Dharmesh Shah credits his success to a big vision plus relentless iteration with tight feedback loops, not raw talent. Students who submit daily photos improve more than those aiming for one perfect shot. The real edge: willingness to grind harder than most, combined with being slightly smarter than those who do.
Chapters
What portion of HubSpot and your success has been, I'm just willing to shut up and focus on this for 20 years, as opposed to you actually being amazing or good at product and marketing and things like that? Yeah, here's how I think about it. I think the outcome is a combination of dreaming really big and iterating really small and having tight feedback loops. So the dream really big is you have to have something that can someday translate. And it doesn't have to be as clear a vision as Sean has laid out as far as, oh, it's going to be Pixar for the new generation. But you have to kind of have— start with something roughly big in mind, at least at some level. But then it really comes down to the iteration, right? It's— I think that others have demonstrated this through data, is that the quality of the output is frequently a function of the number of iterations, not the quality. For instance, one of the common examples that's thrown out is one set of students, divide the class in half, let's say it's a photography class. One set of students is like, okay, every day you have to submit a photo for the next 30 days while this class is running. The other one is like at the end of the 30 days, you're going to submit your best photo and then your grade is going to be based on the quality of that best photo. The first class is like as long as you submit a photo every day, you're going to get an A at the end of the 30 days. And what's been proven out across disciplines is that the class that did the multiple iterations had a better output than the one that was trying to solve for quality. Like the— arguably the first one's like, oh, all I really had to do was like submit a photo. It didn't have to be like world-class quality. It's not the best I could do. But just by virtue of doing it, they're going to make it better and make it better. At the end of the 30 days, they produced a better photo and they produced a better clay pot, if it was a pottery class, than the other one that was solving for quality. And they were like too much in their heads trying to say, oh, I'm going to do the best I can do. Like, no, just do it repeatedly. But the key to that, it has to be meaningful iteration. If you're just iterating and doing the same thing and you're not learning anything, there's no feedback loop, then the iterations have no value. But if you have a tight feedback loop, like I'm going to do this thing and I immediately get response back, That tells me whether I got better or got worse. That is amazingly, like, powerful to be able to do that and compound it over time. So I think I'm not that special, candidly. It's like I'm willing to grind it out more than people that are smarter, and I'm a little bit smarter than people that are willing to grind it out. That's my Venn diagram.
