Jay Hallberg and the case for giving it away

Twenty dollars a month sounds like a reasonable amount to charge for software that makes an IT administrator’s life easier. Enough to establish a business. Little enough to avoid an argument. Jay Hallberg found an argument anyway: what would happen when three programmers somewhere else offered a similar product for ten dollars, or gave it away?

It was an inconvenient question for a young company considering subscriptions. It also helped set the direction of Spiceworks. The founders chose to make their IT management software free and earn money from advertising. Before the company had a community with an orange dinosaur, it had a fairly unsentimental debate about who would pay.

Hallberg’s career keeps circling the practical difficulty inside that debate. People have work to finish. Businesses want to reach them. Somewhere between those two facts, a useful product can become a business - provided the business remembers why people arrived.

The trouble with twenty dollars

Hallberg came to Austin through 3M, which moved him from Minnesota in the mid-1990s. Harvard Business School followed in 1998. There he met Mike Maples Jr., a Motive co-founder. The connection led to an internship and then a job at Motive. His route into startups passed through an established industrial company and a business school rather than a dorm-room unveiling.

He also brought an engineering education from the University of Illinois. By the time Spiceworks appeared in 2006, he had experience on the marketing and product side of enterprise software. His fellow founders were Scott Abel, Greg Kattawar and Francis Sullivan. Hallberg became the founding vice president of marketing.

The audience they chose had plenty to do and limited resources: IT professionals in small and midsize businesses. In a large organization, managing technology can be divided among departments and specialists. A small business can hand the whole untidy collection to a few people. The printer has no interest in how many colleagues they have.

The founders investigated the work before trying to sell an answer. Hallberg later described the method with four admirably unadorned words: “Good old fashioned market research.” The point was to discover demand while there was still time to shape the product around it.

By November 2006, Spiceworks IT Desktop could discover networked devices and report on their condition. It helped inventory computers, servers, routers and printers, along with installed software. Advertisements appeared beside the management console. The economics were visible while the user worked; free came with a business model attached.

A room full of people who understand the printer

A tool can bring somebody through the door. Another person who understands the problem can give them a reason to stay. Spiceworks developed into a place where IT professionals asked questions, exchanged advice and learned from one another’s experience.

For a person responsible for technology in a business devoted to something else, that had a particular appeal. The colleagues nearby might appreciate a working network without wanting to discuss it. A professional community supplied the people who did want to discuss it, including the stubborn detail that everyone else would prefer to skip.

The business also asked something of vendors. They could establish a presence and bring their technical staff into discussions. But technical exchanges were not an invitation to recite a sales presentation. Spiceworks coached marketing clients on participating in the community. Knowing the answer was useful. Insisting on delivering a pitch could make you unwelcome.

“You’ll get thrashed if you make a sales pitch.”

Jay Hallberg, 2015

Hallberg understood how little spare attention the audience possessed. “They don’t have time to talk to salesmen,” he said. A community built around helping those people had to offer a better use of their time. That requirement made trust an operating concern, with consequences for the advertisers as well as the users.

The product could reveal opportunities in delightfully ordinary places. When its tools could track a printer’s ink level, users suggested being able to order a replacement cartridge from there. In 2011, Spiceworks described plans for social shopping features. A dwindling supply of ink had become a clue about where buying could fit naturally into work.

There was personality around the practical assistance. Members called themselves SpiceHeads. The mascot, SpiceRex, was an orange T-Rex. It is a pleasingly disproportionate animal to recruit into network management. Software can list your devices; a dinosaur gives the conference something to put on a shirt.

The orange dinosaur acquires a balance sheet

Community brought scale and a larger set of obligations. In January 2015, Hallberg became president and CEO, succeeding Scott Abel. Abel moved into the chief strategy officer role. Hallberg’s remit now included running the company’s day-to-day operations, a wider assignment than explaining why people should use its software.

The tenth anniversary in January 2016 offered a chance to enjoy how far the business had travelled. The staff outing was to see Star Wars at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin. Hallberg also recalled an earlier office with faulty heating: a new arrival from Dell encountered space heaters and suspected the company could not afford its heating bill. The building had supplied an unfortunate first impression.

Then came a more difficult chapter. In June 2016, Hallberg confirmed that Spiceworks had cut 12 percent of its workforce. He also described a product direction shaped by requests for standalone tools and a closer fit between applications, content and community. The company’s growth story included the responsibility of making cuts, with employees bearing their immediate consequences.

Its ambitions continued to change. At SpiceWorld in 2018, Spiceworks announced machine-learning capabilities intended to connect technology buyers and sellers more effectively. The idea depended on understanding what a business needed at a particular moment. Timing mattered: someone investigating a problem could welcome relevant expertise while having little use for an unrelated solicitation.

That thinking connected Hallberg’s marketing background to the product itself. A business-to-business marketplace has to make sense to both sides. Buyers need help choosing. Sellers need a way to find suitable customers. Getting those interests to meet requires more care than putting an advertisement wherever a screen has room.

Ziff Davis acquired Spiceworks in 2019. The combination brought Spiceworks’ community and software together with Ziff Davis’ B2B marketing business. Hallberg’s founding story belongs to Spiceworks, established thirteen years earlier; the later combined business grew from an acquisition.

By 2020, he was leaving his full-time role. The departure mattered enough to the community that its management team discussed how to communicate it openly. A founder who has spent years explaining what a company is doing eventually becomes part of what members expect to find there.

Three weeks beats a beautiful plan

Hallberg subsequently worked with startups at Shasta Ventures, leading its Elevate program as general manager. He was advising founders on the problem he had already lived through: how to get a product into a market, understand the response and build a business around what people actually wanted.

In 2022, he laid out an approach based on go-to-market sprints. These were short experiments, generally lasting three to six weeks, focused on a particular tactic and audience. A team could choose a segment, understand the buying process, create a small amount of relevant material and test a channel.

The record of the experiment mattered too. Writing down what happened gave the next person context and allowed the team to learn across attempts. It is easy to keep producing activity when nobody can quite remember why the previous version failed.

There is a recognizable connection to those early customer conversations. Research and experiments both expose an idea to people outside the company. They also interrupt a pleasant startup habit: treating internal agreement as evidence that a buyer will care. A beautifully coordinated plan can still be beautifully coordinated around the wrong assumption.

Back at the beginning, with different tools

VelocityEngine began in 2023. Hallberg is its co-founder and CEO; Neil Day is co-founder and CTO. The company’s founding account also names Nick Bhavsar, a fellow Spiceworks alumnus who had worked with Shasta. Hallberg’s next company emerged from a circle of people familiar with the work of taking products to market.

The public launch announcement in May 2025 described software that takes a company’s existing knowledge and organizes it into personas, positioning, messaging and campaign material. The intended customer was another busy team, expected to produce more relevant work across more audiences without a matching increase in resources.

Today, the company describes its product as a campaign operating system. Its workflow connects finding gaps in content with planning, creating and measuring campaigns. The ambition is to make the pieces of marketing work together, so that producing another asset serves an identifiable purpose.

There is a useful restraint in viewing the new company through Hallberg’s earlier work. AI expands what software can produce. A team still has to decide who needs it, what problem it addresses and whether the result helps. Those questions were present when Spiceworks offered a free download to an IT administrator.

In April 2026, Hallberg returned to the Spiceworks story for its twentieth-anniversary podcast series. The episode revisited the brand and the community that had grown around it. Two decades give a founder plenty of decisions to revisit. An early one still explains much of the journey: examine the price, then look harder at the person trying to get through the day.