At newly public HubSpot, co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah told me the company has sought “to not just build a great company, but also build some great entrepreneurs.”
The latest new entrepreneurs to spin out of the Cambridge marketing software firm are Adam Schwartz and Zack Bloom, whose startup Eager aims to let website owners who aren’t especially technical to easily add cool features to their site.
Without having to adds code, Eager lets users add plugins to their site such as an image slider, a loading bar and “InstantClick,” which improves the speed of clicking links. Users can add the features with a few clicks and place the elements into specific locations, and then preview all of it before making the changes live.
Typically, when these sorts of features are available they are “just complicated enough that it would cause people to bounce,” Schwartz said. “We felt we could make this stuff really easy … It felt like the right time. This is a process that really hasn’t changed in 20 years.”
Schwartz and Bloom had led the open-source team at HubSpot for two years, before leaving in April to work on Eager. The startup launched its offering about two months ago, but the focus had initially been on getting developers to add plugins to the Eager app store. Now that there’s a selection of apps available, the company hopes to begin attracting end users of the apps. “We’re hoping to get these in the hands of more non-technical people,” Schwartz said.
While everything is free for now, the aim is to eventually earn revenue by driving sales for other companies’ apps—think Disqus or Shareaholic—and also by selling its own paid apps.
The company is based at Schwartz’s East Cambridge apartment for now, and has bootstrapped so far.
The co-founders had the idea for the company after seeing that their open-source apps at HubSpot—while they were popular among developers—they “weren’t getting a lot of traction outside of that,” Schwartz said.
Ultimately he sums up the opportunity this way: Installing JavaScript apps has been done the same way for two decades, and “it’s really time for innovation there. We want to put forward the sort of technology to enable any single person, and Web owner to improve their website.”
