Larry Kim founded WordStream, a keyword management tool for PPC & SEO campaigns, in 2007 while he bootstrapped search marketing consulting to pay for development.  He secured funding in 2008 and soon after stepped down from the position of CEO to focus on marketing and product development (as VP of product development).  WordStream recently released some new features including Google analytics integration and a free keyword tool, which we reviewed.  Larry was kind enough to take a bit of time away from his busy schedule to answer a few questions…

Sazbean: WordStream was created in 2007, while you bootstrapped in order to provide funding. This is a particularly difficult phase for any startup. How did you get through it?

I caught my first big break in 2007 – I got to pitch my ideas to venture capital firms early on and got rejected by all of them! Rejections can be valuable if they include feedback. So, I worked for about 9 months, using revenues from my search marketing consulting business to grow my team, trying to address their concerns. When I met with them again the following year – demonstrating that I could listen, was committed to the business, and had made progress on my own, it went a long way with the investors.

Another huge break was finding awesome people early on. Every dollar being spent on an early-stage software company should be put towards advancing some kind of working prototype and trying to find customers to validate the design. I was fortunate to find a very highly skilled engineer early on in the process, who in turn, knew other very skilled engineers. And a friend referred me to a fantastic sales and marketing manager. Finding talented people is so hard – especially trying to convince people to join such a small business. I was very lucky in my recruiting efforts.

Finally, you have to be willing to forgo job stability and feel financially uncomfortable for a while. All in, I budgeted approximately 250k of my own money to fund just under a year of salaries, contractors, and capital expenses like hardware & software, to try to get past the bootstrapping phase and a successful funding event.

Sazbean: You acquired funding in 2008. How is the company different now?

It’s different (and better!) in a lot of ways:

• I have investors to whom I’m accountable for results. Goals are both a source of motivation and pressure for me. Luckily, I’ve found I work better under pressure.
• We have board meetings. This requires more formality in terms of business reporting and analytics. The exercise of pulling this data together allows us to better understand and react to our business challenges.
• I can staff positions and acquire capital ahead of revenues. We’re 20 people strong today and have a nice office. (We used to meet in Panera Bread!)
• We’ve hired a president and CEO. Rob challenges my ideas and assumptions and the product is always better as a result of it.
• I’m learning a lot from very experienced business professionals who have a track record of building and growing successful organizations.
• The most profound way the company is different for me personally is adapting to my new role as company founder. For example, I am learning that the most important contribution to advancing the goals of the company isn’t the work I produce, but rather the confidence and encouragement I can provide to the team.

I must say that Sigma Partners has been a great VC firm to partner with.

Sazbean: You recently announced some major upgrades, including integration with Google Analytics and a free keyword tool. Where do ideas for upgrades come from – in-house, customers, or both? Why these particular features?

Our engineering ticket list could be broken up into three sources of roughly equal size:

• New features requested by customers
• Experimental, innovative new stuff that nobody ever asked for
• Fixes and enhancements to existing features

Another way to break up the ticket list would be according to product objectives, for example:

• Stuff that makes life easier for our existing users
• Stuff that would broaden the appeal of the product to new customers
• Stuff that would enable our product to achieve specific business goals, like improving customer conversion rates, customer retention, etc.

I wrote a blog post that describes in detail why we think integration with Google Analytics is important for a Keyword Management Tool.

Sazbean: What other features are on the horizon?

In general we’re looking at the most painful, repetitive tasks in search marketing, and trying to provide innovative new solutions to help make search marketers more effective and productive. Sorry if that’s not the juicy answer you were looking for!

Sazbean: A lot of small business owners realize that pay-per-click advertising is important, but they usually turn to Google AdWords entirely. Why should they use your product?

WordStream takes a totally different approach to PPC campaign creation and management. We help you build better campaigns (by which I mean highly organized campaigns designed to earn high Quality Score) from the ground up, starting with more effective keyword discovery and providing tools to help you analyze and act on those keywords. The keyword grouping features of WordStream are especially powerful. They really make a huge difference in terms of how profitable your PPC advertising can be and how long it takes to organize a campaign. (And these features are incredibly useful for SEO as well.)

Sazbean: Electrical engineering to software to product management to marketing. Sounds a little like my own path. Why the change from software to the marketing side?

In college I did internships in various electrical engineering jobs – I worked in an industrial power plant and even a copper mine! The nice thing about software is you don’t have to work in noisy, dirty factories or dark underground mines, and wear helmets and safety boots to work.

But because I’m not a very good software developer, I decided to focus on software marketing and product management.

The best career advice I have for people is to specialize in something that they’re both good at and excited about. It seems pretty obvious, but I am always surprised by how many people don’t understand this.

Sazbean: You stepped down from the role of president and CEO in 2008 to go back to marketing and product management. What is the allure in marketing and product management?

I have a lot of respect for company founders who invent an innovative product and can turn it into a successful business as president and CEO. But I personally view the role as more of an organizer, whereas marketing and product management are more about idea generation. I think they take different breeds, and I’m definitely the latter.

