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- March 2025
- Case
Stagwell: AI and the Future of Marketing
By: Suraj Srinivasan and Radhika Kak
In early 2025, Mark Penn, Founder, CEO and Chairman of Stagwell, a global marketing company with a network of over 70+ agencies that served over 4000 blue-chip customers across 40 countries, was looking at ways that marketers should navigate the disruption emanating... View Details
- May 2024
- Supplement
HubSpot and Motion AI (B): Generative AI Opportunities
By: Jill Avery
The technologies driving artificial intelligence (AI) had progressed significantly since HubSpot’s acquisition of Motion AI in 2017. Generative AI was the newest major development. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies such as HubSpot were analyzing how generative AI... View Details
- November 2023 (Revised January 2024)
- Case
Bridgit: Persevere or Pivot?
By: Reza Satchu and Patrick Sanguineti
In late 2012, Mallorie Brodie and Lauren Lake, two young women in their final year of college, founded Bridgit, a technology startup that developed solutions to simplify vital but laborious processes within the construction industry. In the Fall of 2013, after months... View Details
- October 2023 (Revised April 2024)
- Case
TetraScience: Unlocking the Power of Scientific Data
By: Satish Tadikonda and William Marks
After pivoting from a focus on hardware to a focus on scientific data, TetraScience, led by veteran SaaS executive, Patrick Grady and Founder Spin Wang, has embarked on a journey from nearly cash-out to a player in the scientific data management space. This case... View Details
- June 2023 (Revised November 2024)
- Case
Collaboration Wars: Slack vs. Microsoft Teams 2023
By: David B. Yoffie, Kriti Gupta, Mehek Punatar, Poonam Sacheti and Poorvi Vijay
What's the future of corporate communications? Email? Corporate messaging? The battle for corporate messaging in 2023 was stacking up as a fight between Slack, which had been recently acquired by Salesforce, and Microsoft Teams. This case explores a classic judo... View Details
- September 2022
- Case
AllSpice: GitHub for Hardware Engineers
By: Jeffrey J. Bussgang and Mel Martin
AllSpice, a software-as-a-service company that built a GitHub-like revision control tool for hardware engineers, was in the midst of preparing for rapid scale when the 2022 market downturn left them with big decisions to make. Cofounder and CEO Valentina Ratner had to... View Details
- March 2022
- Teaching Note
Farfetch: Digital Transformation for Luxury Brands
By: Jill Avery and Sunil Gupta
Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 522-051. Farfetch, a global luxury technology platform and digital marketplace had been surfing the wave of digital transformation in the luxury fashion industry since 2008. While the company’s stock price and market valuation had... View Details
- January 2022 (Revised September 2023)
- Case
Simplifyy
By: Paul A. Gompers and Alicia Dadlani
Jake Lisby, co-founder and CEO of Simplifyy, a property technology startup in Kansas City, Missouri, was both exhausted and exhilarated by the flurry of activity surrounding the pivot of the business model in late 2021. Simplifyy, a venture-backed PropTech company, was... View Details
- March 2021 (Revised August 2022)
- Case
Seeding and Selling Asana
By: Jeffrey F. Rayport, Susie Ma and Amram Migdal
In December 2019, Oliver Jay, Asana’s Chief Revenue Officer (CRO), was reconsidering his go-to-market (GTM) strategy. Asana was cloud-based work management software that enabled users to break up projects into discrete tasks that could be assigned, scheduled, and... View Details
Keywords: SaaS; Customer Journey; Business Model; Business Organization; Change Management; Growth and Development Strategy; Growth Management; Marketing Channels; Marketing Strategy; Product Marketing; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Design; Organizational Structure; Digital Platforms; Internet and the Web; Technology Industry; United States
- February 2018 (Revised October 2019)
- Case
HubSpot and Motion AI: Chatbot-Enabled CRM
By: Jill Avery and Thomas Steenburgh
HubSpot, an inbound marketing, sales, and customer relationship management (CRM) software provider, announced that it had acquired Motion AI, a software platform that enabled companies to easily build and deploy chatbots, fueled by artificial intelligence, to interact... View Details
Keywords: CRM; Sales Management; Customer Service; Artificial Intelligence; B2B Vs. B2C; Business Marketing; SaaS; Marketing; Marketing Strategy; Brands and Branding; Customer Focus and Relationships; Sales; Salesforce Management; Technological Innovation; Applications and Software; Customer Relationship Management; AI and Machine Learning; Technology Industry; Service Industry; United States; North America
- August 2017 (Revised November 2017)
- Case
VTS
By: Mark Roberge and Michael Roberts
The case raises issues around sales force deployment and management issues in the SaaS industry. Specifically, VTS sells a software product to the real estate industry and has designed a Go-to-Market strategy for what the founders perceive to be the unique... View Details
- June 2016
- Teaching Note
HubSpot: Lower Churn through Greater CHI
By: Jill Avery, Asis Martinez Jerez and Thomas Steenburgh
HubSpot, a web marketing startup selling inbound marketing software to small- and medium-sized businesses, is under pressure from its venture capital partners to rapidly acquire new customers and to maintain a low level of customer churn. The B2B SaaS company is in the... View Details
- January 2015 (Revised January 2017)
- Case
Curriculum Associates: Turning the Page from Tradition to Innovation
By: John J-H Kim and Christine S. An
Set in Fall 2014, the traditional textbook publishing industry is being transformed by technological innovations and new student achievement standards. This case chronicles how Rob Waldron, CEO, and his team bring Curriculum Associates (CA), a traditional supplemental... View Details
- January 2015 (Revised April 2015)
- Case
Zeal: Launching Personalized and Social Learning
By: John J-H Kim and Christine S. An
Set in 2014, this case follows John Danner and his team at Zeal as they consider their product development strategy. In February 2013, serial entrepreneurs John Danner and Sanjay Noronha co-found Zeal, an education technology start up providing a web-based, mobile... View Details
- 2013
- Book
Managing Startups: Best Blog Posts
By: Tom Eisenmann
Harvard Business School Professor Tom Eisenmann annually compiles the best posts from many blogs on technology startup management, primarily for the benefit of his students. This book makes his latest collection available to the broader entrepreneur community. Divided... View Details
Keywords: Lean Startup; Startup; Prototyping; MVP; Minimum Viable Product; Freemium; SaaS; A/B Testing; Business Model