"Big Bets that Paid Off" with @Freshworks Founder & CEO Girish Mathrubootham | SaaStr Annual

I have been building customer support help desk for the last 18 years. What is our vision for Freshworks? The lines are blurring between sales, marketing and support. We are going to see a new world centered around the customer. How do you take customer experience to a whole new level? There is no leader in software who is not a multi product company. We believe that happiness is contagious. Happy employees create happy customers. 80% of our employees are in India. Kudumba means we are like family. You are creating impact, outsized impact for employees. India needs more product companies. That's a personal dream for me. We are showing the world what a global product company from India can achieve. We have one shot to take this company to where it could be. Today is day zero for freshworks all over again and the beginning of so much more. Please welcome to the stage Garish Mathrubhuttam, CEO at freshworks. Good afternoon everyone. How are you all doing? Did you have a good lunch? Am I the speaker who's supposed to keep you all awake? So I don't envy my position. So first of all, let me say I miss this energy. I'm employee number one, Girish Matribudam, employee number one at freshworks. How many of you here are co founders of your own startup? Awesome. Let's give it up for all the founders. And let me start off by telling you that I've been there hustling for business in all of these booths every year till a few years ago. Still, I stopped coming, so. So I miss that energy and excitement and I want all of you to keep doing what you're doing and soon we'll see you on stage sharing your stories. So today I am here to talk about five decisions or five big bets that worked for me. So thankfully I don't have to talk about the hundred that didn't. So. And I'm going to use a phishing analogy here to just try and keep it more interesting for me. Otherwise it's very boring if you just keep talking about go to market strategies and things like that. So we'll use a phishing analogy to trend make it a little bit more interesting. So as you probably saw in the video, Freshworks was founded in October 2010 in Chennai, India in a small suburb which most people in Chennai wouldn't know where it is. And we had, or let's say, let me say we were foolish enough to believe that we can start there and build a global software product company. 2010, it sounded foolish, I think. Now how many of you here are from India? Wow, this Looks like an India conference. So starting in India, there's always a famous lesson that today every founder will know it's actually much easier to sell to global customers than selling to Indian customers. Indian customers are notorious for hijacking your product roadmap and you can never sell outside once you start selling to India. So that was now I can talk about it as a big bet that paid off but I think truly that was probably the best decision that we took in those days of how do we go global from day one. And freshworks was truly global from day one. So we did not try, I did not try going and meeting customers in India, trying to sell to companies in India. So when we had I think seven customers, they came from four different continents. Our first customer was from Australia. They're still a customer at Will College from Perth, Australia. So I think that was a big lesson in hindsight that many entrepreneurs, many colleagues who worked at Freshworks and now entrepreneurs, they're all following. Like we have 31 startups that have come out of Freshworks so I'm super proud of that and some of them are here. So the big lesson is try to go after a bigger market. It's like increases your chances of success than getting stuck in a very small niche market. So casting your net wide, bringing the phishing analogy to life. So we were betting on inbound and product led growth before product led growth became a term. So we were PLG is fancy now in the last 4, 5 years we have this term coin but. But 2011, our first customer came online, tried the product for 2 and a half hours, put their credit card and bought the product. So that was probably the best or the biggest addition that worked well. We are an inbound company. Even today we have 40% of our revenue is completely SMB customers, 100% inbound. We also have inbound feeding mid market customers. But this was really what worked for us. But I would like to share some stories around this. So you can see picture of my family. Okay, I was a little bit, I don't recognize the guy over there, but so let's say things have changed for good now. So this is 2011. The story I want to tell you is how we won the Microsoft bizpark India Startup challenge. So I shared a personal story. As a startup founder, you want to break the rules. So instead of showing the product and the demo, I actually talked about what entrepreneurship, how it changes lives. And in my previous job I had a bigger car and I had to buy a small hatchback after starting a company and bootstrapping it. And my kids don't understand the difference between working a corporate life versus being an entrepreneur at that time. So they were quite sad that they couldn't sleep in the back seat of the car. And I was sharing the story along with the product. And so we ended up winning the Microsoft Bispark Challenge. And it was $40,000 first