Sazbean: Thanks, Larry!

Related posts:

• Review: WordStream’s Free Keyword Tool
• WordStream Adds Free Keyword Grouper & Keyword Niche Finder to SEO PPC Tools

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Technorati tags: keyword tool, seo, marketing, ppc advertising, business

I had the opportunity to interview Gary Vaynerchuck on Twitter this morning about his new book, Crush It! Why Now is the Time to Cash In On Your Passion.  If you weren’t able to join us, here’s the twitterscipt:

sazbean Everyone please help me interview @garyvee here – all your questions are welcome! #crushitbook

garyvee @sazbean I am ready #crushitbook

sazbean @garyvee awesome! thanks for the opp to interview #crushitbook

sazbean @garyvee What should biz owners know about #crushitbook that makes it stand out from other social media books?

garyvee @sazbean it is real, I am not full of crap and I will give them back the $14 if they don’t like it #crushitbook

sazbean @garyvee heh good to know! what got you interested in writing a book? #crushitbook

garyvee Easy @sazbean people read them, I am not romanced by any platform, I want to talk to people..heck Ill put a cup on a string #crushitbook

sazbean @garyvee cup on a string – the new social media? How do you convey passion over the Internet/SM? #crushitbook

garyvee @sazbean u don’t filter, u don’t apologize, u come from your heart and most of all you care abt the people that care about YOU! #crushitbook

sazbean @garyvee caring is excellent advice! Do you have any tips for connecting with your community on so many diff tools/networks? #crushitbook

garyvee @sazbean YES- DO IT! so many people talk…work and try to do it and just pound through it and it will happen #crushitbook

sazbean @garyvee oh, one more quick Q: @msesthy wants to know when you’ll be book signing in Metro Detroit #crushitbook

garyvee @sazbean trying…….. lol

sazbean Thanks everyone for joining me for the @garyvee interview – more info on his book: http://bit.ly/kOeAB followup post soon… #crushitbook

Thanks, Gary, for the opportunity to interview you on Twitter.  I know you had a lot of interviews lined up today.

About the book, from Crushitbook.com:

Everything has changed. The social media revolution has irreversibly changed the way we live our lives and conduct our business. There are billions of dollars in advertising moving online, waiting to be claimed by whoever can build the best content and communities. Despite this change, most people keep working at jobs that don’t make them happy and businesses continue to ignore the major marketing and public relations benefits that can be found online.

Buy the book: Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion (Amazon link)

About Gary, from his blog, http://garyvaynerchuk.com:

Gary Vaynerchuk has captured attention with his pioneering, multi-faceted approach to personal branding and business. After primarily utilizing traditional advertising techniques to build his family’s local wine business into a national industry leader, Gary rapidly leveraged social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook to promote Wine Library TV, his video blog about wine. As his viewership swelled to over 80,000 a day, doors opened to a book deal, several national TV appearances, and a flurry of speaking engagements around the world. Gary’s dual identity as both business guru and wine guy has made him the “Social Media Sommelier.”

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If you’re interested in purchasing his book, you can pre-order it on Amazon (release date is Oct. 13): Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion

Yesterday, we had part one of our interview with James Lindenbaum, CEO of Heroku, which provides hosting for Ruby on Rail applications.  We had a great conversation with James, but there was a bit much for one post, so we divided the interview into 2.  Here’s the second part of our interview….

Sazbean: How should business users that are new to Ruby on Rails (ROR) use Heroku?

James: There are several different things about Heroku that make it unique:

Firstly, it’s free to get started.  Which is great for small apps, testing, etc.  It’s very cost effective and very fast.  This means that businesses can actually develop all those good ideas without having to worry about the costs associated with hosting and deployment. Rails is so productive that you can have an app up and running in a few days or weeks – letting businesses test a lot of ideas very quickly.

Secondly, businesses don’t have to worry about the transition when going from an experimental application to a live application.  We handle everything for them.  We have all the heavy duty enterprise stuff you need when your app grows.

We also are very useful for staging.  Most companies have a very complex deployment process, with servers for development, testing, and production.  There are a lot of challenges in keeping all those environments identical, which you need to do to avoid having unforeseen problems in production.  In Heroku, all environments are identical and with staging servers, which don’t use very many resources, you pay for only what you use, making it very economical.  You can quickly create and destroy servers, so many developers are creating a new staging server for every version and leaving them in the account so they now have an audit trail to do regression testing.

Sazbean: What do you feel differentiates Heroku from your competitors?

James: There are a few things we do uniquely.  We’re the only place where you can deploy provisionlessly – just push your code and you’re done.  No steps to worry about.  We’re also the only multi-tenant platform, other than Google’s App Engine, so the platform is always up to date.  All improvements we make to the stack get rolled out to all applications.  Heroku is handling all the maintenance of the application for you.  Our scaling time is so fast – just drag the sliders and after a couple of seconds your application is scaled up.  This is really important so people can quickly match changes in demand for their application.

