revenue leaders ranked customer marketing as their second-highest investment priority. They've seen the data.
Recognise that experience can't be outsourced to a channel. Warby Parker survived because they understood DTC was a tactic, not a strategy. Your experience strategy must span every touchpoint—digital, physical, service, product. This is why integrated HubSpot implementation matters: it connects your marketing, sales, and service functions into a coherent experience.
When we hosted Brian Halligan at the London HubSpot User Group in 2019, his message resonated because it aligned with what we'd already observed: sustainable growth comes from earned trust, not rented attention.
As a HubSpot Diamond Partner, we've spent the years since implementing flywheel strategies for B2B companies across the UK. The results consistently validate Halligan's thesis: when marketing, sales, and service work together to reduce friction and create delightful experiences, growth compounds.
The London HUG continues to bring practitioners together to share these lessons—because community-driven learning is itself an example of the flywheel in action.
The marketing flywheel is HubSpot's growth model that replaced the traditional funnel. It has three stages—Attract, Engage, and Delight—that create a self-reinforcing cycle where delighted customers drive new customer acquisition through referrals and advocacy. Unlike the funnel, which treats customers as outputs, the flywheel treats them as the primary growth engine.
Yes. HubSpot's ecosystem grew from $4.8 billion to $12.5 billion between 2020 and 2024, with 128,000 customers adopting flywheel-based growth strategies. The model spawned Product-Led Growth (now used by 91% of B2B SaaS companies over $50M ARR) and Community-Led Growth (72% faster deal closure), validating Halligan's core thesis that customer experience creates compounding momentum.
Both companies disrupted customer acquisition experience but failed to build sustainable competitive advantage. Casper's mattress-in-a-box concept was easily copied, leading to unsustainable customer acquisition costs. Dollar Shave Club lost its distinctive experience when Unilever's corporate integration "neutered the voice of the brand." True experience advantage requires ongoing relationship value, not just clever delivery.
Effective flywheel measurement tracks momentum across all three stages: attraction metrics (traffic, leads), engagement metrics (conversion rates, deal velocity), and delight metrics (NPS, customer satisfaction, retention, referral rates). The key is measuring how customer advocacy feeds back into attraction—proving the self-reinforcing cycle that distinguishes flywheels from funnels.
HubSpot's integrated platform was designed specifically for flywheel execution, connecting Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, and Service Hub into a unified customer experience. The platform enables consistent experience tracking across touchpoints, closed-loop reporting on customer advocacy, and automation that reduces friction at every stage. Whitehat specialises in implementing HubSpot for UK B2B companies transitioning from funnel to flywheel strategies.