By Bill Klump | @TheKlumper | February 9th, 2012
When Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, the founders of HubSpot® met at MIT back in 2004, they were both interested in the transformative impacts of the internet on small businesses and were early students of Web 2.0 concepts. The discussions and early work were ongoing for two years and in June of 2006 the company was officially founded and funded. Wow how time flies!
Since those early days at MIT, Brian and Dharmesh have played a big roll in how the evolution of the web has fundamentally changed the way we do business. The two founders believe the most interesting aspect of the internet’s impact on business from HubSpot’s perspective is in how it has changed the nature of shopping and subsequently the shape of every vendor’s sales funnel.
“Ten years ago, if a company was interested in buying a new product/service, it started by attending trade shows, reading industry journals, and going to seminars to learn more. Early in the shopping process, it would engage directly with the key vendors’ (sales) people who would feed them asymmetric information from the top of their sales funnel to the bottom of their funnel. Today, that same process looks very different. The potential customer starts in Google by searching on relevant keywords. The prospect would spend time on each vendor’s site, subscribe to the most interesting vendor blogs, subscribe to the vendor’s customers’ blogs, join an industry discussion forum, etc. Relatively late in the prospect’s decision cycle, it would engage the vendor’s (sales) people directly. That first vendor conversation today is much different from the one a decade ago because the prospect often knows as much about the vendor’s product as the sales rep does and the prospect is already much more “qualified.”
The result of this shift in shopping patterns is that the internet has tended to make every marketplace more “efficient.” Just as Ebay makes the niche market for Pez dispensers, WWI shovels, and 1975 World Series ticket stubs more efficient, the internet as a whole is making the niche markets for intellectual property law, system dynamics consulting, and food brokerage more efficient. It used to be that the size of your firm’s sales force was the key to finding the most new customers, but that is not necessarily always the case today. The good news for small businesses is that on the internet, no one can tell if you are a one person sole proprietorship or a 1000 person consultancy.
It turns out that most small businesses (and startups) have relatively niche-y products that they generally sell to companies in their rolodex and companies two degrees away from their rolodex. The internet disproportionately favors small businesses since it enables them to position their niche goods to people shopping for that particular niche good regardless of the numbers of degrees of separation from their rolodex.
HubSpot is based on the idea that permission or inbound marketing (e.g. appearance in a search engine results page (SERP) at the moment a prospective customer is searching on a term related to your product) is more powerful than interruption or outbound marketing. Their products help customers use and measure internet marketing techniques such as social media, blogging, and search engine optimization (SEO).
They include a set of tools such as:
- Business blogging and analytics
- Keyword Grader which helps you find search engine keywords that are popular, relevant, and are relatively neglected by one’s competition
- Link Grader to assess and compare the number and authority of the inbound links that most modern search engines use to generate their SERPs
- Page Grader to offer suggestions for on-page SEO such as length of the title and description in the head of HTML pages, alt tags on images etc.
- Website Grader which compares web sites for SEO qualities, and offers suggestions for improvement. The paid version adds trending and other features versus the gratis version.
HubSpot models the behavior it teaches its own customers by promoting itself through conversations, not one-way broadcast, and by the ‘publish your way in’ (or ‘think like a publisher’ or ‘always be publishing (ABP)’) mindset. This strategy is in alignment with Google’s advice to webmasters that to rank high in the SERPs you must create great content that readers will want to link to. Content includes:
- Frequent posting on its top ranked blog.
- Free E-books on internet marketing topics.
- Interactive webcasts and live video shows on hubspot.tv using Twitter conversations, which are archived on iTunes Store as podcasts and as a YouTube channel.
- Viral videos including musical parodies and satires.
- Free, interactive tools such as the grader.com series.
Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah:
Brian Halligan serves as HubSpot’s CEO – In addition to co-founding HubSpot which has accumulated over 6,000 customers, he is also a Senior Lecturer at MIT where he teaches 15.S16 “Entrepreneurial Product Development and Marketing.” He is the author of two books: Marketing Lessons From the Grateful Dead and Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs, which is in its seventh printing, and to date has sold over 50k copies, has been translated into nine languages, and peaked at #17 overall on the Amazon bestseller list. Brian was named an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year 2011 New England award recipient. In his spare time, he sits on a few boards of directors, follows his beloved Red Sox, goes to the gym, and is learning to play guitar.
Dharmesh Shah serves as HubSpot’s CTO – In addition to co-founding HubSpot which was ranked the second fastest growing software company in the Inc. 500, and has raised over $60 million in venture capital, he is also the co-author of “Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media and Blogs” published by Wiley in October, 2009. The book has been one of the top 50 marketing books on Amazon for over 2 years. Dhaarmesh also authors OnStartups.com, a popular startup blog with over 220,000 members in its online community. He is an active member of the Boston area entrepreneurial community, an angel investor in over 30 startups and a frequent speaker on the topic of startups and inbound marketing.
To learn more about our ‘Disruptor of the Day‘, please watch this short video overview of HubSpot’s Marketing Software, and of course don’t forget to visit them at www.hubspot.com
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