For those who don't know, Freshworks is a company with various business products, which are easy to use. Freshdesk is a customer support software, freshchat is a customer messaging software, freshworks CRM is a CRM software.
The Story of Freshworks
Journey of the company from an idea to being one of the world's top Unicorns
A Thread
For those who don't know, Freshworks is a company with various business products, which are easy to use. Freshdesk is a customer support software, freshchat is a customer messaging software, freshworks CRM is a CRM software.
Freshservice is an IT service management software, freshcaller is a call center software, freshteam is a human resources software, freshping is a website monitoring tool, freshstatus is a communication software and freshsuccess is a customer success software
Girish Mathrubootham is the founder and the CEO of freshworks. Previously, he used to work at Zoho Corporation as a Vice President and Director of Product Management. He also worked as a Product Manager at AdventNet Inc. for a time period of 4 years and 2 months.
Shan Krishnasamy is also the Founder and CTO of the company Freshworks. He too used to work at Zoho Corporation as a technical architect. He pursued his bachelor's degree from TPGIT
The story starts in 2010, when Girish was reading an article on Hacker News, he found the prices rising to 300% and how the Zendesk users were unhappy about it.
He found a comment, where it was written that there's a big opening in the market for someone to come in and take all Zendesk customers. It was a slap on his face.
He knew that opportunity was sitting right in front of him and also he had knowledge about the transition taking place. Then, he thought he should do something in the customer support market delivered as SaaS.
The next few weeks turned out to be stressful. He was very excited about his new idea but didn't expose the fact. During that period freshdesk was expiring.
He spoke to his friend about the matter and he immediately agreed. They both resigned and freshworks came into existence with a team of six people
Girish didn't realize who will fund Freshworks as he had never met a venture capitalist in his life. A blog-writing contest run by Appsumo worked in Girish’s favour. It required one to write a blog on lean startup.
Girish wrote the Freshworks story, where expounded how a simple comment on Hacker News motivated him to resign from his comfortable, well-paying job and launch his own startup.
While he didn’t win the Appsumo contest but his blog which, he had posted on Hacker News went viral.
His product was not ready, yet he earned 300 sign ups. In his blogpost, Girish thanked many people like Naval Ravikant, founder of Angel List and Venture Hacks. Ravikant, in turn, offered to introduce Girish to investors in India.
Girish posted on Angel List on Ravikant’s advice. Anand Daniel of Accel Partners, who had seen the original blog post, also connected with Girish. Around the same time, the team launched the product.
Soon they on-boarded their first customer from Australia, who didn’t even speak to them, just became a customer after experiencing the product’s trial version.
They got six more customers from four different continents but none from India — making them an international tech company from day one
In 2011, Girish went on to participate in Microsoft BizSpark contest and won the first prize of $40,000. Freshworks was the finalist in another event called Unplugged.
These achievements helped the startup garner the investors’ interest. In the same year, he went on to raise a million dollar from Accel Partners.
Talking about the investors’ interest in Freshworks, Girish says, “In all our funding rounds, many people were interested in us. So, we could choose the best among them, which is why today we have Accel Partners, Sequoia Capital and Tiger Global backing us.”
Till now, the company has raised a total amount of $484 million in funding over the 9 funding rounds
The company broadened its corporate footprint by opening offices in Paris, Netherlands, France and Utrecht. It is on the heels of expanding the existing office in London. It also hosted Refresh19 London, this was the first-ever conference held there.
It attracted around 400 attendees. It also grew its presence outside Europe in APAC by partnering with OrangeOne Corporation which is a leading software provider in Japan. It has got offices in Hyderabad, Melbourne, etc.
With a customer base of 40,000+, the company is doing good. It raised revenue of Rs 17 crore during the years 2017 and 2018. The company even had higher employee benefit expenses. For certain period expenses was Rs 364 crores.
It was 61% greater than the last expense which was Rs 226 crores. Freshworks reported that the company has seen a profit of Rs 30 crores at the end of March 2019. It is currently the second unicorn valued at a billion dollars to report profits after the edtech company BYJU'S
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More from Atharva Kharbade
This is the story of a guy named Alex, who made $1 million in just 5 months by selling pixels of his website's homepage, when he was broke
16 years later, now he's the CEO of a company worth more than $2 billion
Thread ↓
1/
Year 2005
Alex has no money in his bank account, and just after 1 month his classes at a three-year university are gonna begin.
Being really determined to avoid student debt, he pulls an all nighter to brainstorm on a question, "How can I become a millionaire"
2/
Twenty minutes later, he had his answer: Sell one million pixels of advertising space on a website for $1 each.
"I thought, 'This is one of those crazy, quirky ideas, but it just might work.I've got nothing to lose.' " says Alex.
