Jennifer Taylor, a director at Freshworks Inc (NASDAQ:FRSH), executed a sale of 7,035 shares in the company on February 12, 2024, according to a recent SEC Filing.

Director Jennifer Taylor Sells 7,035 Shares of Freshworks Inc (FRSH)

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Freshworks designs ridiculously easy-to-use software for businesses of all sizes, making it effortless for them to delight their employees and their customers. Affordable, quick to implement and designed for the end user, more than 50,000 companies worldwide use Freshworks software-as-a-service to enable a better customer experience (CX, CRM) and employee experience (ITSM, HRSM).

Headquartered in San Mateo, California, Freshworks has a dedicated team operating from 13 global locations to serve customers, including Bridgestone, Chargebee, DeliveryHero, ITV, Klarna, Multichoice, OfficeMax, TaylorMade and Vice Media.

Freshworks

Freshworks (formerly Freshdesk) has long been the leading light in India’s SaaS industry. It was India’s first SaaS unicorn, not only achieving massive success but also ushering in a second wave of new SaaS firms, while on their path to becoming India’s SaaS superpower. Since last year, the Indian software-as-a-service (SaaS) sector has been developing at a breakneck pace, but Freshworks’ NASDAQ public offering has pushed things to the next level. The company, which creates customer engagement software for businesses, was valued at after its stock opened 21% higher than its initial offering price of $36 per share. $12.2 billion How It All Started? Freshworks, which was founded in 2010 by current Chief Executive Officer Girish Mathrubootham ( ) and current Chief Technology Officer Shan Krishnamasy ( ), delivers business software to 50,000 clients in over 140 countries. Freshworks provides 11+ products as well as an AI-powered software-as-a-service platform to improve customer experiences, increase staff efficiency, and enable a developer and partner ecosystem. @mrgirish @shankrishna Freshworks began with a single product, Freshdesk, aimed at the customer support software industry. “We wanted to make a platform that combined assistance with businesses’ social networks,” says Ramesh Ravishankar, Freshworks’ Senior Director of Marketing. “For instance, Freshdesk allows clients to connect Facebook pages and Twitter accounts into their helpdesk and manages them from there.” It also enables them to communicate with consumers via WhatsApp to address issues more swiftly.” More traditional customer care capabilities like live chat and the conversion of support communications into trackable tickets that a helpdesk can handle are complemented by these functionalities. Freshservice, a cloud-based IT service-desk software that assists with tickets submitted through email, a self-service portal, phone, chat, or in-person, was introduced in 2014. Freshworks became the umbrella name for current and new goods two years later after the creators introduced Freshsales. Freshworks’ product suite is positioned as offering marketing, support, and sales for the whole customer experience, from acquisition through relationship termination. It provides cloud-based software to organizations with up to 5,000 workers and also utilizes software-as-a-service products to manage its operations. Freshworks conducts up to 4,000 marketing and advertising initiatives each year, accounting for around 70% of the company’s income. This is also reflected in its recurring revenue growth: ( ) Image Credits Freshworks Strategy For Success Freshdesk was the company’s first customer service software. Freshservice (2014), Freshsales (2016), Freshteam (2017), and now a comprehensive suite of enterprise solutions that capture the whole customer life cycle have all been released. Let’s take a look at the success journey of Freshworks. (A) Creating A Blueprint For The Red Ocean Market All of these services — customer service, marketing automation, IT support, and so on — have significant markets on their own. Girish focused on how to identify red ocean markets and develop a strategy that performs effectively in them. In blue ocean markets, the firm would need a specialized sales staff to educate clients on why they need the product, but in red ocean markets, there is already a defined market that does not require discovery but does require significant effort and money to stand out. There were approximately 600 help desk products on the market when Freshdesk launched, creating a deep red ocean industry. Freshdesk was also able to triumph thanks to an easy-to-use product, as well as solid execution and a pleasing appearance. This helped its traffic grow and they have pretty much sustained it: ( ) Image Credits (B) Execution That Outperforms The Competition ( ) Image Credits Freshworks went from $1 million in ARR to $100 million in ARR in only five years, a pace of growth that equals that of the greatest SaaS businesses throughout the world, as seen in the graph above. To get to this point, it needed some unusual methods as well. To fight against established companies like Zendesk and Salesforce, Freshworks generated online content and used guerrilla marketing methods. Freshworks was mentioned among well-known firms like Zendesk as part of the RipoffOrNot campaign. The Zendesk CEO labeled Freshdesk a rip-off on Twitter (because of the word ‘desk’ in both titles). Instead of retaliating on Twitter, Freshdesk launched the RipoffOrNot campaign, which proudly displayed Zendesk’s CEO’s accusation and encouraged users to make up their minds. Freshdesk received PR alongside Zendesk as a result of this, thus putting it on the same level as the industry leader, a clever method of profiting on a competitor’s insult. Freshworks gatecrashed Dreamforce, Salesforce’s largest customer event, in 2018 by taking to the sky with a #Failsforce blimp that circled Salesforce Tower throughout the week-long event. The goal was to persuade consumers not to pay for bloated software such as Salesforce. Girish describes how Freshworks focuses on online client acquisition and how this has aided the company’s worldwide expansion using local talent. Freshworks hasn’t been bashful about promoting itself as the leading help desk provider. The first result for Zendesk versus Freshdesk is “Freshdesk Vs The Others — See Who’s The #1 Helpdesk Tool.” (C) Creating Solutions For Disadvantaged SMBs In The Long Run Freshworks was able to acquire market share by catering to the long tail of small businesses, not just in India but throughout the world. Though the helpdesk industry was fiercely competitive, the SMB market was a blue ocean, with existing solutions that were either too difficult or too expensive for small businesses to use. Instead of elephant hunting (big enterprises), which the global players were concentrating on, Girish refers to it as deer/rabbit hunting. SMBs account for half of the company’s revenue, with the remainder coming from mid-market and corporate customers. It is well reflected in how well it collaborates with other apps to create an ecosystem: ( ) Image Credits Freshworks’ easy-to-navigate website, straightforward pricing, intuitive design, and ease of configuration, all of which are important for any product to find acceptance by SMBs, also helped it acquire traction. To summarize, Freshworks has risen to the top for three reasons: Freshworks picked a booming market and was able to outperform the competition in terms of product, execution, and design. Taking advantage of the situation: Freshworks established its unique approach to target the long tail of SMBs, rather than following the worldwide SaaS model of sales-driven development. Taking advantage of their assets: Early on in its journey, by distinguishing itself and generating noise through creative PR methods, it was able to place itself among market leaders such as Zendesk and Salesforce. Getting a chance to play in the major leagues: Wrap Up Freshworks wanted to expand internationally, which entailed learning about market dynamics, category landscapes, and geographic peculiarities before entering a new country or area and executing its playbook flawlessly in each region it entered. In 2019, Freshworks became the first Indian SaaS business to reach a billion-dollar value. In 2021, Freshworks prepared for an initial public offering (IPO) with pre-IPO funding round, meant to establish the company’s worth and establish a benchmark for how much Freshworks could be valued at the IPO. And finally, on September 22, 2021, the shares began trading on the NASDAQ Global Select Market under the symbol “FRSH”. The initial IPO price was set at $36 dollars per share, easily achieving Unicorn status and claiming the title as the first Indian SaaS company to not only reach a billion-dollar valuation, but also, IPO.

