HubSpot Blog

I've read through the spec along with the FAQ that epeus so graciously shared here. The idea of mentioning beyond the scope of one website's walled garden seems like a very natural progression of ActivityPub and the new-found hype surrounding Mastodon. My concern is that I haven't seen much thought into the security implications.

The spec makes it clear that they're trying to simplify pingbacks but they don't address the fundamental security problems with pingbacks in the first place. And anyone who's maintained a Wordpress site will tell you, the first thing you do is turn off the Trackback and Pingback features [1] because not only does it attract the scummiest deluge of spam [2] but they've also been useful for disclosing internal network info and [3] leveraged to target other websites in DDoS attacks. [4]

The only thought given to preventing abuse is as follows from Section 4.1:
>The verification process SHOULD be queued and processed asynchronously to prevent DoS attacks per section 3.2.
>Receivers MUST verify Webmentions per section 3.2.2.

The first directive isn't a guarantee a DoS attack won't block all IO, it just means don't make it trivial to bring a site down with webmentions. The second directive sounds nice but if you read through section 3.2.2 of the recommendation, it just mandates that you should validate the application data that's submitted. [5] There's no mechanism to authenticate messages, validate the sender, nor limit mentions to a set of trusted…

This piece appears to be biased (and presumably was paid for by Hubspot). As a contrasting opinion, here is a personal perception of Hubspot (having worked with them as a client employee and a consumer of their output). As usual, this is opinion/perception from the writer only (not the opinion of an organization, and not making any claims).

"HubSpot’s HEART values: humility, empathy, adaptability, remarkability, and transparency."

- Hubspot arguably engage in (and recommend) dark UX patterns. Hubspot arguably encourages SPAM, misleading wording and coercion. This is in relation to current industry opinion on ethical UX, let alone future opinion.

- Much of their blog content promotes manipulative marketing and sales, with little consideration of the consumer's actual needs (see https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/emotions-in-advertising-examples for an article on consumer emotions that ironically concentrates on conversion & manipulation of said emotion).

- Hubspot arguably sells to anyone - The culture appears to be 'traditional aggressive salesmanship'. I.e. they do not consider whether the client can afford or gain value from the product, they just push through the sale. This opinion contrasts with their ethics code (https://s2.q4cdn.com/235752014/files/doc_governance/Code-of-Use-Good-Judgment.pdf).

- While Hubspot arguably may not have a moral obligation to prevent it: They appear to be encouraging (or at least facilitating) low-quality content being churned out in…

Oh boy - I didn't realize a question could be so topical. Another first-time founder here (engineer turned founder) that is currently in the middle of learning how to do the b2b sales process (which I'm assuming is what you're doing, if you're interested in b2c, I'm not sure how much of this translates). Needless to say that: (1) I'm most certainly NOT an expert (just someone figuring this out as well); (2) I'm super-duper interested in the responses here.

First things first, I think before selling, my understanding of sales was largely grounded as an "art", and by far the largest turning point in my understanding has been that sales has a pretty large "science" component to it as well, by which I mean tried and true repeatable steps that can be applied consistently.

As a founder, before sales, you need feedback. Assuming you don't have product-market fit (which you almost certainly don't know, because you don't have users), it is MOST important that you talk to customers to get a handle on what they need. The two books I found most valuable here are:
- The Mom Test
- Talking to Humans

(The Lean Startup has a good section on this as well; if, like me, you haven't reread it since starting a company - I would highly recommend doing so, you grok so much more than when you first read it without any experience to ground it to.)

Once you have some intuition around your market and that your product is actually tackling the right problem. I would read Founding Sales…

Absolutely love this product, this is such as stupid problem to still exist in 2021 and an elegant solution.

Many of the 3rd party tools described are installed specifically to improve UX and conversion rate - eg measure user behavior, add a chatbot, etc.

And yet these 3rd party tools are unquestionably the largest deficit to load time plus even worse have huge variability.

- - -

Pulling a bit of a copy paste from a previous recent thread but from a "Why, who cares" perspective website (and app) speed are highly correlated with conversion and engagement ->

Google's headline research on the subject says "Improving your load time by 0.1s can boost conversion rates by 8%."

Some add'l data, sourced by Neilsen Group below:

- Google found that increasing the load time of its SERPs by half a second resulted in a 20% higher bounce rate.

- Google found 53% of mobile visits ended if a page took longer than 3 seconds to load.

- Akamai aggregated data from 17 retailers (7 billion pageviews) and found that conversion rates were highest for pages that loaded in less than 2 seconds; longer load times correlated with 50% drops in conversion rates and increased bounce rates, especially for mobile visitors.

- BBC found that for every extra second of page load time, 10% of users will leave.

Here's the best three simple resource illustrating objective third party results from increasing site speed:

- https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/page-load-time-conversion...

-…

The new way to find clients is by following the below principles ...........

1.Start a blog

2a.Write the content which showcases your expertise

2b.Identify pain points and share your expertise in those
areas

2c.publish the interviews of various persons who are (experts / kind of popular ) in the area in which you are doing consulting.(or) any good content which will of interest to target audience.

2d.in above way you will be building the audience and trust.and people will referring you to their friends if any need arises.

3.Make sure your content is very good/remarkable so that people can share..........

4.As your content spreads you will be known to many people and inturn they will ask you /your company to help on their project.

5.And also develop tools which will be helpfull to target audience.( A good tool spreads like any thing which inturns spreads your company name)

6.Participate actively in various online groups (related to the area in which you are doing consulting) .

you will be suprised when people are contacting you...........

7.Keep an eye on SEO as search engines are driving huge traffic to sites.(good landing page, blog will help in improving the SEO)

8.Adwords (spend some amount on adwords for good targeted keywords to attract diverse audience)

The above is popular referred to as inbound marketing (i.e you will not shout/beg at your prospects for getting leads inturn prospects are coming to.........:))

Important blogs to…

Thank you for asking. I’ve had success using the Challenger Sale model, otherwise known as Insight Selling.

This gives a logical framework for presenting people with new information - starting with a 10,000 foot view of how ‘the world has changed’ and gradually going into more detail about how this change will impact them before providing a solution. [1]

Where it really excels is enabling you to ‘bundle’ ideas into a larger trend, which others may not have seen as connected in the past. Depending on your background, using a sales framework may seem ‘icky’ but it’s a fairly tried and true method of presenting information.

In terms of books, other than Challenger Sale and Challenger Customer I can recommend To Sell is Human by Dan Pink, Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath and How to Deliver a Ted Talk.

An area where you can get a huge leg up over others is in use of PowerPoint / Google Slides. Most people are terrible at it, so if you can deliver a presentation which is 15% better than most you will be at a huge advantage also. The key here is not to see PowerPoint as a tool for conveying information, but as a tool for creating pitches. If you treat every new idea you present as a ‘pitch’ it will transform your effectiveness.

In the same way as gift wrapping a gift ‘elevates’ the gift, wrapping an idea or proposal in a presentation means it’s automatically taken more seriously.

[1] https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/insight-selling-better-pitch