Insights On SaaS From The $32 million HubSpot Mega-VC Round

HubSpot, my former employer, just announced a 4th round of funding from Sequoia, Google, and Salesforce. It’s great to see that the company I believed in from the start is getting this kind of market validation. Congratulations!

There’s a lie that companies and entrepreneurs tell themselves in order to commit to an acquisition.


Oh, we’re not going to change anything! We’re just going to give you more resources to do what you’ve been doing even better!


Yeah! They bought us for a reason, why would they ruin things?


It usually works for a little while, but big company bureaucracy– whether it’s HR, politics or just endless meetings– almost always creeps in. It’s a law of nature: Big companies just need certain processes to run and entrepreneurs hate those processes because they stifle nimble innovation.

TechCrunch - Google Takes Another Big Step to Retain Employees, Autonomous Business Units

The New Dork - Entrepreneur State of Mind (JayZ-Alicia Keys spoof). Thanks @JeanneHopkins for sharing. I love this video!

…a thin line separates the temperament of a promising entrepreneur from a person who could use, as they say in psychiatry, a little help. Academics and hiring consultants say that many successful entrepreneurs have qualities and quirks that, if poured into their psyches in greater ratios, would qualify as full-on mental illness.
Just Manic Enough: Seeking Perfect Entrepreneurs, New York Times

Marketing Resources for Startups and Entrepreneurs

The other night I drove up to Sonoma to present to an MBA Entrepreneurship class on inbound marketing and how to scale a new venture. It was a great experience and very eye opening. The students are working to build their business models and develop business plans, yet none have their own blogs and only about 4 of the 30 are on Twitter. As Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah point out in their webinar, Everything We Wish We Learned about Startups (but didn’t at MIT), marketing a critical factor in the success of a new startup. It’s important to engage and build your community before you even write a line of code or hire an employee.

Here are a few marketing resources that I think every entrepreneur should check out.

Books

  • Art of the Start - the time-tested, battle-hardened guide for anyone starting anything
  • Blue Ocean Strategy - how to create uncontested market space and make competition irrelevant
  • Crossing the Chasm - marketing and selling disruptive products to mainstream customers (the revised technology adoption lifecycle)
  • The Long Tail - why the future of business is selling less of more

Blogs

Community and Events

  • Stanford / MIT Venture Lab - events promote the growth and success of high-tech entrepreneurial ventures by connecting ideas, technology and people in Palo Alto 

Free Tools

  • Website Grader - A free SEO tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of your website
  • Twitter 101 for Business - Tips from Twitter to get started, learn the lingo, and build your business presence on Twitter
  • Marketing Hubs - links to articles, free webinars, guides, and kits for business blogging, social media marketing, search engine optimization and more

Know of other great resources for startups that should be added to the list?

word cloud created using Wordle