| Brian Halligan | |
|---|---|
Brian Halligan in 2010 |
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| Born | September 1, 1967 |
| Alma mater | University of Vermont MIT Sloan School of Management |
| Occupation | Executive, author |
| Website | |
| HubSpot | |
Brian Halligan is an executive and author.[1] He is CEO and co-founder of HubSpot, an Internet marketing company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is also a Senior Lecturer at MIT. Halligan uses the term inbound marketing to describe the type of marketing he advocates.[2]
He has co-authored two books on marketing, one with HubSpot co-founder Dharmesh Shah and one with David Meerman Scott. The first is about serving useful information to prospective customers at the moment they are using a search engine or social media site to fulfill a need or want (as opposed to interrupting them with advertisements at random moments), and the second uses the marketing activities of the rock band The Grateful Dead as an example of using such methods successfully.
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Halligan co-founded HubSpot and incorporated it in June 2006. In 2010, Inc. magazine reported the company has $15.6 million in revenue.[3] As of June 2011, the company has 280 employees.[4] He credits the company's success in part to innovations like the "Alpha, Beta, Version One" policy where employees begin proving their ideas might profit the company "nights and weekends" (the alpha phase) before receiving additional resources (the beta and version one phases).[3] He documents 13 features of the company's "post-modern culture" (including not tracking vacation time taken by employees, a "Big Hairy" mission to transform the way the world does marketing, and a simple social media policy that consist of the three words "we trust you") in an article on Dharmesh Shah's web site "OnStartups."[5] In parallel with his role at HubSpot, Halligan serves on the board of directors of House of Possibilities (HOPe; a community service organization that assists children and young adults with developmental disabilities)[2] and Massachusetts Innovation and Technology Exchange (MITX).[6]
Prior to his present activities, he was venture partner at Longworth Ventures.[7] As Vice President of Sales 2001-2005 at Groove Networks, he helped grow the collaboration software company from pre-revenue to $20 million when it was acquired by Microsoft and rebranded as Microsoft SharePoint Workspace.[8][9] Prior to Groove Networks, Brian worked at Parametric Technology Corporation in several roles leading up to Senior Vice President of the Pacific Rim, which he grew from no revenue to $80 million. However, he found working for a large company unsatisfactory, saying "I tried the big company thing – it sucked."[10][9] Halligan received a bachelor of science degree in electronic engineering from the University of Vermont and an MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management.[2]
Halligan has published two books, Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs[11] and Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead: What Every Business Can Learn from the Most Iconic Band in History[12]
Inbound Marketing was co-authored with HubSpot co-founder Dharmesh Shah. Reviewing the book,[13] Meryl Evans complains it contains "...elementary stuff..." but admits it "...does a good job for those who don’t have a clue about how to use social media for business...". Reviewing in The Boston Globe, Scott Kirsner relates the book's theme -- "don't interrupt, get found instead" -- to The Cluetrain Manifesto and Seth Godin's permission marketing.[14] As of July 2011, the book was in its seventh printing, had sold 40,000 copies, and had been translated into nine languages.[15] The thesis of the book is that people now block interruption marketing (e.g. blocking direct email with spam filters) and the new way to market products is by creating remarkable content (in the literal sense of "content that will be remarked on, linked to, and upvoted for") such a blog articles and social media that will appear in search engine results pages. The book then goes on to explain how to do this.
Marketing Lessons was coauthored with David Meerman Scott. Scott Kirsner, reviewing this book in the Boston Globe,[16] mentions that the authors say they were inspired in part by an article in the Atlantic by Joshua Green.[17] In the book, Halligan notes that he has seen the band and its offshoots over 100 times since first hitchhiking to see them in Saratoga Springs as a highschooler. The authors admire the band's many marketing innovations such as the freemium model, a "taper" section where fans could tape the live show, and early access to tickets via a fan affinity program.
Being an advocate of publishing on-line, Brian is very active in this medium himself, posting on his blog,[18] Facebook,[19] Twitter,[20] and several other sites.
Halligan speaks frequently on marketing and business topics, including the 2011 Online Marketing Summit,[21] as keynote speaker at the Software & Information Industry Association NetGain meeting,[22] and at TEDx.[23] He was Entrepreneur In Residence at MIT[9] and is presently Senior Lecturer there, teaching 15.S16 "Entrepreneurial Product Development and Marketing" with Elaine Chen.[24] He is also an occasional lecturer at Sloan on the science of selling and marketing.[2]
He was named one of the thirteen recipients of the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year 2011 — New England Region award.[25]