What can you build to automate customer engagement?
Website Grader was the foundation of the "Inbound Marketing" movement and product-led growth, transforming the industry from pushy, disruptive sales tactics to attraction-based strategies that actually help potential clients.
The Story:
Back in the early days of the "nerd circuit" around Kendall Square and MIT, I got to know two very smart (and very nice) guys, Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah. They weren’t just geeking out over code—they were cooking up what would become the CRM Juggernaut HubSpot and a whole new way of thinking about sales and marketing.
Their early breakout move was a deceptively simple, wildly effective little tool called Website Grader.
All you had to do was plug in your URL, and in seconds you'd get a score (0–100) along with insights on:
- Meta tags and keyword alignment
- Page structure and content strategy
- Mobile-friendliness and site speed
- Analytics tracking and calls to action
Website Grader wasn’t just a content tool—it was a lead generation engine disguised as a helpful utility. And it worked like magic. Marketers, small biz owners, and SEO wranglers couldn’t resist testing their sites, then optimizing to get their grade up.
And because it was fully automated, Brian and Dharmesh had built a scalable platform that could grow without requiring their constant human effort. It was product-led growth before that was even a buzzword.
This was the early rocket fuel for HubSpot’s customer base and set the tone for the movement they called "Inbound Marketing" - a fundamental shift from interruptive to attractive marketing. It inspired a generation of marketers to stop pushing and start pulling.
They even turned that philosophy into a fun, functional, and very orange gathering of thousands at the annual INBOUND “un-conference.” I had the chance to speak there a couple of times, specifically on business development strategies—the perfect intersection of sales, storytelling, and systems that scale.
Fast-forward to today, and Dharmesh is still building the future—now with Agent.ai, a platform focused on leveraging AI agents to handle complex workflows and customer interactions.
Why is that relevant now?
Because the same automation-first, help-not-hype philosophy that made Website Grader such a killer app is now being applied to AI tools across the sales and marketing stack:
- Smart lead scoring
- Predictive prospecting
- AI-generated content (with purpose)
- Conversational bots that actually help
Those MIT guys didn’t just build a company. They built a movement or two... or three ...
Let's talk about your story... and solutions.
David
617-331-7852
david@davidcutler.net