Sazbean: How well does Heroku handly dynamic provisioning?  If your site gets covered in TechCrunch, how does that work?

James: Right now there has to be a human decision, but it’s very quickly scaled up and we handle all the details.  We’ll do auto-scaling in the future.  We basically already have it, but we’re still at a stage where people don’t really understand how rails apps perform.  When we ask people how they want to scale an app, they don’t know.  So we need to let the community catch up so they can help figure out how apps should be scaled up and provisioned.

Sazbean: Do you provide tools so people can figure out where they should be for provisioning?

James: Not yet.  That’s right around the corner.  We’re coming out with some great features soon.  Most people use New Relic right now, which is a plugin that collects performance information about your application and then provides graphs and charts so you can see exactly what’s going on.

We have some really interesting use cases now that we have over 30,000 apps running on the platform. HeyZap, a casual gaming company, created a Swine Flu game – Swine Fighter.  They built it and then publicized it and were featured on Times, Reuters and other news sources.  They’re running on Heroku and they came to us when they were going to be in USA Today in just 2 hours.  We told them to scale up their dynos, so they did, and that was that.  They were able to serve millions of users over just a few days.

We have another customer who wrote an application for a site in Hungary that’s like Facebook.  It really took off like crazy.  6 or 7 weeks ago they were doing 300-400 dynamic requests per second, sustained.  Even at night they were doing 40 requests per second. We were able to push through 1/2 billion page views, and that doesn’t count any of the caching that was going on.  We scaled up that fast in just a matter of days and they’re able to scale up and down with the demand.

Sazbean: Where do you see the market growth for enterprise Ruby on Rails (ROR)?

James: From our internal numbers, it’s growing, but hard to say across what industries.  We have Fortune 500 companies registering all the time.  But bigger enterprises are always slower to adopt.  So, you see what you’d expect: bigger companies are starting to use Heroku for staging, testing, rapid prototyping and smaller apps.  Some are using it for larger, mission-critical apps, but they’re still the outliers.

Sometimes when someone registers from a big company, we contact them to see if they’re using Ruby at work. Last year, they’d say “no, we’re only allowed to use Java at work, I’m using Heroku for a personal project.” Six months ago, they’d say “we’re not supposed to be using Ruby, but there are three of us working on this project, and we’re using Ruby, and don’t tell anyone.” Then a few months ago, the story started to be “they came to us and told us we had to get this project done on a really short timeline, and we told them we could only get it done if they let us use Ruby. They did and the project was a success, so now we’re doing a medium-sized Ruby project.”

We have a large company that has a 400-person development team, doing Java and Perl, and they realized they weren’t agile.  So they restructured into 20, 20-person teams, with 2 of them being Ruby teams.  Immediately, the 2 Ruby teams are just way more productive, so all the business people want their stuff going to the Ruby teams because it’ll be done in 2 weeks and it’ll be pretty.

We also have Ruby teams who finish projects and then they go to IT to deploy and IT says they can’t deploy it or it’ll be 3 months to provision for it.  So the Ruby guys go to upper management and say, “look we’re building these apps in a matter of weeks, and IT provisioning is taking twice as long as the entire project to deploy.  You’ve got to let us go outside.”  So, they get to go outside, but then there’s no support from IT and you have two choices: a service-driven, highly managed hosting provider with a lot of guys to help (which is very expensive), or Heroku, where things are harder to break.

One of our big drivers right now is the inability of IT to keep up with the rate of development.

Related posts:

• Another Interview with James Lindenbaum, CEO of Heroku – Part 1
• Heroku Out of Beta – Fast, Easy & Cheap Ruby Hosting
• Heroku – Technical notes
• Interview with James Lindenbaum, CEO of Heroku

Technorati tags: heroku, ruby, rails, programming, hosting, ruby on rails, ROR, web programming, agile development, web development

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Heroku (who we’ve covered here, here and here) provides provision-less hosting for Ruby applications, letting developers focus on developing.  The hosting service allows developers to  just push their code and it’s up in running – no worrying about running scripts, or setting up servers.  Heroku recently came out of beta and now offers commercial, paid service.  A few weeks ago, I had the chance to speak with Heroku’s CEO, James Lindenbaum, about their recent developments:

Sazbean: So it’s been a few months since the commercial launch, how have things been going?

James: They’re going really well.  The uptake has been pretty incredible and we’re trying to keep up with it in terms of young billing systems, etc.  Lots of people are finding a lot of value in what we’re providing and there’s a good mix of paying customers – some previous beta customers and some new people.  Lots of people really liked our service but had a lot of questions about what the service was going to cost when it came out of beta.  Now that we’ve answered that, more people are comfortable with signing up.

Sazbean: Why’d you decide to go with the tiered ala-carte pricing?

James: We spent a lot of time thinking about pricing.  We tried different types of pricing with some of our beta users and got a lot of feedback. We’re in a very interesting spot.  We’re a very modern, sort of next generation platform which takes advantage of the cloud.  A lot of people wanted to see a usage-based, metered system – pay by the drink – and we’re able to do that because of the cloud infrastructure.  On the other hand, we wanted to provide a very simple, easy way to do things – the small/medium/large idea.