3/
Tew already had some experience with website design, so with a paltry $100, he quickly bought a domain name and some basic web hosting services and had his website, https://t.co/APDYhSjFTQ, up and running in two days.
4/
The concept was simple: Businesses could buy 10x10 or larger blocks of advertising space for a $1 per pixel and place their logos and links on his site.
16 years later, now he's the CEO of a company worth more than $2 billion
Thread ↓
1/
Year 2005
Alex has no money in his bank account, and just after 1 month his classes at a three-year university are gonna begin.
Being really determined to avoid student debt, he pulls an all nighter to brainstorm on a question, "How can I become a millionaire"
2/
Twenty minutes later, he had his answer: Sell one million pixels of advertising space on a website for $1 each.
"I thought, 'This is one of those crazy, quirky ideas, but it just might work.I've got nothing to lose.' " says Alex.
3/
Tew already had some experience with website design, so with a paltry $100, he quickly bought a domain name and some basic web hosting services and had his website, https://t.co/APDYhSjFTQ, up and running in two days.
4/
The concept was simple: Businesses could buy 10x10 or larger blocks of advertising space for a $1 per pixel and place their logos and links on his site.
It's been 2.5 years now since I'm on antidepressants and many people closely related to me still believe that depression is something that's "just in the head"
Our society needs to seriously rethink of mental health. Our society needs to be educated
3 years ago, during my JEE prep, when I went into clinical depression, no one could diagnose me of it. I had every symptom of it.
I literally got no help. This is not about me, I'm telling this from a general 3rd person view.
Any help that I got was wearing a ring made of horseshoe of a black horse of a specific breed. All the blame was slapped on 'Shani'
I was being taken to orphanages and slum areas so that I could see that my ailments are nothing in front of theirs.
Loads of toxic positivity
I lived in a PG hostel. I used to go to institute. Used to meet numerous people everyday. But not a single person could diagnose me of any medical condition. Not their fault, even I didn't what I'd been going through
Our society needs to seriously rethink of mental health. Our society needs to be educated
3 years ago, during my JEE prep, when I went into clinical depression, no one could diagnose me of it. I had every symptom of it.
I literally got no help. This is not about me, I'm telling this from a general 3rd person view.
Any help that I got was wearing a ring made of horseshoe of a black horse of a specific breed. All the blame was slapped on 'Shani'
I was being taken to orphanages and slum areas so that I could see that my ailments are nothing in front of theirs.
Loads of toxic positivity
Yes, \U0001d5fd\U0001d5fc\U0001d600\U0001d5f6\U0001d601\U0001d5f6\U0001d603\U0001d5f6\U0001d601\U0001d606 can be \U0001d601\U0001d5fc\U0001d605\U0001d5f6\U0001d5f0
— Atharva Kharbade (@athrvakhrbde) September 25, 2020
Before you let your ignorance kick in and make you laugh out loud, try seeing life with a new perspective
No BS
A thread...
Read this if you use sentences like "Good vibes only" or "Just be positive and stay happy"
I lived in a PG hostel. I used to go to institute. Used to meet numerous people everyday. But not a single person could diagnose me of any medical condition. Not their fault, even I didn't what I'd been going through
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Share files privately & secure, without a size limit or storing anything online.
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Your writing AI assistant.
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1. Scribe How
Screen recording extension that instantly converts any process into a guide.
93% less time spent documenting and sharing processes
🔗 https://t.co/dk5fk7zxmz
2. Writesonic
Your writing AI assistant.
The only AI writer in the world that can help you write SEO-optimized, long-form (up to 1500 words) blog posts, and articles in 15 seconds.
Explore Chatsonic - Like ChatGPT but with superpowers.
🔗 https://t.co/j8GX4jn07Q
3. Dotcomkings
Free resources to find gigs, side hustles, and platforms that can help you start a small business and make money online.
🔗 https://t.co/ceKDtabBBE
4. Quillbot
Using cutting-edge AI, QuillBot's paraphrasing tool assists millions of people in rewriting and improving any sentence, paragraph, or article.
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Some random interesting tidbits:
1) Zuck approves shutting down platform API access for Twitter's when Vine is released #competition
2) Facebook engineered ways to access user's call history w/o alerting users:
Team considered access to call history considered 'high PR risk' but 'growth team will charge ahead'. @Facebook created upgrade path to access data w/o subjecting users to Android permissions dialogue.
3) The above also confirms @kashhill and other's suspicion that call history was used to improve PYMK (People You May Know) suggestions and newsfeed rankings.
4) Docs also shed more light into @dseetharaman's story on @Facebook monitoring users' @Onavo VPN activity to determine what competitors to mimic or acquire in 2013.
https://t.co/PwiRIL3v9x