marketing Archives - Madhav Bhandari

My Top Marketing Newsletters of 2020: Filtered from 100s

Madhav Bhandari - October 18, 2018

Last updated: Jan 6, 2020

One of the ways I stay updated on marketing trends is through newsletters. Every year, new strategies are discovered, new roles are defined, new concepts surface & some old ideas die. And I’d like to aware of it to keep a general view of the broad marketing landscape every year.

I started subscribing to a bunch of newsletter about 5 years ago and realised it was just too much content to consume. Subscribing to them wasn’t serving any purpose for me as I was just bookmarking & starring my newsletter emails, never reading them.

That’s when I decided that I only have the bandwidth to go through 5-6 newsletters at a time, which is how the below list got created. Every couple of months, I keep refining this list of newsletters to see which one has delivered most value for me over years.

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Business Milestone: Thoughts on achieving $2M milestone in SaaS

Madhav Bhandari - March 12, 2017

Business Milestone: Thoughts on achieving $2M milestone in SaaS

I’m so proud to announce that Hubstaff crossed $2M in annual recurring revenue this week. What makes this milestone even better is that we achieved it as a self-funded company with a bootstrapped budget. Our customers are our investors.

If you prefer listening to these lessons, I covered them in this podcast episode.

How it all started

Dave, my boss and co-founder of Hubstaff, connected with me in the very first week of 2015 to discuss if I wanted to join the team as a growth officer.

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How direct sales helped us grow from $287,000 to $883,000 revenue in <1 year

Madhav Bhandari - September 17, 2016

How direct sales helped us grow from $287,000 to $883,000 revenue in <1 year

Up until August last year, the Hubstaff team didn’t place much focus on direct sales. We assumed there wouldn’t be enough ROI since our product cost is pretty low at $5/user. Instead, we focused on inbound marketing because it’s the kind of channel that got us great results. I feel that this is often the case; direct sales are underrated and take a backseat to online marketing.

Nathan Barry of ConvertKit wrote a post on how he prioritized direct sales as a channel to acquire customers over his content marketing and other tactics. With direct sales, ConvertKit saw a whopping growth of 2605% in the last 12 months. That post inspired us to start allocating some time in direct sales as a growth channel for us.

Here are the steps we took, which ultimately contributed to our more than 200% revenue growth in the past 12 months.

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