A Great Piece Of Startup Advice And When You Should IGNORE It

9 Dec 2021 · 1 min

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In this segment, Dharmesh Shah reflects on HubSpot’s early days and the strategic choice to build a comprehensive, integrated marketing suite rather than focusing narrowly on a single feature—a direct reversal of the common startup mantra to “focus on one thing and do it really well.” He explains that this decision was driven by customer feedback: prospects were frustrated not by the quality of individual tools like content management or social media, but by the difficulty of making disparate tools work together. Consequently, HubSpot bundled CMS, search, social, and other tools into one platform to solve that integration pain. Shah concludes that while conventional startup advice is often sound, founders must identify market-specific realities that justify deviating from it, and selectively ignore advice that doesn’t align with customer needs.

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You know, one of the common questions I get is, oh, did I know from the get-go that HubSpot was going to turn out to be a relative success? And the answer is no one can really be sure, but that is what we were shooting for. We were kind of swinging for the fences. Some of the best entrepreneurial advice you will get, and that I have probably given out 100 times, is to kind of focus on one thing and do that one thing really, really well. And at HubSpot, we did the exact opposite. And our motivation there is that at the time in the kind of marketing suite, and the reason we chose to do this kind of broad swath of build a content management system and search tools and social media and all those things in one thing, which is exact polar opposite of what entrepreneurs should be doing, is that that's what customers needed. The world at that time when we talked to them didn't want slightly better content management system, slightly better social media. That's not what was keeping people on the sidelines. What was keeping them on the sidelines was it was just hard to get all these things to kind of work together. And so the lesson there is most conventional startup advice is probably pretty good, but you're going to have to pick a few things that just don't make sense either for you, for your market, for what you're trying to do.