There’s nothing more inspiring than speaking with a successful entrepreneur. Hearing their secrets to success not only reminds us of our own aspirations, but gives us hope that these dreams can actually become realities. I recently spoke with Dharmesh Shah, the co-founder of HubSpot, and heard his story of turning a simple hypothesis into a key resource for other startups and entrepreneurs.
Melissa Zieger: Tell us about how you developed HubSpot and the secret to its success.
Dharmesh Shah: My co-founder (Brian Halligan) and I met while graduate students at MIT. The thesis behind the company was that traditional, outbound marketing was broken, and the tools needed to transform an organization's marketing to inbound were too complex and disconnected. HubSpot's been successful so far because the thesis was correct.
MZ: How is HubSpot different from other Internet Marketing or SEO companies?
DS: Two big differences. First, instead of offering an individual tool for a piece of the marketing puzzle, HubSpot provides "all-in-one" marketing software tools. This makes things much easier for companies as the software and data are integrated. The second difference is that HubSpot provides a platform – a way for other companies to integrate both their software tools and their services into HubSpot. HubSpot has a marketplace where our customers can install third-party applications or find consultants and service providers.
MZ: What's the biggest challenge HubSpot customers are trying to solve?
DS: The big challenge is that most organizations need to transform their marketing. This involves changes to the top of the funnel (attract more visitors and prospects) and the middle of the funnel (convert more of those prospects to leads and customers). Our customers recognize the importance of making this shift from outbound to inbound, but it's a change, and even necessary change is hard.
MZ: You’ve done a number of startups and invest in startups. What’s the single best tip you ever received about starting your own business?
DS: The best advice I've ever received (from one of my MIT professors) is "watch your competitors, but don't follow them". Too many entrepreneurs focus too much on what is already happening out there, and often make one of two mistakes: They fail to start at all, because they look for a market in which there is absolutely no competition (such markets are rare, and often indistinguishable from non-existent markets). Or, they start the business, but then fall into the trap of obsessing over their competitors when they should be obsessing over their customers.
MZ: I love your “Tweetable Insights” on OnStartups.com. Where did the idea come from? Do you see them used frequently?
DS: I had the idea because one of the things I do all the time is copy and paste a fragment of an article and tweet it out. This led to the idea of "why not just make it easy for people to tweet things from within the article". That led to the idea of: "What if I just had an article with tweetable insights?" I've done a number of them, and they work well because they're designed to be naturally viral. For example, the article I did on Seth Godin has had over 1,300 retweets.
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