
How a simple comment on Hacker News made me quit my job and launch a startup - girishm
http://blog.freshdesk.com/the-freshdesk-story-how-a-simple-comment-on-h-0
======
wensing
One word of caution--do not, I repeat do NOT, focus on price ("we are
cheaper") as the main reason for people to use you. People who are "priced
out" of other solutions still need to buy in to whatever you are doing, beyond
price, or else you risk losing those customers to your competitors should your
competitors offer a cheaper/simple plan.

You're off to a great start (I just signed up for the beta), but make sure you
do the hard work of selecting your target customer ("who will we NOT serve?")
and don't preach price--preach superior experiences.

~~~
6ren
philosophical aside: a low-cost business model is a legitimate disruptive
strategy, which many startups follow with respect to physical businesses:
travel agents, newspapers, retail, maybe hotels etc. Lower costs enable
unmatchably lower prices. I agree with your practical advice; esp when applied
to co-disrupters, who also (should) have low costs.

~~~
wensing
Agreed, but if I were in those industries I would market the superior
experiences those low-costs allow us to deliver, with price merely as an
enabler (makes product a viable alternative to commodity/free option, or an
accessible entry into something previously reserved for kings).

Example #1: Zappos has low costs vs. bricks and mortar so they can afford to
do free shipping overnight.

Example #2: Southwest has low costs so they don't have to charge for bags.

Example #3: ING Direct has low costs so they offer a better interest rate.

~~~
feral
Counter-example:

Ryanair is a hugely successful airline business in Europe.

Its advertising and marketing strategy is about low price above all else, and
unashamedly so.

Look at their garish and ugly website: <http://www.ryanair.com/en> Count how
many times they use the word 'cheap'.

Read the wikipedia article, which mentions how badly they treat customers, and
their rapid growth and financial success:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryanair>

Sometimes low-cost, sold as low-cost, works well.

~~~
cookiecaper
See also WAL-MART. Wal-Mart doesn't purport to do anything better than its
competitors really, and I don't know how they could; they all sell the same
things, and so price is the only real competition (environment counts too, but
it's a tertiary point). Wal-Mart is now one of the biggest companies in the
whole wide world.

~~~
nitrogen
AIUI Walmart is successful because they mastered logistics.

~~~
uxp
Which is a key point, and probably the one wensing was originally trying to
make. If you can build a business with the intent of doing something like
logistics extremely well (which lowers your costs) then you can pass that on
to the consumer of your products. They don't give a rats ass about your
logistics, but they do care that whatever the blackbox your warehouse does
ends up shaving 20 cents off that bag of chips. WalMart still gets about the
same percentage of profit, but the overall cost of the product is less.

Lowering your price just to be cheaper than your competitors only cheapens the
market and doesn't add anything of value to the product. You will quickly
learn why everyone else keeps their margin up higher than yours when you can't
expand due to lack of funds, or you have to cut something else out to keep in
business.

------
chime
Zoho is most probably the best known tech startup from India that isn't in the
typical call-center or medical transcription business. As key Zoho employees
go on to build in their own companies, this could bring SV/YC culture in India
where success does not mean finding a big check-writer from US but rather
building products that users from around the world can use and buy. Keep up
the good work FreshDesk.

~~~
random42
Slideshare also started its development office in India first. Its as
product-y as it gets.

------
guylhem
Beautiful story. The way you listed to the market, built the right product in
the right moment - just perfect.

One think caught my eye: $160 for your office space?? From what I've seen on
<http://blog.freshdesk.com/freshdesk-gets-a-fresh-office> it looks very
decent. Your burn rate is also quite good.

How easy is it for a non indian to start a company in India?

