Blog Column

What is inbound marketing? Just a sexier version of SEO?

Forbes recently reported that the Cambridge-based SaaS company HubSpot has completed a $35 million round, bringing their fundraising total to an impressive $100 million. HubSpot’s founder Brian Halligan is credited with coining the term “inbound marketing,” which seems to have gained relatively widespread adoption (at least within the marketing sector). According to Halligan, “Inbound Marketing […]

---

The marketing wheel – purchasing as experimentation

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the marketing process in the past year.  Trying to convince small contracting businesses with small budgets to hand over their credit card, will do that to someone. More recently, I’ve been looking more carefully at the marketing ASP space and trying to fit the pieces together. […]

---

How much is spent on marketing each year, in the US?

After digging around for a while to find some reasonable estimates of this number, I used a few data sources to come up with what I think are some reasonable estimates. First, I used US Census data (2007) to establish the number of businesses in the US, along with total revenue, plotted on the following […]

---

Dealing with churn when selling SaaS to SMBs

After the first several months of actively selling a premium service to contractors who signed-up for BuildZoom, we realized that churn was happening.  An annual churn rate of 20% seemed alarming given the ~10%  annual churn rates I had been used to in the mid-to-large market SaaS space up to this point in time and much […]

---