Brian and his Hubspot co-founder Dharmesh, wrote a great book called Inbound Marketing…it’s well worth the read.

Hubspot is one of the hottest companies floating around Boston right now,  and are helping define the future of social media (in some ways, they remind me of BzzAgent circa 2005-2006 — they’ve got that mad type of mojo right now).

As one of Brian’s buddies, I figured I’d ask him a few questions to provide some Inbound Marketing-like exposure – and help him move a few units.

1. What is Inbound Marketing and why should anyone pay attention to it?

It used to be that you could efficiently grow your businesses by interrupting potential customers with outbound marketing methods like cold calls, email spam, advertising, etc.  Today, people and businesses are tired of being marketed to and are getting better and better at blocking marketing interruptions out.  At the same time, people and businesses have fundamentally changed the way they shop and learn turning more and more to Google, social media sites, and blogs to find what they want.  Inbound Marketing helps companies take advantage of these shifts to help companies get found by customers in the natural way in which they shop and learn

2. You built a nifty tool to track amazon sales of the book.  Why and how is it representative of what Inbound Marketing is all about?

It turns out that for an author, Amazon is a killer application and is the target of deep obsession.  There are two things in particular that are interesting to authors on their Amazon page.  First, Amazon tracks your “ranking” relative to the millions of other authors who have books for sale with folks like Dan Brown holding positions near the top.  The better your book is selling, the lower your ranking.  It is a little hard to figure the ranking out and how often the update it, so it is tempting to go to Amazon every 30 seconds and hit refresh.  Rather than do that, we build book.grader.com which tells you what your ranking is at all times, sends you an email alert when your ranking breaks a new record, lets you track your ranking via graph over time for your book and other books side-by-side.  Second, you want to see how many and know when you you got a new review of your book.  If you poured your soul into your book over gallons of hot cocoa, you hope/pray that people actually like the thing.  So, BookGrader tracks how many reviews you got and alerts you via email when you get a new one.At HubSpot, we help people “get found” in Google, blog, and social media.  BookGrader is a toe in the water of helping folks “get found” in Amazon.  If you are an author, check it out — its free!

3. Tell us about the writing process – what worked, what didn’t and is it true you wrote the whole thing in your boxers?

I wrote the book with my co-founder, Dharmesh Shah.  We put together an outline and split it up 50-50.  Despite the fact that we had most of the book in our heads from our work at HubSpot, it still was a huge amount of work on top of our day jobs.  My first step into the process was on a weekend away in Stowe where I locked myself inside at the Topnotch resort by the fireplace downing cup after cup of hot cocoa and cranked out about a third of it that weekend.  The rest was done in spurts over nights and weekends.  It turns out writing a book is hard to do in little bites — you need to get the whole thing straight in your head before you write, so you need some quality time.  Wrt boxers, yes I am a boxers man (as opposed to briefs), but I wrote most of it in sweatpants.

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