Dharmesh Shah recommends startups build inbound marketing from day one, writing better content than competitors. Outbound marketing like PPC lacks a sustainable advantage since anyone can outspend you, while good content compounds over time and can't be easily replicated.
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What I encourage companies to do is take some portion of your budget and invest it in inbound marketing, kind of give it the time. In presentations that I've done about inbound marketing, I've put photos of kittens up and said like outbound marketing kills kittens and things like that. But in reality though, HubSpot's been doing outbound marketing at least as part of our mix for ever since HubSpot's been around. So what we believe in in terms of marketing is effective marketing. So if you have marketing that's working for you and the numbers prove out, as long as it's not overly evil, I think that's okay. The issue with outbound marketing is that there's no competitive barrier essentially. Like let's say you're spending money on advertising. If someone's willing to spend more money on advertising, they're going to win. It's going to be very quick in this day and age, like if you're doing PPC ads. So my advice would be all the things that you should be doing for your business— inbound marketing is a good, scalable, long-term way to build this kind of marketing base. If you're in the software business, you should be writing your blog the same day you start writing code for your product because it works. And I've seen it work across all sorts of different businesses of different sizes or whatever, like thousands of times. I mean, you don't have to write prize-winning content. You're not out to win Nobel Prizes. You have to write content that's better than your peer group. The people that believe will actually invest. Essentially, that's enough in order to win at inbound marketing.