price at that time. No equity, no safe note, free cash from Microsoft. That was the oxygen supply for freshworks in the early days. So I'll tell you, the total capital in the company at that time was $85,000. So this is almost 50% of our capital coming in from Microsoft. But what did I do? I did not add it into the kitty and try to extend the Runway the next two months. I ended up spending $45,000 figuring out all the online channels to see which ones will scale for us because I had made the decision to be going global and going inbound. So ended up spending all the money on Google AdWords, some of it in Google AdWords. Very expensive when you're very early stage, you know that even more expensive now like tried LinkedIn ads even more expensive than Google AdWords figured out a lot of channels, smaller channels that wouldn't scale but still was giving us leads for much lower rates. So at the end of that $45,000 spent, we ended up having 70 customers in two months which was great for a startup and also helped us get funding from Accel. The first round of funding when we had 70 stranger customers from all around the world paying us an average of $30 a month. So we had $2,100 of MRR but that was enough to get us a million dollar funding. And that's why I said it's a big bet that paid off the decision to go global, the decision to splurge the entire $40,000 and some more in two months to get those customers. Not super efficient at that time, but I think overall it played out well. So that's the story I wanted to share about betting on inbound casting your net wide go for a larger market. Okay. The second bet is around hiring. Now a lot of you are sitting here so San Francisco is probably the at least used to be before COVID the place for SaaS talent. What do you do when you start a company in a city like Chennai in 2010, 2011 and you're trying to hire people? There is literally very little experience being there done that talent and the willingness to join a startup that's probably just raised a million dollars like it wasn't very easy. It wasn't easy or we just couldn't find the talent. Right? So I think that's where the bet was on. And I've been told or I've been asked several times in the early years to either move to Bangalore because you can't find the talent in Chennai, or move to Silicon Valley because you can't find the talent in India. So that message kept coming several years. But we decided that, hey, we can build a company and be successful from wherever we are. We just need to find people who are willing to work with us. And so the bet was on hiring younger talent with a learning mindset. And I'll tell you, I'll share the secret sauce of our hiring. I don't know how many of you are aware of the book called First Break all the Rules by Marcus Bingham. So what I learned from that book is about the difference between skills, knowledge and talent. So skills are easily teachable. Knowledge is something where factual knowledge is again, easily teachable or learnable. Experiential knowledge comes from, of course, experience. But talent is what you're naturally born with. And so we decided to bet on the inherent talent in employees, even if they did not have the experience. So I'll give you an example and you have to understand this with context. So in India, pretty much everybody finishes engineering and then figures out what to do with life. And many of them would, 70% would be computer science engineering. And then they'll put up their hands and say, I want to do sales, I want to do marketing. So that is the social structure of India. Right? So if I want to hire customer support, I could be hiring a biomechanical engineer. But if she's, I would check for empathy, detail, orientation, patience. So those are the skills with which I would hire somebody in customer support. If I'm hiring somebody in pre sales, I would actually look at, hey, do they have the ability to think on their feet? Can they adjust their level based on the audience skill level? You can be talking to a power user or you can be talking to a layman user. Can you teach something? So these are some of my interview hacks. So the entire bet was really based on like what I learned from the book. You can't put in what God intentionally left out. So ignore the educational background, especially in India where everybody's a computer science engineer. So ignore their experience sometimes because they may not be in the right job right now. So but focus on what they're truly good at. If you're hiring a salesperson I should enjoy having a conversation with you. Think about it. When did you last buy something from someone? Like you enjoy the conversation with the salesperson. Can they talk about any topic? So we went to the basics of betting on the core skills of the talent and our core skills of people and then unlocking that talent. I can actually name examples from in the audience, but I won't. I'll actually show you. By the way, I'll also tell you that when we were. Before I talk about this candidate, I'll tell you. Our programming language was Ruby on Rails. Till employee number 69, we did not hire a single programmer who actually knew Ruby on Rails. We hired great programmers and figured out that, okay, they can learn Ruby on Rails and then contribute. So I'm not making this up. So this is from LinkedIn, a screenshot that I picked last week. So this is an