Freshworks' Journey to India’s First SaaS IPO: A Deep-Dive

Before getting into this growth story, I’d like to give a shoutout to Chris Von Wilpert from Sumo for inspiring me to write this case study. I’m a big fan of growth stories; probably you’re too. Whenever I come across such articles, I directly save it to my reading list on Pocket. It’s so amazing to learn the strategies, tools, and know the minds behind successful organisations. However, something I hate is people gauging companies by the funding they’ve received or the number of employees (that’s lame), remember Instagram when they got acquired? I feel that’s the worst way to judge a company. Zoho, for example, has raised 0$ in funding but still But being honest, we’ve all been guilty of doing this. You discover the real story only when you talk to the employees, especially the founding team. made $450M+ revenue in 2019. Why no Indian SaaS growth stories? There’s one question that I’m dying to ask the SaaS community – Why don’t we get to read Indian SaaS stories so much as funding news. To change that today, I’ll share the story of Freshworks and highlight the marketing strategies they’ve used to become one of the largest SaaS startups in India. While Freshworks is a popular name across the tech industry, let us start by uncovering the company’s history first. History of Freshworks was started in 2010 by Girish Mathrubootham (an ex Zoho employee). Their first product was Freshdesk, a self-service solution for customer support. The tool turned out to be a great success. Within two years of existence, they managed to Freshworks (previously Freshdesk) acquire more than 10k+ customers. As per Inc42, the company has generated over 404 INR crores (about $54 mn) in FY19. Out of which, 30 CR is profit which is 76% more than FY18. The company is currently valued at around 3.5$ bn and . This makes Freshworks one of India’s largest software startups, along with Zoho. Overall they cater to over 150,000 businesses, including the likes of Honda, Cisco, and Toshiba. ranks 40th in Forbes Cloud 100 list Why it’s so interesting to learn the growth of Freshworks? I know this question would be looming over your head – “ “. Why Freshworks? Apart from being a fanboy, I was very interested in understanding their marketing strategies. Most importantly, how they were able to attract 1.5 million monthly visitors to their website. Just for comparison sake, Chargebee attracts 708k visitors/pm, Kissflow 357k visitors/pm, and BrowserStack 838k visitors/pm. But does it matter? Aren’t these just vanity metrics? But in my opinion, it’s more than just traffic numbers; it’s about other aspects like – What strategies are they using to drive a million website visitors monthly?What are they doing differently to compete with already established players like Zendesk and Salesforce? What’s their content strategy owing they have more than 12 products in their suite? Does that give them an advantage? This article aims to answers (hopefully) all the questions above and more. In this article, I’ll throw light on some of their marketing strategies that fuel their growth every month. This below research is considering their journey till date. So let’s dive right in : 1. Failsforce campaign (the perfect example of guerilla marketing) Salesforce is probably one of the leaders when it comes to cloud CRM. They have dominated the space for years, and they continue to do it, especially the enterprise market. They are also . I know Freshsales is nowhere near Salesforce in terms of features, but you get the point right. Freshworks’ biggest competitors (directly competing with Freshsales) You might have seen SaaS rivalries on Twitter, but on 25 Sep 2018, Freshworks took it to another level. On the day of Dreamforce, SalesForce’s largest customer event, they gatecrashed and flew a blimp (saying #failsforce). The main idea was to tell people, stop paying for bloated software like Salesforce. People quickly took this to Twitter, and within a few hours, it resulted in hundreds of tweets and media coverage. They got featured by publications like . Forbes, Adweek, and Techcrunch <iframe width= height= src= frameborder= allow= allowfullscreen> "560" "315" "https://www.youtube.com/embed/_fmXl-Aj5LQ" "0" "accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" </ > iframe After the campaign’s success, they created a separate website to promote the campaign (they call it “Failsforce”). Since then, it has become a tradition now. They run the campaign every year during Dreamforce. Last Failsforce, they did a 2 hour live stream hosted by Parker Trewin from Freshworks and Nathan Latka. Freshworks is not alone, even Zoho had gatecrashed the Dreamforce before with . pedicabs and food-trucks that advertised their push into enterprise software I don’t have the exact numbers, but I cannot imagine a better way of introducing your brand than flying a blimp on the day of your competitor’s biggest event. Kudos to the whole Freshworks team for pulling this off. It certainly requires great courage. #2. Influencer Marketing Influencer Marketing is the new buzzword across marketers. Everybody wants to include it in their funnel. According to a report by BigCommerce, “ .” Nearly two-thirds of marketers increased their spending on influencer marketing 2019 That’s huge. Webinars Webinars have been a crucial part of Freshwork’s brand awareness strategies. This is especially true for Freshsales and Freshcaller. For Freshales alone they have conducted over 30+ webinars with industry experts like Rand Fishkin (founder of Moz), Patrick Campbell (CEO of ProfitWell), and Greg Holmes (Head of Sales, Zoom). Apart from Freshsales, there were over 32 Webinars conducted in 2018 alone. Although I haven’t attended any of their webinars, it’s clear that they have an effective influencer marketing strategy in place. These has been crucial in building them a strong position globally. Online Events are the new webinars. Most large SaaS companies are trying to leverage it for lead generation. Virtual summits Freshworks have hosted quite a few virtual summits in the past. The