Today's Guest: Dharmesh Shah, HubSpot Co-Founder

Today:

🎙️ Dharmesh Shah helps us understand what to do in the early days of your entrepreneurial journey.

🎥 A quick video on the Wrong Way to launch a startup vs. the Right Way

 🏊️ Ok, let’s jump in.
Everything below in bold is my emphasis for the readers.

Aron:
Our community is super interested in the early days of startups. Can you take us back to the mid-2000s when you and your co-founder conceived HubSpot.
How did you know you were filling a gap in the market with HubSpot?

➡️ Dharmesh:
We were strong believers in "charge early, charge often". The best evidence that you're filling a gap in the market is to get a product out there in the market and charge money for it. See if customers will pay. We also had all customers on a month-to-month model, so they could cancel any month. So, if they continued to stay with HubSpot, that was evidence that we were solving a problem they cared about.

Aron:
Were you already in the customer relationship space?

➡️ Dharmesh:
My first startup was indirectly in the customer relationship space, so I've been working in some variation of CRM for 30+ years.

Aron:
Today, HubSpot has countless features.
In the early days what was the ONE thing you decided to do well, and why?

➡️ Dharmesh:
One of the best pieces of entrepreneurial advice I've received — and given, is that it's important for a startup to do one thing and do it really well. We went the opposite way. Even in the first year of HubSpot we had a very broad set of features: SEO, content management, landing pages, forms, etc. Why would we do this? Because that's the problem customers needed to solve. There were great tools in each of those categories, but getting them all to work together was hard. So, we decided to make it easy with an all-in-one approach.

Aron:
Do you advise startup founders to focus on one small niche where they can dominate?

➡️ Dharmesh:
Generally, yes. Odds go up the narrower your aperture of focus. Generally, a good approach is to start narrow, then as you build credibility and momentum, expand from there.

Aron:
You invest in early-stage startups and you mentor founders.
Can you briefly take us through the process that you use to evaluate if an entrepreneur is on the right track?

➡️ Dharmesh:
The one key thing that I think is the most predictive is whether adoption and retention is going up. You want to not just customers buying the product, but also using/adopting the product and then sticking with the product. If those numbers are going well, that's a very positive sign they're on track.

Aron:
I expect your top priority is having them intimately understand the customer and the problems they are facing, yes?

➡️ Dharmesh:
Absolutely yes. I believe strongly in Solving-For-The-Customer. Understand their problems. Their needs. Their future needs.

Aron:
Some of our entrepreneurs do not have a lot of resources. Can you speak to those users outside the United States for a minute.
How do you advise they move forward with their entrepreneur dreams while being limited by location and cash?
Do you suggest they start a service first? Share their expertise on social media? What would be a good way to begin?

➡️ Dharmesh:
You can start with a service first, but you have to be careful — because it's easy to get too addicted to the service revenue and you never create the business model that will scale. Anything the company can do to reach potential customers (blogging, social media, video, etc.) is generally worth the investment. They're long-term assets that will continue to pull in potential customers (vs. advertising which turns off when you don't pay for it).

Thanks, Dharmesh!


If you want to follow Dharmesh on twitter, go here: Dharmesh’s Twitter

📺️ Watch this on how to correctly create a startup!

@validatorai

the right way vs the wrong way to build a startup #tech #ai #startups #validation #startup #aitools #technology #techstartups #vcfunding #... See more

⌨️ Reply to this email and let me know what you’re working on!

Be sure to follow us on Tik Tok and other social media below. 👇️ 


And don’t forget to check out today’s sponsor, Brilliant. (Scroll back up to the orange section)