When we founded HubSpot in June of 2006, we needed to "attract" prospects and "convert" them into early customers from an essential stand still.  In essence, the vision in our heads for the product was to solve the very problem we started with, so we started "eating our own cooking" from day one. 

The benefit of being a small business today is that it is much easier to find potential customers than it used to be.  Today, most people/companies start their "shopping" process in a search engine (v. on the phone, at a trade show, at a seminar, or talking to a sales rep).  On the internet, all companies are created equal, so if you are smart about how you do search engine optimization and produce good content that others in your niche link to, then you will bubble to the top for potential customers in your market regardless of size.

We wanted HubSpot to give us the ability to create and change content on website pages without any computer gurus, IT staff, or stress involved.  We wanted to do this because we know that Google "rewards" sites with "fresh" content, we wanted to be able to react to our own rapidly changing market/customers in near real-time, and we wanted to be able to "test" different marketing messages to see what the uptake was without having to lock ourselves in like you used to have to do with paper-based brochures.

We also wanted HubSpot to give us the ability to add or re-arrange pages without computer gurus, IT staff, or stress involved.  This gives us the ability to create new web pages whenever we want which is especially useful when we want to create a specialized landing page for a person to land on when they are searching on specific phrases in Google.  For example, if someone links to us from Google after searching on "SEO," then we might not want them to visit our generic home page, but rather would want them to visit a customized home page with additional content about SEO.  We wanted the ability to do this for links from other sites/blogs on the web that were sending traffic to us as well.  By adding these pages with specific content directly targeted at the user, we dramatically increase our likelihood that prospect will turn into a qualified lead that buys our product.

We wanted HubSpot to give our team (not one individual) powerful blogging features that were easy to use and were integrated into the website navigation.  We like the blog format because it transforms our website from something like an online brochure that people read one time (like a paper brochure) to a website where people can "subscribe" to new content (on an on-going basis) and can interact with the writers via comments.  This new type of 2-way website that includes a blog is much better than a brochure online when it comes to increasing the percentage of prospects who end up converting to customers.

With our blog, we wanted to call it something other than HubSpot because it is our opinion that if you only write things in your blog that are selling your product, you are less likely to build a loyal following outside your user base.  Readers are not anxious to help you sell your product by linking to it, by commenting on an article, or by submitting it to a social bookmarking site (i.e. Digg, Reddit).  Readers are happy to do these activities for a blog about an industry or set of ideas as long as it is not selling overtly.  With our tools, it was easy to keep the same look/feel of our website, publish our blog, and keep the navigation so people could bounce back and forth.  The results have been fantastic so far.

With HubSpot, we wanted to make sure we built in the world's best software practices with regard to search engine optimization, so that all our customers could benefit without having to hire a consultant to come in once a month.  Also we wanted it to be flexible, so that when Google updates its search algorithms, we could figure out how to capitalize for ourselves and have it automatically happen for our customers at the same time.

Our tool gives us the ability to set up questionnaires, surveys, and forms allowing our prospects to "self-select" themselves into our beta program.  This is useful, but what is truly compelling is that we designed HubSpot so that when a prospect "self-selects," our "intelligence" about him is put into a searchable database.  In addition to the information our new qualified prospect put in the form, HubSpot puts information on how many times the prospect visited our site, how the prospect got to the site each time (i.e. Google, a link) which web pages/blog articles he read, which blog articles he commented on, which pages he visited multiple times, etc.  This "prospect intelligence" enables us to have a much better conversation (email or telephone) when we first touch them because our product helped us do a bunch of the solution selling up front.  The likelihood of a good conversation goes way up because we already know a lot about what that prospect is thinking about.

Another thing our tool does is give us terrific analytical information that had been virtually impossible for a small business like ours to pull together without an IT staff dedicated to this type of thing.  There are several analytics tools on the market that already measure different aspects of web traffic (i.e. Google analytics, Technorati, Alexa, Feedburner, etc.), but there were issues with all of them.  The first problem we had with these tools is that it is difficult to pull together a holistic picture of what is happening to the top of your funnel without using several different packages with different user interfaces.  The second problem is that these tools only look at traffic and we want to look at how many prospects we are attracting and what percentage of those we are converting to customers.  The third problem with these tools is that they do not let you overlay marketing initiatives on top of your analytics so you can see which events are driving traffic and which events are driving traffic that turn into qualified leads that buy something.  In most small businesses, marketing is a bit of a black art, so we wanted to build the tools that transformed our marketing into a ROI-based science.  There's a famous expression that says "I know I'm wasting half my marketing budget every year, I just don't know which half."  We built a system for ourselves where you can get to an ROI per program/activity, so we would not waste any of our own money.

The last thing our tool does for us is give us feedback on how we are doing and advise on what we can be doing better.  We worked with some of our PhD friends from MIT to build a website grader that tells us how well our website is doing relative to our peers on its ability to attract the right prospects and on its ability to convert high percentages of those to customers.  In addition, we have built it to tell us specifically what we can do to improve these metrics.  It is one of those tools that gets smarter over time with increased usage, so it continues to provide us with good advice.

We spent countless hours over multiple years studying the tools for small businesses in the online marketing space prior to founding HubSpot.  Some of the features we describe here are unique, but what makes it exceptionally valuable to us as users is how all of this functionality is brought together in one platform designed for small business users (no technical expertise required) who want to leverage the inherent benefits the internet disruption offers them without having to spend a lot of money, hire an IT staff, or work with five different vendors. 

We are working night and day to create a killer marketing platform that creates competitive advantage for our own small business.  If you are interested in using HubSpot to help you grow your business, we would be thrilled to share all our knowledge and make sure you stay in step with the best tools and techniques we know of.  All modesty aside, we think any business just starting up or any small business with a website grade of less than 60 would get significant value from using our tool.