popular ones being the and the . I closely followed the High-Velocity Sales summit and found the sessions very insightful. High-Velocity Sales Summit Customer First Event The promotion strategy used by them was something that caught my eye. Almost all the speakers posted a video on LinkedIn inviting people to catch them speaking. Even Freshworks’ employees were very creative in promoting the event. The last event was the . Unlike other events, this was offline. It was conducted in 11 cities within 31 days. They brought many famous industry experts to speak around the latest trends in Customer Support, ITSM, and Sales. Experience Roadshow #3. Podcast With every company tapping into podcasts, Freshworks also jumped on the bandwagon in 2017. They host “ “, There are over 43 episodes published now. Mind the Gap a podcast on growth, marketing, and customer experience. It is a mix of brand stories and interviews. Ahrefs recently posted a case study covering the lessons they learnt after spending . It’s very interesting. But TL;DR podcasts are not effective for direct lead generation. 51,975$ dollar on Podcast ads To understand more I connected with Abishek who is responsible for starting it and also the host. Here’s what he had to say – Over 60% of listeners are from the US. We started the podcast to tap on the SMB segment, and the funding news helped us get the perfect start. We created two podcasts around our funding, one globally and one in India. One thing about podcasts is that it is a long haul. We started seeing traction only after 4-5 months. As with any piece of content, we equally divide efforts into creating content and promotion. Great content with no listeners is of no value. #4. Competitor comparison pages Let me ask you a question. What do you do before buying a product? Ideally, you’d stack it up with the competition to find which one is the better choice for you. Right? When you talk about buying a business tool, making the decision is even more difficult. Apart from comparison, you’ll also need to convince multiple stakeholders in your team. To make it easy for customers to make a choice , they published multiple comparison pages for each of their products. For example, their support product, Freshdesk, they  compared it with – - Zendesk - Salesforce desk - Microsoft Dynamics 360 You can use these pages in multiple ways, for example – 1. Running competitor Adword ads campaigns 2. Attracting visitors searching for terms like “Zendesk Alternatives” 3. Converting customers on the brink of buying their product Overall it is a great strategy that every SaaS company should publish on their website. #5. Content Marketing and SEO strategies Freshworks have been very consistent in producing high-quality content across their products. The content topics include They also focus on creating collaterals like Infographics, E-books, and video case studies consistently for lead generation and sales enablement. informational posts, startup tips, book reviews and exhaustive guides. After speaking to multiple marketers regarding the content strategy, here’s what I understood – KEY TAKEWAYS 1. Since they were late entrants to every market the first step was to understand their competitor’s successful content. 2. Their content pipeline was usually a mix of these pieces and few keeping their product roadmap in mind. 3. Every member of their marketing team were responsible to contribute content. 4. For promoting the article they worked on creating backlinks, inter-linking, placing CTAs on the blogs, and pushing the article on social media. 5. To capture blog subscribers they used exit-intent pop-ups with downloadables as content upgrade. This was very effective for growing their email subscribers. To engage with them, they sends out a weekly newsletter with the latest posts. #6. Leveraging the power of free tools Developing free tools to drive traffic and generate new leads is not something new. Companies have been doing it for years. CoSchedule’s Headline Analyser and Hubspot’s Signature Template Generator are great examples. The sole purpose of these tools is to attract more traffic, generate links and also to increase leads. Freshworks also created free tools like to fuel their traffic. To take a closer look at their strategy, I’ve taken the example of Freshping. Freshping and Freshstatus Freshping is a website monitoring tool. You just need to enter the URL you want to monitor, and they’ll send you an email when it goes down. In addition to this, you get access to a dashboard where you track the uptime of the website. Once you sign up for the product, you’ll exactly understand the reason they’ve created it for – push their paid products. It starts right from the email verification email 😮. Once you log on to their product, there’s a separate tab “Explore” that showcases their different products. While Freshping might be a dead-simple idea, it has created quite the buzz for Freshworks. The product has been launched thrice on Product Hunt and here are some stats – – The first launch got them over 1k+ upvotes, and they were the 2nd product of the day. – The second launch got them over 500+ upvotes. Freshping Freshping 2.0 So did these products just create buzz on social media and communities? No, it drives them organic traffic too. According to Ahrefs, Freshping alone brings them close to 6K organic traffic monthly. It ranks for keywords like “isitdown” which has over 45,000 monthly search volume. This tool alone has helped them to attract links from That’s huge. over 500+ referring domains. Upon a bit of digging, I found that a lot of links are from the Freshping’s badge they offer once you sign up. Smart indeed. That’s it from my side. In case I’ve missed something, please put it down in the comments. What’s next? I hope you enjoyed reading the article. I feel that Freshworks is a great company to follow, especially for marketers. Their out of the box marketing strategies have been crucial for their growth and inspiring other Indian SaaS companies. Want to read more articles like these? Go to - https://contentzeal.com/category/growth-story/

