"Cracking the Code: Building a SaaS Empire by Mitigating Market Risk" @dharmesh @HubSpot

But one of the early decisions we made, which was I think very fundamental to HubSpot, was that when Brian and I started the business, our kind of thesis in our head was, okay, we're building a SaaS company. I've built commercial software products before. Let's stipulate that if we happen to have stumbled into like a real market, we will be able to build the software. If we end up going down in crashing burning flames and this doesn't work, it will be not because we couldn't build the application. We weren't inventing new video codecs or driverless cars or anything like that. It was a relatively simple business SaaS app. It was big, but it wasn't particularly hard. And so we said, it's like, okay, well, if this doesn't work, which we need to figure out really soon if it's not going to work, it'll be because there's no market. That will be the primary cause of failure, and we'd rather know that now. So then everything was, in the early years, were kind of oriented around that thesis, which is we need to mitigate market risk and not product risk. We'll assume we'll build the product if the market's there.