HubSpot
Encyclopedia
HubSpot is a venture-funded
marketing software company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts
. Its customer base grew from over 1,400 in July 2009 to over 3,600 in November 2010, mainly in the USA.
and Dharmesh Shah, met at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT) in 2004 and incorporated HubSpot in June 2006.
It was backed by venture capitalists including General Catalyst Partners
, Matrix Partners
, Scale Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital
, Google Ventures
and Salesforce.com
.
In summer 2010, HubSpot moved its offices into the Davenport, in the Lechmere
neighborhood of Cambridge.
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
, blog
ging, and search engine optimization
(SEO). They include a set of tools such as:
The company is influenced by the ideas of David Meerman Scott
who serves on its board as special advisor. Scott featured Website Grader is his book World Wide Rave and HubSpot is a sponsor of the Inbound Marketing
Summit
that Scott co-organizes. Scott wrote the foreword and is series editor of a book that Halligan and Shah co-authored. Scott's E-book
Goobledygook Manifesto
inspired Gobbledygook Grader (an automated tool to detect gobbledygook
) and some metrics in Pressrelease Grader.
A copy of Scott's book The New Rules of Marketing and PR
appears prominently on Rebecca Corliss's desk in her music video that satirizes "link love
".
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:
For one hubspot.tv episode, the hosts secured a celebrity guest appearance from Biz Stone
not by hiring a booking agent but by hearing he was in the area, hosting a #BizInBoston Tweetup event, and then creating a viral campaign on Twitter
itself using a
Using a similar technique the hosts secured a guest appearance by MC Hammer
whose refreshing insight about Internet marketing and social media was "Forget the numbers! Just stay interesting."
The same year, HubSpot was named in the Lead411's Hottest Boston Companies list.
HubSpot was also recognized as an AlwaysOn East Top 100 company in the "SaaS
and Enterprise
" category.
The company also received the 2010 TiE50 Award and the 2010 BtoB Social Media Marketing Award.
and beta subdomains:
praises Website Grader
for its effectiveness and its congruence with his webmaster's SEO practices and own informal SEO strategy of "Create as good content as you can and assume that Google finds it." On the other hand, Michael Gray claims
that automated analysis of the on-page and off-page SEO can give misleading results compared to human expert analysis. The comments section of this posting includes a rebuttal from Shah. Similar pro and con themes emerged in a discussion on the Web Pro World Forum.
Video blogger Steve Garfield
visited the hubspot.tv studio for the Biz Stone episode and published a largely favorable review.
Cartoonist Mark Hill and HubSpot's Shah satirized their industry in a cartoon
which speculates that such marketing is only being used incestuously to market marketing to marketeers. Nick Ellery's commentary on this expresses concern that it's hard to find "gems" for marketing.
In his analysis
of Google's sandbox
ing of Website Grader in May 2009, SEO expert Rand Fishkin speculated that it was a case of Google's anti-spamdexing
algorithm "...throwing out the baby with the bathwater." The grader.com domain acquired over 250,000 inbound links from inception to the time the article was written
and it's possible this unusually rapid growth tripped a "circuit breaker" in Google's algorithm. Sometime around September 2009, this issue resolved itself and HubSpot's position on Google SERPs for the queries Fishkin used was at or near the number one position.
Some attendees of HubSpot webcasts question HubSpot's judgement on the delicate matter of when one has won permission to talk about ones products rather than the audience's critical business issue.
On February 11, 2010 Twitter Grader was hacked and a message sent out to all Twitter Users who had active OAuth promoting a video of BizStone by an account started just a day earlier - creating a storm on Twitter.
On June 2, 2010 HubSpot launched a social media experiment that involved an alternate reality game
. The game involved a spoof home page for an educational site that they sponsor (Inbound Marketing University). The spoof inconvenienced the site's students, so HubSpot had to backtrack and apologize.
Venture capital
Venture capital is financial capital provided to early-stage, high-potential, high risk, growth startup companies. The venture capital fund makes money by owning equity in the companies it invests in, which usually have a novel technology or business model in high technology industries, such as...
marketing software company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, in the Greater Boston area. It was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England, an important center of the Puritan theology embraced by the town's founders. Cambridge is home to two of the world's most prominent...
. Its customer base grew from over 1,400 in July 2009 to over 3,600 in November 2010, mainly in the USA.
History
The founders, Brian HalliganBrian Halligan
Brian Halligan is an executive and author. He is CEO and co-founder of HubSpot, a Cambridge, MA-based inbound marketing company. Halligan is also an Entrepreneur-In-Residence at MIT. He has co-authored two books on marketing.-Academia:...
and Dharmesh Shah, met at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...
