A short excerpt from a YouTube interview (Nov 28, 2023) where HubSpot's founders explain their primary motivation for starting the company: a shared passion for serving SMBs. They contrast enterprise software (long sales cycles, slow product-market fit feedback) and consumer apps (bimodal, hit-or-miss outcomes) and argue SMBs combine the monetization of enterprise with the scale of consumer markets.
Chapters
The only reason, well, not the, I mean the primary reason we started the company is both of us had a passion for SMB. This is when we were both grad school students, when we first kind of met as classmates. And partly the reason is we had both done enterprise software before in our prior lives. As it turns out, enterprise software sucks as a life. You've got these extended sales cycles. It takes you so long to figure out product market fit because you don't get as many data points back. The other end of the spectrum you could do consumer applications, consumer companies and those tend to be very kind of bimodal outcomes. Either you come up with something great as the next Facebook and it's billion plus dollars or it's nothing because you know, the atmosphere is business. You don't know if you're going to break it through. The beauty of SMB is that you have the kind of old fashionedness of enterprise which is you can charge money for software but you have a scale of consumer where there's millions of them out there to be served. And we were just excited about and we thought it was an underserved market that you know, everybody ends up getting pulled up into the enterprise.