So, we’re trying to satisfy both groups with a hybrid model. If you don’t want to think about it, pick based on the size of the database, choose the appropriate dynos and go.  Or you can fine tune all of your performance options.  But, it’s still a work in progress – it’s a good first step and we’re going to continue to work on it.  It’s been very well received so far – even better than we expected.

Sazbean: What was the reaction at Railsconf in May?

James: It was pretty good.  We had very good acceptance.  We changed the format of Railsconf this year with 4-5 minute vinettes about different features.  People really loved it and felt it provided a lot of good information.  We had a lot of good questions in our product talk. We have 12 people at the company now, and a lot of good thought leaders in ruby, who were able to get out there and talk.  We love conferences because it’s nice to feel the enthusiasm and energy from the ruby community – and a great opportunity to get face-to-face feedback and reactions from people.

Sazbean: What should non-technical business people know about Heroku?

James: Most of our future development will be in the add-ons section of our service.  We’ll be providing functionality higher and higher up the stack in terms of application performance management, monitoring and data replication, which will be more business-value oriented and less technical in nature.  We’ve checked off the low-level prerequisites and more business-value oriented features are coming. It’s as easy as ever to deploy applications using our platform.  We have many people using the platform for enterprise, mission-critical applications and there are a lot of success stories where they’re either saving a lot of time or able to use a lot of agility in the development process due to our platform. We’re selling productivity, time and agility.

Sazbean: Why should business people want Ruby on Rails (ROR) used for their applications instead of other languages?

James: Exact same story here.  You can be so much more productive using ROR.  It’s so much faster to write a usable, useful application, and a lot easier to do things the right way on rails. With rails, out of the box, as long as you don’t do anything unusual, you have an application that just works – it spits out all the proper caching headers, provides restful resources and APIs, helps you not repeat yourself, keeps your model/view/controller logic separated – just makes it easier to write a good application.

Java lets you do things the right way, but it’s a lot of work – it’s very heavy-handed.  And even with the newer stuff, it’s also not as flexible.  When you want to make significant changes to your business process, you have a lot more work with Java than a language like ruby.

Php doesn’t have enough structure.  I love php and wrote a lot of enterprise php applications.  The newer frameworks are pretty good, but it still doesn’t get you as far as you are with rails.

.Net is similar to Java – very heavy handed, a lot more work to do things.  It’s not rocket science, it just takes a lot of little elements to get things to work.  And if you don’t have to do all those little things, you can concentrate on the more important things.  It’s like carrying a really heavy backpack all the time – you get used to it – but one day you don’t need it anymore, so you set it down – and all of a sudden it’s incredibly liberating.

Heroku is trying to provide that same level of benefit for hosting that rails provides for development.

More of the interview in Part 2, tomorrow…..

Related posts:

• Heroku Out of Beta – Fast, Easy & Cheap Ruby Hosting
• Heroku – Technical notes
• Interview with James Lindenbaum, CEO of Heroku

Technorati tags: heroku, ruby, rails, programming, hosting, ruby on rails, ROR, web programming, agile development, web development

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AdJuggler (originally covered here) is an ad serving and management system which targets small and medium-sized publishers.  Jonathan Rivers, Executive Vice President, took a few minutes to explain how AdJuggler is different from the big ad serving companies like DoubleClick and what the future holds for the company.

Jonathan, you’re quoted as saying, “For years we’ve been saying that companies can deploy AdJuggler’s technology to receive all the features provided by the three largest vendors but at a more attractive price.” (from About AdJuggler).  How do you continue to stay competitive in an industry that’s dominated by DoubleClick (now owned by Google) who can also leverage price?

Jonathan: One of the great things about an industry thats dominated by large players is that they leave a lot of folk by the wayside for one reason or another.  Our focus as a company is to lower the barriers to entry in the online ad serving market as well as providing boutique level of service and support whenever and wherever possible.  One of the interesting things about Doubleclick is that they don’t actually leverage price.  They still have high CPM’s and high monthly minimum.  Their focus is really on the top tier of the marketplace and not really on the small to mid sized publishers, which is a space that we really shine.

When we talk about lowering the barriers to entry there are a couple of places that we do that.  The first is focusing on the ease of use of the platform, the second is with service and support.  When we sat down to launch the AdJuggler 6 platform, we spent months gathering feedback from our customers and traffickers and really concentrated on trying to refine the workflow of the product.  One of the key design ideas was to reduce the number of clicks and particular action took and to reduce the number of steps that any task took.  At the end of the day, our customers really want to focus on their business which is their site and their content, and we like to focus on letting them spend less time working with an ad server and leaving them more time for their core business.