(MIT) in 2004 and incorporated HubSpot in June 2006.
It was backed by venture capitalists including General Catalyst Partners
General Catalyst Partners
General Catalyst Partners is a private equity firm focused on venture capital investments in early stage technology-based companies including software, infrastructure software and applied technology businesses. The firm has also includes a growth capital team that focuses on later stage...
, Matrix Partners
Matrix Partners
Matrix Partners is a US based private equity investment firm focusing on venture capital investments. The firm invests in seed and early stage companies in the United States and India, particularly in the software, communications, semiconductors, data storage, Internet or wireless sectors.The firm...
, Scale Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital
Sequoia Capital
Sequoia Capital is a Californian venture capital firm located on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, California. The Wall Street Journal has called Sequoia Capital "one of the highest-caliber venture firms", and noted that it is "one of Silicon Valley's most influential venture-capital firms"...
, Google Ventures
Google Ventures
Google Ventures is the venture capital investment arm of Google Inc. that makes financially driven investments in technology companies. Google Ventures seeks to invest in start-up companies in a variety of fields ranging from Internet, software, and hardware to clean-tech, bio-tech, and health...
and Salesforce.com
Salesforce.com
Salesforce.com is an enterprise cloud computing company headquartered in San Francisco that distributes business software on a subscription basis. Salesforce.com hosts the applications off-site...
.
In summer 2010, HubSpot moved its offices into the Davenport, in the Lechmere
Lechmere Square
Lechmere Square is located at the intersection of Cambridge Street and First Street in East Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was originally named for the Colonial-era landowner Richard Lechmere, a Loyalist who returned to England at the beginning of the American Revolution. His lands were later seized...
neighborhood of Cambridge.
Products and services
- HubSpot Basic offers SEO, marketing analytics, content management system, business blogging, and landing pages.
- HubSpot Professional adds features such as Salesforce.comSalesforce.comSalesforce.com is an enterprise cloud computing company headquartered in San Francisco that distributes business software on a subscription basis. Salesforce.com hosts the applications off-site...
integration for closed-loop marketing metrics. - HubSpot Enterprise adds further features like A/B testing.
For detailed comparisons, a feature table is available. - Training and consulting services
Strategy
HubSpot is based on the idea that permissionPermission marketing
Permission marketing is a term popularized by Seth Godin used in marketing in general and e-marketing specifically. The undesirable opposite of permission marketing is interruption marketing. Marketers obtain permission before advancing to the next step in the purchasing process. For example, they...
or inbound marketing
Inbound marketing
Note: The sole purpose of this article is to disambiguate two pairs of meanings of inbound and outbound marketing. Please see the linked articles for in-depth information on the respective meanings....
(e.g. appearance in a search engine results page
Search engine results page
A search engine results page , is the listing of web pages returned by a search engine in response to a keyword query. The results normally include a list of web pages with titles, a link to the page, and a short description showing where the Keywords have matched content within the 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
Outbound Marketing
Interruption marketing is a pejorative term that refers to promoting a product through continued advertising, promotions, public relations and sales. It is considered to be an annoying version of the traditional way of doing marketing whereby companies focus on finding customers through advertising...
. Their products help customers use and measure internet marketing
Internet marketing
Internet marketing, also known as digital marketing, web marketing, online marketing, search marketing or e-marketing, is referred to as the marketing of products or services over the Internet...
techniques such as social media
Social media
The term Social Media refers to the use of web-based and mobile technologies to turn communication into an interactive dialogue. Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein define social media as "a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0,...
, blog
Blog
A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...
ging, and search engine optimization
Search engine optimization
Search engine optimization is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the "natural" or un-paid search results...
(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.
The company is influenced by the ideas of David Meerman Scott
David Meerman Scott
David Meerman Scott is an American online marketing strategist, and author of several books on marketing. Based in Boston, he is a speaker at conferences and corporate events and he runs seminars about marketing around the world....
who serves on its board as special advisor. Scott featured Website Grader is his book World Wide Rave and HubSpot is a sponsor of the Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing
Note: The sole purpose of this article is to disambiguate two pairs of meanings of inbound and outbound marketing. Please see the linked articles for in-depth information on the respective meanings....
Summit
that Scott co-organizes. Scott wrote the foreword and is series editor of a book that Halligan and Shah co-authored. Scott's E-book
E-book
An electronic book is a book-length publication in digital form, consisting of text, images, or both, and produced on, published through, and readable on computers or other electronic devices. Sometimes the equivalent of a conventional printed book, e-books can also be born digital...