~~~
elai
How about BC Canada? It's west coast, and tech companies get a lot of
corporate tax breaks, and canadian immigration isn't as horrible as US.

~~~
spitfire
What tax breaks do we get in BC? I didn't know of any except for things like
biotech, greentech, etc.

------
mindcrime
That is one awesome story, congrats! I was especially struck by some of the
stuff you said about product/market fit. To me, this bit is pure gold:

 _We started engaging with our prospects on what they were currently using and
what problems they were facing. In many cases people were telling us clearly
what they really wanted to see in their customer support software._

Yeah, that's the key, right? Actually engaging with the customers and finding
out what problem they're really trying to solve. This cuts to the core of
sgblank's Customer Development stuff and the whole Lean Startup movement.

 _We were surprised to see that a lot of what customers wanted were their core
problems solved and not some fancy features of supporting customers from their
Facebook wall or converting tweets into customer support tickets. While we
understand that these are definitely the way of the future, many many
customers do not need this today._

Heh, perfect example of how us techies can get caught upin the fancy, glitzy,
"cool" stuff and maybe not realize that customers are not so concerned about
that, as they are getting work done. Really, really good reminder to focus on
the customer's needs!

 _Another important learning for us was that customers did not want to be
dealing with separate invoices for their helpdesk, their contact management
software, for their customer feedback forums and customer satisfaction
surveys. The SMB customer wants one invoice and as much functionality as
possible in the customer relationship management solution._

That's gold too... It reminds me that sometimes the "problem" isn't so much a
technical problem, as a structural problem with the existing business
arrangements. Wanting one invoice instead of 3 or 4 is a wonderful example of
a problem an entrepreneur can solve, and it doesn't have anything to do with
product features or technology. Reading this is like having a glass of cold
water thrown in your face (well, for _some_ of us!)

 _We also identified underserved market segments (companies with multi-brand
support requirements) and segments which were getting priced out because the
current solutions were expensive. So we reprioritized our feature set to what
we thought is the ideal product/market fit for us. This means that things like
Twitter and Facebook integration can wait. But things like multiple support
emails or support for SLAs and Business hours are in._

Very inspiring. Thanks for sharing such details about your experience. I think
a lot of people can learn something useful from your experience. You've
certainly given me some thoughts to chew on.

------
luckystrike

      Now we have a team of six people - (3 developers, 1 UI/UX designer, 
      1 QA / Customer support engineer and me as - the Product Manager / CEO)
    

It would be great if you could throw some light on how you went about building
this team and your hiring process. In my experience, it ain't easy here in
India to find quality talent willing to work in an early stage startup whose
product is still not out in the market.

Did they come through the connections made during your Zoho stint?

All the best for this venture!

~~~
girishm
Yes. That is one advantage that I had working at Zoho for nine years. Everyone
in the team has worked with me at zoho. 3 of the 6 people had worked with me
at Zoho and had moved on to other companies. They came back to work for
Freshdesk as they believed in the ability of the team to ship products.

~~~
luckystrike
Great. I think it also helps that you were at a senior position in Zoho. Apart
from the visibility and a large network, it probably makes it a little more
convincing for people who are on the fence when it comes to joining such a
venture.

------
credo
Congratulations on the launch (and welcome to HN, since I see that your
account is just 3 hours old :)

That said, your post suggests that you acquired domain knowledge at Zendesk,
then decided to use that knowledge to immediately and directly compete with
Zendesk with _price_ as your only differentiatior.

I suspect that the folks at Zendesk aren't going to sue you on any non-compete
or trade-secret agreements, but I'm curious to know if you think that your
competition raises any ethical concerns or not.

 _[edit] Thanks for the correction, Aditya and apologies Girish for reading
the post too fast and confusing Zoho with Zendesk_

~~~
callmeed
I also wonder about using the word "desk" in the name of a competing product.

~~~
patio11
Given that the category is called "help desk software", ZenDesk has a lock on
"desk" like I have a lock on "bingo"

~~~
callmeed
Good point.

------
retube
It's a great post. But I'm posting here to gripe: why oh why do so many blogs
never have a direct link to their business front page? It's always to the blog
front page. You see a blog article posted, interesting read, the next thing
you want to do is visit the front page. grrrr.

~~~
bhaile
Interesting you say that as that is one of my gripes about blogs on company
websites.

------
cpeterso
Great focus on MVP and a lean team. Designing a _usable_ service for
outsourced "enterprisey" software is challenging because your _customers_ (a
company's HR dept, in this case?) are not your _users_ (support desk employees
and the company's own customers). These three sets of people will all have
different feature requirements.

------
OmarIsmail
I have to say that your post on how to get a corporation in the US is
fantastic. I'm sure there's a lot of information out there, and it's something
many people have done before, but the fact that you laid it out extremely
clearly and gave very relevant contact information is amazing. Really great
stuff.