When we talk about boutique levels of service and support, that is core to our company, our staff and our business model.  We have 24/7 support via phone and email, and those are folks in our facility who are trained and responsible for supporting our products.  The first part of taking care of customers is getting them well trained on the product so that they are successful right out of the gate, and our standard contracts contain 4+ hours of training.  Most folks don’t need it, but hey if they do, its there for them.  The second part is taking care of them once they are in production.  This means answering their emails in a timely fashion and being there for them if they want to call and talk to someone about how to do something.  Its our policy that email requests be addressed within hours of hitting our systems and our support team actively monitors open tickets to make sure people get taken care of.

The quote above was from the press release about AdJuggler becoming a member of the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau), and submitting AdJuggler 6 to be IAB certified.  Besides being more competitive, are there any other reasons AdJuggler joined the IAB?  I imagine having a voice in IAB standards would be very useful to product development.

Jonathan: In theory yes, but in terms of share of voice we would have little if any impact there.  I think the standards are pretty well fleshed out at this point, and for us joining the IAB was really about commitment to our customers and our industry.

Speaking of competition, what are the challenges AdJuggler faces when working with third-party tags?  How well do they work as far as tracking and serving?  Have you run into any limitations?

Jonathan: The biggest challenge for us I think is the lack of transparency out there in the marketplace.  There are some ad servers out there who dont have click tracking variables and that makes it difficult for people to traffic or track their tags.  If there is a standard I would like to see the IAB chime in on it would be click tracking and the inclusion of variables or API style standards for ad servers to be able to better communicate with each other to help reduce discrepancies.

Many advertisers are very concerned about click fraud.  How does AdJuggler mitigate the effect of click fraud on the stats for advertisers?  Is click fraud as big of a problem as advertisers fear?  What should advertisers worry about in terms of click fraud?

Jonathan: Our customers are primarily publisher and networks, so I cant directly speak for the needs of the advertiser community.  That being said, I think click fraud is going to be an issue for the display (as opposed to search) side of things here shortly which is why we are in the process of integrating Click Forensics solution into AdJuggler now.  This is one of those places it really made sense for us to work with an industry leader to provide better tools to our user base.

In terms of what people should worry about in terms of click fraud:
The more subtle fraud attempts.  Blatant click farming is pretty easy to detect after the fact, what you have to watch out for is very slow methodical fraud which can be harder to detect, thats why we are working With Click Forensics.

AdJuggler offers full API access, as well as customization services.  How are your customers taking advantage of these services?

Jonathan: The two biggest areas we are seeing folks use the API are back-end integrations and custom portals.  On the integration side we have a number of folks who have plugged into either their billing or trafficking systems.  This allows them to keep using the systems they already know and use and to have ad serving as a modular component.  Next up are custom portals, we have had several customers do them for themselves and we have done a fair number to order.  Customized portals are a great way for a network to really provide value for their publishers, it allows them to customize the experience to their publishers needs, or to provide that full level of integration with the site or other specialized technologies they may be using.  On the publisher side its a great way to extend their services to advertisers (and increase revenues) by provide self service advertising tools.

Behavioral targeting has been a hot topic in Internet marketing circles as a way to reach customers throughout the buying process (and sales funnel).  For example, a visitor to Cars.com may be interested in buying a car in the future and their behavior on the site may give clues as to which cars they are interested in.  Advertisements targeted to those interests may be more effective for the advertiser.  AdJuggler offers targeting based on cookies, keywords, geo-targeting, etc.  How do these meet these goals of behavioral targeting?  Are there other targeting methods planned for future versions?

Jonathan: Most behavioral targeting is being done via cookies, and we have a couple of customers who have built their own targeting engines doing just that.  One of the great things about cookie targeting as a technology is its flexibility.  It allows for behavioral and retargeting as well as multi condition display rules.  (show x banner if they have seen y or z, but not w).  In terms of targeting types we tend to like to provide raw technologies and help companies apply them in case specific solutions.  That being said a simple retargeting module is in the planning stages, and we have a very deluxe header/referrer targeting module that is available on a custom basis.

What does the future hold for AdJuggler?  Do you have any plans for future versions you can share with us?

Jonathan: More tools to simplify life really.  I mentioned the Click Forensics integration which should be formally announced later this month.  For the fall-winter season we are looking at another general product release that contains refinements as well as improved support for both XML based ad tags as well as support for XML feed advertising (receiving feeds from 3rd parties).  Additionally we will be releasing a network centric version of AdJuggler with built in customizable portals for their advertisers and publishers.

Related Article: Web Ads – AdJuggler

Technorati Tags: AdJuggler, thruport, advertising, ads, display ads, online advertising

HubSpot was started by Dharmesh Shah and Brian Halligan when they were both graduate students at MIT. Dharmesh, who has founded two companies and invested in others, also blogs about startups at OnStartups.com. Dharmesh took a few minutes to explain how HubSpot is different from other SEO and Internet Marketing companies and how inbound marketing can improve business websites. Look for a Sazbean review of HubSpot later this week.

What made you decide to start HubSpot – an Internet Marketing company?

Dharmesh: HubSpot [started] while I was at MIT in graduate school.  The thesis behind the company was that small businesses could benefit greatly from the Internet by more efficiently attracting prospective customers.

