Dharmesh Shah: evaluation

Transcript context

…Okay, so this theme has come up a bunch already in our conversation. I asked Chris Miller, previous podcast guest, what you're amazing at and what I should talk to you about. And he said that you're very good at zigging when other people are zagging, and zagging when other people are zigging. And I think that's already come across in our conversation. I guess, is there anything else along those lines that you think might be helpful to people, in terms of how you think about that, or examples of that in action? So this comes down to high-conviction, low-consensus bets. And so we had like three things that we were zigging... And by the way, it's not just me. My co-founder and I both have that zig versus zag. And we ask ourselves this to this day, it's like, "Okay, well we understand this is the way the world moves, this is the way it's normally done, but have we considered this completely? And I'm not saying we should do it, but have we considered this alternate path?" So I would encourage you, at any stage of the company, you don't necessarily have to do the zig versus zag, but you should at least know what the zig would've been and have talked it through. So that's thing number one. Some of the best startup advice I've heard and I've ever given is, "Startups should focus on one thing and be really, really exceptionally world-class better than anyone else at that one thing." And one of our early zigs is, "We are going to do exactly the opposite of that." So from year one, HubSpot decided to build an SEO tool, web analytics, blogging tool, content management, all of it. And every one of those categories that we were building a product in, literally this is year one, had great products with great companies behind them. And so it's like, "Okay, well, why would you do that? " And- And so it's like, okay, well why would you do that? And the reason is that the one thing we wanted to be good at was solving for the actual customer problem that existed, and the customer problem that existed was not a dearth of tools, lots of great SEO blogging, everything, all the tools existed, but SMB specifically did not have the wherewithal to put all those pieces together. So you and I, it's like, "Oh, I can throw a website up. I can put Google Analytics on it. I can put a Wufoo Typeform format. I can do all these things. I can wire doc. No big deal. Why is this so hard?" But for most people, most SMBs, that's a science project, and so we said, okay, in order for us to solve the actual customer problem, we have to solve the actual customer problem, even if it's uncomfortable, even though it's contrarian and every instinct and every advice we've heard or given says we should not do this. We should not go that broad. But once we make that decision so that the other lesson learned, it's like, and we said this in the early years and it's gotten better since, let's say you do this, and this is the all-in-one approach, we're going to have this broad-based product. It's like, "Okay, we're going to be many miles wide and only so inches deep." One of these, and this goes back to our very systematic thinking, is like, "Okay, we're going to measure each of those individual product categories that we're now playing in. Are we in the top three in the market in that category? If the answer is yes, that means we invested too much in that category." each of those individual product categories that we're now playing in. Are we in the top three in the market in that category? If the answer is yes, that means we invested too much in that category." We should not be in the top three because our value proposition is not that we are the top three blogging tools or one of the top three web analytics tools. We have the top three, whatever, our value proposition is that everything works so well together that that being in the top three and having those right features or whatever doesn't matter. Doesn't matter as much as the all-in-one. And that means we over-index on one individual category by virtue. That was one of our heuristics for being able to tell that we were over-indexed on one particular aspect of it.…

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