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Career startup guy.
Author of the book "Inbound Marketing"…
Author of the book "Inbound Marketing"…
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Dharmesh Shah posted thisYou can lead a horse to water, you can't make it drink. You can lead an AI model to context, you can't make it consume.
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Dharmesh Shah shared thisHow I Grow Better With AI, Personal YouSpot Example: Episode 1. Here's one of the ways the new YouSpot product (from HubSpot Next) helps me with my domain name purchases. I have a YouSpot cloud agent setup that has *exactly* this configuration (stated in natural language): "Check my last domain related emails to/from GoDaddy. Extract the domain names discussed and add them as domain name objects to second brain. Retrieve the estimated domain value using the built-in tool and store that in the object. Send me an email with which ones you added and their estimated value." And this results in a daily email that looks like the screenshot shown. Life changing for me. One accidental benefit. When I get the annual "renewal" email from GoDaddy, the agent picks up that email, gets the estimated value from DomainValue .com (app that's also part of YouSpot) and adds it to. my database. Result: An automatically updated database of all of my domain names on GoDaddy with an estimated value so I have a sense of the total value of my portfolio. Something I *never* had the time to maintain before. Now happens automagically. A related, even bigger benefit: If I am in the midst of negotiations of a domain name that I've made an offer on, but the ball got dropped, it'll show up in my daily update email with an analysis of the negotiations and advice on whether I should make a counter-offer or send a nudge to the seller. You can sign-up for YouSpot right now for $1/month (100 credits) to try it out. Visit YouSpot .com. If you're a domain investor, this will likely pay for itself with just ONE insight that you may have otherwise missed. #youspot #hubspot
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Dharmesh Shah posted thisWhat I lack in intelligence I make up for with an inexplicable obsession to just grind and iterate. When people say: "Dharmesh, why do you do this? You don't *need* to do this." My response is: Yes I do. It's who I am.
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Dharmesh Shah reposted thisThis is going to be huge. Dharmesh Shah is on fuego these days.
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Dharmesh Shah reposted thisDharmesh Shah reposted thisHubSpot's stock is down 36% this year, but up nearly 10% this week. Today their co-founder launched a $1 AI-native CRM that challenges the assumptions HubSpot was built on. Dharmesh Shah just launched YouSpot through HubSpot Next. HubSpot has over 300,000 customers paying an average of $11,800 a year. Conversely, YouSpot is built for the one-person company that starts at $1 a month. Traditional CRM like HubSpot, Salesforce, Zoho or Pipedrive all assume someone has to: - Enter the data. - Keep it clean. - Update the pipeline. - Remember who to follow up with. YouSpot assumes AI can do all that work. It connects to Gmail, Google Calendar, LinkedIn and X, and it builds the relationship context, finds missed follow-ups, surfaces opportunities and gives AI agents ongoing jobs. He says this isn't AI just bolted on a CRM. He built it as an AI Agent the has a database to manage its work. What I find fascinating is that HubSpot is letting its own co-founder build something that doesn't have to protect HubSpot's existing model. To build it he said he asked, ... If we were building CRM today with AI available from day one, what would we build? Every legacy software company should be asking the same thing. Not, how do we add AI to what we already sell? Instead, we should be asking "What would we build if we started over"?