How is HubSpot different from other Internet Marketing or SEO companies?

Dharmesh: The big difference between HubSpot and most SEO companies is that it sells a product, not a service.  We believe that most small businesses can learn and apply the principles of Search Engine Optimization themselves.  We provide the tools to help these marketers leverage the power of SEO without having to spend thousands of dollars on consultants.  Further, HubSpot thinks of SEO as just one component of good internet marketing.  We offer an integrated suite of applications all designed to help small businesses draw more visitors to their websites and convert a higher percentage of those visitors to leads and customers.

From the demo of HubSpot’s Inbound Marketing System, it seems that a large portion of the lead generation and traffic generation relies on HubSpot’s blogging platform.  Why the focus on blogging instead of other types of content?

Dharmesh: Inbound marketing is about helping prospective customers find you instead of the classic “outbound” method which is centered around blasting the world with your message in the hopes that some small fraction that care will engage.  We think blogging is a great way for small businesses to engage their market.  It improves search engine rankings, provides useful content and generally helps differentiate a business.  Having said that, we take a broader view of what a “blog” really is.  Blogs can incorporate lots of different types of content (text, audio, video, documents, etc.).  A blog is a vehicle for delivering useful content in a simple, easy-to-consume format.

How do you produce lead generation and SEO results if a company already has a blog they want to use instead?

Dharmesh:  It is not mandatory for our customers to use our blogging application to get value out of HubSpot.  If a business already has a blog, that’s great!  What we help with is determining how that blog is performing and making the most out of the visitors that are reading the blog.  We think of blog content as a marketing “asset” and help businesses create a higher return on their marketing assets.

Earlier this month, HubSpot released the Press Release Grader.  Are there any other new features in the works that you can share with us?

Dharmesh: Press Release Grader has been a surprise hit for us.  Within weeks of launch, the tool has already been used to grade over 5,000 press releases.  The next big set of changes we’ve got planned for Press Release Grader are around deeper content analysis and more actionable suggestions on how a press release can be improved.

What’s on your horizon as far as future plans and goals?

Dharmesh: Our goal is very simple:  To help as many small businesses harness the power of inbound marketing as possible.  To this degree we are building a great team that is passionate about helping small businesses.  We have already been selected by 500 small businesses that subscribe to our software and the results are very gratifying.  Every week we hear success stories from our customers as to how they are finding more customers and growing their businesses with the power of inbound marketing and HubSpot software.

UPDATE: Sazbean’s review of HubSpot

Technorati Tags: HubSpot, OnStartups, inbound marketing, internet marketing, seo

Mento, now in public beta, is a link-sharing and tagging website, similar to Del.icio.us or Pownce, with expanded functionality to create conversations around the link sharing. Creator and CEO Greg Hochmuth took a few minutes to explain how Mento is different and to share his vision for business users. Look for an upcoming Sazbean review of Mento. Greg was kind enough to provide a number of invites to Mento for our readers.

How do you see people using Mento for business? What functions do you feel are attractive to the business audience? What additional functionality are you planning that may be of interest for business use?

Greg: Our vision for Mento has three parts: at the core, it should be the central place for you to share, manage and discover links — with a strong emphasis on people you know and trust. In the current release of Mento, the first part of that vision is the most complete one and focuses on the casual, personal exchange of links among friends.

The second part and third part, which are now under active development, extend that use case in more professional and structured. In our planning, they are indeed targeted at businesses and knowledge workers. Mento will enhance the collaborative nature of its link sharing capabilities so that it will be easy for workgroups to gather links in a secure environment, discuss and annotate those links, and make them fully searchable (“re-findable”). Mento’s current “private groups” feature gives a hint of this direction and it will be vastly improved with the next release, which we have scheduled for early fall.

The third part of our vision will open Mento as a platform for publishers and businesses who want to create a branded, editorial stream of links for interested subscribers. Imagine a health care provider that publishes a weekly digest of relevant health links — or a business publication that selects the day’s highlights of industry analyses. Mento will give such publishers easy tools for compiling, editing and publishing such link streams while providing end users with a variety of subscription and personalization options.

Ultimately, our goal is to help our users manage their incoming information streams more effectively, connect with relevant content (that they wouldn’t find otherwise), and make it easy to share what they discover. Although we’re far from that goal, Mento’s tools will increasingly be valuable to business users who depend on relevant and manageable information on a daily basis.

The ability to share links with friends and coworkers on Facebook, Del.icio.us, Tumbler, Twitter, Magnolia, Friend Feed, etc. is very useful. Being able to import bookmarks from these and other services is very important to business users (and bloggers) who may already have a “wealth” of links invested in those services. Will you be adding the ability to import links from other services? And if so, when do you expect this functionality to be available?

Greg: A feature for importing links is surely in the works. In building the initial set of features, we focused mostly on “new” links that you find and want to share on a daily basis. We held back on importing links because we knew that Mento still needed better tools for managing larger collections of links. Once those are in place, we’ll gladly welcome users who want to keep their entire link archive on Mento. This will likely coincide with the release of our upgraded collaboration features that I talked about earlier.

