The Hard Choices Behind How inbound.org Grew 5X

Sam Mallikarjunan
ThinkGrowth.org

Inbound.org is one of the largest, most successful communities of marketers in the world with over 160,000 members. But how did it get there?

Originally founded by Rand Fishkin and Dharmesh Shah as a “good for the world” side project, it became a project of HubSpot Labs in November of 2013.

When I joined the inbound.org team near the end of 2014, the site already had about 20k total members and 80k monthly visitors. But we wanted to build a home for a movement. The inbound movement is far larger than 20k people. It’s millions of sales and marketing professionals who want to grow their businesses by building better buying experiences.

That’s a highfalutin, yet worthwhile, goal.

But as with most worthwhile goals, getting there was less glamour and more hard work.

Inbound.org is now well on its way toward that mission. The site grew 5X last year and is on track to grow 5X again this year. There are still compelling and challenging obstacles that team has yet to overcome. They will have to grow 5X again, and then 5X again, and then 5X again before they succeed in connecting the world’s marketers and salespeople in this mission.

That’s going to be a great story. The people still working on it will undoubtedly write it well.

This, however, is the story of inbound.org’s first 5X growth.

We Made Hard Choices That Paid Off

We didn’t over-focus on the early adopters.

One of my favorite answers around “do we have product/market fit?” is Alex Schultz’s cerebral perspective around new user cohorts having user retention that’s asymptotic to the x-axis.

In other (clearer) words:

You’ve made it when you no longer lose all of the new users you acquired over a certain period.

Our early adopters tended to be SEO professionals due to the nature of where the seed users came from. Following the letter of Schultz’s axiom rather than the spirit, you might assume that we had product/market fit because we were acquiring new SEOs who remained active on the site.

However, we made an intentional decision to make the site less SEO-focused in terms of content. This made the site less valuable to the early, heavy users — a tough pill to swallow. But our goal was to build the online home of the inbound community — which is far larger than “just” SEO.

Takeaway for others: Your early adopters will rarely form the core of your future growth. Sometimes you have to make the painful decision to leave some behind.

We Wizard of Oz’d the site a little.

We manually massaged the rankings of content on the home page in the early days. This was an intense debate on our team. The purists thought that only the community should influence what makes the home page.

But by giving the community moderators the power to feature and boost content we dramatically increased the clickthrough rate on homepage links. This meant people found more value in the site, and stayed active users.

Takeaway for others: Solve for the user experience, even if you have to hide behind a curtain pulling levers until your product begins to organically create the value you intend.

We hurt smart people’s brains.

This was one of the most difficult management challenges I ever had, because it’s cognitively uncomfortable for smart people to see important problems going unsolved.

We suck at CRO? I know — we’re going to be okay with that for now.

Our onboarding experience could be way better? I know — we’re going to be okay with that for now.

Or, the most common, “if we just had {{insert feature here}} so many more people would use the site!”. That may be, but we don’t and we’re going to be okay with that for now.

We used a strategic framework called M-SPOT. I emphasize the O because it stands for “omissions”: Things we know are important but we’re going to intentionally devote zero resources toward. (For now.)

Not some resources. Not work on it nights and weekends — zero. We dedicated no cognitive load to those problems.

It was incredibly uncomfortable, but hugely important in staying focused.

Takeaway for others: No team can focus on all potential opportunities at the same time. It’s easier (although still not easy) for a team of very smart people if you acknowledge the deficiency and identify it as an intentional omission. Focus, focus, focus!

We got insanely good at pivoting.

Frankly, we didn’t know what the hell we were doing. None of us had ever built and grown a community like this before. We were good tacticians and good strategists and everyone on the team was exceptionally good at what they did. Everyone had opinions and ideas, yet no one really felt like we knew exactly what to do.

But it’s not like I was sitting on the right answer and just not telling the team — I didn’t know either. We made decisions, executed on plans, and modified our plans quickly based on the results.

I was particularly proud of how good the team’s “pivoting muscles” became. We got really good at failing quickly.

We strove to be excellent at failure.

