Back in October, GroSocial raised $450K in seed funding from the Kickstart Seed Fund, Monarch Ventures, Rock & Hammer Ventures and a handful of angel investors. The seed funding acted as early validation and fuel for the Utah-based startup, which is on a mission to help SMBs — and organizations that lack the resources to train or hire dedicated social media teams — boost customer engagement and monetization via social media.
Today, the Utah-based social media marketing company has officially received further validation from investors, with the announcement that it has closed an additional $1 million in funding. Each of the investors that participated in the startup’s initial financing have re-upped, along with a handful of newcomers, including HubSpot Co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah and HubSpot CMO Mike Volpe. → Read More
Smart B2B companies have long known that winning big was predicated on redefining the rules of competition to your advantage over incumbent vendors. A more difficult question is whether you want to own a meme. In other words, do you want to define a new categorical term. Microsoft did that to great effect when they created the office suite category. More recently, Salesforce.com did something similar, becoming the de facto player one thinks of when they think of cloud computing in the process. It’s a very high-risk, high-return strategy. → Read More
Marketing software company HubSpot has brought on a new leader today—Akamai CFO JD Sherman. Sherman has been chief financial officer at Akamai for over 6 years.
Prior to Akamai, Sherman served as the chief financial executive of IBM’s $21 billion Systems and Technology Group. Over the course of 15 years at IBM, Sherman held senior executive positions in Finance, including Vice President, Finance and Planning, zSeries Server Division, and Assistant Controller of IBM Corporate Financial Strategy and Budgets.
→ Read More
HubSpot, which just raised a massive $32 million from Sequoia Capital, Google Ventures, Salesforce and others; has acquired fellow marketing software company Performable. Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed.
Performable offers a marketing software platform for businesses looking to optimize their marketing, sales and customer service efforts. The startup gives clients a view into the sales and marketing performance across e-mail, web, social media and mobile tools. Performable provides businesses with analytical tools to understand what marketing and sales efforts are working and can trigger marketing campaigns based on real customer behavior. → Read More
Digital marketing startup HubSpot is close to closing a new round of financing, we’ve confirmed, that may put a valuation on the company in the $200 million range. Google Ventures is likely to invest, we’ve heard from multiple sources. And Sequoia Capital, which has recently shown an increased willingness to invest in later stage funding rounds, is rumored to be interested in the company as well.
The company last raised capital – a $16 million round led by Scale Venture Partners – in late 2009. They’ve raised a total of $33.5 million to date. → Read More
Marketing software maker HubSpot has analyzed close to 9 million Twitter profiles based on data collected through its Twitter Grader tool, and has come to the conclusion that accounts with a profile picture average about 10 times more followers than those without.
That on itself is not so surprising; a Twitter profile associated with the default avatar generally screams ‘newbie’, which is generally an incentive not to follow someone unless you know that person in real life or on other social networks. → Read More
WooRank is a brand new service designed to let website publishers and marketers evaluate the SEO-friendliness and other aspects of their Web sites on the fly, free of charge. If this reminds you of what HubSpot built with its Website Grader tool, it’s because the concept is extremely similar.
WooRank evaluates Web sites based on 50 criteria in an automated fashion, free of charge, and provides helpful SEO and other tips. A premium version will be offered in about 3 months: for a yet-to-be-determined fee, publishers and marketers will then be able to screen Web sites based on up to 120 pre-defined critera, get served more personalized tips as well as references to online tools that they can use to increase the findability and performance of their Web sites. → Read More
Marketing software startup HubSpot has put together its third ‘State of the Twittersphere’ report, which is based on an analysis of more than 5 million Twitter accounts and 6 million tweets, collected by the company’s free Twitter Grader tool.
The main take-away from the report (PDF): peaking at around 13% in March 2009, growth in new Twitter users has recently slowed down significantly, dropping to a mere 3.5% in October 2009. That’s still growth, but a mind-blowing growth rate it is no longer. → Read More
Digital marketing startup HubSpot has raised a third round of funding to the tune of $16 million, bringing the total invested in the Cambridge, MA company to a healthy $33.5 million. The round was led by Scale Venture Partners and joined by previous investors Matrix Partners and General Catalyst Partners.
