Marketing with Mike Volpe

At the Atlassian Starter Day I had a chance to share some of my thoughts on startup marketing based on doing marketing at HubSpot and helping to grow the company from 5 people to over 160 people and nearly 3,000 customers over the past 3+ years.

Below is a video of the presentation, as well as my slides.  If want to read more text tips and comment or discuss this topic, there is a great discussion on the OnStartups Blog article.

Next week I am the day 2 keynote speaker at the Internet Technology Summit in Orlando where they have asked me to talk about how we have built HubSpot to 160 employees and 2,800 customers using the latest technology tools.  I am going to talk especially about how the vast majority of our company activity is conducted in the cloud, and the cultural implications of that.  I have blogged way back in January 2007 about the disruptive effects of Google Docs, and do feel that the availability of tools like these affects how you should start and build a company.

Here are some of the cloud based business tools I will be talking about, all of which I use myself:

• Google - email and calendar
• Google - documents, spreadsheets, videos
• DropBox - document sharing
• Mozy - computer backup
• Confluence - corporate wiki
• Jira - bug and issue tracking
• HubSpot - marketing
• Salesforce.com - sales and customer support
• GoToMeeting / Skype - online meetings
• Lots more...

Do you use a lot of cloud-based business tools?  What would you want to hear about on this topic? Leave a comment below!

 

The key to having a successful business is to attract customers cheaply and then quickly monetize those customers at a multiple of what they spent to acquire them.  At least according to David Skok from Matrix Partners (and investor in HubSpot) - that link is to an interview in the Wall Street Journal.

I agree.

Too often startups make their strategy too confusing and complicated.  This is because they don't have the answer yet.  Most really successful businesses have a pretty simple model at the core.  Google, Ebay, Salesforce.com.  See?

Seth Godin is a smart dude.  This article talks about how you should start marketing before you have a product.  This is something I have talked about a lot at HubSpot on our blog, in webinars and in interviews.

For startups, you used to spend 1-2 years building a product and then hire a marketing guy or gal.  Now a marketing pro should be part of the founding team.  Build an audience of fans, beta testers, future customers.  No product required.

Start Marketing Before You Have a Product

• Start blogging before you have a product.
• Start engaging in social media before you have a product.
• Start SEO before you have a product.
• Start building your database and capturing leads before you have a product.
• There is nothing stopping you, and it makes product launches easy.

HubSpot started marketing before we had finished the product.  Its one of the reasons we got to 1,000 customers so fast.  You should try it too.

PS - If you want to get started, there's a free trial of inbound marketing software at www.HubSpot.com (if you're lucky - it goes up and down as we test some things).

Flickr Photo credit: http://flickr.com/photos/learnscope/  

HubSpot is having a 1K Celebration to celebrate our first 1,000 customers.  We're doing an open house in our new office.  Come by, meet the team, have a drink, play some foosball.

Thursday, Feb 19, 7pm
1 Broadway, 5th Floor
Cambridge, MA 02142

Registration is REQUIRED.

Cuil is a new search engine that just launched with lots of buzz in the startup world.  It is supposed to be a "Google Killer."  I don't get it.  I think it sucks.  Here's why:

1. They lie.  They claim to have the "world's biggest search engine" yet when you search for some simple terms, Google returns a lot more results than they do.  "Search Engine" yields 378 million results in Google and 165 million in Cuil.  "Startup" yields 57 million in Google and only 40 million in Cuil.
2. They are solving the wrong problem.  I don't need my search engine to crawl more web pages.  I need higher quality, more targeted results.  I need less search engine spam.  I need more personalization.  Cuil does none of this.  Crawling the last 0.1% of webpages Google misses is like including the microscopic dust particles under my bed during a search of my house.  Who cares!!!
3. Their results suck.  Search for "Cuil" in Cuil and you Search in Google for "Cuil" and you get a bunch of results that make sense, including a news article and Cuil itself.  Search for "Cuil" in Cuil, and you get results like "Properties for Sale in Cuil Mhuine, Ireland", "The Shire of Cuil Choluim" and "Download Chase Around the Windmill".  What a joke.

What do you think?  Is there anything about Cuil that is actually Cool?  Leave a comment...

We went out to Kings for some bowling last night to celebrate HubSpot's 2nd birthday party.  I had a lot of fun, and I think most other folks did too.

Here are some HubSpot photos on Flickr, or watch the slideshow below.

I have thought for a while that Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook Founder and CEO) is certainly a very smart guy for starting Facebook and bringing it to its current level of success.  But I also think he is crazy for not selling at least a portion of his personal holdings - just to take some winnings off the table and make sure he is set for life.  Zuckerberg could do this with about 1% of the company, and still have a gigantic stake in Facebook.

The other thing that I find surprising is that he, and the investors, think he is the best CEO for the company right now.  They have hundreds of employees and are thinking about going public. Now, when I was 23, I certainly thought I was capable enough to lead a huge company through and IPO and manage all of the employees.  But, I was wrong.

4 Reasons Why Mark Zuckerberg Should Hire a New Facebook CEO

1. Mark Zuckerberg will have trouble building a team.  The job of the CEO is to build and hire a great team.  Many really qualified VPs will have trouble working for a 23 year old.  No matter what your knowledge of social networking, there are just larger corporate issues you have zero experience with, and I think being 23 makes it a lot harder to hire a great management team.
2. Mark Zuckerberg will have trouble pleasing Wall Street.  Wall Street (those folks you need to deal with after an IPO) can be hard to please.  One thing that they value is experience and seniority.  The current Facebook CEO has neither.  Having a gray-haired person in charge makes Wall Street feel good, and makes IPOs smoother.
3. Mark Zuckerberg will lose touch with the customer.  Facebook is no longer for college students.  It is growing by over 250,000 users per day, and the biggest demographic is people not in college.  This is a very different audience with very different needs from college students.  One very valuable skill that marketing and product development people hone over many years is the ability to understand customers that are not like themselves.  I do not think a 23 year old can do that.  And it is critically important that the CEO has the pulse of your target market.
4. Mark Zuckerberg has the wrong skills for the next phase of Facebook.  Facebook has crossed the chasm.  It is now going into the mainstream and has well over 60 million members.  Facebook is not about innovation, being scrappy and developing cool new stuff anymore.  Facebook is now about monetizing page views, a proper management structure for growth, and building profits.  Mark is clearly a good founder and startup CEO.  That role almost never overlaps with the roles of a mid-stage growth CEO.

Disclaimer - I have not met Mark Zuckerberg.  I have no idea how truly smart/stupid, mature/childish he really is.  This article is an opinion based on a little work experience and watching an episode of 60 minutes.  And of course, I am also jealous!

For some other commentary on Facebook, see this article about the top 10 Facebook career mistakes and the classic "Cool Wand" Facebook story.

Cisco is buying WebEx. I don't get it. Sure, a lot of Cisco customers could purchase the WebEx product (a lot of them probably do already, WebEx claims 65% marketshare), and I am sure Cisco will be able to grow WebEx sales at a good rate. But Cisco will also have to absorb WebEx's employees, and is inheriting technology that is not that good and is about a decade old. There are a lot of other much smaller companies that have better and newer technology. If Cisco is looking to really get leverage from their customer relationships and distribution, why don't they buy a small startup with newer/better technology than WebEx, and then use the Cisco brand and channel to really supercharge the sales? Why would they bother to pay $3 billion for WebEx (with $380 million in revenue), when they could pay $25 or $50 million for a startup with better technology? The only reason I can think of is that Cisco needs the $380m in revenue and $50m in profit from WebEx to meet its growth goals.