A brief transcript excerpt from a conversation with HubSpot founders describing their contrarian strategy: they deliberately targeted small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) instead of pursuing enterprise customers, faced challenges raising funding because investors expected enterprise focus, and believed the Internet and evolving business models favored scalable SMB-focused marketing software.
So I think one thing that's worked for us along the way is we've had a healthy disrespect for conventional wisdom was the hardest chapters in HubSpot were raising all our funding rounds because nobody everybody wanted us to go to the enterprise. I'm like no, we're doing SMB. Year goes by, five years go by 10 years go by one of the IPO roads but we must have a path do you think Nicely played Brian.
And I do want to talk about what the vision was on day zero versus today but the more I thought about this SMB stuff and I had some of that DNA too but I changed my mind quickly to survive.
We did think that the Internet disproportionately benefits small relative to large particularly on the marketing side. We also saw the business model evolving where you can actually scale a small business software company and then you're going to churn out customers so your customer, you know, your customer dollar retention you're going to have a divot to fill.
