The genius of Hubspot

Hubspot is a concept more than a company. It is a vision executed with relative perfection. It serves as the best example of what a properly implemented inbound marketing plan and vision can do for a company's success and growth.

Through the careful use of blogs that seem authoritative, use of words like founder, expert, guru when referring to the founders, by linking blogs about other people who may be known as founders, experts, gurus, hubspot has become the premier example of how to successfully practice what you preach.

But what do they really deliver for their customers? Are many of the blogs their partners write truthful and free of conflict of interest? As an example, here is a blog post by a company Kunocreative that talks about why you should upgrade to Hubspot Enterprise.  To quote the author:

"Maybe "Enterprise" should be called "Turbo" instead, since these tools can help your company rapidly expand sales volumes and reduce time-to-sale significantly."

But is this an unbiased view from a company that has used Hubspot technology to increase its own sales? Not really. Kunocreative is a "Hubspot Certified Partner" which benefits if a customer buys Hubspot Enterprise product.

Hubspot is a collection of ideas and concepts. It is overhyped and overblogged. It may be useful as long as it does not detract companies from being focused on developing their core technology.

It may seem to promise manna from the heavens through inbound marketing but caveat emptor.

If you are not careful, then only thing that will be inbound will be a bunch of bills from Hubspot & its partners rather than customers.

20 Innovative Startups

The business insider article on 20 most innovative startups was puzzling and inspiring at the same time. The choice of the title "most innovative" was puzzling - since the criteria for how they were selected was missing. Secondly, all the startups were from the US - I would be willing to bet that if you truly were going to look at 20 most innovative startups, then there perhaps - just perhaps may be some outside the US.

What was inspiring is that many of the startups did seem to have a fair amount of success and chance for continued growth. Some like H.Bloom may wilt over time and some like Taskrabbit may be cloned or reinvented into oblivion but there were others that seemed like they could give established players a run for the money.

I was particularly drawn towards those that seemed to offer a platform for enabling/accelerating innovation as opposed to a single innovation (admittedly Sphero was pretty cool). These platforms included

a) Kickstarter - permits anyone to be an angel investor (with checking account rates of return) in products that truly believe in.
b) Kaggle - Disseminates some fairly difficult problems to researchers around the world ; Kaggle is not the first to leverage crowd-sourced research; Innocentive has been doing it for a while. Their model however appears to be more democratic.
c) Skillshare - A platform for replicating the model of community-center courses but on an expanded scale. The  students of ETR500 may want to check out this skillshare course on Business Model Generation

Others like Quora appear to leverage the networking ability of their founders and may still have a chance at developing into useful services. The ones looking at simplifying banking may have a better chance at profitability  but they also carry significant risk.

Overall, the article had some good picks but also had a slight whiff of venture manure. Do sniff around, but carefully.