HubSpot
Most companies that invent a category try to own it. HubSpot did the opposite. They gave it away.
In 2006, Dharmesh Shah and Brian Halligan coined the term “inbound marketing.” The phrase captured something obvious once you heard it: instead of interrupting people with your message, earn their attention by being genuinely helpful. Create content that answers their questions. Solve their problems first.
The counterintuitive part came next. They deliberately did not trademark the term.
As Dharmesh explained on the podcast ([[episodes/30b-founder-how-to-rank-1-i|$30B Founder: How to Rank #1 in AI]]):
“A lot of people thought we were crazy. But our reasoning was: if it’s just ours, it’s marketing speak. If everyone can use it, it becomes a category. We wanted to own the category, not the term.”
This is a subtle but important distinction. A trademark gives you legal protection. A category gives you market leadership. HubSpot chose the latter.
The MIT Meeting
The company traces back to a chance connection at MIT. Dharmesh was doing his MBA. Brian was a venture partner and instructor. They hit it off over a shared obsession with company culture.
Brian had developed a thesis that traditional marketing and sales was fundamentally broken. Companies interrupted people with cold calls and banner ads. Consumers had learned to tune it all out.
The insight was that the internet had shifted power to buyers. They could research products on their own terms. The companies that won would be the ones that helped with that research rather than fighting it.
Content as the Wedge
Before HubSpot had customers, Dharmesh started a blog called OnStartups. No monetization plan. Just writing about what he was learning about startups.
By 2006, it had become one of the most popular startup blogs online. That audience, built through free content over several years, became HubSpot’s first customers. The company was practicing inbound marketing before the software existed.
This is the pattern that would later define The Hustle’s playbook and countless other media-to-software businesses: build an audience by being useful, then figure out what to sell them.
The Conference as Category Creation
The INBOUND conference started with around 200 people in a small venue. Seventeen years later, it is one of the largest business conferences in the world.
The growth of the conference mirrors the growth of the category. As more people used the term “inbound marketing”—freely, without licensing or permission—the market expanded. HubSpot did not own the phrase, but they owned the definitive event, the flagship software, and the origin story.
Mathematical Induction
Dharmesh describes his operating philosophy using a concept from mathematics:
“I think of it like mathematical induction. You don’t need to solve the whole problem. You just need to know that if you can get from step N to step N+1, and you can do step 1, you’ll eventually get there.”
This is a useful mental model for building anything large. You do not need to see the entire path. You need to know the next step works.
The Next Wave
In a more recent conversation about where marketing is heading, Dharmesh introduced a new term: AEO, or Answer Engine Optimization.
The argument is straightforward. SEO was about ranking on a search results page. AEO is about being the answer that an AI gives directly. When someone asks ChatGPT a question, you want your content to be what it cites.
This is the next iteration of the same philosophy. Earn attention by being useful. The platform changes. The principle does not.
What HubSpot Got Right
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Category creation over trademark protection. Letting everyone use “inbound marketing” made it a real industry, not a buzzword.
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Content before product. OnStartups proved the model before HubSpot existed.
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Events as moats. INBOUND conference became a physical manifestation of their market position.
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Iteration over grand plans. Mathematical induction: just figure out the next step.
The company went public in 2014 and has grown to a market cap exceeding $30 billion. The term they gave away for free turned out to be the foundation of everything.