HubSpot

HubSpot, Inc.

File:HubSpot Logo.png New HubSpot Logo
Type	Public
Traded as	NYSE: HUBS
Industry	Internet Marketing
Founded	June 2006
Headquarters	Cambridge, Massachusetts
Key people	Brian Halligan, CEO & cofounder Dharmesh Shah, CTO & cofounder
Products	HubSpot, marketing consulting services
Revenue	$115.9 million (2014)
Number of employees	785
Website	www.hubspot.com

HubSpot is a company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts that develops and markets a software product for inbound marketing also called HubSpot.

HubSpot was founded by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2006. Originally funded by Shah and a faculty member at MIT, it raised more than $100 million in funding from Larry Bohn, General Catalyst Partners, David Skok, Matrix Partners, Rob Theis, Scale Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, Google Ventures, Salesforce and Fidelity. The company advocates for the inbound marketing concept in its own marketing through viral videos, Twitter, webinars and an annual inbound marketing report.

Software and services

HubSpot provides a software product for inbound marketing also called HubSpot. It includes tools for social media marketing, content management, web analytics, landing pages and search engine optimization. The HubSpot suite of online tools has three primary applications: content management tools for creating or managing blogs, templates, forms and landing pages; exposure optimization applications that help the content be found, such as through search engine optimization; and lead tracking and intelligence tools, which track and manage e-mail marketing, customer interactions, qualified prospects, reports and analysis. As of 2012, about 8,000 companies used HubSpot. Eighty-five percent of the customers are based in the US.

HubSpot has integration features for salesforce.com, SugarCRM, NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and others. Nimble users can have HubSpot automatically add visitor data to their Nimble account, and users of PR Newswire's iReach can access iReach from the HubSpot dashboard. There are also third-party services, templates and extensions that can be downloaded through the HubSpot App Marketplace. HubSpot offers consulting services and hosts the HubSpot Academy, an online resource for learning inbound marketing tactics. It also hosts user group conferences and offers inbound marketing and HubSpot certification programs.

Corporate history

HubSpot was founded by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2006. Shah invested $500,000, which was followed by angel investments from Edward B. Roberts, the chair of the Entrepreneurship Center at MIT, and MIT Sloan classmate and entrepreneur Brian Shin. The company introduced the HubSpot software in beta in 2006 and officially launched it in December 2007. An additional $5 million in funding was raised in 2007, which was followed by $12 million in May 2008 and $16 million in late 2009. The company grew from $255,000 in revenues the first year the software was released to $15.6 million in 2010. Later that year HubSpot announced its acquisition of oneforty. Oneforty began as an app store for Twitter, but shifted into an online resource for social media marketing. The company also introduced new software for personalizing websites to each visitor. According to Forbes, HubSpot started out targeting companies of 1-10 employees, but "moved steadily upmarket to serve larger businesses of up to 1000 employees."

HubSpot raised $32 million in additional venture funding in February 2012 from Sequoia Capital, Google Ventures, Salesforce and others. In March 2012, HubSpot acquired the Google Chrome notification center company Chime. HubSpot raised $35 million in another round of venture funding in November 2012 from Altimeter Capital, Cross Creek Capital and others. At the 2013 annual Inbound Marketing Conference, HubSpot announced a software product for sales staff called Signals (now called Sidekick). By December 2013, Sidekick had 26,000 users and HubSpot set it up as a separate startup within the company.

HubSpot filed for an initial public offering with the Securities and Exchange Commission on August 25, 2014 for listing on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol HUBS.

Ethics scandal

In July 2015, Hubspot's CMO Mike Volpe was dismissed for violating HubSpot’s code of business conduct and ethics code after an independent investigation overseen by its board of directors found that he tried to procure a draft copy of a book about the origins of the company. This book was Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble by Daniel Lyons, a former Newsweek journalist who had worked for HubSpot from 2013 to 2014.

The materials, released by the FBI in March 2016 under Freedom of Information Act, indicated that certain Hubspot executives viewed the upcoming book as "a financial threat to HubSpot, its share price, and the company’s future potential", reported The Boston Globe. The FBI report discusses "tactics such as email hacking and extortion" in the attempt to prevent the book from being published. The individuals involved were ultimately not charged for any wrongdoing; the records released do not indicate why.

