Startup Growth Engines

“[CHI] is a measure of the degree to which one of our customers is practicing inbound marketing in a way that is likely to lead to long-term success. Our customers with the highest CHI scores get the biggest lift in traffic and leads every month. These customers also give us the highest Net Promoter scores and have the highest renewal rates.” [20]

While the initial idea was panned by HubSpot co-founder Brian Halligan, Caputa’s persistence won out. The last reported number we were able to find, at the end of 2011, shows that the partner program accounts for 20% of the company’s new business.

Can people start using your product gradually, or does it require immediate behavior change?

In 2008, a sales rep, Pete Caputa, came up with an idea to build a partner program that would allow agencies to resell HubSpot services as value added resellers (VARs). Agencies, Caputa believed, would give HubSpot additional distribution to targeted prospects. Having trusted partners gave HubSpot not just additional sales reach, but a trained (and

“So I found you while I was looking around the network. Let’s connect directly, I’m happy to help you with requests and forward things incoming. It will probably make both of our networks bigger.” [16] Elman refers to this as inception, or planting the idea of why your product is going to be useful or meaningful to users before they ever even sign

To give these numbers some perspective, as of 2010 when Libin shared some of Evernote’s revenue stats, their cost per user was around 9 cents per active user per month, and they made around 25 cents per user per month [3]. This is likely why he asserts, “We don’t care if you pay, we just want you to stay around and keep using it and get all your fr

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.

“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.”

For each of the case studies contained, we’ve attempted to identify two main elements of growth: what helped the business gain early traction, and what is fueling the business today.