HubSpot's Egyptian Pivot

A story about how HubSpot's first version was built by developers in Egypt found through Elance, and how they pivoted from their original concept.

"The first version of HubSpot was built by Dharmesh and these two guys in Egypt that he found online. He put a test out there and Faramawi (and another developer) built the prototype.

Here's how HubSpot worked in the early days: All day long I would be using the product, demoing the product, pitching the product, and using it to run our marketing. At the end of the day, I'd write up the 10 most important bugs I found. Then at night, since Dharmesh is a night owl and those guys were working at night in Egypt, they'd fix all 10 and create like 50 more. It was just a constant whack-a-mole that first year.

We actually started as 'Legal Spot' - a general purpose platform for legal firms. We had a prototype and would go to law offices to demo it. They weren't super psyched about it, but there was this little piece around grading websites and SEO that the law firms got excited about. Dharmesh and I finally said 'why don't we just work on that one thing they keep asking us about?' So we killed Legal Spot, built Website Grader and the lead generation system, and went horizontal instead of vertical, selling it to all our friends and startups."