By Joss Poulton, Co-founder & CEO, ClearSync
Origins: HubSpot, Onshape, and PLG before it was cool
In 2015, I left the Ops team at HubSpot to join a fast-growing, well-funded SaaS startup called Onshape. At the time, “product-led growth” (PLG) wasn’t yet a buzzword, but both HubSpot and Onshape were pioneering it.
At Onshape, users could sign up for free, upgrade with a credit card, and add seats — all self-service. We aimed to bring a friendlier and more consumer-like experience to B2B software. The early vision was that the company wouldn’t even need sales reps.
Like many PLG companies, Onshape used Stripe for billing and subscription management. Stripe made in-app billing easy – until we tried to connect it to the rest of the business.
Stripe + CRM = Chaos
Once the early excitement wore off, it became clear that we needed sales reps to work alongside our self-serve flow. At the same time, getting reliable billing and subscription data into Salesforce was becoming a nightmare.
We hired a third-party developer to build a custom integration between Stripe and Salesforce. It used custom objects, we backfilled historical data, and pushed live webhook events into Salesforce to be analyzed by custom code.
The result was a highly fragile system. Webhooks were dropped or came in out of order. Stripe’s intricate object and event structure was complex to replicate and interrelate within Salesforce. Every week revealed a new edge case we hadn’t planned for. The data was hard to trust, let alone act on.
10 Years Later
A decade later, as a RevOps consultant, I saw the same patterns again and again: high-growth PLG companies struggling to connect billing data from Stripe with customer data in their CRM — now usually HubSpot.
It’s a painful irony: Revenue Operations teams, by name, are responsible for making revenue data actionable. And yet, they often can’t answer basic questions like “what’s our current MRR?” or “how many active subscriptions does this company have with us?”
Across companies, I saw the same duct-taped spreadsheets or Zaps, manual workarounds, and data blind spots.
Around this time, I was exploring different SaaS startup ideas with my now-cofounder Rachel Decker, one of my closest friends from our early days at HubSpot. Rachel went on to become a founding UX researcher at HubSpot and has since led product and UX at multiple SaaS companies.
Most ideas felt interesting, but this one felt necessary – building a purpose-built Stripe-to-HubSpot integration that gives RevOps and Finance teams the clarity they need to unlock value across the entire business.
The Opportunity Behind ClearSync
Most PLG companies choose Stripe and HubSpot early on, and rarely want to switch off of either. That creates a growing gap between billing and customer data. ClearSync bridges that gap.
With ClearSync, teams will be able to:
Automatically associate Stripe Subscriptions to Contacts, Companies, (and, soon, Deals) in HubSpot
Quickly see the MRR/ARR values of all subscriptions inside HubSpot
Segment and report on every individual Stripe MRR change event historically
Build a SaaS Finance Dashboard in HubSpot with clean, categorized MRR history
Trust their revenue data, with event logs and discrepancy detection built in.
Other use cases abound – like using the data to pay out sales commissions, delineate between “sales-led” and actual self-service revenue, and making sure that you treat a Company with 10 individual subscriptions like a larger customer than they might initially appear with fragmented data.
We’re building ClearSync because we’ve lived the pain of disconnected critical systems, and we knew there had to be a better way than custom or overly simplistic integrations.
If you’re a RevOps, Finance, or Growth leader using HubSpot and Stripe and are tired of stitching together spreadsheets or Zaps, we’d love to talk. We hope you’ll join us in building a future where your subscription and revenue data in HubSpot is finally reliable, visible, and actionable.