ex employee called Sairam. So he see here. Okay, so the first marketing job that I had posted on LinkedIn for Freshworks. So I got 85 applications. I had people who had worked for eight years in marketing in India, not in software. So I had experience people three, four years. And he was a fresher, just out of college, finished his MBA and I was looking. I had asked everybody to send in writing samples because sitting in Chennai with an inbound model market, product marketing is all about content, right? You have to do SEO, you have to do website content. So I was looking for a really good content writer who can write engaging content. So of the 85 resumes or applications that I got, like, his was the best blog. He had a blog, he had sent a blog link. I saw deeply engaging stories, random people coming and commenting. So that is how we gave the job to him. And you can see he's had a very successful marketing career over the years, twice at freshworks. So, and this is, I think it's especially useful for many of you here. You have to accept the fact that when you are a young startup, you may not be able to attract all the talent that you want. And also today it's cool to work in a startup. 2010 in India, 2011, it wasn't cool. People weren't rushing to join a startup, right? So you have to learn how to work within the constraints that you have. And so this ended up to be like really, really great. We found an amazing team where people were happy to come in and learn on the job, but also contribute and grow. So okay, big bet. 3. See a lot of times when people look at Freshworks, they don't really Understand what is the true differentiation of freshworks. So our business model of going global, going inbound from India, spending a lot of money on online marketing and online acquisition, but actually servicing all of those leads from a low cost location like India, very low. Our sales, if you look at our early years, our sales cost would be like 20% of the CAC. Marketing would be 80%. I haven't seen that anywhere else in the world. Right. So that was truly the differentiator. And we knew that I had booked, I always wanted to build a multi product company. I'd actually booked 40 domains starting with fresh in 2010. So now I had to convince our investors to let me build the second product. And we actually built our second product when Fresh Desk, our first product was not even a million dollars in revenue because we had conviction in the model going after a large market, we are going inbound and we are able to close deals from Chennai. So we said okay. We also saw that. I'll probably show you the product evolution journey. So Freshdesk was the first product we launched in 2011. What I saw even as early as 2012 was one out of every four or five customers of Freshdesk was actually using Freshdesk as an internal employee help desk. And I knew how to build an employee support system because I built four help desk in the past. So instead of taking the same product and putting a marketing website saying hey, you can use Fresh Desk for IT support like some of our competitors do that. So we actually purpose built an ITSM product today. So this second product, fresh service which we launched in 2014 today is north of $260 million. ARR. I can tell the numbers because I was at an investor day today morning so it's public information. So also along the years what we noticed was hey, some of our customers like we saw customers using or asking us for like chat or they wanted to support customers on modern messaging channels or cloud telephony. So we added Chat and Fresh Chat and Fresh Caller as Modern messaging and cloud telephony. In 2016 we actually unveiled our customer 360 vision because we saw that hey, we were struggling ourselves with sales tools, a marketing tool and a support tool that our own. We were using FreshTest but data was siloed so we thought hey, there has to be a better way. So we thought okay, how can we have a single record for the customer? So we then launched fresh sales in 2016, fresh marketer in 2017 and our Freddy AI. So I'll talk about that in a bit. We launched in 2018. So as of last month, August 2023, we launched the Freshworks customer service suite, which is an omnichannel customer service suite helping businesses. B2C companies engage with their customers on like Instagram or Apple Business Chat. Today, business want to have conversations with their customer. So the reason I'm showing you all of this is as a founder, you have to be planning ahead. The work that you do in product today is going to help you in revenue two, three years down the line. And especially once you have product market fit in the first product, when the revenue is coming in, that's when you will have the time to actually invest in the second product. If you don't do that, let's say like last year or this year, the macro gets tough and investors are asking you to cut down the spend. You may not be able to invest in your second product at that point of time. So while your sales team is thinking one quarter ahead or about this quarter, you should also worry about that as a founder. But at some point of time, at least once every quarter, you have to be asking, hey, how am I going to. You have to assume that, okay, if things go well, if you are successful, how does the company look like three months down the line, three years down the line, two