One of the most common startup advice that most founders get is to focus on one thing and do that really well. HubSpot did the exact opposite and in the process, ended up building a $32 billion company.

It’s also being noticed that Alphabet, the parent company of Google has been talking to its advisers about making an offer for HubSpot.

Currently, HubSpot literally has the best tools and resources available on the field of marketing and sales.

Background Of HubSpot

Let’s start off with some background of the company:

HubSpot was founded in 2006 by Brian Halligan & Dharmesh Shah after they met at MIT.

In 8 years, they grew from zero to $100 million+ revenue with an IPO in 2014. As of 2023, HubSpot generated an annual revenue of $2.17 billion & has grown by 25.38% since 2022.

Both Brian and Dharmesh had successful backgrounds in tech before launching HubSpot.

Brian was VP of Sales at Groove Networks, which was acquired by Microsoft, and Dharmesh was founder and CEO of Pyramid Digital Solutions, which was acquired by SunGuard Data Systems.

The Problem

Before HubSpot came along, traditional marketing was broken.

Rather than wasting dollars on outbound efforts like advertising, cold calling, trade shows, Dharmesh and Brian believed that companies should focus their effort on developing content like blogs, e-books etc. — which of course we now know as inbound marketing.

This tied nicely into Dharmesh's narrative because he himself had been successfully running a blog aimed at startup founders called On Startups.

Their goal with HubSpot was to build an inbound marketing software that helps businesses “market to humans.”

Early-Stage & MVP

HubSpot was initially a simple tool - it had blogging, social media management, email marketing, and lead nurturing as its features, all designed to create inbound demand and build lasting relationships.

The first version of HubSpot enabled people to build powerful, customized information portals, collaborate via intranet & extranet, manage websites & communicate with clients.

HubSpot began in 2006 with just 3 customers. They got these early customers via their network.

At MIT, Brian & Dharmesh built a name for themselves as the go-to-guys for web marketing & website development. They created content around the themes of inbound marketing and got their first 100 customers just from doing that.

Brian & Dharmesh started blogging twice a week while they were building the product for the whole 9 months until they launched their first version.

Blogging-Led Growth

This blogging approach did two things for HubSpot. One — it helped them understand their customers´ problems and understand nuances around communication & messaging that would resonate with their customers.

Secondly, it helped them build credibility on Google when they launched. By the time they launched their product, they ranked number one on Google for many terms that had a decent amount of traffic relevant to the customers pain points.

They had around 1,000 followers in the blog that were interested. They got tons of free trials via this blogging-led growth approach.

Besides hiring engineers, one of their early hires was a reporter from New York Times back in 2008. Adding a proven writer with journalism experience created a solid foundation for their inbound marketing efforts.

They also hired someone to build out the partner channel program back in 2007. They partnered with marketing departments of SMBs, small marketing shops, web designers and SEO consultants to get deal flow through to HubSpot.

In 2009, Halligan and Shah wrote the book on inbound marketing—Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media and Blogs. These content writing efforts compounded over time creating a flywheel effect for what was to become.

Building A Media Company

HubSpot is a tech company operating like a media company.

It has a newsletter, a publication, blogs, it has videos, livestreams and everything you could imagine from a traditional media company.

HubSpot started publishing before they even had a product to sell.

Content & Blogging

They started their blog in 2005. As of February 2024, they had 10.4 million people landing each month on the blog - 80% of them coming organically. They rank for 18.8k keywords.

Blogging has been central to HubSpot’s content marketing plan, but with time they have diversified to include several other forms of content in their strategy too, mimicking that of a media company.

HubSpot content is categorized across – Blogs, Newsletters, Videos, Podcasts, Resources, Social Media.

HubSpot has a different set of posts for its blogs - Marketing, Sales, Service, Website, Industry News. Every blog post has a personalized and relevant Call-To-Action at the bottom — this tripled the number of leads they were getting from the blog.

This segregation ties into its marketing KPIs too - its MQLs.

By separating their sales and marketing content, HubSpot was able to capture leads from different segments of their audience & trigger relevant email sequences, and show them create personalized onboarding that was tailored to that persona.

They have about 14 writers across these different blog themes. They have an editor who oversees each blog theme and there is a manager that oversees them.