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Dharmesh Shah shared thisWoo hoo! Thrilled to announce YouSpot, the AI-native Solo CRM from HubSpot Next. tl;dr: YouSpot is a CRM built for one-person companies like founders, consultants, authors, freelancers, angel investors, creators, etc.. It builds a "second brain" from your business context and remembers the things you might otherwise miss. Intro price of $1/month for the first 1,000 customers (423 slots already taken). Sign up at YouSpot .com. t's *not* for GTM teams (I recommend HubSpot). It's also *not* for consumers. It's for operators running a 1 person business. You connect Gmail, GCal, X/Twitter, etc. and the other tools you already use. YouSpot builds the context for you - who you know, what you’ve talked about, what might need a follow-up, and which opportunities may deserve your attention. It can surface the relationships, follow-ups, and opportunities that matter instead of waiting for you to remember to update a record or create a task. Here’s what you need to know: 1. YouSpot is part of HubSpot Next, an innovation group inside HubSpot (the #1 agentic customer platform with over 300,000 customers [NYSE:HUBS]). 2. It’s built specifically for the solo market. If your business has a GTM team, even a small one - go with HubSpot. If you’re a 1-person team looking for something more powerful than Claude + a spreadsheet but less weighty than a full CRM, check out YouSpot. 3. YouSpot is truly AI-native. Under the hood, it’s actually implemented as an AI harness with CRM tools inside. You chat with it like ChatGPT or Claude. 4. It doesn’t just store your context. It uses that context to help you figure out what deserves your attention. 5. You can chat with your second brain inside YouSpot – or you can use the robust MCP connector and connect it to ChatGPT, Claude or any AI app that supports MCP. 6. YouSpot supports cloud agents, inspired by OpenClaw. These are “always working” agents that have access to your second brain and can do things on your behalf. You define what you want your agent to do in natural language. 7. The pricing is Pay-As-You-Go. No big commitment. Introductory price of $1/month (that’s as low as I could make it and still let people put it on a credit card). The product is still very early. I built it for myself. If you’re a solopreneur, would love to learn how you keep track of the people, follow-ups and opportunities that matter today. And as I've done before, I”m building this in public. I’m making daily updates to the product. This has been an amazingly fun product to work on. I’m up late night till 2am every night. Please share your thoughts. All comments read. Even ones from bots and agents. Thanks for your support.
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Dharmesh Shah shared thisI'm hours away from soft-launching YouSpot (the AI-native Solo CRM) that I've been furiously working on. But, had to take a moment and thank Chris Silvestri for the shout-out on the copywriting for the YouSpot pricing page. I was proud of this bit: "One you. One plan. Wonderful." The introductory price? $1. It doesn't have a "No questions asked cancellation policy." It has a ONE question asked cancellation policy. The question is: "What's ONE thing we could have done to keep you as a customer?". I love this stage of the product building process. The Zero to ONE. (See what I did there). :) Thanks, Chris!Dharmesh Shah shared thisWhat a microcopy gem in the wild. Now THIS is what I call an anti-slop human touch. Most “cancel anytime” copy does the minimum to settle signup anxiety. This one does many things well: - builds trust with the crossed-out “No” - shows the human behind the business - shows that this human cares, especially when price is just $1 - sets expectations clearly with the tooltip copy - the tooltip copy itself shows you that they care about giving you value first and foremost This shows that non-slop copy is not only the words you write, but also the tiny decisions you make to add a personal touch. Well done, Dharmesh Shah 👏 (also, looking forward to trying YouSpot out)
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Dharmesh Shah reposted thisDharmesh Shah reposted thisWe've graded 1,331 software products to answer the question: Are third-party vendors keeping their customers' data hostage by limiting API access? The unfortunate answer is yes; 57% of products score a D or worse. Therefore, I think it's important to showcase the heroes like HubSpot, which scored a very well-deserved "A" on our API report card. Dharmesh Shah did this correctly from the beginning. At my last company, Divvy Homes, our sales team used the HubSpot UI to rapidly prototype and test new sales workflows and strategies. This was several years ago, well before the proliferation of Claude Code, and with any other CRM it would have taken our engineering team a herculean effort to ensure our core product could keep up with these sales experiments. In 2017, we still had to make pull requests manually, like cavemen. The Hubspot APIs are so rich and well-documented that it was a strategic (and really no-brainer) decision to choose it as our CRM. It is really awesome to see that this decision by HubSpot leadership to be API-first (probably made over a decade ago) set them up so nicely for today's technology.
Dharmesh Shah commented on a post
10h
My kid's still in high-school, but I'd say:
Never cheap out on experiences. Whatever it is that people are doing, join them.
Always buy the budget version of your AI tools. You can get a lot done with free or near-free tools for what you're doing.
Dharmesh Shah commented on a post
12h
Detailed feedback is a gift. Thanks!
Here are some things I'd love for you to retry and let me know what you think:
1. Model picker got a rethink. Plain-english names with one-line descriptions of when to pick each, "Auto" as the default. And Gemini's in there now. (You were right — "OpenAI GPT" next to "GPT 5.6 Sol" meant nothing.)
