Read a pretty inspiring post from a blog I highly recommend for anyone looking to get their own startup off the ground http://onstartups.com. The blog is ran by Dharmesh, the CEO and co-founder of hubspot, where he consistently puts out excellent content. I liked some of the ideas in this post, and wanted to share them!

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The following is a guest post by Brian Halligan who is my co-founder and CEO at HubSpot (which means he gets to do most of the really hard work). 

I recently did a lecture at a Babson MBA summer class on Entrepreneurial Leadership.  I got a lot of questions from students about how and why HubSpot won the Boston Business Journal’s #1 place to work award….hmmm….good question.

At the highest level, we are trying to create a “post-modern culture” (I just came up with that term…too high falutin?).  Believe it or not, this post-modern culture was inspired by the TV show Mad Men.  The show is set in an advertising company 50 years ago and it pokes fun at corporate culture in that era.  For example, almost all of the women in the office are secretaries, many of the married men are sleeping with these secretaries, everyone boozes heavily during work hours, etc.  While watching Mad Men, I couldn’t help but wonder what a show might look like 50 years from today that poked fun at current working conditions and company culture.  That led us to think a bit about what just didn’t make sense anymore given the realities of the Gen Y worker, broadband in the home, constant connectivity via mobile devices, the modern market for hiring exceptional people, etc.

Here are some of the more interesting features of working life at a post-modern company that have come out of that Mad Men inspired thinking.

1.  Vacation Policy = No Policy: In our father’s era where people needed to come to the office to collaborate and do real work, a vacation policy made a lot of sense.  The reality is that today I get emails from HubSpotters at all hours of the night and have a steady flow during the weekend.  No one asks for vacation credit for being on their iPhone while sitting on the beach on the Cape, so why should they have to ask for permission to take vacation during the week.

2.  “We don’t care which 80 hours you work”: In the early days of HubSpot, people used to ask us about working unusual hours or working part of the day at home and Dharmesh and I used to always say, “We don’t care which 80 hours a week you work, so long as you put in your 80.”  The reality is that most of us don’t work 80 hours, but you get the idea…

3.  Extreme Transparency:  Other than salaries, there are few secrets at HubSpot and I wonder whether we should just expose those too.  One manifestation of this extreme transparency is on the wiki where I personally write a new wiki article a couple of times a week about what is on my mind about the future of the company, problems I see that need to be solved, opportunities that I’d like folks to look into, board meeting notes, etc.  The articles are widely commented on and some of our best initiatives get spurred by these discussion threads.  Among my favorite articles written by other HubSpotters have the title “If I Were CEO Of HubSpot, I Would…”

4.  No door policy:  Many companies have an “open door policy,” but we have a “no door policy.”  No HubSpotters have an office – we all sit out in the open next to each other.  I am currently writing this article wedged between two developers, Michael and Andrew, whose work I’ve gotten to know quite well when I otherwise would have been out of touch in a corner office.

5.  Seat rotation:  If have been sitting next to Andrew and Michael for about two months, but we are about to do one of our quarterly seat rotations where we pull numbers from a hat to see who we will be sitting next to.  This ensures folks get to know different people from around the company.  I’m looking forward to seeing whom I’ll be sitting next to next week!

6.  HubSpot Fellows:  We hired Professor Andy McAfee from MIT Sloan to help us start the HubSpot Fellows Program, which is like an MBA for HubSpotters.  Courses offered so far:  Strategy HubSpot Style, Statistics, Learning Leadership From Legends, and Improving Written and Verbal Communications.  The courses are open to any HubSpotter and are taught by Andy and me.  …We did this because we want our employees to learn and we want to attract employees who like to learn.

7.  Free beer: I can’t remember how it got started, but we always have free beer in our fridge.  I’ve noticed folks seem to wander around and drink a beer or two at the end of the day to unwind.  We are up to about 170 people and I’ve yet to see someone do something stupid.  HubSpotters seem to be rewarding the trust we put in them here.

8.  Friday 4pm Happy Hour:  We are certainly not the only ones who do a Happy Hour on Friday, but we have our own unique twist on it.  Every Friday at 4pm ET, we film HubSpot.tv live in our office and encourage employees (and community members) to watch the show, play a little ping-pong or foosball, and hang out.

9.  Games:  We have a west coast style games room where people can play ping-pong, foosball, hang out on the couch, or hit the beer fridge.  We do this because it is a good way for folks to get to know each other and refresh their minds. 

10.  Tournaments:  We have frequent tournaments, including ping-pong, foosball, iron chef, and softball.  All of these are just plain fun and bring folks together across groups.

11.  Dress code = no dress code:  Doesn’t made sense to me to tell people what to wear…we’re not in a boarding school -- we are in a company where we want people to be as productive as possible.

12.  Big Hairy Mission:  Our mission is to “transform the way the world does marketing.”  At least to me, that mission is big enough that I can really get psyched about it and be proud to tell others I’m working on it.  I don’t know for sure that other employees feel the same way, but I suspect it is the case.  Modern workers are more like cathedral builders than brick layers if you give them the right mission.

13.  Social media policy = we trust you:  Any of our employees can post an article on our blog, can tweet, can blog privately, etc.

This last point of “trust” is a common theme that runs throughout a post-modern culture.  If you are hiring exceptional people who have lots of good options, you should trust them to make good decisions that will improve the enterprise value as your interests are strongly aligned.

What aspects of corporate culture do you think are passé?  What creative corporate culture things are you doing at your company that you think we could emulate?

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Looking for other startup fanatics?  Request access to the OnStartups LinkedIn Group.  130,000+ members and growing daily.

Oh, and by the way, you should follow me on twitter: @dharmesh.

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http://www.dukky.com/

There's a reason people call it junk mail--as much as 99 percent of direct-mail ads are ignored, or cursed at, before being tossed into the trash.

But Shawn Burst saw potential amid the unredeemed coupons and "This week only!" offers: What if it was possible to combine a direct-mail campaign with social media and other web technology? What if he could make junk mail extremely valuable--not just to the people who get it but also to the marketing groups and businesses that send it out?

Two years ago, Burst founded Dukky, a company dedicated to exactly that idea. After 15 years in the direct-mail and printing industries
in New Orleans, Burst knew that the most effective campaigns have a good offer and a good mailing list. But he also knew that even the best lacked strong customer engagement and truly measurable results.

"We've been on this mission to build a tool that would give every business, big or small, an intelligent lead-generation tool that closes all the holes," Burst says.

What Burst and his Dukky partners developed is, simply, a souped-up lead-generation device. It makes print advertising trackable, and it lets marketers watch the progress of their campaigns in real time. It builds a deep database--the all-important mailing list--as it goes along. And by adding social media--giving respondents a chance to share the promotion on Facebook, Twitter or some other outlet--it can make the despised coupon-in-the-mailbox a full-on, viral-marketing phenomenon.

In January, Dukky launched the first version of its software platform. Within months, it had more than 100 clients, including Chik-fil-A restaurants and Stein Mart department stores. It monitored their campaigns in real time and collected detailed information about their customers (including e-mail address, birthday and gender). It orchestrated one campaign so effectively, the response rate was an unheard-of 280 percent--with no additional investment.

"This is going to be a game-changing technology," says Richard Birt, senior vice president of customer analytics and insights at KSL Media, an agency in New York and Encino, Calif., that buys advertising for clients. "In 30 years' time, I consider it one of the top three groundbreaking technologies in database management."
Burst is counting on it.

Say Ducky
Burst, a lifelong resident of the New Orleans area, attended Tulane University and then went to work with his brothers at their direct-mail and print facility, where he was responsible for product innovation. Dukky spun out of that business and, when it started to gain traction and attract funding, it became Burst's sole focus (his title is executive vice president of sales and marketing).

A note about that name: It's pronounced ducky, as in rubber ducky. Early on, Burst, a busy father of four, was doing some strategic thinking in the shower.

"One of my only places of refuge," he says. "I looked down and there was a yellow rubber duck. I thought about how ducks fly in formation and how that related to our co-op mail approach." Because ducky.com wasn't available and because two-consonant domain names were popular, the company name was hatched.

According to the Direct Marketing Association, more than 54 percent of all advertising spending in the United States goes into direct-marketing channels. Spending in 2009 was more than $149 billion; direct mail and catalogs alone made up $44.4 billion of that.

Despite the big numbers, marketers know the frustration of not being able to quantify their results, and anyone selling advertising is acutely aware of the demand for metrics. In a tight economy, marketers want sales leads more than they want anything else.

Meanwhile, social media has altered how consumers make buying decisions. Sure, people still look at ads in magazines, and if they don't TiVo, they may even watch a commercial once in a while. But chances are, they are paying more attention to their connections on Facebook and Twitter.

Dukky's tool for bridging the online and offline worlds is something called a PURL: a personalized URL, or web address, that is pre-populated with a target customer's data. That individualized PURL--say, gift.com/johndoe--is printed on a piece of direct mail sent to John Doe. And the offer on the mailer requires a trip to the Internet to redeem it.

