If you ask people who know us where Dharmesh and I got the idea to start HubSpot, they'll probably tell you our starting point was the shifting balance of power between buyers and sellers.

They wouldn't be wrong. The vendor-client relationship has changed, and it has permanently altered how we do business. But the real story is much bigger than that.

We didn't start HubSpot because we thought only marketing was changing. We started HubSpot because we saw technology changing the world faster than ever before, and we wanted to democratize that change so small businesses could unlock their potential and grow.

The buyer-seller relationship is just one example of the dozens of ways technology impacts the way we do business. It all started when people began taking the Internet (and the free flow of information it enabled) seriously, around the early 1990s. The rise of the Internet empowered people to educate themselves, share insights, and share feedback, and ultimately it allowed us to demand more for ourselves.

If all of this sounds painfully obvious, that's just a testament to how thoroughly the Internet has changed our expectations of the people we do business with. But back in 1990, you might not have seen any of this coming.

Unless you're Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, or David Weinberger. In 2000, they penned the ahead-of-its-time book The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual, which accurately predicted the Internet's impact on organizations' interactions with their employees and marketplace.

I first read the manifesto when I was working for Ray Ozzie at Groove Networks, a legendary software entrepreneur who became CTO of Microsoft after they acquired Groove. He believed these four authors were seeing into the future, and he built Groove to help organizations run the way the Cluetrain Manifesto authors thought they should.

The authors had one message they wanted businesses to hear, loud and clear: “We are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. We are human beings—and our reach exceeds your grasp.”

In other words, this is the core philosophy HubSpot was founded upon: treat everybody like they're a human or become obsolete. We call it “inbound.”

The book begins with 95 theses, a play on Martin Luther's 95 theses that he nailed to a church door in Germany. Most of these theses still ring true today and in many ways describe a world we still haven't reached. Here are some of my favorites:

1. Markets are conversations.
2. Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.
3. Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.
4. Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments, or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, and uncontrived.
5. People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice.
6. The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.
7. In both internetworked markets and among intranetworked employees, people are speaking to each other in a powerful new way.
8. These networked conversations are enabling powerful new forms of social organization and knowledge exchange to emerge.
9. As a result, markets are getting smarter, more informed, more organized. Participation in a networked market changes people fundamentally.

When Dharmesh and I founded HubSpot, we baked these principles into the core of our product and go-to-market strategy. We wanted to disrupt the way companies engage with their markets, and we've always been committed to helping our prospects rather than treating them like lines on a P&L.

We didn't stop with the product, though. The Cluetrain Manifesto isn't just about companies and their markets—it touches every aspect of how organizations do business, externally and internally. Companies that can't recognize what their constituents want won't be able to compete and will go away.

Why?

First, the Internet drastically changed the power dynamic between companies and their employees.

In the pre-Internet age, career development went something like this: People would graduate high school or college, take a job, and work their way up the corporate ladder. Employees tended to stay with the same company for many years, and frontline workers didn't have much influence in decision making.

Most organizations were rigidly hierarchical and designed to keep leverage in the employer's hands. Companies placed their key decision makers at the top of a pyramid, and everyone below fed them information.

Before the Internet, this was the most efficient way for companies to operate. Individual frontline employees worked on tiny slices of the company, and they had little influence or knowledge that could contribute to major decisions.

So people hoarded information. Knowing something nobody else did gave you power, and was the quickest way to get access to higher-ups and advance your career. What data you did possess was difficult to quickly disseminate and was usually reserved for the higher-ups' ears only. As a result, only people with formal authority—the CEO and other C-level actors—had enough context to make decisions.

Today, it would be laughable for someone to stay at the same company their entire career. Junior employees provide input on strategic decisions all the time. You'd be hard-pressed to find a company where a CEO knows more about what's happening on the ground than her frontline employees. And if a company treats its employees like cogs in a machine, you'd better believe people will find out—fast.

Second, the Internet drastically changed the power dynamic between companies and their customers.

Just as it was hard for information to spread within a company, there were no channels like Yelp where customers treated badly could share their stories. So companies could strong-arm buyers into deals with bad terms and use interruptive sales and marketing tactics without fear of backlash.

Before information was so readily available online, buyers also had to rely 100% on what sellers said about their products. There were no places that aggregated product information or customer feedback, so buyers either had to rely on their personal networks for recommendations or take companies at their word.

Today, there are thousands of review aggregation sites, companies are extremely transparent about their pricing, and every company has a features listing web page.

There is no room for the old way of doing things anymore. Information within and among companies is ubiquitous. People demand far more from their employers and vendors because they can. And that's better for everyone.