2. Connecting accounts is no longer a dead end. Ask it to connect Gmail / LinkedIn / HubSpot / X and you get a connect button right in the chat instead of an apology about permission screens. One click, then it syncs itself.
3. Notes form relationships now. Attach a note that mentions a person or company and the graph wires up the edges on its own. The spider's web you asked for — this is the start of it.
4. Voice is hands-free. Click the mic, talk, stop talking. It sends itself.
5. Setup now tells you the browser extension exists. You shouldn't have had to stumble on it.
Let me know what you think. Will continue to crank after dinner.
Dharmesh Shah commented on a post
13h
Thanks for trying it out. Watched the episode and I was squirming the whole time -- because YOU'RE RIGHT!
Just have work to do to get the experience to the "magical" experience you spoke of.
But, the product is 5 days old (and in private beta)>
I'm going to take it as a personal challenge to get you something that's at least borderline useful (but probably not magical) by UNBOUND.
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Dharmesh Shah liked thisDharmesh Shah liked thisCollege prep rule of thumb: Never cheap out on ____ Always buy the budget version of ____ What goes in your blanks? (I’m in the last days of college prep for one of my sons 🙂)
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Dharmesh Shah liked thisDharmesh Shah liked thisToday marks a year at HubSpot Ventures and a year since moving to SF! A few reflections: 🧡 Venture is a team sport I’m incredibly proud to be a part of a team and company that values transparency, trust, and collaboration. From our Ventures team (Adam Coccari Nate Morgan Jenn V.), to corporate development (Brandon Greer Alyssa Pierce Jason Stein An Pham), to HubSpot’s executive and product leadership (Dharmesh Shah Kate Bueker Charles MacGlashing Yamini Rangan), it’s a true team effort to be in service to our founders. It can feel cliche, but when you’re doing hard things, the people you surround yourself with make the biggest difference. 🪴 Relationships compound Looking back, I can point to steps in my early career that gave me lifelong friends, mentors and teammates that have come back into my world over the last year - previous coworkers who have taken the leap to start their own thing; business school friends have become co-investors; I’ve even reconnected with old high school classmates years into their founder journeys. All of these relationships in life, over the course of many chapters, have continued to flourish, which has been such a fun part of this newer role. 🌁 SF is the city of serendipity with an unfair advantage I always knew technology moved fast, but today’s AI era, especially in SF, feels faster than ever. Yes, it can feel like a bubble sometimes. But on the flipside, the city is filled with energy and optimism unlike any other place in the world. People come here to dream up previously impossible things, which I think makes the city so special. I also joke that SF is the biggest tiny city - it feels so common to run into people through work events or in your personal life. The density of ambition and accessibility to learning is so unique to the Bay Area. Those who know me well know I’ve changed my mind on SF :) Cheers to year two!
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Dharmesh Shah liked thisDharmesh Shah liked thisDharmesh Shah shipped YouSpot — a dollar buys you in. Nick L. and I unboxed on Friday's Value-First AI Daily show. What you'll find in the clip: 1. A dollar buys 100 credits — about 100 chat messages. 2. The model picker mixes Anthropic and OpenAI, Opus and Fable 5 included — bigger ones may cost more than one credit (my balance currently say 88 credits left without any activity after the show) 3. Nico's take: most general users don't even know model switching is a thing, let alone why it matters. (clear value for AI-natives though.) 4. We fed it an Office Space meme and Fable 5 answered in character: "I have people skills!" 5. Nico's control test: feed GPT the same meme — same response, or is this one actually special? 6. GPT models did not engage in the role play. All three Claude models did. 7. What the heck does OpenAI GPT mean right next to GPT 5.6 Sol? 8. No Gemini in the picker — surprised us both. 9. Claude has a personality, GPT would rather just get the work done. Choose wisely. 10. One chat at a time — no running two side by side yet. Couldn't go back to previous chats after starting with 5 separate model test. Finished the unboxing with Sol. 11. "Can you set up the system for me?" Yes: audit, structure, network, workflows. 12. Voice-driven but not hands-free — still gotta click submit. 