$30B Founder: How To Rank #1 In ChatGPT

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
All right, so we had Dharmesh Shah on the podcast today. Dharmesh is interesting. One, he's probably the most listened to and viewed guest that we've ever had. And two, the reason he is that way is because Dharmesh runs HubSpot, which is a $25 or $30 billion company that makes billions in revenue, and he's a billionaire. He also is sort of like a hacker, so he launches little projects all of the time. Sometimes they work, sometimes they fail, sometimes they make $5,000 a month. And so he's probably the only person on earth that has this perspective of both being a big thinker and launching new projects.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:29)
Yeah, on this episode, we wanted to talk to him about the early days. Like, how did you actually get HubSpot off the ground? You had no money, you didn't have any connections, and he figured out a new model of marketing around blogging and SEO. And we wanted to talk about what did that look like then? Because today with AI and ChatGBT, seems like there's a new opportunity. And I have more energy than I started with because he's got this kind of, I don't know, there's like playful builder, like get after it energy. That's pretty contagious.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:56)
All right. Give it a listen. Let us know what you think in the YouTube comments.
Dharmesh, what's going on? How are you?

**SPEAKER_3** (1:11)
Doing well. Back from a busy but fun week at Inbound in San Francisco.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:17)
Did you guys get together in SF?

**SPEAKER_2** (1:20)
Yeah, we did. Dharmesh is like, you know, this was his Coachella. He's there. He's the guy.
So, Sam, I go to San Francisco and basically like the street is shut down for the, they take over that area, the Moscone Center, and they have this thing called Inbound. And so Dharmesh is like, hey, after your talk, let's go hang out. So we go hang out. And my first question was like, dude, so what is this? Because I'm, you know, I know it's a conference or like sort of this event. I'm not like confused about that. But I'm looking at it and there's these giant, you know, like they make those block letters and it just says inbound. It doesn't even say HubSpot. First thing is like it says inbound. And there's all these people walking around. And I'm just thinking, why are they here? What is this all about? And he actually told an interesting story about like the origin of this that I think is kind of like a pretty interesting business strategy. Dharmesh, tell the story. You told me something. You go, I was talking to Brian and he was telling about these very well funded companies that were had CMOs that were trying to get website like traffic to their website. And here's Dharmesh just blogging for fun at home. And he's getting like way more traffic. And then and they kind of looked at that. They're like, they have a chief marketing officer. They have an ad budget. They have like all this stuff. How are you getting 10 times more visitors to your website? Like people come into your store that they are. There's something here, right? Like, wasn't that the story?