Case Study: 6 Growth Tactics that Turned Freshworks into SaaS Unicorn

Two weeks back, Zoho Corporation sued Freshworks for copying its trade secrets. I wrote a report on comparing the two businesses during my MBA as part of a course requirement. In the wake of recent developments, I believe it will be an interesting read: attaching below, a version of the essay. Disclaimer: I worked at Freshworks for fourteen months before pursuing MBA The Indian software industry used to be known for its offshore service operations of companies in the West. During the last few years, the trend has been changing. Two companies are building software products to the world from the capital of the southern state of Tamilnadu. and , are very similar companies, in their business strategy and problem-solving approach. They differ in aspirations and vision. Freshworks Zoho Freshworks is a relatively new age internet start-up focussed on aggressive growth. It engages in guerrilla marketing, often going head to head with one of the industry leaders like SalesForce, which is more than ten times its size. Zoho portrays itself as a neighbourhood company from southern Tamilnadu with big ideas and empathy for small businesses. This essay studies the companies from a strategic perspective, compares their choices and attempts to identify their essence. In the last few decades, India has become a global powerhouse of the IT services industry. Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, Cognizant and Accenture recruit in large numbers from the engineering colleges around the country. They take advantage of the prevalent labour arbitrage, offer software services for Fortune X companies in the West. The Indian economy has prospered due to the growth of the software services industry. Tata Consultancy Services has an amassing 8.37 trillion INR in market capitalization as of June 2019, which is a little higher than 8.36 trillion INR market capitalization of Reliance Industries. The explosion of data coupled with the availability of high-power computing enabled businesses to move to the Cloud. Migration to Cloud is a painstaking process for engineers in a company; therefore, they were outsourced to eastern countries like India. Indian software service companies, during its long affiliation with western clients, developed expertise in Cloud computing. It forms the base for software as a service (SaaS) products. Traditional software products came with licence or purchase options often priced at exorbitant rates. Office essential software was purchased at negotiated terms, but during the brink of the millennium, things changed. The dotcom bubble period saw many businesses opening in silicon-valley without a strong vision or knowledge. Later, when the bubble was burst, only a few, invested firms survived. Companies started after the dotcom bust emphasized on investing in their productivity tools. As the cost of acquiring a new customer started rising, companies began listening to their customers. A new category of products called Customer Relationship Management (CRM) was born. CRM consists of all the steps in the sales cycle from lead generation, approaching a client, documenting the interactions, follow-up and eventually closing the account. Sales associates who work with multiple clients were facing problems of keeping track of their customer interactions, and often these details were handled in excel sheets. Salesforce, the world’s leading SaaS player today, started developing and selling CRM software that is hosted on the Cloud. Businesses need not have dedicated servers, network monitors in their office space. The property can be used to grow their business. This revolutionary idea in Cloud computing gave birth to the SaaS marketplace. While IT services in India were still growing in the early 1990s, a young Princeton PhD Sridhar Vembu started his career at Qualcomm in the United States. He says that . He started AdventNet Inc headquartered in Chennai, Tamilnadu in 1996. AdeventNet started selling software for telecom operators in the Bay Area. AdventNet Inc was later renamed after its successful CRM product, Zoho, as Zoho Corporation. he could not find a single product in the US that was manufactured in India, while products from China, Taiwan were common Girish Mathrubootham, a product manager at Zoho Corporation, faced a problem with his . He approached the shipping company’s customer service and months went by without any viable solution. He realized that their customer service software was ancient and broken. Later on the hackernews website, he saw frustrated comments from customers of the software about its high price. He quit his job at Zoho and started developing Freshdesk, a support desk software. Freshdesk, launched in 2010, was rebranded into Freshworks in 2017 after adding an array of SaaS products to its portfolio. television getting broken in transit in 2009 Freshworks has raised $400 million and has surpassed $200 million in annual recurring revenue. After the advent of Cloud computing, starting a business became very easy. Registering an office space and running the company from the comfort of the laptop became very common. However, only a handful of companies become big. Everyday tools that businesses need vary based on their scale of operations and the complexity of the sector. Traditional SaaS companies develop the software by understanding the problem of big enterprises—the software becomes heavy, comes with many features, and eventually, the price is very high. A small business might not need many of these features. For example, let us assume a help desk software is required for a company operating on the scale of Amazon. The software should be able to withstand the complexities of a global e-commerce giant. It will need support to be available in hundreds of languages, process queries from tens of channels. Whereas, a small boutique shop in the corner street, running their business through a Facebook page might not need the sophisticated features of the support software used by Amazon. They would also not be able to afford it. This is where Zoho and Freshworks operate - focusing on small and medium scale businesses who seek affordable software to run their business hassle-free. IT service management (ITSM) is another problem faced by companies of small and medium-size. As the companies grow, they accumulate assets in the form of laptops, monitors and other accessories. They should be protected and audited frequently for any mishap or misuse. ITSM software helps them manage assets in the company. Affordability issues can be viewed in two ways. Firstly, the high price paid to the software that is financially not viable to most businesses. Secondly, the licensing deal. Many companies work on very thin , and they cannot afford to pay for licensing fees for a lifetime. Monthly, yearly flexible subscription plans will benefit these companies. and offer them a free trial for the first month. The free trial helps the customers to audit the software for their needs and if they deem fit, proceed to purchase. bottom-line Zoho Freshworks : Editor's Note On Freshworks' request, we'd like to clarify that they offer a 14-day trial. Prof. Saral Mukherjee says, “strategy is all about closing doors”. At any moment, a business will face multiple opportunities to choose. The strategy of the company depends on the occasions they say no to—hence closed doors. Let us analyze the strategy of the two firms. Both Freshworks and Zoho are privately owned companies. Zoho was bootstrapped from Sridhar Vembu’s own money, and he has refused to take any investor funding. He says that investor funding will force the company to focus on high growth, and the company might lose focus on its values and objectives. He further says, “Beyond money, there is also a mission and purpose in life.” Zoho is a family owned business that has not prioritised aggressive growth. Yet, three of the five billionaires (in dollar terms) from Tamil Nadu are namely Sridhar Vembu, Sekar Vembu and Radha Vembu. Freshworks is a VC friendly company. Accel Partners, Tiger Global, CapitalG and Sequoia are some of the investors in Freshworks. The