13. Setup audit done in 16.4 seconds: nine objects, five image uploads, three saved prompts — nothing else yet. 14. LinkedIn, Gmail, calendar all unconnected — kept cold on purpose, so the self-fill promise went untested. (Received email later in the day saying 10 years of LinkedIn posts had been brought in. They exist as objects you can click into...including LinkedIn urls!!! OMG I've dreamed of this day.) 15. "I just want you to do it for me" — it built an onboarding workspace, wrote a guide, filed it, and reported Google, LinkedIn, HubSpot and X still unconnected. 16. Its own words on the wall: "I can't click through third-party permission screens on your behalf." 17. What it built anyway: a real workspace — project, connected objects, tags, sharing. 18. Nico mentioned that a browser plugin exists; I never stumbled across it during unboxing so it did not get installed. 19. The model doesn't switch mid-chat, and one attempt hit "Something went wrong reaching the assistant." 20. Agents and background tasks are tucked behind the profile picture — should be front and center? 21. His line, exactly: "If it's not a Jarvis, then what are we doing? And this is really close." 22. Last thing we touched: the graph. A note attached to a LinkedIn node, but no relationship formed — the wish is watching it build that web itself. 23. To Dharmesh: We would love to unbox this with you in classic HubSpot product manager fashion! If not, we're going to keep unboxing it, so really no pressure 😁 #youspot #ainative #crm #valuefirst
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Dharmesh Shah liked thisDharmesh Shah liked thisSalesforce announced Claudeforce, and the obvious question for anyone who follows HubSpot and SFDC ecosystems is: Did HubSpot already do this? The answer is... largely, yes. HubSpot launched its Claude connector in July 2025, allowing users to bring HubSpot CRM data directly into Claude. By November 2025, the integration could create and update CRM records, log activities, and analyze engagement history, including emails, calls, meetings, tasks, and notes. The connector also respects HubSpot user permissions. Fast forward to August 2026, and Salesforce has announced Claudeforce. Its first major release, Salesforce in Claude, gives users access to Salesforce data and actions inside Claude, launching with 37 prebuilt sales skills for things like meeting preparation, deal health, and pipeline review. Salesforce says the open beta is expected in September. So, is Salesforce scrambling to catch up? I wouldn't go that far. Salesforce's approach is more deeply packaged around enterprise governance, prebuilt skills, and its broader AI infrastructure. But from a practical customer perspective, HubSpot had already identified something important over a year earlier: People don't necessarily want another AI assistant inside their CRM. They want their CRM data available inside the AI assistant they're already using. That's where I think HubSpot has been playing offense. HubSpot didn't wait to build the world's biggest proprietary AI ecosystem before connecting its CRM to Claude. It met users where they were already working and gave them access to their CRM context. Salesforce is now making a much larger strategic move with Anthropic, and Claudeforce could become significantly more sophisticated, particularly for large enterprise environments. But this announcement also raises an interesting question about market strategy. HubSpot continues to make its CRM easier to connect with the tools people actually want to use. Salesforce continues to build increasingly powerful infrastructure around the Salesforce ecosystem. Neither strategy is inherently wrong. But if you're trying to win market share from the other platform, I think HubSpot's strategy is easier to understand. Make the CRM easier to adopt. Make the data easier to access. Meet the customer where they already work. Salesforce's Claudeforce announcement is impressive. But it's also hard to ignore that HubSpot customers have been asking Claude questions about their CRM, updating records, and analyzing engagement history for a while now. Maybe Salesforce isn't scrambling. But HubSpot clearly wasn't waiting around.
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Dharmesh Shah liked thisDharmesh Shah liked thisICYMI: the HubSpot connector for Claude just got a MAJOR upgrade! A few things that are now possible that weren't before: - Sales reps can ask Claude for a view of active leads, follow-up priorities, and where each contact stands in their journey. - Marketers can create a landing page, check which campaign drove the most deals last quarter, and build the next one, all in a single conversation. - Customer service teams can ask Claude to pull the most common complaints this month, flag conversations with churn risk signals, or surface a full comms history before a call, across every connected channel at once. If you already have the connector set up, you'll just need to reconnect to access most of the new features (but it’s definitely worth doing). Full details in the comments.
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