Prägte "Inbound Marketing", baute $38B Unternehmen aus 3 Kunden auf

Shah's own May 2007 account of the still-free Website Grader: it was in beta, had almost no promotion behind it, and had already graded more than 28,000 websites while pulling around 500 visitors a day.

“Even in it's current beta state (very little PR and promotion), it has graded over 28,000 websites and gets over 500 visitors a day.”

Shah's stated reason for running the tool free was that free usage is the cheapest way to build a pool of people who can later be converted to the paid product.

“It's a greaty way to get early users to use the product and have a pool of potential people to upgrade.”

A free tool that graded a visitor's website was, by Halligan's own account, a core, popular part of the product from HubSpot's earliest stage — the template the later Twitter and Foursquare graders copied.

“A popular, core feature of our product was our website grader.”

By the time of the Series D round, Halligan credited the inbound content engine (blog, SEO, tools) with generating over 30,000 leads in a single month.

“last month alone, we generated over 30,000 inbound leads”

The stated logic was to earn attention through search, blogs and social content rather than interrupting prospects with outbound tactics.

“we help our customers pull them in from search engines, blogs, and social media sites and other forms of inbound marketing”