Takeaway for others: Accept that you’re likely going to make several changes in direction, and communicate that with the team.

We got fairly good at focusing.

The “focus, focus, focus!” is from Dharmesh Shah constantly trying to keep our attention focused. 8 months after leaving the team, I still have visions of a tiny Dharmesh standing on my shoulder telling me to focus whenever I feel myself wanting to work on too many things.

Should we build a Q&A site and seed the activity? Probably, but not yet.

Should we build premium business profiles? Maybe, but not yet.

Should we have original comic strip content? Probably not, but definitely not yet.

We did a fairly good job of focusing, but we still wandered off on occasion. The hardest part of the aforementioned pivoting was refocusing.

Takeaway for others: Pivoting is fine, but focus, focus, focus! One of the most difficult and dangerous challenges a startup can face is ignoring exciting, billion dollar opportunities while you focus on the most exciting billion-est dollar one.

We balanced pleasing our investors with pleasing our users.

Inbound.org was founded by Rand and Dharmesh, but HubSpot Labs took it over because — while it was important to both people and companies — we had the reach, resources, and (frankly) the time to focus on growing it quickly.

However, inbound.org wasn’t a lead generation source for HubSpot. In fact, HubSpot content posted on inbound.org was subject to the same community standards as everyone else’s content — which led to some awkward moments with coworkers. We kept the separation between inbound.org and the core HubSpot team as sacred as the separation of church and state.

Meanwhile, HubSpot invested the equivalent of a nice seed round of funding in inbound.org. Why? They wanted us to build a huge home for the inbound movement. “Rising tides raise all boats”, and more people doing inbound marketing means a larger potential market. The greatest impediment to HubSpot’s future growth wasn’t competition or feature sets, it was the adoption of the inbound methodology.

“HubSpot’s biggest threat was not any individual competitor — but inertia, because change is hard.” — Dharmesh Shah

Because of this, we focused intensely on growing the size of the community. We had to balance creating an experience for very smart people to have very smart conversations with the fact that not all members of the community are working on the same problems or at the same scale. We focused on growing the user base with the intentional omission of focusing on highly active users.

Alex Schultz has another great axiom here about not needing to focus on your most active users — it’s the users on the margin you need to worry about.

We focused our efforts on acquiring new users and getting them to regularly complete simple actions rather than building features for our most vocal users.

Takeaway for others: Make sure you and your investors agree on the specific growth goals. When revenue is off the table (as is often true with early stage consumer content startups like this), it’s critical that everyone understand and agree on what the metrics of focus will be.

Features aren’t always the answer to competition.

Another common symptom of smart people is seeing functional solutions to problems. They often see new features as the primary solution to user challenges.

But in “winner-takes-all/most” markets (like communities), it’s usually not a lack of features that’s impeding growth — it’s a lack of focus on growth.

There were other marketing community sites that raised 100X the funding we did and had 10X the team size, and some of them even had a more beautiful and feature-rich experience than we did. But we focused on the real value that a community has — other people. Because of this, we had a massive head start in taking the market.

Takeaway for others: New features are the easy answer, but not always the right answer. This may be uncomfortable to admit, but plenty of superior products die meaningless deaths in the face of superior growth.

Confidence was key.

By this, I mean statistical confidence. It’s tempting to try and run a fancy user cohort retention analysis by feature set. However, when your test sample says “4 people used this feature but they’re all still very active”… well, who cares?

“Give me the serenity to avoid testing things I can’t measure with statistical significance, the focus to iterate on the things I can, and the formulas to know the difference.” — the Growth Team’s Serenity Prayer

Takeaway for others: It’s tempting to show smart, colorful graphs with really mathy sounding conclusions and data sets, but if you’re doing first-touch lead generation attribution analysis on your blog that is generating 5 leads a month, you’re wasting your time. Focus on growing the traffic and subscribers to the blog (something you can do efficiently and with confidence) and then focus on sophisticated attribution. See earlier remark on hurting smart people’s brains.

Like it or not, perceptions matter.

