Monica Selby
It’s kind of an “Are you kidding me?” story.
A couple of years ago Girish Mathrubootham was just browsing Hacker News when he came across a comment complaining about customer service platform Zendesk. The commenter pointed out that there was a huge opportunity for someone to swoop in and take away Zendesk’s market dominance.
A couple of months later he and his new cofounder Shan Krishnasamy quit their comfy jobs and committed to Freshdesk full time. They brought 4 other employees with them, even though they had raised no money at that point. Before long they built a product, incorporated in the US, and raised some capital from Accel Partners and Tiger Global. The company built out a platform that allowed companies to offer exceptional customer service with a lot less internal hassle.
Things were going spiffy.
Until, last December when someone hopped on Twitter and called the company an “unethical troll.” In several weird twists, another Twitter user attacked Freshdesk’s Indian ethnicity, the CEO of Zendesk jumped in and called the 6 month old competitor a “rip-off,” and it was discovered that the original attacker was actually a blogger paid by Zendesk.
Okaaayy…
I’ll hand it to Freshdesk, though. A little controversy never seems to hurt, and the blatant attacks from their biggest competitor did nothing to dampen their 2013. This year Freshdesk unveiled a freemium model, swearing that prices would never change, and announced free services certain startups. (Including, by the way, all attendees from Everywhere Else Cincinnati.)
In 2013, the young company also announced that they had reached 10,000 customers. Those enterprise customers include companies like Goodreads, Hugo Boss, Stanford School of Medicine, The Atlantic, and Pearson.
I can imagine that many of the founders’ friends and family thought they were crazy for quitting comfortable jobs to explore this idea. (We’ve all been there, haven’t we?)
It seems the gamble is paying off for Freshdesk, though. They still aren’t quite as big as their rival, which is rumored to be considering an IPO next year. But, they obviously have the bigger company running a little scared if Zendesk is attacking them so publicly.
Not that Freshdesk seems too worried. They just keep delivering a great product and giving back to the startup community. Sometimes it doesn’t matter if you’re first in an industry, as long as you’re the best.
