Drift: the B2B SaaS company that built a category instead of competing in one
David Cancel and Elias Torres founded Drift in 2015 as a website chat product. Most B2B chat tools at the time competed on features. Drift competed on category — coined “conversational marketing” as a name, built a podcast and conference and book series to teach the market the category existed, and grew the company to a $1 billion-plus Vista Equity investment in 2021. Salesloft acquired Drift in February 2024.
- Story: David Cancel and Elias Torres founded Drift in 2015. They named the category they wanted to compete in — "conversational marketing" — and then built a podcast, a conference (Hypergrowth), and a book series to teach the market the category existed. Vista Equity took a majority stake at over $1 billion in 2021; Salesloft acquired Drift in February 2024.
- Why it matters: Most B2B SaaS companies compete inside someone else's category. Drift made up its own. That move — pairing a product with a content brand that defines the language — turned out to be more durable than any feature comparison would have been.
- Takeaway: Naming the category is more powerful than competing inside someone else's category.
- Takeaway: Pair the product with a content brand so you can teach the market the category exists.
- Takeaway: Founder-led content (David Cancel's voice) outperforms agency-produced thought leadership at this stage of company.
Drift — the four-step story
Drift at a glance
Quick facts
Where B2B marketing was in 2015
In 2015, B2B SaaS marketing was form-based and slow. Prospects landed on a website, filled out a form, got an email five days later, got nurtured through a 12-step drip sequence, and eventually got a phone call from sales. The whole flow had been the standard for so long that nobody questioned it. Buyers wanted answers in seconds; sellers were responding in days. There was no shared name for the gap.
David Cancel had been the Chief Product Officer at HubSpot before founding Drift, so he knew the inbound-marketing world intimately. The insight was that the chat widget on the corner of every B2B website was being wasted. It could be the most efficient sales channel in the business if it were treated as a real-time conversation rather than a glorified contact form.
The strategy
Drift launched as a chat product, but the product alone wouldn't have differentiated it — there were plenty of chat tools in market. The strategic move was to define a new category. The team coined “conversational marketing” as the name and then built the entire content brand around teaching the market what the category was and why it mattered.
The content brand included three big pieces:
- The David Cancel podcast. Founder-led content that built David’s personal brand in lockstep with Drift’s. He talked about product, marketing, sales, leadership — not just Drift.
- Hypergrowth. An annual conference that grew to thousands of attendees. It was the only place in the world where you could attend a conference about “conversational marketing,” which made the category feel real.
- The Drift Book series. Practitioner-aimed books on the category, written by Drift employees and customers. Books got into people’s hands and onto bookshelves in B2B marketing teams.
What grew, and what came with it
Drift scaled steadily through the late 2010s and early 2020s. The company added AI-powered chat in 2018-2019 (well before the LLM era made AI chat a feature every B2B SaaS company felt obligated to add), expanded into conversation analytics, and built a partner ecosystem of agencies and consultancies trained on the category. Customer count grew from low hundreds at launch to thousands.
In 2021, Vista Equity Partners made a majority investment that valued Drift at over $1 billion. The company didn’t IPO. In February 2024, Salesloft acquired Drift, combining conversation-led inbound (Drift) and outbound sales engagement (Salesloft) into a single revenue-engagement platform. The exact deal terms weren’t disclosed.
What other B2B SaaS companies tried to copy
Many B2B SaaS companies tried to copy the category-creation playbook in the years that followed. Some worked (Gong with “revenue intelligence,” Lattice with “people success”). Most didn’t. The patterns of failure were consistent:
- The category name didn't describe a real shift. Drift's “conversational marketing” described an actual behavior change buyers were trying to make. Made-up categories that didn’t map to a real buyer problem felt like marketing rather than insight.
- The content brand was outsourced. Drift's content brand was led by the founder. Companies that hired an agency to produce a category-defining podcast couldn’t produce the same voice or sustained presence.
- No conference or community. Drift built Hypergrowth as a real annual event with real attendees. Companies that tried to coin a category without building the in-person community around it didn't produce comparable durability.
- The product didn't match the category. Drift's chat product was a real implementation of the conversational-marketing thesis. Companies that coined a category for a product that was the same as everyone else’s couldn't sustain the differentiation.
How RGM thinks about category creation
When clients ask whether they should try to coin a new category, the honest answer is: only if there’s actually a new buyer behavior the existing category names don’t capture. Category creation is high-effort and high-risk. It requires a founder willing to be the content brand for years, a real annual touchpoint (conference, community, awards), and a product that genuinely implements the new category’s thesis. Companies that try to do it without all three usually end up with a marketing budget burned and no category to show for it.
When the conditions are right, the upside is real. Drift went from a small Boston startup to a $1 billion-plus exit in nine years, in a market where competitors with more capital and more brand recognition couldn’t catch them. The leverage came from defining the field they were competing in, not from competing harder on someone else’s field. That’s the lesson worth taking, when the conditions support it.
Frequently asked questions
What is conversational marketing, exactly?
The Drift definition: real-time, personalized, two-way conversations between buyers and sellers, replacing the form-and-wait flow that defined B2B marketing for years. In practice, it means chat (originally human, later AI-assisted) on the corner of B2B websites that routes qualified prospects to sales reps in seconds rather than days.
Did Drift invent the chat widget?
No. Live chat as a website feature predates Drift by years. Drift's contribution was treating chat as a sales channel rather than a customer-support channel and building the surrounding category language to make that distinction matter to B2B buyers.
How big did Hypergrowth get?
At peak, the Hypergrowth conference drew thousands of attendees annually. The exact figures varied year to year and the event format changed after COVID. The conference was a meaningful component of the category-creation strategy throughout Drift’s independent years.
Why did Salesloft acquire Drift?
Salesloft is an outbound sales-engagement platform; Drift is an inbound conversation-led platform. Combining them gives Salesloft a single platform spanning the full revenue-engagement workflow. The acquisition reflects a broader B2B SaaS consolidation trend where overlapping point products get rolled up into platforms.
Is the “conversational marketing” category still real?
Yes, though the language has evolved as AI chat has become a generic feature across B2B SaaS. The category name is less of a differentiator in 2024 than it was in 2018, which is part of why Drift made sense as part of a larger platform rather than as a standalone category leader at scale.
Sources & references
- Drift (now Salesloft) — Product page after the Salesloft acquisition.
- David Cancel (LinkedIn) — Founder profile and post-Drift activity.
- Salesloft acquires Drift (Feb 2024) — Public press release on the acquisition.