MICHAEL AUSTIN/THEISPOT.COM SPRING 2020 MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW 77
et me tell you about my evening routine. Every night, my dog Romeo and I come
home from the Cambridge, Massachusetts, offices of HubSpot, where I’m CEO,
by taking a Lyft. We play our favorite band on Spotify. Cranking the music, we
boogie over to the dog area, clean out some of Romeo’s toys, and see if he got a
new package in the mail from Chewy — he loves their chicken lollipops. After a
snack, I head down to the gym for a workout I booked through ClassPass. I come
home and shower and shave using a new package from Dollar Shave Club. I order
something from DoorDash, and, after it arrives, Romeo and I put our toes up and
check out a favorite movie on Netflix. Then we lie down on our Casper mattress,
and we get a good night’s sleep.
I think we have a fascinating evening routine. Why? Because all these companies — I just ripped through
eight of them — have replaced companies I used to do business with.
It’s not just my evening routine; it’s my daily routine. It’s all of our daily routines, isn’t it? There’s been a mas-
sive wave of disruption happening in the consumer world, courtesy of companies like Lyft, Netflix, and Spotify.
The same shift is going on in the business world. When I’m on the West Coast, I set up in a remote office and
collaborate with team members on Slack. When
there’s a meeting, I fire up Zoom. When I’m
hungry, I scarf down something from ezCater.
Again, this is a wholesale swap of vendors.
But this isn’t disruption in the way most of
us think of it. We tend to think about technol-
ogy disrupters — the browser, Google, Intel,
the iPhone, maybe the Tesla someday. Big
technology companies with lots of patents. (In
2018, Intel was granted 2,735 patents, Apple
2,160, and Google 2,070.)^1
Companies like Chewy and Dollar Shave
and ClassPass — are they technology disrupt-
ers? I’m not so sure. I went very deep on this
list of companies plus a few others, about
20 altogether, with two of my colleagues at
HubSpot. We talked to almost all of these
The Experience
Disrupters
To compete in 2020, it’s not good enough to have a disruptive product.
Your customer experience also needs to shine.
BY BRIAN HALLIGAN
DISRUPTION 2020: FOCUSING ON THE CUSTOMER