When knowledge is concentrated in the hands of a small group of people and nothing forces those with power to take care of those without, things get worse. When the same people call all the shots, companies can quickly fall into a rut because they lack diversity of thought. When the market doesn't punish companies for not treating their employees and customers well, they have no financial incentive to do so.

We used to live in an outbound world. Players who traditionally held power and information—employers, vendors, bosses—could pretty much dictate the terms of their relationships with their constituents. But that's not the case anymore.

Today, we're living in an inbound world. People only give their time, money, and attention to institutions and people that delight them. Inbound marketing, sales, and customer success is just part of that equation—it's how organizations should talk to their marketplace.

Within an organization, inbound is just as important. As Dan and Todd write in this book, to do inbound, you have to be inbound. That means treating your employees like the valuable contributors they are, not seat-fillers who are expendable. That means inverting the pyramid of power so your frontline employees, who have the best information on how your prospects and customers behave, can tell their managers, and their manager's managers, what they're seeing and how it should affect your company's future.

At HubSpot, that also means openly sharing information about our market and our business so everyone from our president to a new hire can make good decisions. That means asking our customers and partners for feedback—and actually listening to it—so we can get better and avoid being blindsided by irrelevance.

The companies that keep their employees in the dark, pummel their prospects into buying, and squeeze every last drop of value from their customers without giving anything in return simply can't compete. There's nowhere to hide.

The Cluetrain Manifesto guys knew this all the way back in 2000. And 18 years later, the marketplace is just starting to catch up.

For example: When we first started HubSpot, we didn't have a formal organizational chart, and I was adamant about never having one. We sat down one day to draw a “shadow” organizational chart that mapped influence, and we found that some of the most influential people weren't formally imbued with a great deal of power. That's how we believe it should be—influence and power aren't reserved for those who sit at the top of a formal hierarchy.

In 2007, though, our employees weren't ready for such a radical shift—an organization without job titles or chains of command you could track on paper. So we created a job title structure and an organizational chart. The social pressures associated with explaining to your Uncle Ted what you do for a living when you go home for the holidays have not gone away entirely—and certainly existed in full force when we founded the company almost 12 years ago.

So we came up with other ways to ensure frontline employees are empowered. We have an internal wiki where all our financials, slides from executive team meetings, details on new initiatives, and postmortems of experiments are published for the whole company to see. We created a Culture Code very early on so we could be very deliberate about the kind of workplace we wanted to be. We publish documents outlining each department's high-level strategy and plays for the year. We ask our frontline employees to pitch to us all year round so we don't get trapped in our executive ivory tower, and hold formal open calls for ideas so everyone has a chance to speak.

This is the direction we're all heading in. Eventually, you'll see more and more businesses where power is decentralized and no single individual wields a rubber stamp. This is the natural progression of things, and whether we get there in 15 years or 50, we are going to see organizations flatten more and more, as people tire of hierarchies and power structures. And once more, organizations that cannot adapt will disappear.

It's getting harder and harder to compete and get your company off the ground. When Dharmesh and I founded HubSpot, there were approximately 30 other competitors in our space. Today, there are over 5,000. It's getting easier and easier to start a company, and harder and harder to scale it up—the web giveth, and the Internet taketh away. To survive in this market, you have to get every piece of your organization right.

Great employees are drawn to a strong culture and a worthy mission—people don't want to work for companies where the end goal is nothing loftier than making two more cents per share this quarter. Treating your customers well means they'll spread the good word to their networks. Giving your partners the tools to succeed and flourish will lead to a long and healthy relationship, and guard against your competition.

Ultimately, it's pretty simple—do the right thing by your constituents, and they'll stick around. Information is everywhere. Word of mouth means everything. You can't get away with treating any of your constituents poorly anymore.

If you're not there yet, you're in luck. We're on the cusp of a seismic shift, and because you're reading this book, you get to be the first to learn how to move your business ahead, and build an organization to be inbound, inside and out.

When information is ubiquitous, we all do better. When everyone understands the big picture, they can figure out how to move the needle in the little universe of their job. It's not just Dharmesh and I sitting in a room making decisions. Everyone can learn a little more each day and improve their decision making and increase their impact. And eventually, the virtuous effects of this openness and idea sharing ripples all the way back up to the top of the organization.

The sooner a business can figure this out, the bigger of an advantage they will have in today's market. There's no guarantee that practicing inbound will lead to success—no one can guarantee that. But it's a certainty that without being inbound, an organization will get left behind. Don't let it happen to you. We can all do better and be better.

—Brian Halligan
CEO and Chairman, HubSpot