We had long, hard conversations within our team about focusing on traffic, which is a simplistic metric that no one likes focusing on. To this day, it still hurts me on the inside how much we focused on just raw traffic.

Traffic is one of those metrics that can dangerously misalign the team with the users if you’re not careful.

With a site like inbound.org we needed the help of others to grow: Eric Ries, Google Ventures, original content writers, comarketing partners like Buffer, etc. All of them partnered with us because of the reach we could offer.

Let’s be honest. It didn’t matter to a comarketing partner if we had 100 users who sat there with their eyes glued to the inbound.org site 25 hours a day. Eric Ries partnered with us to help crowd-fund his book. We were able to offer exposure to tens of thousands of potential contributors which meant that we were able to get one of the most interesting minds in startups for an AMA in our community (which helped us grow).

Takeaway for others: Your growth may require some horse trading, but what if the people who can help you grow don’t need any horses? This can be a hard truth that startups don’t want to admit. It’s also one of the most dangerous potential distractions your team can have. Never, ever, lose sight of the value you’re creating for the users — but balance that with acquiring the “currency” you need to fuel growth.

We Also Made Some Big Mistakes

You can outgrow churn — but only for so long.

While focusing on user retention too early can stagnate growth, so can focusing on user retention too late. The counterpoint to focusing on user growth is, eventually, churning users begin to outnumber the rate at which you can acquire new users. This stalls growth.

Visualization from Tom Blomfield showing how, eventually, you can’t outgrow churn.

We probably missed the mark on pivoting to focus on user retention by 3 or 4 months — an eternity in startup time. We were suffering from “round number bias”.

Round number bias is where you work harder to reach a round number than the same incremental improvement between odd numbers. The most commonly cited data is for baseball players: “If you look at the batting averages of baseball players five days before the end of the season, you will see that the distribution over .298, .299, .300, and .301 is essentially even — as one would expect it to be by chance. However, at the end of the season, the share of players who hit .300 or .301 was more than double the proportion who hit .299 or .298.” (“Round Numbers as Goals: Evidence from Baseball, SAT Takers, and the Lab.”, Psychological Science 2011).

We were chasing the 100,000 user mark. That round number would look great when we announced it, it would convince more people to join than if we were at 92,364 members, and it would also resonate as a huge milestone with stakeholders. Frankly, it would feel good for our team. It was a cathartic benchmark after which we could take a deep breath and focus on other things.

What we missed, however, was that prior to reaching that mark we had approached the point where user churn became larger than our ability to acquire new users. Overall Weekly Active User growth stalled. Because we hadn’t pivoted to retention sooner, we stalled in active user growth.

Focus is good. Blinders are bad.

Takeaway for others: Over-focus on early adopter churn can impede growth, but so can round-number bias. If the “North Star” is Weekly Active Users, you’re going to deconstruct that metric into component metrics (such as acquisition, activation, retention, referral) and focus on one at a time. Focus is good, but make sure that the intentional omission of the other component metrics doesn’t reach a point where it impedes progress toward the North Star.

Culture is intentional, whether you intend it to be or not.

Inbound.org was a unique team because it was the only fully remote team at HubSpot and was comprised primarily of full-time contractors. Different time zones, different cultural backgrounds, and different personalities all exacerbated the “normal” cultural challenges of a remote team. Some people work for remote teams because they don’t want to have frequent interactions with coworkers. Some people can’t function without that.

Whether you like it or not, your team will develop an internal culture.

If you just assume that “culture will figure itself out” or “smart people don’t need an intentional culture”, you’re going to end up with a lot of tension on the team.

Takeaway for others: Investing the time in intentional culture may seem like a waste of time now, but it saves you a ton of pain and agony in the future. It’s worth it.

T he Labs team made frequent and fast mistakes, but they also did a phenomenal job under extreme uncertainty. They turned inbound.org into one of the largest and most active sales and marketing communities in the world.

Valuable lessons are often obscured by the rosy mythologies of origin and growth. Hopefully this helps you focus, focus, focus and grow, grow, grow!

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