Marketing

HubSpot promotes the concept of inbound marketing through its own marketing. According to CRMSearch, "the company promotes a message of 'publish your way in' and practices what it preaches as a prolific creator of content, including blog posts, social media posts, white papers, webinars and more."

The company manages an 8,000-member LinkedIn group called Pro-Marketers. The HubSpot Internet Marketing blog was ranked as the 21st most influential marketing blog in AdAge’s 2013 Power 150. It hosts HubSpot TV, a live broadcast with commentary on current events. HubSpot does not have a PR agency on retainer.

According to Harvard Business Review, HubSpot's most effective inbound marketing has been its free online tools, such as Marketing Grader (formerly Website Grader), which grades a website's performance and gives it a score based on how it compares to other websites that have been ranked. WhoRetweetedMe.com, which was introduced in Beta in August 2011, shows the number, timing and audience of tweets containing any URL provided by the user.

There was a debate in 2009 on whether HubSpot was over-commmercializing tweetups after it used Twitter to secure celebrity guests on HubSpot TV. In 2009, as an April Fool's joke, the company created a personality grader tool. The next year, as a marketing stunt, HubSpot claimed it received a cease and desist letter from "Kronos Media". It created a "Captain Inbound" character to defend HubSpot from an "evil" interruption marketing firm. There were polarizing responses whereby some customers thought the legal troubles were genuine and felt misled and others enjoyed the ruse. On August 23, 2011, HubSpot's "social media scientist," Dan Zarella, was awarded a Guinness World Record for the largest online marketing seminar after "The Science of Social Media" obtained 10,899 attendees. That same year HubSpot announced its acquisition of OneForty through a series of Tweets, obtaining 400 retweets or mentions within the first two hours.

HubSpot publishes "The State of Inbound Marketing Report" annually. The 2012 report found that 89 percent of businesses are maintaining or increasing their inbound marketing budgets. In 2011 it found that 65 percent of companies had a corporate blog, up from 28 percent the prior year. Additionally, 44 percent of marketers said Facebook was critically important to their marketing strategy, up from 24 percent in 2009. The 2010 report found that 77 percent of Internet users read blogs. It also publishes a State of the Twittersphere report. The Twittersphere report has found that links in a tweet are more likely to be clicked on if the tweet is short and the link is posted early in the message and that Twitter profiles with a picture attract six times as many followers on average. Additionally, HubSpot's research found that New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and London were the top tweeting cities in the world. In 2008 the company estimated Twitter had 4 to 5 million users, 30 percent of which were “brand new or unengaged.”

Corporate culture

File:HubSpot Offices2.png

HubSpot's offices

HubSpot has a corporate culture similar to many technology companies on the West Coast of the US. It has repeatedly been named as a Best Place to Work by the Boston Business Journal. The company began an unlimited vacation day policy in 2010 and started an employee training program, called the HubSpot Fellows Program, the same year. HubSpot's "startup within a startup" program was started in 2008.

HubSpot offered a $2,500 bounty for referring a successful candidate, which was increased to $10,000 in 2011, while the company was looking for HTML5 developers. Senior recruits coming from large corporations are offered a “jailbreak” bonus of $1,000 for each year they spent at a big company. The culture of the company, including the experience of being fired by HubSpot, is described in The New York Times article "Congratulations! You’ve Been Fired" by Dan Lyons.

Critical reception

A review in CRM Search said HubSpot "is not the best product in every category ... yet may still be the single best marketing solution in bringing all the tools together." Many of HubSpot's individual applications have competitors, but HubSpot strives to provide an all-in-one approach.

A comparative analysis conducted by VentureSkies compared data security in HubSpot’s CMS with WordPress-based websites. It showed that HubSpot maintains an increased level of information security, as well as protection against hacking, through a set of security measures including human factors (e.g., 24/7 monitoring), restricted access to hosted data (limited to Web server level, no file server access), restrained JavaScript and multilayered infrastructure security embracing network, storage and compute environments.

A review in CRM Search identified HubSpot's "Strengths" as the sophistication of its Call to Action (CTA) tool and its online ecosystem, the HubSpot Marketplace. According to the review "Ease of use is a design hallmark for this application" and its pricing is reasonable. Under "Weaknesses" the review said "it has more breadth than depth." It said the lack of customization and design tools can be limiting. According to the reviewer, it lacks some advanced tools such as Business Process Management (BPM) tools to manage workflow.

External links

• Official website