Ground Up Podcast

From HubSpot to Toast to Crayon: The Evolution of the Inbound Marketing Playbook with Ellie Mirman

On this episode of Ground Up, Ellie Mirman shares details on the early days of building the inbound marketing playbook at HubSpot, how the channels and mediums have changed, and how she’s successfully employed that inbound playbook at 2 other early-stage SaaS companies.

John Bonini John Bonini on October 28, 2019 (last modified on October 25, 2019) • 1 minute read

Imagine this: It’s 2008 and simply having a blog as a business is a massive competitive advantage.

Ellie Mirman remembers.

She was at HubSpot in 2008 and remembers experimenting with new distribution channels that seemed to pop up every week––Facebook when it rolled out to businesses. Twitter. LinkedIn. YouTube.

As the first marketing hire Mike Volpe made at HubSpot, Ellie helped invent the inbound marketing playbook.

She ran the first inbound marketing summit, which would later become INBOUND, in 2008. There were 300 attendees at the Cambridge Marriott.

Since then, everything has changed.

And, it’s all stayed the same.

Ellie is CMO at Crayon now, another early-stage startup.

And, she says while mediums and channels have exploded, a lot of the playbooks she first employed at HubSpot a decade ago…still work.

Just…differently.

About the author
John Bonini
John Bonini is Director of Marketing at Databox. He's passionate about building brands that tell great stories. Connect with him on Twitter @bonini84.
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