focus of Freshworks is to grow and grow faster. The company has delivered 61% average annual growth over the years. Zoho has said no to the conventional marketing techniques. It has positioned itself as a company that brings out products from rural Tamilnadu and Andhra Pradesh. shows Sridhar Vembu walking in the paddy fields of Tenkasi. He talks about how a world-class software product is made in the fields of southern-rural Tamilnadu. , aired during the GST rollout, discusses the Zoho software that integrates the GST feature into the auditing module. Sridhar Vembu localizes his positioning. An Advertisement seen recently Another Zoho ad Freshworks is an aspirational company. Even though they started their relationship with small business customers, they wanted to grow big. Salesforce, one of the market leaders of the SaaS industry, conducts a conference every year called Dreamforce in San Francisco, California. . Last year, . Freshworks’ positioning is its user interface and affordability. It targets customers who are annoyed with high priced, less user-friendly products. Freshworks advertises its products on the shuttle buses running between the conference venue and train stations it went a step further to trend #FailsForce in a blimp around the conference venue #Failsforce campaign. Credits: Bizjournals Zoho primarily drives its recruitment through campus and hires at entry-level. . Engineering students in Chennai look up at Zoho as the place to start their career. The attrition rate of Zoho is high as SaaS companies are coming up in the urban part of Chennai with competitive salaries. Around 20% of the employees come via Zoho University route Freshworks founder Girish Mathrubootham studied at SASTRA University. More than half of the workforce in Freshworks are SASTRA alumnus. Freshworks is strategically a poster brand for aspiring software engineers in Chennai. Amazon, Cisco and Paypal are the only sizable multinational companies in the city. Freshworks, which has been enjoying the soft spot from the press, is the place to be for Chennai software engineers. Freshworks also poaches talent from Zoho corporation and top technology companies. Girish Mathrubootham and his co-founder Shan Krishnasamy were Zoho employees. Spotting  ex-Googlers, Amazonians is very common in Freshworks office. Everyone in Zoho joins with the position ‘Member Technical Staff’. All the managers start with ‘Member Leadership Staff’ designation. The promoted ones get to be Team Leaders. All Team Leaders report to one of Sridhar, Sekar, Manikandan or Radha Vembu. Zoho has a flat hierarchy. CEO Sridhar Vembu sits with other engineers in an open workspace. Sridhar Vembu at his desk in Zoho Office. Credits: Tech in Asia Freshworks follow traditional multilevel reporting system which ranges from an entry-level software engineer, business development executive, customer support executive to CxOs who report to CEO Girish Mathrubootham. Variety is a key area where both companies differ. Freshworks, initially named the same as its first product Freshdesk, at the time of writing the essay, . Over half of them were launched within the last two years. Freshworks focuses on building capability on its core product Freshdesk and  expanding it to the other products in the portfolio. For example, help desk software such as Freshdesk has incidents reported as tickets. A support agent will be assigned a ticket with a Service Level Agreement. Once it is resolved, feedback is taken from the customer to improve their experience. Freshservice, ITSM tool treats all the service incidents as tickets with IT experts as agents. Freshsales, CRM software operates all the prospects as a ticket, sales representatives as agents. Likewise, Freshrelease tracks engineering tasks as tickets and respective engineers as agents. It may appear from the outset, Freshworks has multiple successful products. But, all of them have one common identity as a workflow tool. It has been tested and mastered and is quite successful too. had ten products in its portfolio Freshworks Universe If we see Zoho’s product portfolio, it tells a different story. AdventNet started with , a tool for telecom operators. Once it became successful, Zoho Office Suite was simply with the existing consumers. In 2007, , IT operations and Service Management software was launched. Since the majority of Zoho’s customers are small businesses, it has multiple products supporting mail operations, financial accounting, customer relationship management, help desk, IT support, security, operations management. It also has a separate suite of products to support the Internet of Things (IoT) for small and medium businesses. The critical success of Zoho platform lies with the product which seamlessly integrates the data across the above mentioned Zoho products. With over forty five products, Zoho aspires to create one unified experience for its customers. Combining all the products, it has created , one subscription plan to use products to empower sales, operations, support, HR, marketing and operations. Zoho is focused on portraying itself as a one-stop solution provider for small businesses, whereas Freshworks aspires to be a multi-successful-product brand. WebNMS upsold ManageEngine Zoho Flow Zoho One Zoho Universe The closed doors discussed above will lead us to understand the functioning system and strategies of Zoho and Freshworks. Traditional SaaS companies focus on Fortune 500 clients. The deal size of the sales is enormous. Consider , which operates at a high level and upper mid-level customer segment. They will typically hire a sales executive in their California office with around 100,000 USD salary. With an average deal size of 5000 USD, the sales executive is expected to close at least 20 deals every year to meet the cost to the company. The large deals will take lot of time to follow-up and close the account. Whereas, Zoho or Freshworks, operating from Chennai office can hire a fresh out of college grad for around 35000 INR per month. They target small businesses with relatively small deal sizes ( ) but work on a high-volume basis. Zendesk as low as 50 USD The start-up ecosystem has made it easy to start a business. Therefore, there is plenty of demand. Traditional SaaS companies, based out of the United States, cannot operate in this space due to the high cost incurred with employee compensation to the company. A considerable segment of small and mid-size businesses is available for grab, taking advantage of labour arbitrage — the key benefit of IT service companies, Zoho and Freshworks are building world-class software products from India. Even though their business strategy is the same, Freshworks and Zoho have two different souls. Freshworks is burning cash of its investors in aggressively expanding the operations. 60% annual growth rate is a voluntary standard for the company. and will be the first Indian product company if he manages to do that. Girish is looking to list Freshworks in NASDAQ stock exchange Sridhar Vembu is not interested in raising money. His business is self sustainable. With an entirely bootstrapped company, he believes that he has the freedom to choose the way the company operates. Zoho believes in the public good. “ “, says Sridhar Vembu. We are a state-of-the-art tech company with a very old-fashioned approach to company building. Zoho has said no to aggressive growth, focuses on its strengths and moves slowly. It has got an array of products, but there is no strategic focus on moving up the pyramid. Zoho is a risk-averse company; they serve small businesses and operate at volume. Freshworks is a fast growing company aspiring to be a market leader. When Freshdesk was started, they acquired customers quickly with prompt service and delivering delightful moments. If they diversify their portfolio and replicate the same success, they will become one of the market leader. They are also trying to expand into high-end customers. This is a fundamental shift to its core strength of labour arbitrage-business model. From the analysis and the current market scenario, it is understood that Freshworks is undergoing a transition in their strategy.

