Stories in SaaS and What you can learn from them — Part I
Creating value has never been so difficult, especially in the times we live in. Customers have lower attention span, have far more choices to choose from, have become more demanding and have developed an affinity to try out before placing a bet.
Yet a lot of start-ups have accepted the ever changing dynamics of the customer’s world, adapted to create value which can be sustained over lifetime.
SaaS start-ups of all have ingrained customers as a part of their product offerings. Providing consistent value to your customers, improving on the core value offering in your product and in turn, getting an annual recurring revenue for that value is quite a challenge.
In short you bet on the relationships.
In our current 4 part series, we analyze 4 SaaS companies and their journey. In the process what you can learn about, the key themes which you can adopt for your startup.
Each SaaS story has a common denominator: marrying humanized approach with a technology niche.
Part I: Hubspot
Hubspot was started by Brain Halligan and Dharmesh Shah in 2006 who met each other at Business School in MIT. Both of them were of the opinion that there is a high need to change the traditional sense of marketing, making them start their own venture — Hubspot and coming up with the concept of inbound marketing.
Inbound Marketing is basically attracting valuable prospects by developing content that they would be interested to read. Together, they also wrote a book on Inbound Marketing: Get found using Google, Social Media and Blogs in 2009, which was much later since the inception of Hubspot.
In the history of SaaS growth companies, Hubspot has been amongst the few to have a massive growth trajectory, ranking at 5 in the world in the online marketing tech space. It started with just 3 customers in 2006, and they ended last year with over 73,400 customers in more than 120 countries. The company made a revenue of $674.9 million last year.
What made them stand out?
Hubspot excelled in its content marketing strategy ever since it came into existence, at the same time they created ample amounts of resources that they offered like expert blog posts, webinars, and tools etc offering a stickiness to the site and fueling their growth.
The graph below displays Hubspot’s interest over the entire time span of its existence on Google Trends.
Keynote: Practice what you Preach. Generate interests by making ancillary products
Hubspot understood early to engage with users by creating sticky products, which got attention from the users.
Pivoting around customer needs helped them generate enough interests and build email lists to go after. Applying what we know as Inbound Marketing.
Awesome Content makes awesome Game Plan
Content marketing has been vital in Hubspot’s journey making them visible in the internet space. The 4 websites which have been critical to its growth namely
Hubspot.com | Inbound.org | WebsiteGrader.com | ThinkGrowth.org
If you notice from the different traffic sources above, Hubspot generated enough content to grow themselves organically, also act as their own referrals, and establish a brand name in the marketing space.
Currently, their go to market strategy is to acquire customers through organic channels but they do spend a minimal amount on paid channels where they are promoting their free CRM to use and instigating them to eventually use the paid version which covers the core features of the main product.
They effectively blurred the lines between support/help documents and “how to do X”, rolled out templates which can be used by marketers, and enough programs to certify yourself and act as an ambassador of Hubspot.
The critical aspect of a SaaS model is ensuring future revenue streams consistently, it is here when your content becomes the communication line and customers can interact consistently without one time Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), or account management exercises.
Keynote: Concerted effort in reaching their prospects timely by the means of valuable content and insights was key to their growth and also sustaining it.
The slightest efforts can yield massive turnarounds and have a profound impact on your startup’s success. What Hubspot created became a benchmark in the industry, especially for SaaS based companies.
In part II we discuss another SaaS company which disrupted a traditional business model of long sales cycle negotiations by empowering their users Atlassian’s growth story and how their Product Led Growth model fueled their revenue and rapid expansions, coming right up!
