Marketing & Growth

Since its inception in 2005, accelerator Y Combinator [http://ycombinator.com] has helped fund, advise, and build over 1,400 companies. Some of these have gone on to become billion-dollar household names—Airbnb. Stripe. Zenefits. Dropbox. And a few have also died along the way. We wanted to understand these trends and see what makes a YC company. To do that, we have analyzed data on over 1,000 of these companies to see what they do, where they are, and how they work. Here's what we found. The

Ask 10 marketers or sales leaders to define Account Based Marketing (ABM) and you’ll get 10 unique and conflicting responses [http://business.linkedin.com/marketing-solutions/blog/linkedin-b2b-marketing/2016/what-is-account-based-marketing--10-definitions-from-the-experts] . As the definitions of ABM are ambiguous and quite varied, let’s agree to define Account Based Marketing as this: a simple approach that aligns sales and marketing teams on the same pre-defined target accounts. In practice

Location still matters for startups. If you are in fashion you should probably be in Paris or New York. If you're in film you most likely need to be in Los Angeles. And if you're in tech, you should still probably be in Silicon Valley (based on the data below). San Francisco, and the greater bay area, is still the dominant hub for tech startups. Other hubs around the world are growing rapidly, and even surpassing SV in some categories, but Silicon Valley still reigns supreme by almost every met

When you’re in the API business, marketing can be tricky. Your product is built for developers, but they may not always be the decision makers. To make the sale, you often have to win over a whole organization. That means getting all key stakeholders (not just developers) to try your product. At Clearbit, we've found that the best way for people to try us out has not been directly through our API—it's been by giving away free tools that show what's possible. Heads up - this is a long one. We'l

Every customer that comes to your product is different. They have different needs, job titles, work habits, budgets—the list goes on. Wouldn’t it be awesome to give each of them a personalized experience right from the start? Well, you can. And it’s not as hard to implement as you might think. There are a number of cool ways to use data to remove friction from your product and improve the experience for your users. Here are a few ways to finally put all that data you’ve been collecting to work