Six years ago, while working as a venture capitalist, Brian Halligan saw that the typical playbook for sales was broken. “The approach was to have cold calls and advertisements,” he said. “But customers were finding ways to avoid the messages.”

Brian instead realized that a better approach was to leverage inbound marketing. But to make this work, there needed to be a comprehensive software platform.

So Brian quit his gig as a VC and started HubSpot. Since then, the company has grown at a hefty rate, hitting over 8,000 customers.

And to pump things up even more, Brian has pulled off a mezzanine financing round of $35 million. In all, the company has raised about $100 million. “With the capital, we plan to expand more aggressively in Europe and also to buy some companies,” said Brian.

Hubspot makes it much easier for companies to engage in social media, to leverage blogs, analyze data and engage in email marketing. “We were inspired by Apple and how Steve Jobs revolutionized the MP3 player,” Brian said. “At the time when it launched, there were 13 rivals but they had little marketshare. Apple realized that the best approach was to make a device that was simple for mere mortals.”

Brian says that the goal is to take Hubspot public, which is certainly reasonable. After all, the marketing automation space has been hot lately, as seen with recent offerings from companies like ExactTarget (NYSE:ET) and Eloqua (NASDAQ:ELOQ).

With the huge success of Facebook (NASDAQ:FB), entrepreneurs have been looking for ways to add social elements to niche categories. Some examples include Spotify and even Pinterest. So why not do the same for sports? Well, that’s what Eric Goldstein and Dave Grossman did. They created the popular app, SportsYapper. It’s becoming the way sports fans can cheer or commiserate about their teams.

Think of SportsYapper as the “second screen.” That is, it is what people look at when their watching television. The app is available for Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) iPhone and iPad as well as Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) Android.

In fact, SportsYapper caught the interest of Mark Teixiera, the Yankees first basement. He has since become an investor in the venture.

A key to SportsYapper is that it allows people to focus on their interests, without having to deal with pain of hashtags. In other words, there will not be a flood of posts, such as from the often-annoying play-to-play updates on  games. This has actually become a big problem with Twitter. Oh, and SportsYapper lets its users make posts of up to 300 characters.

As with any new social app, it is impossible to say if SportsYapper will be the category killer. Expect to see other operators to launch.

Despite all this, the market looks primed for a sports-focused social network. And so far, it looks like SportsYapper has the first-mover advantage.