Goobledygook Manifesto
inspired Gobbledygook Grader (an automated tool to detect gobbledygook
Gobbledygook
Gobbledygook or gobbledegook is any text containing jargon or especially convoluted English that results in it being excessively hard to understand or even incomprehensible...
) and some metrics in Pressrelease Grader.
A copy of Scott's book The New Rules of Marketing and PR
appears prominently on Rebecca Corliss's desk in her music video that satirizes "link love
Methods of website linking
This article pertains to methods of hyperlinking to/of different websites, often used in regard to search engine optimization . Many techniques and special terminology about linking are described below.-Reciprocal link:...
".
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-bookE-bookAn electronic book is a book-length publication in digital form, consisting of text, images, or both, and produced on, published through, and readable on computers or other electronic devices. Sometimes the equivalent of a conventional printed book, e-books can also be born digital...
s on internet marketing topics - Interactive webcasts and live video shows on hubspot.tv using TwitterTwitterTwitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July...
conversations, which are archived on iTunes StoreITunes StoreThe iTunes Store is a software-based online digital media store operated by Apple. Opening as the iTunes Music Store on April 28, 2003, with over 200,000 items to purchase, it is, as of April 2008, the number-one music vendor in the United States...
as podcasts and as a YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....
channel - Viral videos including musical parodies and satires.
- Free, interactive tools such as the grader.com series
For one hubspot.tv episode, the hosts secured a celebrity guest appearance from Biz Stone
Biz Stone
Christopher Isaac "Biz" Stone is a co-founder and Creative Director of Twitter, Inc and also helped to create and launch Xanga, Blogger, Odeo, and , founded in June 2011 with his long time collaborators Evan Williams and Jason Goldman to focus on building systems that help people work together to...
not by hiring a booking agent but by hearing he was in the area, hosting a #BizInBoston Tweetup event, and then creating a viral campaign on Twitter
Twitter
Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July...
itself using a
#bizinboston hashtag and mentions of Stone's Twitter username. The tactic initially caused concern among some members of the Twitter community, but these were quickly resolved.Using a similar technique the hosts secured a guest appearance by MC Hammer
MC Hammer
Stanley Kirk Burrell , better known by his stage name MC Hammer , is an American rapper, entertainer, business entrepreneur, dancer and actor. He had his greatest commercial success and popularity from the late 1980s until the mid-1990s...
whose refreshing insight about Internet marketing and social media was "Forget the numbers! Just stay interesting."
Acquisitions
- On June 16, 2011 HubSpot announced its acquisition of the marketing automation company Performable.
- On August 18, 2011 the company tweeted its acquisition of Laura FittonLaura FittonLaura Fitton is the founder of oneforty, an app store for Twitter, acquired in August 2011 by HubSpot and co-Author of Twitter for Dummies.-Academia:...
's company Oneforty, which is focused on Twitter-based marketing. The innovative Twitter format of the news release drew praise from the Wall Street Journal.
Return on Investment
Two studies by a student at MIT Sloan School of Management indicates a substantial return on investment of the HubSpot methodology. HubSpot itself also has published several success stories. One web site offers a free spreadsheet to estimate ROI on such methods.Community
HubSpot is a sponsor of InboundMarketing.com, a community website for marketers. The discussion forum of the community is hosted by the StackExchange software service.Awards
In June 2010, HubSpot was awarded "Best Places to Work in Greater Boston" in its category.The same year, HubSpot was named in the Lead411's Hottest Boston Companies list.
HubSpot was also recognized as an AlwaysOn East Top 100 company in the "SaaS
Saas
SAAS is an abbreviation for* Social Accountability Accreditation Services* Software as a service * Student Awards Agency for Scotland* Seattle Academy of Arts and Sciences* South Australian Ambulance Service...
and Enterprise
Enterprise software
Enterprise software, also known as enterprise application software , is software used in organizations, such as in a business or government, contrary to software chosen by individuals...
" category.
The company also received the 2010 TiE50 Award and the 2010 BtoB Social Media Marketing Award.
Easter Eggs and Betas
Besides the seven subdomains and one beta site linked there, the grader.com site has unadvertized Easter eggEaster egg (media)
Image:Carl Oswald Rostosky - Zwei Kaninchen und ein Igel 1861.jpg|250px|thumb|right|Example of Easter egg hidden within imagerect 467 383 539 434 desc none...
and beta subdomains:
- Email Grader (beta) that grades your eDM (e direct mail) marketing pieces
- Action Grader (beta) Compare A/B web site actions e.g. to optimize calls-to-actions.
