Blog

Why It’s Impossible to Hire Good Growth Engineers

I’ve spent a nontrivial part of my last two months at Percolate focused on hiring growth engineers — software developers who are passionate about agile, creative app development, customer acquisition and scalable experimentation. This clearly represents a valuable skill-set, as talented individuals in this role can have a major impact on the overall trajectory of … Continue reading Why It’s Impossible to Hire Good Growth Engineers

What Hubspot’s IPO Announcement Says About the Future of Marketing

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported marketing software company Hubspot has started IPO discussions with Morgan Stanley after achieving 50% year-over-year revenue growth in 2013 to $77 million. As most already know, Hubspot’s central offering is a suite of software that helps companies manage their inbound marketing, a strategy focused on creating quality content to … Continue reading What Hubspot’s IPO Announcement Says About the Future of Marketing

Understanding Twitter Engagement: The Anatomy of 100,000 Followers

Last year, I launched a social marketing automation app that's quietly grown to become what I now believe to be the largest third-party "Twitter advertising" platform - I use that term loosely - on the web. To give you a sense of scale, it's actively generating millions of impressions and hundreds of thousands of engagement events (follows, … Continue reading Understanding Twitter Engagement: The Anatomy of 100,000 Followers

The Five Pillars of Growth Hacking

Growth hacking is currently going through a turbulent adolescence. After being thrust into the public spotlight by opportunistic media pundits and loosely-correlated startup success stories, the innovation community has struggled to define and defend growth hacking as a practice or designation with substance.  To borrow from a thoughtful, recent article by Lincoln Murphy, the growth hacker … Continue reading The Five Pillars of Growth Hacking

Defining Content Marketing in 2014

There's no question content marketing is evolving rapidly. In 2009, content marketing meant blogging and writing SEO articles for your website. Fast forward five years, and content marketing is simultaneously both more omnipresent and more challenging to concretely define.  If a brand's presences across social, mobile and web are defined by the reach and discoverability … Continue reading Defining Content Marketing in 2014

What Can We Expect from Jelly?

Jelly, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone's new mobile startup, is pretty fascinating.  For context, Jelly is a social question app based on mobile photos, placing it at the intersection of Q&A (Quora), local, real-time information (Foursquare), short-form visual content (Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter) and ephemeral, person-to-person swipe-based interaction (Tinder). Creating a visual layer (interlaced with conversation) over … Continue reading What Can We Expect from Jelly?