**SPEAKER_3** (2:46)
Yeah, that's exactly the story. So I was still in grad school, finishing up writing my thesis. Brian graduated a year ahead of me, but we would still get together like once a week and chat about ideas, right? It's like, okay, well, because we had kind of considered the possibility of starting a company together. While we were doing that, he was working as a venture Parker, one of the VC firms here in the Boston area. His sort of job, his role was to help these startups go from rinky-dink little startups and get scale, right? It was just to help them with their go-to-market marketing sales, how do you get customers?
And so, we'd be meeting, and as part of my thesis work, called Unstartups, the Patterns and Practices of Modern Software Entrepreneurs, because I'm a software guy. And my thesis advisor, who's one of the tougher advisors, about like three quarters of the way through is Dharmesh. Like, you've got a lot of words here, but there's not a lot of data. This is not like Dharmesh's opinion. This is supposed to be a thesis. This is, you know, you have to have some like research and things, and this is, you guys know me well enough now. So, my immediate thought was, well, what he's asking for is going to involve like interacting with humans. And that sounds awfully unpleasant. That's not what I signed up for. And so, I thought that like blogging was a new thing at the time. I'm like, well, maybe I can like write a blog, and maybe I can get comments on the blog, and I can use that as like the citation of the research. Like, oh, well, you know, in my blog article, I said this and some people said this or whatever. So, that's what I did. I start a blog. In order to come up with a name for the blog, I just took the first two words of the title of the thesis, which was on startups, stuck the words together and put a.com at the end of it. And this was, you know, in the early days. So, that was available. So, I registered it for $15 or whatever it was. And anyway, so that, like, how do I get people other than my mom and, you know, two friends to read it, right? Like, what's, what do I do? And so, then I kind of dig in. It's like, oh, well, there's, you know, this thing called Google. They got two types of traffic. You can pay your way in or you can do what's called search engine optimization, can get organic traffic. These social media sites like Dig and Reddit at the time. It's like, here are the things you do in order to get people to your website, right? That was a collection of things. And so those are all the things that I sort of dug into obsessively and learned about. And we can talk about some of those because I think that's a good topic even for today as things evolve. And so Brian's watching me do this now when we're meeting is like, Dharmesh, how's that blog going? It's like, that's going pretty well. Here's the traffic. He's like, how the heck are you doing that? I'm like, oh, well, there's this thing called SEO. And there's this, you know, like, here are all the things that you do. He's like, well, you know, like my portfolio companies, like they can't get a hundredth of that traffic. They should be doing this, not whatever it is they're doing. Like stop the madness in terms of spending this budget on things that are just not driving any engagement. And so that was the kind of genesis of the kind of idea of inbound marketing. It's like, okay, well, everybody was doing it wrong. They needed to be doing it. Like, let's pull people into your website that are kind of curious. How do you educate them? How do you put value out there? And our kind of catchphrase at the time was, you know, try to add value to your perspective customers before you try to extract it. Like all other marketing was forms of how do I extract value from you, how do I interrupt you at dinner, how do I get you in? And we were the opposite of that. And so now back to the conference, so when we did that, we're like, OK, we didn't have a product yet, right? We're like, OK, well, here's the things that we're doing. I was using stuff that was the common things like Google Analytics and blogging software and things like that. So two things we decided, one was that the reason so many people weren't doing it is not that it didn't work. It was that it was just too hard to put all those two pieces together, all the pieces that you needed to do. And we'll put that aside. So we're like, OK, well, there's lots of dotting of heads in terms of the idea being right of this kind of inbound marketing thing. And so we decided, amongst other things, to say, OK, well, let's start blogging about that. Let's see what the market has to say about it. Let's start getting up on stages when we can get up on stages. And then part of that, we're like, OK, well, let's have people that are like-minded that believe in this, this kind of new way. Let's get them together. So the first conference was at a Marriott that was across the street from the office. It was like 200 people in a ballroom at the Marriott. And we made the decision when we started the conference, it's like, this is not intended to be a company conference. The idea here is there's this thing called inbound marketing, which we think is a better way. And all this is really doing is we're acting as a host to kind of bring this community together to talk about these things. In fact, we actually forbade. I don't think I've ever used the word forbade before, but it's like you're not allowed to pitch HubSpot from stage. If not, if you're HubSpot employee, you're not allowed to pitch any of your companies from all the speakers that we had. It was just all of us internally at the time. And so we sort of kept that up. That's why the conference was never named HubSpot. This is the 17th year that we've been doing that event on an annual basis. And it was a convening of the community, not a tech conference, the classic sense, where you see the CEOs get up there and pitch their book and like, here's what we're doing. And that proved to be good. There's a few smart things that I did that I would recommend that everyone should go off and try to do this. But a few things that worked, if you're really looking to kind of start a movement, start a category, we did not trademark the term inbound marketing, even though we had coined it, right? And we were starting a company, right? So it's like, okay, well, if this thing is actually going to be a thing, we want everyone to use it. We want people to put it in their job titles and their job postings. It's like, we want it to be a thing. And the way to make it a thing is to make it accessible to everyone, make the event accessible to everyone. So, even in the early years, we had direct competitors that would send like half a dozen people, that would send their entire team to the Inbound Conference, even though HubSpot was a competitor. So, it was an industry event, not a conference.