Phase One: The Beginning - Market Product Fit

The road to $100M doesn't start with product. Which is why the term Product Market Fit never sat right with me. Starting with product puts the cart before the horse. You are starting with the solution, and then trying to fit it to the problem.



We need to do the reverse. Start with the market, then look at the product. The problem your company exists to solve lies within your market and target audience, not within your product.



Christopher O'Donnell, Dan Wolchonok, and a few other engineers did this initial work and built the very first version of HubSpot Sales (then known as Signals). The total team size was about 7 people and the product had about 2,000 WAU, and maybe a few thousand in MRR.



During my first two weeks at HubSpot, I spent countless hours talking to customers to define our market and audience hypotheses more concretely. We built out detailed personas, but the four main things we defined were:

Category . What category of products does the customer put you in?

. What category of products does the customer put you in? Who . Who is the target audience within the category? There are always multiple personas within a single category, so this breaks it down further.

. Who is the target audience within the category? There are always multiple personas within a single category, so this breaks it down further. Problems . What problems does your target audience have related to the category?

. What problems does your target audience have related to the category? Motivations. What are the motivations behind those problems? Why are those problems important to your target audience?

The high level first version for HubSpot Sales looked like this:

Category . Sales Software.

. Sales Software. Who . The individual contributor. There were also two sub-types of ICs: SDRs and Account Reps.

. The individual contributor. There were also two sub-types of ICs: SDRs and Account Reps. Problem . Not knowing where a prospect or client stood in the process.

. Not knowing where a prospect or client stood in the process. Motivation. A couple of motivations: 1) Money. Knowing where a prospect was led to better prioritization and selling, which led to more closing. 2) Uncertainty. The target audience's life was filled with constant uncertainty. Relieving that uncertainty was a big deal.

After we understood the market, we then defined the four key areas of product hypotheses that aligned with the four areas we identified in the Market:

Core Value Prop . What was the core value prop of the product? How did it tie to the core problem?

. What was the core value prop of the product? How did it tie to the core problem? Hook . How could the core value prop be expressed in the simplest terms?

. How could the core value prop be expressed in the simplest terms? Time To Value . How quickly could we get the target audience to experience value.

. How quickly could we get the target audience to experience value. Stickiness. How and why will customers stick around? What are the natural retention mechanisms of the product?

The v1 of the product was extremely simple. It consisted of a Chrome extension that, with a click of a checkbox, let you track your emails and get instant notifications on who opened and clicked on your emails. You got up to a couple hundred notifications for free, or paid $10 for unlimited notifications.

Our Market Product Fit Hypotheses looked like this: