Website Grader's Growth Path

A story about how Dharmesh Shah accidentally created a viral lead generation tool for HubSpot without initially collecting user information.

"Back when we first started HubSpot, it was just Brian my cofounder and I. We would manually look at people's websites to see if they would be a good fit for HubSpot. We'd look at their source code in Chrome, check their meta tags, and look at their Alexa ranking.

Since we were doing this manually with no tools, I built something to automate it. It would ping the APIs, bring down the source code, check if the tags were right, and give it a score. It was initially built just as a tool for the two of us.

I decided to put it on the web because I thought it might be useful. I called it website grader.com since the domain was available. It absolutely took off - we got tens of thousands of people using it.

The funny part is how clueless I was. We had a meeting with Gail Goodman, who was the CEO of Constant Contact at the time. I showed her Website Grader and she loved it, but then suggested we might want to add an email address box to capture user information. We had about 100,000 people use the tool with no way of knowing who they were - we weren't even collecting leads. We obviously fixed that later."