HubSpot built the canonical customer acquisition machine — coined inbound marketing, built HubSpot Academy, runs the State of Marketing research, grew to 250,000+ customers.
The most valuable B2B companies didn't win their markets — they created them. A breakdown of the category creation playbook behind Gong, Drift, and HubSpot, with the five moves that define every category creator.
HubSpot invented inbound marketing. Now HubSpot is publicly arguing that AI search is rewriting it — and quietly rebuilding for a world where the chatbox replaces the search box.
Three B2B software companies built content-marketing infrastructure that would define the discipline. HubSpot anchored on "inbound marketing" category creation. Mailchimp built distinctive brand voice. Buffer built radical transparency. Three doctrines, one shared insight: content marketing is the growth strategy, not a sub-function beneath it.