~~~
joelhaasnoot
Definitely good information to have. Lots of services and startups, especially
those for payments, phones or other geographically constrained industries
(which really need a good startup to disrupt them), never make it outside the
US. However, from the comments I gather you need some sort of US SSN to be
able to get the Braintree account? Any other "hickups" to non-US citizens? I
ask because one day that might be the best solution for what I work on and
expanding to the US.

------
vibhavs
The name is a little too close to ZenDesk, isn't it? Especially since the two
companies are in the same market.

~~~
vibhavs
Why downvote? I feel the comparison is inevitable.

------
sushilchoudhari
Awesome story Girish, very inspiring and down to earth!Loved the simplicity
and the way you approached product market fit! We as tecchies more often than
not, deprioritize the part of finding out what the customer really wants.
Thanks for sharing and Good Luck!

------
evancaine
Your design looks great. You mentioned that getmefast did it and I had a look
at their portfolio which isn't as strong in my opinion as your design and UI.
Did you UI designer have to change what they came up with?

------
khsdf7
Frankly, this isn't very interesting. Some guy gets inspired to launch a
startup, grows a company beyond the bare minimum, and we are supposed to
swoon?

Come back when you have 150 employees and the competition is begging for
mercy. Then sing to us about the blood sweat and tears.

People get inspired to launch startups all the time, and some of them become
great businesses. Some of them fail miserably. Lets all do ourselves a favor
and not praise effort before it bears fruit.

------
mdolon
Pretty inspiring, though I hope you add a live demo to your main site (maybe
to handle support? :). I know as a potential customer, I'm hesitant to pay for
anything I haven't seen and interacted with.

~~~
girishm
We have a live version in private beta. I plan to post it to HN for feedback
as soon as we are ready for the public launch.

------
kirpekar
Congratulations and nice write-up!

Can I ask how the startup is doing financially?

~~~
girishm
We are in private beta so the money is yet to flow in:)

------
psyren
Doing this right now, have just submitted for YCS2011 :-)

------
themonk
Congrats Girish.

Unrelated question: as of now your post is number one on hacker news, would
you like to share what does it mean in term of traffic on your blog?

------
eaxitect
I've found it very inspirational and informative...

------
maheshs
Some UI issue while mouse over SSL on Firefox 4 <http://imgur.com/yktw8>

~~~
heyitsnick
Same in chrome 10 windows 7

~~~
girishm
Thanks for letting us know. Will fix it soon.

------
dedward
Good Luck..... I guess this sort of explains what's up with AdventNet and it's
quirks too... all the good people left?

~~~
girishm
Definitely no. Zoho(AdventNet) was the best thing that happened to me in my
(work) life. It's an amazing company with over 1200 employees with very smart
engineers and a kick-ass product culture. I owe everything that I learned in
Product Management to AdventNet. It's a huge playground for people who are not
afraid to try new things. I used to tell my team members that working in Zoho
is like getting an MBA on how to build a Product Business.

------
stretchwithme
Glad to hear it. A great example of how sharing information, once again, helps
people to take bold action.

------
daimyoyo
Great post. Reading HN is better motivation than any cheesy book on the
market. I love HN. :)

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roadnottaken
great story. FYI - the mouse-overs for the 'Premium' price plan are broken in
both Chrome and Firefox for me (Win7). they get cut off at the edge of the
white-border.

------
anand_21
thanks for putting a inspirational example for Indian startups

------
mtogo
Saw the word "cloud", scrolled down, yep-- business guy.

------
MatthewPhillips
Congratulations! Makes me want to do the same thing.

------
gopi
Very inspiring...Goodluck Girish!

------
Straubiz
awesome story! Very inspiring

------
victorantos
is it worth it?

------
Candlemoat
You lost me when you said you liked the idea of 99designs.

------
Nugem
The word STARTUP is starting to SUCK the life out of me. It is now as bad as
"epic" and "fail" with the word being used in 1/8th of every headline on HN.
THANKS!!!!!!

~~~
mtogo
You are on a forum about startups.