Your service is very similar to Pownce. What do you see as your key differentiators from their service?

Greg: Pownce is a well-designed service and has a great team behind it — we like them a lot. Yes, Pownce is similar to Mento because of its feature to send links to friends — but it isn’t very different from instant messaging in that respect and it doesn’t make those shared links more manageable. Because Pownce also does file sharing and event publishing, we feel that it can focus less on the specific needs of sharing and saving just links. Mento tells who clicked on your links (so that you can create a conversation) and who visited a page together with you; it lets you create channels and use tags for your archive, personalization and higher relevancy; and it integrates much more with other services you may already use like delicious, Facebook or Twitter. And then of course, there is the screenshot feature, which has been a run-away success with our users (we recently released a Mac-friendly version by integrating with Skitch)

Being able to share a Mento feed on a blog or company website via a widget is also important to business users. Do you have any plans to add this functionality? And if so, when will it become available?

Greg: Indeed, we plan to release both widgets and a public API in the coming months. The API will be delicious-compatible so that you can use any delicious-based tool for managing and working with your Mento links.

How do you envision people using the ability to add screenshots to saved links with Firefox?

Greg: It’s been the feature that our users have loved the most so far. Many say that it makes it easier for them to highlight the important, noteworthy part of the page that they’re sharing, to “crop” a larger image on the page, or to give a better impression of the overall experience (especially for dynamic interfaces like Maps or Flash-driven content). Personally speaking, I also find that it helps make my links more memorable, which will be even more useful once we add alternate ways of exploring your archives and browsing larger aggregates of Mento links.

Why did you decide to create Mento? What are your plans for the future?

Greg: There is more and more noise in our information environment every day and it’s getting harder and harder to filter the meaningful signals. We’re on a mission to make your daily information streams more manageable and more meaningful. With that in mind, there is a lot left to build and a lot of room for improvement.

You seem to get quite a bit done with a very small development team. What’s your secret?

Greg: There is no secret other than dedication and knowing what’s important to us. We think that we’re slow, to be honest — we would love to iterate at the speed of thought but until that’s possible, we’ll work long hours and enjoy what we’re building!

Technorati Tags: mento, social bookmarking, B2B social bookmarking

Here are some more technical questions that didn’t make it into the profile interview James Lindenbaum, CEO of Heroku

Sazbean: Will you be supporting DNS redirects for users who want to use their domain instead of heroku.com?

James: That’s already available. You can add your own custom DNS at any time. There are a bunch of applications that are hosted right now, where you can’t tell at all that they have anything to do with Heroku.

Sazbean: One of the services you have tackled is authentication. How does this work in Heroku?

James: Yeah, so user authentication is a long-standing area of challenge. It is something that tends to be very similar for most applications and no one enjoys constantly rewriting it, but on the other hand everyone always needs something slightly different and no one has yet come up with a good model that works across all applications. So when you come into Heroku you have a couple of ways you can go. You can always build user authentication how you normally do, use a plugin like acts_as_authenticated, and you can switch your application to public. We have a public vs private toggle and when you switch your application to public anyone can access it and you can implement your own authentication. Or we also provide something to try to make people’s lives easier as a bootstrap to get started right away. Since your application can be private so that users have to authenticate through Heroku to get to it, you can leave it like that and we pass the authentication information in with the request, so that you can access that easily with some code we provide that is automatically loaded with your application. So you could not write your own, and rely on Heroku authentication. A place where that’s really useful is when you wake up one day and want to build something really light weight, like something to gather some information from some other system. You don’t want to make it public, and you want to avoid writing your own authentication, so you can just add some of your co-workers as collaborators. Then you can tap into user information like email if your app needs to associate some information with comments or whatnot. We have some much more interesting things coming down the road for built-in authentication, but this can get you started quickly today.

Sazbean: You mentioned elasticity earlier, and I’ve also heard the phrase liquid scaling used elsewhere. What are these terms?

James: So there are a couple things. The term ‘elastic’ has to do with being able to expand up and then contract down. The key there is to be able to decrease, not just scale up but to also scale down so you can minimize the amount of resources you are using. That way you only use what you need. Liquid scaling is about making the chunk size smaller. With Amazon you have instances. You have an entire machine for one hour. That’s the smallest chunk size. Those are your units and you can use more or less of those, but we think that’s not granular enough. We think people should be able to think about it on a per-request basis. Our scaling is per-request, so that we actually can scale up and down fluidly without having these large step sizes.

Technorati Tags: heroku, rails, ruby on rails, ror, rails hosting, internet consulting

I got the change to talk with James Lindenbaum, CEO of Heroku. Heroku is looking to eliminate all the reasons companies have for not doing software projects. This interview comes at an interesting time; companies are finding it difficult to justify spending money on software projects that have any risk associated with them (which are all projects, frankly). Heroku is here to remind those companies that when the barriers are low, so are the risks. James was kind enough to take a few minutes for this interview right before getting on a plane for RailsConf. I want to thank him again for that.

