Raise your hand if you know a business that would like more visitors to its website, more leads for its sales team—and more customers to fuel growth. Chances are your hand is up. We all know businesses that want to grow. There are millions of them. Since you're reading this book, chances are, your business is one of them.
Now, raise your hand if you love getting cold calls from eager salespeople during dinner. Or spam e-mails with irrelevant offers in your inbox. How about popup ads when you're trying to read an article on the Internet? No hands up? Didn't think so. And, as it turns out, most other people share your sentiment.
The problem is that there's a fundamental mismatch between how organizations are marketing and selling their offerings—and the way that people actually want to shop and buy. We all want to help our organizations grow, but nobody (including marketers) likes the way we are commonly marketed to.
In 2004 (a decade ago!), the two of us met while we were both graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
After graduation, Brian was helping venture-backed startups with their marketing and sales strategies, when he noticed a problem. The “best practices” marketing and sales playbook he had successfully used for years at previous companies wasn't working that well. Not only were the practices far from the “best,” they were fundamentally broken. Trade shows, e-mail blasts, and advertisements just weren't that effective anymore. People weren't responding to these interruptive tactics and had gotten really good at blocking them out.
Meanwhile, Dharmesh was still at MIT, working on his graduate thesis. Between classes, he started a blog on startups and entrepreneurship. He creatively named it OnStartups.com. The blog gained mass adoption—and massive traffic, which surprised us both.
The two of us would meet regularly to talk about Brian's work, Dharmesh's classes—and startups. One topic especially interested us: Why was a tiny blog written by an MIT grad student with no budget able to get so much more traffic and interest than companies with professional marketing teams and big budgets? What was going on here? What was Dharmesh doing? Rather than interrupt people with advertisements or e-mails, Dharmesh was figuring out ways to pull in people from Google, other blogs, and social media sites. All for free. With many late nights and experimentation, he figured out how to “get found” by thousands of people on the web.
After many meetings, much coffee, and the occasional wine or Belgian beer (a favorite for both of us), we came to a startlingly simple observation.
People did not want to be interrupted by marketers or harassed by salespeople. They wanted to be helped.
The world has changed dramatically: People no longer live, work, shop, and buy as they did a decade or two ago. And yet, businesses still try to market and sell like it's the 1990s.
Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.
—Victor Hugo
We started talking about this transformation in how people shop and buy. We called the traditional, interruptive methods “outbound marketing,” because they were fundamentally about pushing a message out, and started calling the new way “inbound marketing.” Inbound was about pulling people in by sharing relevant information, creating useful content, and generally being helpful.
So, we talked about this transformation to anyone who would listen—one-on-one meetings with local businesses in Boston, onstage at conferences with hundreds of people, and on our blog with thousands of readers. The response was overwhelmingly positive and incredibly exciting.
It is a fantastic time to be a marketer or an entrepreneur today. For the last 50 years, companies such as Procter & Gamble, IBM, and Coca-Cola used huge amounts of money to interrupt their way into businesses and consumers' wallets using outbound marketing techniques. The outbound marketing era is over. The next 50 years will be the era of inbound marketing.
The next question was, if the concept of inbound was so easy to understand and inspiring, why weren't more companies doing it? Why were millions of companies sitting on the sidelines instead of tapping into the power of this transformation?
The reason was clear: Though the idea of inbound made sense, people weren't completely sure how to get started and how to make it work for their business.
The problem wasn't a lack of tools. There were content management systems and SEO tools and social media applications and e-mail tools and marketing automation tools and on…and on…and on. Many of these individual tools were great—but the task of combining them was gargantuan. It wasn't within the realm of mere mortals who didn't command an impressive army of IT folks.
So, on June 9, 2006 (MIT commencement day), we officially started HubSpot—a software company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We started the company for two reasons. First, we believed in the transformative power of inbound marketing and how it could help businesses grow. Second, we wanted to make it easy for organizations to get into the game so we committed to building a platform from the ground up that was expressly designed to help them do it.
We built HubSpot with one simple goal: Make it easier to get going with inbound, so businesses could get growing. One platform to learn. One password to remember. One bill to pay. And, one phone number to call. One integrated system, designed from the ground up to transform how organizations market and sell.
We took all our ideas about how to market in this new way, and tried them at HubSpot. We started a blog, we produced videos, we did webinars, we wrote eBooks—we even started HubSpot Academy, which trains and certifies people on inbound marketing. Over 100,000 certifications have now been completed.
HubSpot now employs over 800 people and has 12,000 customers in over 70 countries across the globe. We attribute much of our success to inbound marketing, both applying it to our business and helping our customers apply it to theirs.
What you are now holding in your hands is the collective learnings we have had. The concepts of inbound marketing that we've learned and applied to HubSpot, and insights from thousands of companies that have seen the power of this new model work in their own companies.
Eight years ago, when we started HubSpot in a tiny one-room office a block away from the MIT campus, we thought we were starting a software company. We were wrong. We had not just started a software company, we had sparked an entire movement. The inbound movement now extends well beyond our four walls—it touches and transforms millions of individuals from all over the world.
We believe we're still in the early stages of the inbound movement, and the best is yet to come.
Thanks for joining us on this journey.
Brian Halligan (@bhalligan)
Dharmesh Shah (@dharmesh)