“The one thing that I feel is important, and it's probably not a good objective business decision, but I think as an entrepreneur I find it much more satisfying if I know certain users pay for my product. I feel like I've really created something of value. If all I create [is] something lots of people look at, and then advertise—let's say I have a

Prior to building and releasing the first iteration of Belly, the team spoke to hundreds of merchants in the Chicago area to understand merchant needs and challenges. This is the ultimate in customer development: leveraging customer interviews and research to help define the problem and pre-sell the solution, all while identifying what the likely m

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

So if you’re reading an article about, you know, optimizing landing pages you’ll have an offer at the bottom of that blog article that has something to do with a landing page optimization webinar or something like that.”

They’re often doling out stickers and premium trial coupons to help turn more of their network into Evernote users. In exchange the ambassadors are associated with a brand they love and recognized as an expert among their peers.

“We didn’t have a lot of money, only $1 million in seed financing. We focused on marketing and making the site useful just in San Francisco. We thought that pattern of expansion might be the right one from looking at Craigslist, which started in the Bay Area and then expanded from city to city.”

“It’s Easier to Focus on a Strength than Improve a Weakness.”

The key to pulling this off, however, was gaining enough initial growth for public profiles to actually make an impact, which is why the company waited until they’d reached 2 million users before they began indexing user profiles.

The first couple of years I really didn’t feel that, I didn’t have a good enough appreciation that the most important thing for consumer facing software was that it was beautiful, simple, people immediately and intuitively understood how to use it. It really wasn’t about making it more powerful, it was about making it more natural.