The One Thing That Made HubSpot a Unicorn

1 Sept 2022 · 1 min

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HubSpot co-founder Dharmesh Shah explains why the startup didn't follow the typical advice to focus on one thing. Instead, HubSpot built a full suite of tools—CMS, SEO, analytics—so small and medium businesses could do inbound marketing without piecing together separate products. Shah says the real win was picking a customer group, finding their hard problem, and solving it completely.

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What's the one thing that made HubSpot a unicorn? So one of the best pieces of startup advice: startup founders should focus on one small thing and do that really, really well, better than anybody else. And that is exactly the opposite of what we did when we started HubSpot. We wanted to help small and medium-sized businesses get leverage out of this new approach to marketing that we called inbound marketing. So we built a content management system and SEO tools and web analytics. So we built literally like all the things. And so why would we do something so foolish and crazy? And the answer is we were solving for the customer. The problem was that it was just too hard for small businesses to kind of really put all those pieces together and get leverage from the internet. And so that's the problem we set out to solve, even if that means building this kind of wide swath of products. So pick a group of customers that you care about that's large enough. Find a problem that they have that's worth solving. Attach yourself to that problem and that group of customers. But if you solve for the customer, that, that's not a It's not a bad way to go. It's worked for us.