Sazbean: So is Heroku a new kind of hosting company, a SaaS provider, or something wholly different?

James: I think it’s something wholly different. We tend to think of it as a new kind of platform. Software as a Service is an interesting thing, but we’re not really providing the software, you are. So it is really more of a Platform as a Service. We follow a very different model from hosting. The end point that we are after is that you can come and say ‘Hey, I need to build something’ and then just have it run. There are a bunch of things we need to have in place to make that happen, and hosting infrastructure is just one of them.

Sazbean: How is Heroku helping businesses that use your platform?

James: The failure rate for software projects is astonishing, somewhere around 80%. People spend a lot of time wondering why that is. Our feeling is that almost all of the cause has to do with barriers. Large capital expenditures mean people have to make tough decisions about whether not to do something, and the cost of these projects is then totally decoupled from the value. You are committing to a set of costs, and those are going to be your costs whether or not your application ends up providing value. So it becomes a risk management game. We think that is a problem. Cost and value should be coupled. An on-demand pricing model is interesting for a number of reasons from an economics perspective, but we think it’s interesting solely because it fixes this problem. If an application is valuable you use it, and if you use it you are paying for it. If it’s not valuable you don’t use it, and if you don’t use it you aren’t paying for it. This removes that risk management aspect. So now you can think about what you want to build and not whether or not it’s worth building. That’s really the difference between us and a more traditional hosting company. Even with someone who is really quick, you have to call them. You have to cut a deal with them and get your servers provisioned, and that can take hours or days. We strongly feel that if you have to pick up a phone and call someone it’s a deal breaker. You have to be able to have an idea, go click a button, and be up and running. We think that is just vital.

Sazbean: Why Ruby on Rails for this Platform as a Service?

James: We’ve seen over time that Rails is extremely accessible, there are a lot of people that are able to build software with Rails that might not have been able to previously, and we think that is a really good thing. We think that it’s great that all these well rounded people are coming in. We disagree that those new to Ruby and Rails should have to go learn all the hard stuff. It is the frameworks and the platforms that need to shape up and make themselves easier and more accessible. Basically if you have an idea for an application and you have to stop and think about whether it’s worth building or not, then we have not done our job.

Sazbean: There can be a perception that user friendliness equates with limited options. Does it in this case?

James: No, and that’s a really interesting thing. One of the reasons why we think Ruby is interesting is because it has a very unique bipolar thing going on. On the one hand, it is one of the most advanced languages available. From a computer science standpoint, it has all the really fancy stuff; meta-programming, fully dynamic typing, reflection, self-introspection, so on. On the other hand, it’s really accessible. It reads like English, the syntax is really clean, and a lot of people who don’t really have programming experience seem to understand it fairly intuitively. Rails took that and advanced it into the web space, where you can do really advanced stuff with a web application but it’s also super easy to use, super easy to approach, and for 90% of the cases, you don’t have to do that much work. We love that idea and we want to extend that even further, up into the tools and down into the underlying infrastructure. It is a difficult line to walk. You have to think about your choices so that you are making everything easy and accessible, but you are not limiting the power and the expressiveness. That’s one of the main things we are keeping in mind when we’re making decisions about what to do and how to do it.

Sazbean: So who is using Heroku today? Is it the Ruby enthusiast, the professional programmer or is it both?

James: It’s a mixture. So far that mixture is in even thirds. A third are people who really haven’t done a lot of development before. They’re coming in enthusiastic about Rails. They just want to build a site, that is their end goal. The next third are fairly serious Rails developers. They know Ruby and are capable of doing all the sticky bits themselves, but they just don’t want to. The last third are really serious Rails developers. They are trying to do really difficult things and they care very much about the details of how our stack is implemented. These guys are willing to take a hands off approach if they trust you are doing it well, and they can get all that time back to spend on the more differentiated stuff like the actual application code.

Sazbean: Heroku is currently free to use. Are there any plans to change this once you leave beta?

James: We are always going to offer free accounts pretty equivalent to what we offer now, with enough resources to do something interesting. We will always offer that, but we will, at some point soon, be opening up a full on-demand pricing model.

Sazbean: And the closed beta, how is that going?

James: It’s going really well. It has been interesting. There is a huge amount of traction there and a really large amount of activity now. We’re up to about 12,000 developers and 14,000 applications. That’s been great because these guys are really hammering on the system and they’re really helping us to smooth it out and make sure it’s an easy process. It’s nice that we have this mix of users too, because we have the hard-core guys saying ‘Hey, what about this advanced feature?’ and then we have the beginners saying ‘Hey, I can’t seem to get this very simple part to work’. They are helping us maintain that balance. We are looking to come out of beta as soon as possible, but we are providing infrastructure and we’re pretty conservative about reliability, so we won’t lift that label until we feel really comfortable about stability.

UPDATE: I posted my technical notes on Heroku that didn’t make it into this profile interview.

Technorati Tags: heroku, rails, ruby on rails, ror, rails hosting, internet consulting