Speaker (founder-level) describes an early strategic decision at HubSpot: prioritize validating and mitigating market risk over product risk. They assumed building the SaaS product would be feasible if a real market existed, so early efforts focused on determining market demand quickly rather than on technical innovation.
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 and 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 relatively simple business SaaS app. It was big, but it wasn't particularly hard. And so he 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.
