Inbound Organization

Foreword

If you ask people who know us where Dharmesh and I got the idea to start HubSpot, they'll probably tell you our starting point was the shifting balance of power between buyers and sellers.

They wouldn't be wrong. The vendor-client relationship has changed, and it has permanently altered how we do business. But the real story is much bigger than that.

We didn't start HubSpot because we thought only marketing was changing. We started HubSpot because we saw technology changing the world faster than ever before, and we wanted to democratize that change so small businesses could unlock their potential and grow.

The buyer-seller relationship is just one example of the dozens of ways technology impacts the way we do business. It all started when people began taking the Internet (and the free flow of information it enabled) seriously, around the early 1990s. The rise of the Internet empowered people to educate themselves, share insights, and share feedback, and ultimately it allowed us to demand more for ourselves.

If all of this sounds painfully obvious, that's just a testament to how thoroughly the Internet has changed our expectations of the people we do business with. But back in 1990, you might not have seen any of this coming.

Unless you're Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, or David Weinberger. In 2000, they penned the ahead-of-its-time book The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual, which accurately predicted the Internet's impact on organizations' ...