Solved in three. We had a strong prior.
Greetings, fellow human.
We built an inbound campaign with a total addressable market of one.
Dharmesh, it's you. Come on the BUILD617 pod. Booking takes zero phone calls, and we checked: that's your favorite number of phone calls.
Campaign live for 0d 00h 00m 00s. Target accounts: 1. Conversions: 0. Phone calls placed: 0, and it stays that way.
We filed this under your own system.
You tag your messages so people know how hard you're pushing. We'd like to be equally clear about where this website sits.
Inbound marketing, pointed at one of its inventors.
We ran the playbook exactly as written. The only thing we changed was the size of the audience.
Attract
Create something valuable for your ideal customer. Ours is a website with your name in the URL.
Engage
You are 0% of the way down this page. Our dashboard is going wild.
Delight
You sit down at 38 Chauncy Street and tell Boston how you did it.
The introvert-optimized guest rider.
We read that you take fewer than ten business calls a year and have never had a direct report. We designed the whole booking around that.
We wrote software to measure this page's laughs per minute.
You measure your keynotes this way. So this page is instrumented too. The number is currently embarrassing and only you can fix it.
Tough room.
0 laughs, 0 groans. A groan counts as half a laugh under dad-joke accounting.
Press the button. We have a dad-joke agent and it has been waiting.
Fifteen recorded. One chair open.
No PR playbooks, no rehearsed answers. Conversations about what Boston gets right, what it gets wrong, and what it takes to build here. Hosted by Nick Leonard and Nathan Spielberg.
A small tribute to your weekend project.
You built a word game in a weekend and sixteen million people showed up. We built one in an afternoon for an audience of you.
Five letters. Six tries. Hint: it's in the URL.
Our portfolio of dreams has one domain in it.
You've said most of your domains never get built on. Same here, until this week. Notes from the registrar search:
Three times as many breakout companies out of Boston in ten years.
That's the mission. BUILD617 is what happened when a few founders got tired of talking about it and found a room.
- Founder-led
- Run by people who are building their own companies in the same space. For founders, engineers, and early operators in AI, robotics, and deep tech.
- Equity-free
- We are not a fund or an accelerator. We take 0% and it costs nothing to join.
- No spectators, no panels
- Small and curated on purpose. 38 founders so far, 12 companies working side by side at 38 Chauncy Street, shipping real products.
- Loud on purpose
- Boston has the talent and the money. What it's short on is volume. The schools, the investors, and the builders mostly don't hear each other. The pod is us turning it up.
- Passed down, not pitched
- The best thing we can give a first-time founder is an honest hour with someone who already built a major company here. Which brings us back to you.
You went to MIT, started HubSpot across the river on June 9, 2006, and never left. That is the episode.
The founders working out of 38 Chauncy hear plenty about why companies leave. They rarely hear, at length and unfiltered, from someone who stayed and built one of the biggest.
Nathan is MIT too. Course 2, so he mostly saw Sloan from a distance. He went to Stanford for the PhD and came back on purpose. Nick has been making the case for this city on mic for fifteen episodes. We'd like you to make episode sixteen the one people send around.
Questions you may have, answered async.
Do I have to get on a call to schedule this?
No. Pick a date at the bottom of this page. It lands in Nathan's inbox and he confirms in writing.
What will you ask?
Why you stayed in Boston when the advice was to go west. What the city gets right and wrong. What you'd build at 38 Chauncy if you were starting today. Agents, obviously. Questions come ahead of time in one doc.
Will you really measure laughs per minute?
Yes. We'll count them and send you the number. If it beats a keynote, we will never bring it up again. Publicly.
Can I send my agent instead?
We would watch that episode. But the chair is human-sized, and it's the decade of agents, so there's time.
How long does it take?
Forty-five minutes. We'd take twenty. We'd take a voice memo.
My heart says yes but my schedule says no.
We've read your "sorry, must pass" page. We are not here to argue with your heart. We'd like a word with your schedule. In writing.
Is this website a bit much?
You once bought a domain to get into the AI parties. We bought one to get you into ours. Ours cost less.
Did an AI build this?
An agent did most of the typing. Two founders did the pleading.
One question. Two buttons.
Will you come on the BUILD617 pod?
Sent. Episode 16 has a date.
Nathan has your picks and will confirm by email. Zero phone calls were made. Our conversion rate is now 100%.