While Brian was helping venture-backed startups with their go-to-market strategy, we started to notice something curious: Customers had gotten really good at blocking out interruptive marketing and sales tactics. The tried and true tactics of old (direct mail, email blasts, cold calls) simply weren’t effective anymore. Meanwhile, Dharmesh’s blog OnStartups was seeing massive growth in traffic. We’ll admit, we were surprised. How had this tiny blog with no budget generated more traffic than companies with professional marketing teams and way bigger budgets? It felt like a modern-day David versus Goliath. So after many meetings, even more coffee, and the occasional Belgian beer (a shared favorite of ours) we came to the simple observation: People don’t want to be interrupted by marketers or harassed by salespeople. They want to be helped. It was time to make the marketing and sales process human. Time to treat buyers like people, not numbers on a spreadsheet. Time to build an inbound community and help people achieve their business goals in a more personable, empathetic way..