The Essence of The Zoho vs. Freshworks [Deep Dive]

After Silicon Valley a6 Indian SaaS Startups Products that will disrupt the market in 2020nd Israel, India is the 3rd largest tech ecosystem in the World. If you walk around South India today, especially Chennai, you’ll see how Indian Entrepreneurs are centralising themselves towards SaaS. Indian SaaS Industry now revolves around deep tech, cybersecurity, defence, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning. While other regions are not as excited about SaaS products, the opportunities for SaaS are very strong in India. Just check out these success stories of Indian SaaS Startups: Freshworks, with 200,000+ customers has crossed $150 million ARR Zoho, with 450,000 customers, has clocked close to $500 Million in Revenue per year Roughly, Indian SaaS companies generate a billion dollars of revenue only from a handful of Chennai-based SaaS companies like Zoho, Freshworks, ChargeBee, KiSSFLOW, Indix, Ramco, and ChargeBee. With these SaaS companies leading the way, India now has a surge of young players that are on the way of making it a SaaS powerhouse. In this article, we have evaluated top 6 SaaS products that can disrupt the market in 2020: Troop Messenger: A compact solution that unifies communication and collaboration capabilities Troop Messenger, a Hyderabad based Indian SaaS product, is one of the most promising additions to the collaborative chat space. This business communication & collaboration tool offers messaging, video conferencing, project management, and many compact features in a simple, cohesive UI. Highlights: Troop Messenger has helped millions of project teams achieve their business goals and provide excellent results The office collaboration app is optimized for mobile devices, allowing users to seamlessly connect with team members from their phones or tablets. : Enterprise plan offers 1TB storage Storage Up to 1TB : To Find any user you by typing a name into the search bar. This feature shortens the norm of scrolling through directories and helps connect to people faster. Advanced Contact Search : Make collaborative more interactive and organise your unique workflow without limiting the number of groups. Unlimited Groups : 24/7 Professional assistance to address your requests Free chat and email support : Troop Messenger is GDPR compliant Data records : Access all of your messages, at any point of time, for as long as you want. Unlimited message history : Built-in video calling and screen sharing facility to facilitate easy delivery of project ideas and presentations Video calling and Screen Sharing : State-of-the-art reporting via a cohesive and simple admin dashboard. Business on TM have been using analytics to supervise their team members and also track individual performance. Analytics Awards & Accolades: The Top 20 Business Instant Messaging Software The Top 20 Business Instant Messaging Software High Performer 2020, Awarded by G2 Recognised as one of the best instant messaging software for business, TechTimes Certificate for Great User Experience, Awarded by Compare Camp Rising Star 2019, Awarded by Compare Camp Great User Experience 2019, Awarded by Finances Online Top Slack Alternative 2019, Awarded by Finances Online : Best Biometric Attendance Management Software in Hyderabad Time Dynamo TimeDynamo is the new age biometric attendance management software that can be conveniently installed in the office/workplace premises to access an actionable and seamless analysis of employee attendance. Highlights: Time Dynamo is Best-in-class employee attendance management system that eases attendance tracking and cuts down on the labour costs TD helps manage leaves, on-duty, overtime, holidays, shifts, & more using  a single software. Attendance: Fingerprint scanning Integration Iris scanning Integration Face scanning Integration Exception - In case of check-in / check-out missed Request and Approvals Leave request Comp-off request Permission request Swap request Schedule Management: Shift Roster( Daily / Weekly / Monthly ) Weekoff Roster ( Daily / Weekly / Monthly ) Notifications: SMS Notification Email Notification Customised Notification Employee Leave Reports: Self leave report ( Daily / Weekly / Monthly ) Team leave report ( Daily / Weekly / Monthly ) Leave graph report ( Daily / Weekly / Monthly ) Employee Attendance Reports: Self attendance report ( Daily / Weekly / Monthly ) Team attendance report ( Daily / Weekly / Monthly ) Attendance graph report ( Daily / Weekly / Monthly ) Awards & Accreditation Shortlisted as Top 10 innovative Product Showcases, by NASSCOM Recognition as one of the best workplace biometric attendance systems : Customer Live Chat Support Application Click2Magic Click2Magic, a widely popular SaaS product, has been developed by Tvisha Technologies, an Indian SaaS company. It is a stand-alone live chat support app that engages web and mobile visitors with a built-in mobile and desktop notification. Highlights: Click2Magic, as a Chat Support App, makes it easy for agents and customers to stay in touch, irrespective of their location. Since this app is cloud-based, the chats are always secure to assure customer privacy and easy access. : With this feature of Click2Magic, users can capture their leads and improve sales by organizing client contact in one centralised database Lead Capturing Management : Server side scripting and client-side scripting Dynamic Web Pages : Prioritize daily sales calls, record and make calls from the browser. Organise, build, and track better relationships with customers. CRM Campaign Management : Connect with your visitors and convert inquiries into leads, provide better support, in real time. Then use the gathered information for seamless updates of contacts and lead generation. Live Chat Widgets Awards & Accolades: Recognition as one of the best Customer Live Chat Support Application Top Lead Capturing Live Chat Support Application : Face recognition-based Time and Attendance Solution for a contractual and distributed workforce Truein Truein brings transparency and controls to the attendance process, optimizes workforce utilization, and plugs revenue leakages. It is a complete attendance solution that runs on mobile/tablet devices and provides accurate attendance. Highlights: App-based (User app and kiosk app), it can be set up anywhere, instantly Offers geo-fencing to ensure the staff mark their attendance only from approved locations Centralized controls enable a real-time view of multiple sites 70+ customizable policies as per location or staff to automate shifts, OT, late marks, and more Generates payroll ready reports