Startup Growth Engines

Now that HubSpot is the firmly-established authority on inbound marketing, INBOUND is a fitting way for the company to foster innovation and education in the field.

Topicality matters but newness doesn’t.”

“This brief, unpredictable thrill, to me, is a major selling point of the app and why it is so successful. The concept of variable rewards is not new and is a powerful behavioral driver. Snapchat taps into this.”

In a true tragedy of the commons, these viral media companies may ultimately be the victim of their own success if Facebook decides that the core product value and user experience is being infringed upon.

Shah goes on to refer to the Influencer program as “one of the smartest inbound marketing campaigns I’ve ever seen”—which means quite a bit coming from the guy who literally wrote the book on inbound marketing and helps run the inbound marketing powerhouse HubSpot.

Website Grader was easier to market than the actual HubSpot product, because it required no up-front investment yet provided instant value.

It goes from a timeline point of view—a historic record of activity—to fleeting, in the moment captures that allow users to drop many of the filters we’re taught to put on what we share.

If you’re an entrepreneur or business executive the charge is equally clear: you must remove the walls between your sales and marketing organization and product development. You must move quickly to an integrated growth organization and foster a culture that prioritizes growth across the company.

However, when users have to switch from one product to another and learn a whole new skill set in the process, requiring them to pay up front might actually make them more likely to use the product than if they’d gotten it for free (based on the sunk costs fallacy).