- Alerts Grader - grades your Social Media Alerts on Google Alerts, Twitter and LinkedIn
- Speaker Grader that collates Twitter tweetsTwitterTwitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July...
containing 1) either the hashtags#upvoteOR#downvoteand 2) the speaker's Twitter handle e.g.@dmscott, and 3) the hashtag of the event e.g.#sxsw - Buzz Grader - intermittant functionality. Grades buzz in the generic, lower case sense of ones brand being mentioned on blogs, in the news, and on TwitterTwitterTwitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July...
. Not to be confused with the upper case word Buzz on the branded social media services Google BuzzGoogle BuzzGoogle Buzz is a social networking, microblogging and messaging tool from Google integrated into the company's web-based email program, Gmail. Users can share links, photos, videos, status messages and comments organized in "conversations" and visible in the user's inbox. On October 14, 2011,...
or Yahoo! BuzzYahoo! BuzzYahoo! Buzz was a community-based news article website, heavily derived from Digg, that combines the features of social bookmarking and syndication through a user interface that allows editorial control...
. - LinkedIn Grader - intermittant functionality. Also called Social Grader.
- Gobbledygook Grader "...evaluates your written content (press release, brochure copy, etc.) and checks for use of gobbledygook, jargon, cliches and over-used, hype-filled words."
Criticism and Controversy
Guy KawasakiGuy Kawasaki
Guy Kawasaki is a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, bestselling author, and Apple Fellow. He was one of the Apple employees originally responsible for marketing the Macintosh in 1984. He is currently a Managing Director of Garage Technology Ventures, and has been involved in the rumor reporting...
praises Website Grader
for its effectiveness and its congruence with his webmaster's SEO practices and own informal SEO strategy of "Create as good content as you can and assume that Google finds it." On the other hand, Michael Gray claims
that automated analysis of the on-page and off-page SEO can give misleading results compared to human expert analysis. The comments section of this posting includes a rebuttal from Shah. Similar pro and con themes emerged in a discussion on the Web Pro World Forum.
Video blogger Steve Garfield
Steve Garfield
Steve Garfield is a videographer and video blogger based in Boston, Massachusetts. One of the Internet's first video bloggers, Garfield began experimenting with the technique in 2002 and launched his own video blog on January 1, 2004....
visited the hubspot.tv studio for the Biz Stone episode and published a largely favorable review.
Cartoonist Mark Hill and HubSpot's Shah satirized their industry in a cartoon
which speculates that such marketing is only being used incestuously to market marketing to marketeers. Nick Ellery's commentary on this expresses concern that it's hard to find "gems" for marketing.
In his analysis
of Google's sandbox
Sandbox Effect
The Sandbox is a name given to an observation about the way Google ranks web pages in its index...
ing of Website Grader in May 2009, SEO expert Rand Fishkin speculated that it was a case of Google's anti-spamdexing
Spamdexing
In computing, spamdexing is the deliberate manipulation of search engine indexes...
algorithm "...throwing out the baby with the bathwater." The grader.com domain acquired over 250,000 inbound links from inception to the time the article was written
and it's possible this unusually rapid growth tripped a "circuit breaker" in Google's algorithm. Sometime around September 2009, this issue resolved itself and HubSpot's position on Google SERPs for the queries Fishkin used was at or near the number one position.
Some attendees of HubSpot webcasts question HubSpot's judgement on the delicate matter of when one has won permission to talk about ones products rather than the audience's critical business issue.
On February 11, 2010 Twitter Grader was hacked and a message sent out to all Twitter Users who had active OAuth promoting a video of BizStone by an account started just a day earlier - creating a storm on Twitter.
On June 2, 2010 HubSpot launched a social media experiment that involved an alternate reality game
Alternate reality game
An alternate reality game is an interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants' ideas or actions....
. The game involved a spoof home page for an educational site that they sponsor (Inbound Marketing University). The spoof inconvenienced the site's students, so HubSpot had to backtrack and apologize.
Technology
HubSpot Content Management System is written in C#, use the ASP.Net framework and SQL Server database, runs on IIS web servers.The apps run in the Rackspace Cloud. Other tools are written in a mixture of Python, Java, and PHP and run on MySQL and Apache at Amazon EC2.External links
- hubspot.com - official site
- grader.com - free samples of the type of tools HubSpot uses for measuring online presence
- HubSpot on Facebook - official FacebookFacebookFacebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...
page - HubSpot on Google Plus official Google Plus page