They have analysts who build quarterly editorial calendars across all blogs. They include a mix of 2 kinds of content (a) blogs optimized for search intent and (b) blogs focused on garnering influence.

They have a team that focuses on the conversion of blog traffic into MQLs for HubSpot. They look at which blog posts generate the most traffic and leads, decode what content should be created for more MQLs, document the impact, and strategize for future blog posts.

Videos & Podcasts

YouTube is their best performing distribution channel with 28.81% of people coming to the HubSpot blog via YouTube.

HubSpot launched their Marketing YouTube channel as early as 2007. They have added more channels to their brand - the HubSpot Academy & HubSpot’s software products.

HubSpot Academy is the company’s educational hub for inbound marketing, sales, and service, offering both free courses and certification.

They have a YouTube Strategist who looks at the channel as a whole and figures out how to optimize the channel, what type of content to create etc. They also have a scriptwriter who writes scripts and they have a whole production team to nail their YouTube game.

And it's working. Across all their combined channels, HubSpot has more than 600k followers.

They repurpose a lot of their content — from blog posts to Youtube. They embed YouTube videos on the original blog posts. This gets more views on YouTube videos.

And by embedding the video on the blog posts, HubSpot increases its SERP rankings on Google. (Videos are more likely to rank in the video carousel on the Google search results pages)

Another thing they do is that in most of their videos, they share a lead magnet usually a free guide or PDF that requires you to enter your email to access. This way they’ve grown their email list to more than 2.5 million emails.

They also have a podcast — Marketing Against The Grain, which focuses on creating brand awareness and positioning HubSpot as a thought leader in the space.

Their goal is to use the podcast to grow traffic on the blog, convert leads from the podcast, increase the number of downloads, boost views on YouTube, etc.

Social Media

HubSpot’s social media game is also on point. It has a widespread presence on almost all the popular social media channels, from X to LinkedIn.

The social media accounts are very active, making sure that they don’t just have a presence but are seen often by their followers.

Their social media content offers tons of value with lots of quick tips and valuable information for marketers, business leaders, and other prospects.

Apart from the occasional event promotions and company news, they mostly share content that their audience would be drawn to because of its relevance and value.

For instance, a common theme was sharing tidbits and quotes from HubSpot’s leadership. Dharmesh is incredibly active in X (formerly Twitter) and LinkedIn and his own thought leadership content brought visibility into HubSpot, the company.

HubSpot’s Facebook strategy is off-the-charts. They have close to 2.1 million Facebook followers. Their native videos have insane views, likes, comments & they provide HubSpot with valuable leads by offering free tools related to their videos in the video comments.

They have thousands of videos with more than 100k views.

HubSpot also uses FB ads to promote their e-books as lead magnets. The users sign up, are directed to a group where they answer a few questions and are then redirected to the download page. At the bottom of the page they have a CTA to try out HubSpot.

HubSpot’s second largest social network is LinkedIn where they have over 1 million followers.

To generate leads from LinkedIn, HubSpot uses LinkedIn Sponsored Content and promotes templates, e-books in exchange for their email.

Newsletter

In 2021, HubSpot acquired Hustle for $25-30 million — a newsletter started by Sam Parr which shares business and tech news to get you updated in just 5 minutes.

They even have a paid revenue stream within Hustle called Trends - it provides premium content as a subscription to its readers.

Currently, HubSpot holds a huge list of 2.5 million emails.

Education-Led Growth

HubSpot condensed its learnings on inbound marketing and started sharing those with customers via the HubSpot Academy, which started way back in 2012. They webinars to teach customers how to use HubSpot and how to be good at marketing.

In 2013, they released the first inbound certification. This course taught them everything on how to leverage inbound marketing in the digital world.

People would take the 4-hour course and would want to speak to the salespeople asking how they could use HubSpot to apply what they had just learned. They then built HubSpot Academy into the HubSpot product as a learning management system.

Today HubSpot Academy has 165,000 members.

Conclusion

HubSpot's success isn't just about innovation; it's about execution.

From their early days of category creation to their relentless focus on customer needs, HubSpot has consistently stayed ahead of the curve. They've not only attracted customers but created loyal advocates over the years.

HubSpot leveraged its human side by genuinely understanding its customer base and consistently coming up with solutions that could make its customers' lives easier. And its mission to build a media company is something to be admired as well.