According to the blog post announcing the investment, the valuation of the company went up again with this fresh round of funding. → Read More
Hubspot’s Facebook Grader will tell you your “reach and authority” on Facebook. My score is 90/100.
The tool works by analyzing the number of friends you have, how important those friends are (whatever that means), how complete your profile is, how many wall posts you have and how many groups you belong to. It turns out I haven’t filled out much of my profile and there are some other things I’ve neglected to attend to, so I only get an A-.
I can live with that, but there are others out there who seem to take issue with how the site ranks people. French entrepreneur Loic Le Meur is “outraged” that it doesn’t take into account that he has a fan page, for example (I find fan pages obnoxious myself), and gave him a score of only 97.6. C’est la vie. → Read More
How many followers do most people really have on Twitter? The average number of both followers and other members people on Twitter are following is about 70, according to the State of the Twittersphere, a new report by Web marketing startup HubSpot. But that average is skewed by elite Twitterers who have hundreds or thousands of followers. The vast majority of people on Twitter use it to keep in touch with a much smaller circle of friends and peers. For those with 50 or fewer followers (three quarters of all users), the average number of followers is 15.6 and the average number of people they are following is 18.4.
Some other key stats from the report:
—70% of Twitter users joined in 2008
—20% of Twitter users have joined in the past 60 days
—The average user has been on Twitter 275 days
Internet marketing is big money, and so is the $12 million recently raised by HubSpot, a consultancy and software provider for sites looking to improve their visibility online. The Series B round led by Matrix Partners comes on top of the $5 million raised from General Catalyst Partners last September, bringing the company’s grand total to over $17 million. In addition to providing paid SEO services, HubSpot offers a free search optimization tool called Website Grader that will automatically assess your website, score it on a 1-100 scale, and show you where to make changes that will get it in front of more eyeballs. The tool claims to have assessed over 300,000 sites, and your score on the 1-100 scale represents the percentage of those sites that your site tops (kind of like the SAT). CrunchBase Information HubSpot Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Want to know how to get your Website high up in natural search results, but don’t want to pay a search engine optimization (SEO) firm just to find out what you are doing wrong? Now you can get a free, automated evaluation of your site on Website Grader. Just type in your Website address, and it will spit out a report detailing what you can do to boost your site’s SEO juice. It even gives you a grade. TechCrunch scored a 99 out of 100, but we do have some weak areas. Apparently, we use too many images and not enough metadata. Website Grader found 3,918,184 inbound links to TechCrunch, and 17,500 pages indexed on Google, where we have a PageRank of 7 (out of 10). Blogs by their very nature tend to do well on natural search results, because they are constantly updated and have a lot of links going in and out. Just for fun, I typed in the WSJ.com and the NYTimes.com to get comparison stats. Both also scored a 99. But, as you’d expect, the NYTimes trounces the WSJ.com (and us) when it comes to PageRank, inbound links, and traffic. That is simply a function of being an open site versus a closed, subscription site like the WSJ.com. Here are the comparison stats: These figures really show the penalty the WSJ.com is taking by sticking to its subscription wall. Instead of a PageRank of 9 like the NYTimes.com, its PageRank is the same as ours. The traffic rank numbers are from Alexa, so I’d ignore them. The number of WSJ.com pages bookmarked on del.icio.us or indexed by Google is a tiny fraction of what it would be if it was a fully open site. Even if these numbers are not completely accurate, you get a sense of how much a better job the Wall Street Journal could be doing to make its articles visible to the outside world. Website Grader is operated by HubSpot, a search engine and Web-marketing optimization company hoping to get leads from the site. If you use it, don’t be surprised if you get contacted by one of its sales reps trying to upsell you to one of its paid services. Hey, you didn’t really think it was free, did you? CrunchBase Information HubSpot Website Grader Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
San Francisco, CA
