Dharmesh Shah explains why HubSpot builds products in-house instead of acquiring them. Small businesses lack the resources for complex implementations, so fragmented software would hurt them. Large enterprises can afford consultants to handle complicated systems, but SMBs can't.
The number one thing we're solving for is that ease of use. That's the thing that HubSpot was founded on to make it easy for SMBs. We didn't think we would be able to continue to make it easy or keep it easy if we just did a bunch of acquisitions, first CRM and then service or whatever things we wanted to get into. We're like, okay, we're going to have to make the sacrifice to build this and continue to build this in-house. So we have that user experience cohesion, which we think SMBs value. Now in the Fortune 1000 market, that's not that big a deal. Usability. Yeah, people like it. It's not a huge deal because they have armies of consultants that can do implementations. They have the budget, they have pain tolerance. which an SMB just does not have, right? They just don't have the resources to be able to kind of deal with hard-to-use software products. So we think it was just, we were solving for our market. Not to say there's anything wrong with the kind of grow-by-acquisition path. That's certainly a tried and true path, but it just wasn't for us.
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