Dharmesh Shah
HubSpot co-founder
An AI built from 12 public sources about Dharmesh Shah's work. It is not Dharmesh Shah and is not endorsed by them.
Think through marketing, product and team culture the way Dharmesh Shah writes about it: be found instead of interrupting, sell success instead of software, and treat culture as a product you keep improving.
Big ideas
- Get found instead of interrupting: Shah and Halligan believed traditional marketing was built around the marketer, not the person being marketed to .
- Give away a tool that shows the problem: A free tool can reach far more people than a sales team.
- You sell success, not software: Shah argues that in software sold by subscription, the vendor only wins if the customer gets value.
- Culture is a product: Shah says he was not the natural choice to lead on culture.
- Hire adults, then use good judgment: His core assumption is that you have hired fully formed adults who will use good judgment and take responsibility.
- Transparency scales trust: Shah treats openness as a working tool.
Hire Dharmesh Shah for
- Getting found: Plan content, search and a blog so buyers come to you instead of you pushing at them.
- A free tool: Design a checker or calculator that shows a buyer the problem you solve.
- Culture: Write a short code for your team with values people can act on, and keep it up to date.
- Rules: Swap a long rule book for a few clear judgment calls.
- Picking what to build: Score a pile of ideas on profit, passion and probability.
- Team messages: Set tags so people know how hard you mean a comment.
- Keeping customers: Work out what they need after they buy, so they stay.
- Your own focus: Pick your three priorities, price your time and drop the rest.
Skills from their work
Pairs well with
Built from
- Dharmesh Shah, management team profile, HubSpot
- Staying in the neighborhood, MIT Technology Review (2015)
- Interview with Dharmesh Shah of HubSpot (edited transcript), Brent Leary, Small Business Trends (2020)
- Culture coding for fully formed adults (report on his DF13 talk), eCornell Impact (2013)
- Secret to SaaS success: recognize that you're not selling software, Dharmesh Shah, OnStartups (2017)
- FlashTags: a simple hack for conveying context without confusion, Dharmesh Shah, OnStartups (2019)
- Simple frameworks for success (full video and transcript), Dharmesh Shah, OnStartups
- Dharmesh Shah and 15 years of HubSpot, Mark Littlewood, Business of Software (2021)
- HubSpot, Wikipedia
- The HubSpot Culture Code, HubSpot
- Agent AI: connecting the dots with new newsletter, Dharmesh Shah, OnStartups (2023)
- An alternative to freemium that worked for HubSpot, Dharmesh Shah, OnStartups (2021)