HubSpot  recently had a very successful IPO, but does it have what it takes to be successful long-term?

Recently it seems we are living in an era where some big tech company seems to launch, get bought, or has an IPO every other week.  The business models for some of them are something altogether untested and new, and their valuations can seem crazy.  The key to understanding the value of HubSpot is understanding what it provides to the consumer and in HubSpot’s case the consumer is business.

HubSpot is a company that designs and offers software as a subscription service to help businesses and marketing agencies market products online.  That means they design tools for social media marketing,  email marketing, content management, analytics, and search engine optimization (SEO)  among many others

My company has used Hubspot’s product for nearly 4 years on all of our contact forms as a lead management tool.   It is an outstanding product but my concern is that it can be difficult for an average user to effectively leverage.  It requires deeper assistance from a web developer and in many cases a marketing expert as well.  Implementing HubSpot’s tools is a major hurdle.

The notion that HubSpot  is entirely a “Software as a service” or SaaS product is also somewhat misleading. The need for manual assistance is required and in turn, makes it hard for marketers to get full value from it. With that said, Salesforce.com has some of the same problems and has become a major player and dominant in the lead management space.

HubSpot has operated at a loss over the last year, of $33 million to be exact, which may seem problematic for investors.  However, HubSpot’s revenue stream is that of a subscription based service and most all software subscription services tend to slump in the beginning.  HubSpot seems to be turning that corner now with revenues last year of $77.6 million on 50% year to year growth.   In February they were given a valuation of more than a billion dollars from The Wall Street Journal.  And that’s not to mention that HubSpot raised over a hundred and twenty million dollars in their recent IPO.

I don’t know if at this point it even needs to be said that inbound marketing and ecommerce are taking over their old counterparts, but that doesn’t mean that businesses understand it.  Digital is the focus of marketing going forward and businesses are in a mad rush to figure out how to get data on their customers and use it to increase their bottom line online, and that’s the niche that HubSpot is filling.

Like Facebook – the value is in knowing the customer, and companies are shelling out big bucks to Facebook because Facebook knows everything about their customers.  But getting someone to click on your link in Facebook really is only like getting them to walk through the door of your store.  What tools do you have to keep customers engaged with your brand and products?  What exactly should you be analyzing to get to know your customers better or at least as well as Facebook?   And how can you tell if your efforts are even working or if you need to change your approach?  These are the tools of the inbound marketer, and it’s where HubSpot excels.

Every company that wants to survive in the future will need to become experts at profiting using inbound marketing techniques.   HubSpot provides business’ marketing teams, and marketing agencies alike with tools and analytics to become online marketing powerhouses.  Hubspot’s IPO will help place more of an emphasis on the digital marketing industry and may cause other companies to follow suit.

I believe that, going public often gives companies the focus to begin to fine tune their product…Facebook is a great example of this.  In my opinion, HubSpot has the right stuff to do well in the publicly held arena and will be a winner.

As part of the promotion for the latest iteration of the Iphone, Apple inadvertently ticked off a lot of customers -presuming that they’d like a copy of the new U2 album and thereby uploading it onto their devices. In doing so, Apple basically said, “whether you like U2 or not, you like U2.”

This deal definitely benefitted U2 over Apple. Let’s face it, U2’s best is behind them. I’m even a U2 fan, but when I go to a concert I am looking to hear their hits and if they play their new music, I am less than thrilled. Plus they got paid something like $100 million and got their music out to the masses with little to no effort.

In this day and age when marketers know more than ever about what people like, what they value and what they find offensive – it really is a wonder how one of the most successfully marketed companies in history ever came to the decision to go through with this. Some of the words used to describe the publicity stunt were very telling about the way it made people feel – words like violation, intrusion, presumptuous.

There was some division among music fans and critics at first. Some wondered what the fuss was all about, after all it’s free music. When the dust settled though, it was pretty clear that it was a bad move on everybody’s part. If Apple had offered the album to people for free who could then either take it or leave it, things might have been different, but no, you had no choice but to own it the way you owned every other album in your Itunes library. These Mp3 libraries are the new record or cd collections for people, and for a lot people, especially music fans, every song in there represents a very personal choice to put it there.

The way we interact with music is a very personal thing that we cultivate over years. Our music represents more to us than just preference or taste, but a deeper reflection of our personality, our experience, our friendships and our memories. For most of the past hundred years we could turn to our physical albums and mixed tapes that we’d accumulated over the years and feel that same passion and fervor for the collection itself as we do for the ephemeral music affixed to it.

But for the past decade or so we’ve seen our physical music collections begin to disappear and I think to some degree it has weakened our relationship to music. I think that upsets us all a bit whether there is something we can do about it or not. In this instance in particular, it was as if the largest corporation in the world, Apple, viewed the buying public as one monolithic consumer instead of individuals. I think it’s clear today that even vaguely eluding that everyone might enjoy the same music is nothing short of tone deaf.

The ultimate irony for me is how the single U2 released tells of the potent musical experience of hearing The Ramones for the first time as something new and different, while the release itself seems to rob people of something approaching that feeling.

So you want to try Ello, the new indie ad-free social network that boasts it won’t buy or sell your information. First of all, good luck getting into the network, which is currently invitation only, and second, what about your friends and your friends’ friends? Where exactly is all the content you go to Facebook to see going to come from and why would you spend any time on a social network without it?

What makes a social media network ‘social’ is the amount of people on them sharing content pictures and stories, and everyone is on Facebook sharing great content, approximately 829 million per day according to Facebook. That is why I say, like them or hate them – Facebook isn’t going anywhere soon and has nothing to worry about from other social networks, especially Ello.

What may be even more compelling is the number of mobile daily active users on Facebook.  Ello does not currently have a mobile app.  How on earth would Ello get people to replace Facebook with their social network when most of Facebook’s users are on mobile?

While the demand that Ello’s exclusivity is creating is palpable, what makes the web an interesting place is its interconnectivity. The internet takes interesting ideas and makes them visible regardless of previous constructs of popularity and exclusivity. People like it that way. Exclusivity doesn’t work in social networking, inclusivity does. Facebook has already gotten nearly a billion people to be social in the same place on the web. At some point Ello will probably be open to all, but think about what Facebook has done in the short time that it has existed.

Most people looking to share content in Ello will have to troll Facebook to find it, go back to Ello and share it. It won’t take people long to realize they could have just stayed on Facebook. The only people willing to keep up that charade are users trying to build up their social media profiles with friends and followers for no other reason than looking popular “statistically” which definitely does not represent the average social media user.

Isn’t that why Google Plus is such a boring lonely place? Tell me if this sounds familiar, you joined Google Plus and you waited for others to join you and share content, only when you looked back at Facebook – everyone was still over there sharing the stories and content you really cared about.

It reminds me of another exclusive social network “Netropolitan” that just launched offering services to rich people who can afford the service, which I think will also end up being a boring place to hang out on the web.