It sounds like a hassle, but Dukky and the marketers who use direct mail are confident consumers will take that extra step. "People's online and offline lives are pretty intermingled now," Burst says.

The PURL leads respondents to a microsite created exclusively for the individual customer. It mirrors the direct-mail campaign and is where John Doe ultimately gets what he wants: A coupon he can print out, for example. But before the payoff, he is required to share more information about himself, which is then collected and tracked via Dukky's platform. Finally, John Doe is offered a quick way to share the offer with friends through social media: If he likes the offer, he can post it to his Facebook page, or Twitter, or whatever social gizmo. No pressure.

The end result: A deep connection with customers before they even set foot in the store. A rich database for future marketing. And--incredibly--a good chance that the customer himself will become a viral marketing agent.

The First Wave
Dukky takes the most effective form of direct marketing--an offer that requires the customer to interact with the company--to the next level, "by combining that interactivity with social media," says Richard Joutras, CEO of the Segerdahl Group, a direct-mail printer in Wheeling, Ill., that uses the Dukky platform. "It's direct marketing on steroids."

In the case of Stein Mart--which had never done an interactive direct-mail campaign before Dukky--it exceeded its expectation of 2.5 percent offer redemption by 16 times and got a list of 5,500 potential customers.

"Not only are we exponentially raising the numbers, but now Stein Mart has a list of people they didn't have before," says Jimmy Treuting, CEO of Dukky.

Chik-fil-A had even greater success. Rick Gonzalez, the owner of the franchise's store in Covington, La., used Dukky's platform on a direct mailing of 5,000 free sandwich offers. He received an incredible 14,000 responses, thanks to the offer going viral, and, more important, he built a strong database for future promotions.

"I had tried for eight months to build an e-mail database and had 150 names," Gonzalez says. "After the four weeks of this campaign, I had 3,400 names."

It's almost as though Dukky is removing the perceived influence of the marketers by making the consumers themselves the advocates for a product or service. "It's the difference between kicking the door in and throwing something at you, and ringing the doorbell and showing you what we want to sell you," Joutras says. "If it's the right offer, people will want to use it."

That's an important point about what the Dukky platform doesn't do: Create the actual campaign. "Our tool is not a silver bullet," Burst says. "If you have a crappy list and a crappy offer, our tool might only make it a bit less crappy."

Dukky lets marketers figure out how good the campaign is as it is in progress. As customers are accessing PURLs and sharing offers on Facebook, marketers can see the regions where it's working best, how long customers spend in different phases of the process, who their best advocates are, and so on. That allows marketers to rank customers based on how much they help attract new customers. Or as Adam Boalt, Dukky's interactive director, puts it: "Our clients love watching their campaigns come alive."

Boalt, who founded an interactive marketing agency in Washington, D.C., and West Palm Beach, Fla., helped Burst develop the software platform. The third Dukky principal, Jimmy Treuting, was one of the original investors in the company and a veteran of online startup ventures, and in January he joined the company as CEO.

Since the software was launched in January, Dukky's efforts have landed more than 100 customers, Burst says. For Dukky's enterprise clients--the direct-mail printers and ad agencies--the software license fee is $999 per month. Those outfits can use and brand the tool however they choose and use it with any of their own clients. They upload their lists into the system and pay anywhere from 2 cents to 6 cents per PURL, based on the volume of their campaigns. Burst projects sales this year to be $5 million.

Dukky is beta testing a version for smaller businesses--including those that don't have the budget for a marketing agency. The most basic subscription level for small businesses is $99 per month, which allows for three campaigns and 350 leads into the database. Bigger packages are available for larger businesses that need more campaigns and more database entries.

Ultimately, that tool could be distributed via any number of outlets that have access into small businesses, from IT systems integrators to companies that provide services such as web hosting and online directories to small businesses. Even big guns like Google are being discussed; Burst sees the potential to integrate the Dukky tool into Google AdWords.

The licensing strategy has led to $3 million in private equity raised to date, including an undisclosed amount from LongueVue Capital in New Orleans.

"What attracted us was the opportunity to bring offline companies online and the software-as-a-service model," says Rick Rees, general partner and co-founder at LongueVue. "The scalability of that business model is tremendous."

Dukky is also exploring applications
for print media advertising and mobile tagging technology and how to take those consumers directly to advertisers' PURLs.

Actually, say Burst and company, they are exploring every avenue they can think of.

"In the end," Burst says, "we just want to be known as the best and easiest-to-use lead-gen system for any size business."

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