with the final calculations for payroll processing Selfie-based mobile attendance for distributed staff using the Truein user app Onboarding of staff directly on the kiosk app Full-fledged leave monitoring system Awards & Accolades: Software Suggest Customers Choice Award, Winter 2022 Software Suggest User Rating Award, 2021 SourceForge Customers Choice Award Slashdot Users Rating Award, 2022 : Mobile Marketing Platform with app marketing automation CleverTap CleverTap, an SaaS based mobile marketing and customer lifetime management company, was founded in May 2013. CEO of CleverTap, Sunil Thomas, was named as one of the top marketing technology trailblazers by Advertising age in the year 2017. Highlights: Using Clevertap, businesses can engage their target customers on the right channel, with the right message, and at the right time CleverTap offers state-of-the-art behavioral analytics for businesses keen on understanding their customers better Real-time Customer Data Platform to build marketing strategies Automated Segmentation of users according to preferences, frequency, intent and recency. Campaign Optimization through machine learning, intent-based segmentation, and journey optimization.https://www.troopmessenger.com/blogs-amp/saas-companieshttps://www.troopmessenger.com/blogs-amp/saas-companies Audience Analytics using Cohort Analysis, Flows, and Funnels and Uninstall Tracking Awards & Accolades: Best Mobile Marketing Campaign (Gold) Most popular companies powering digital content Bronze Stevie® Award for Business Technology/Best Marketing Solution Top 25 entrepreneurs leading the future of technology : B2C Multi-Channel Marketing Automation WebEngage WebEngage, has gained it reputation in the SaaS industry, as a full-stack Customer Data and Marketing Automation Platform for B2C. It enables consumer businesses to automate their communication and also improve customer retention through cross-channel user engagement. Highlights: Cross Channel User Engagement is facilitated via multiple channels like Email, Text Message, Web Message, Survey, Feedback, In-App Message, Push Notifications, Facebook, Web Push, and Whatsapp. Web-Engage Journey Designer Interface has a drag and drop design for implementing the multi-channel campaigns. Actionable insights on on users of active campaigns, analytics on user and  engagement channels Target customer and user segmentations on the basis of demography, psychography, behavioristic features, and more Cross Channel User Engagement through Web-Push, Emails, Push Notifications, In-App Notifications, Web Notifications, Facebook, Survey and SMS Features that support a personalise communication that drives brand loyalty Intuitive interface to map the workflows Awards & Accolades: TiE Lumis Entrepreneurial Excellence, TiECon, 2015 NASSCOM Emerge 50, NASSCOM, 2015 Top 10 Startups To Watch In India, Mashable, 2014 The Tech List, Times of India, 2014 Techcircle Fastrack, Techcircle, 2012 Smart CEO Startup Awards 50, The Smart CEO, 2015 : A Feature Packed Suite of SaaS Products FreshWorks Freshworks offers a suite of SaaS products that include: Freshdesk: Customer Support Software Freshchat: Customer Messaging Software Freshteam: Application Tracking Software Fresh Marketer: Conversion Optimization Suite Freshservice: IT Service Management Software Freshsales: Sales CRM Software Freshcaller: Call Centre Software Freshconnect: For teams to partners and collaborate with full context Fresh Status: Hosted Public Status Pages Fresh Success: Customer Success Software Freshping: Free Website Monitoring Tool Fresh Release: Project Management Software Highlights: Software within the Freshwork suite requires minimum customization. They are easy to set up and ready to be implemented on premise. These tools are backed by world-class customer support, which has helped this company earn  trust of over 150,000 companies operating globally. CRM Software. Project Management Software. Business Intelligence Platforms. Video Conferencing Software. Expense Management Software. Accounting Software. Online Backup Software. Awards & Accolades: Collaboration Solution of the Year at UK Cloud Awards 2018 Technology Impact Awards for Company of the Year 2019 by Growth Success Great User Experience Award for 2018 G2 Crowd’s Best Software Awards 2019 Expert’s Choice Award for 2018 Clap Messenger Clap Messenger takes you to the Super app world with chat and collaboration facilities. This single portal hosts a wide range of apps, including communities, polls, surveys, document scanners, e-commerce (upcoming), etc., to help the users to stay within a unified app to achieve what they want seamlessly! Clap Messenger is a super app that takes care of your every daily need! Highlights: Unlimited Groups: You can bring in your friends, family, colleagues, and others to group chats where you can share unlimited content with them. Votocrat: With this poll and survey app, you can create polls and surveys to know the majority opinion of the user base. Communities: Be a part of the communities to meet people from all parts of the world with similar interests. You can create a community for schools, alumni, businesses, gaming, etc., Document Scanner: You don’t have to download a separate app for scanning your documents. Get it done with Clap Messenger only. Voice-Video Calling: Put a stop to endless chats! Get on to the voice-video calls of Clap Messenger for clear and crisp interactions. Unread Messages: Forgot to read chats? need not worry! This filter helps you to figure out all the unread messages in just one go. Awards & Accolades: Clap Messenger is one the early super apps of India. India is a Great Market for SaaS Players India has become home to some of the most celebrated global SaaS products. Over the last couple of years, Indian SaaS startups have become quite open to the idea of offering state-of-the-art SaaS solutions. India’s success with top notch SaaS products like , , , and has India emerging as a strong market for SaaS products. Zoho Troop Messenger Time Dynamo Click2Magic Clap Messenger As a result, there are many that have established their footing in recent years. Most of the SaaS products from these companies have been accredited in Indian and global market simultaneously. successful SaaS companies With the remarkable growth in the SaaS industry of India, a number of new products that cater to different niche requirements have also emerged. This explains why the Indian SaaS industry is projected to grow at a competitive rate over the next decade. If you know any SaaS product that can disrupt the market in 2020, let us know in the comments below.

