Earlier this year, leading CRM provider Hubspot acquired the Connect.com domain name in a deal facilitated by marketplace Brandforce and its co-founder, Louis Pickthall. Connect.com, which hosted an Efty-powered landing page up until its acquisition, is now the home of Hubspot Connect, a social network in its early days.
The domain took Hubspot $10 million to acquire, and it didn’t take long for the company to put its new domain.
Recently, Hubspot co-founder Dharmesh Shah took to the stage at the company’s Inbound conference, which maintains a digital home at Inbound.com, and officially unveiled Connect.com to the audience.
The launch, which starts at around 19 minutes in the video above, reveals some overall ideas that Shah and his team have about the platform.
“This is a moment I’ve been looking forward to for years,” said Shah as he was introducing the section.
Describing Connect.com, he said, “it will be a connected community that helps you connect the dots. We creatively named it Hubspot Connect, and it will live at Connect.com. It will be the connected community for growth professionals[…] it will combine a network, a marketplace, and an academy.”
Shah shared also shared future plans for the platform. “Imagine using Connect to hire someone with verified experience using a part of Hubspot, like hiring an ops person that used our custom objects feature. Imagine you’re in Hubspot Academy and there’s a Connect button to join a study group for any course inside Hubspot Academy. Imagine you’re a creator and you want to create a specialized course for social media growth in the higher ed industry for Latin America. That’s something Hubspot would never be able to do, and that’s the power of community.”