Six Indian SaaS Startups Products To Watch in 2022

As businesses overcome the post-COVID slumber and leap towards the digitization journey, they are sharpening their focus on developers as their go-to persona. Unsurprisingly, the importance of developers within and outside the business has grown multifold. As developer focus becomes the new norm for all business functions, will developer experience trump everything else? To learn and interact more about the evolving developer experience, Freshworks conducted a on 22nd September 2022 in Bengaluru. The full-day event encompassed insightful tech sessions, a developer panel, Demo booths, and developer showcases filled with fun activities. Developer Summit Below are excerpts from an insightful developer panel led by Satwik Hebbar, Senior Director of Engineering, Freshworks with Jadeja Dushyantsinh Anopsinh (Dushyant below), Advisor, Commudle, Harish Kotra, Platforms and Community Lead, AngelHack, Karthic Rao, Google Developer Expert in Machine learning and Ponvannan P, Co-Founder & CTO at Konnectify. The next leg of the Developer Summit is happening in 2022, ! San Francisco on 16th November register now for a free entry What is Developer experience (DX)? – “Developer experience encapsulates so many things, like the ability to allow developers to do what they want at that moment, whether it is about finding a particular sample code, or particular information, or looking for a use case for a particular API. So, if there is a way that an experience can encapsulate all of this, that is Developer experience for me. Dushyant In essence, Developer experience should be an extension of a Developer that brings out the best of me rather than making me think in a typical way of what a company wants to, or platform wants to look at. Firebase was fantastic; how they identified the use case good understanding of sample code, and documentation.” – “For me, it’s about how quickly I can get started on the external platform; how quickly can I see the ‘Hello World’ output on the platform. My personal favorite platform are Twilio, and Stripe. In terms of getting started – I’m a fan of fdk (Freshworks Developer Kit), and you inviting me to the Summit is also a great example of an enriching Developer experience!” Harish – “Developer experience to me would simply mean obsession for simplicity which is a natural extension of what previously was the fundamental longing to have for consumers in product management. It’s a similar extension to have that view with respect to the SaaS platform. Just that it now requires a different lens to have empathy for developers and really simplify it for them. Karthic So yes, obsession with simplicity to make a developer successful with a particular product. Scaling, and administrating it should be simple; no one should require a 3-day training to be able to do that. We must make a lot of dumb choices, we have to stop doing some of the things that would have increased the complexity of the system, not just from the way it works but also from the end user perspective; that’s why it takes a different lens to actually simplify or to be obsessed to simplify things so that the developers can be extremely successful, pretty fast.” – “Now that’s an interesting way to look at it – from the platform perspective as to how you build it such that you take challenges away from the developer’s hands and move it close to the platform as much as possible. Nice!” Satwik – “I would say how you have user experience for developers per se is what I consider as Developer experience. So, if I have to code something for my experience, it would mean I have a framework, the libraries, and everything put in place, and if I get stuck, I have the support. So, combining everything around the product, and providing all the support is called the developer experience for me as a developer.” Ponvannan Is DevX the new UX? – “What kind of changes have you seen in the last decade or so, such that DX has become more important than the UX? What has led to it?” Satwik – “The number one factor is bottoms-up developer adoption becoming a driving force for growth, sales, and revenue, for getting capital venture funding for start-ups. That has completely changed the landscape. Now so much money is being spent to ensure that DX comes first because now, if you want to go for series A, and series B then you need bottoms-up developer adoption for your product.” Karthic “If developers are the ones who are going to discover your product, if they are the decision-makers, if they are the ones who are going to try your product, they are the ones who are going to build apps, then these are the numbers that you will show for your next funding. These are the numbers that are going to become the funnel for your revenue which means all your obsession from the product, marketing, decision makers, and every part of the developer lifecycle goes into the DX, and thus it becomes very important.” – “If I have a low-code platform with the framework and library and if it is able to cut off 60% of my development time, then I don’t mind going ahead with Low Code. It should be open, with no compliance concerns.” Ponvanna – “From old school to today, there has been a lot of commoditization of services on platforms. What would previously take months, like building a Machine learning model and deploying it, is now an API call away from multiple service providers. Adoption, in terms of finding these platforms and then being able to experiment, is also helping to drive growth. That’s why DX is more relevant now than ever before.” Harish – “So Dushyant, what would be 2 or 3 areas that you would recommend our developers to ask for, where they should demand from the platform in terms of DX?” Satwik – “Many times, as a developer, we don’t realize how much power we have to influence the platform we are working on. We spend 8-10 hours a day working on it or some of us even bet our careers on it, but we never share our frustration with it.  So that is something that we should share with the platform or make them aware of, that “hey, this is my environment,” because they will understand the challenge only when they understand what environment you operate in.” Dushyant “Secondly, you should try to show them the mirror. That’s one thing I’ve done many times to platform companies I’ve worked for that is – I would like to be in your shoes, could you show me what’s happening? Because 99% times product managers or product developers, or engineers who are building that platform may have a blind spot on that. They may have their fancy internal systems; they may have their tools and applications and code snippets on top of it. They never really experienced what it could be like to be in someone else’s shoes. Ask for a roadmap, have clarity what’s upcoming, and if I have a pain point, is this going to be addressed in the next release.” Peek into the future – one thing that developers as a community would love to experience? – “There are a couple of areas that are pretty ripe for great development experience – AI, and the other is web3. DX, it’s still in a phase where its rapidly evolving to simplify the App development experience. Great developer experience could democratize the experience of App development.” Karthic – “For me, that would be a lot more abstraction from platforms so that the developers don’t have to worry about how data is stored, what is the security policy, and what are licenses I need to know about. Let them focus on coding, that’s all.” Harish – “Low code platform will define the DX. So, if I have a library, I have a framework, if I have 1000’s lines of code, and I’m able to solve the complex logic, then I’m sorted. I can focus on business problems to achieve the solution, and that’s how it will be transformational.” Ponvanna – “Many times as developers, we have struggled for the right kind of information, I would like to see if there can be an evolution of the platform, which is an extension of me. I’m a big believer of that idea – so at that moment when you are stuck, could there be a service or functionality so that whenever it could come in and give me contextual info - hey, you are using this, but maybe this is the right thing to do. So, some of those contextual, personalized information and education could make things better for DX.” Dushyant If you would like to receive the video recording for the upcoming sessions at the Developer Summit in SF or if you would like to visit in person, then don’t forget to . The event is packed with an engaging agenda on developer experience, building your first app on the Freshworks Developer Platform, how to monetize apps on Freshworks Marketplace, and developers showcases. register here

FRESHWORKS

freshservice.com

5K-10K employees

Since 2010

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FRESHWORKS

freshservice.com

5K-10K employees

Since 2010

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FRESHWORKS

EVERGREEN INDEX #4549

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