years down the line. So you have to be planning for revenue that's going to come two years down the line. So that is something that we have always done, thinking ahead of building multiple products, that's serving us well now. Our second product is actually the fastest growing product now, better than our first flagship, larger product. Okay, so this is not a big bet. This is a lesson. So when you are building multiple products, right? When you're building doing so, there is always this famous theory, like, how can you do so many things? So at freshworks, we have a culture code. One of the values is craftsmanship. So I will use this example of making biryani to help everyone understand how many of you here do not know or have never tasted biryani. Okay, Very few. Okay, so this is this authentic, flavorful Indian dish. You can find it now in many parts of the world. So I'll share the story of Dindikal Talapakati biryani. It's a small town, tier 2 town in India which makes flavorful, delicious biryani. So the first generation built this out of a small restaurant. Many people who are traveling along that city would take detours to go in, have lunch there and then go because the food was so amazing, the biryani was awesome. And the second generation is now actually building a business on this biryani. So they have Now, I think 25, 30 stores. They have one in Milpitas as well, and definitely, I think in New York and Singapore. So. But you have to. And of course, when you're building a business, you have to take care of all the metrics like single store profitability, average selling price per table or per person, all of that. But you have to understand that the foundation of the business is in the biryani. The day the biryani loses its original recipe or flavor, the business will collapse. Why am I saying this now? As founders, we need to understand that all the metrics that we talk about in our board, to our board or to our investors, so they are all important for leadership. They are important for the board. But you cannot push down the metrics to the people. So you have to celebrate your employees for making biryani. So like, if your marketer is writing a brilliant blog Post or your AdWords person is coming up with a creative campaign, or let's say your product person has really built a cool feature. So employees need to be celebrated for making biryani or actually creating those. Whatever, doing whatever they are good at, because the combination of those ingredients is what brings that biryani for your business. If you focus too much on the metrics and push it down to employees, not everybody is excited about a billion dollars in revenue or 5 million in revenue they're not excited about. Salespeople can be excited about hitting a target, but employees need to be celebrated for what they're really good at and what value they're adding. So that's why what I call us making Bryani. So this story is told to everybody in freshworks. I've told this to multiple startup events because it's important as founders to understand what you care about in metrics may not be what your employees care about. Okay, moving on. So big bet 4. So one of the things we realized in our inbound, a lot of times people think when you're doing inbound, it means SMB customers, small customers, right? But what most people don't realize is you can close larger deals inbound. Like even as early as 2013 and 14, we had closed Burger King 3M, Schneider Electric, Macmillan Publishing, Pearson Sony, all of these customers actually came inbound. Average SMB customer would buy like four or five seats of freshness. Like Burger King was 300 seats. So we had like, we were closing several customers with 100 seats and 200 seats, all from Chennai, could be a $50,000 deal, big celebration would happen, but it'd be closed on the phone from Chennai. So I would say we were Covid ready 10 years before COVID So in terms of selling remotely. So, so basically once we realized that, what we wanted to do was, hey, how do we now take the product to more mid market and larger enterprise customers? So how do we overlay a field sales motion on top of the inbound motion that was working now it's really, really hard to have two go to market motions. I'll tell you, we are going through that phase and but if you want faster growth, you have to do it. Every company that started with PLG or inbound @ some point of time, you can see they will overlay a field sales motion. Dropbox is a great example. So here's an example again, I think this was 2015 or 16 where we did a PR saying, hey, we announced Cisco as the 30,000 customer. But you have to understand inbound, it was not an enterprise license across Cisco. It was one team in Cisco coming and buying for them. But it still helped us. Like when Procter and Gamble saw this, they came to us and said, hey, we saw that Cisco is using your products, so we would like to come and evaluate. Right? So I think it's important to understand the power of inbound. It's not just about SMB customers. And now we decided, okay, our product is working well in these larger companies. And many times what starts out as a 25 seat, 50 seat, 100 seat deal would expand to several hundred seats. So. And that is still ongoing even as we speak now. Right? So, so that's when we decided, okay, why don't we go and overlay this field sales motion and go after larger customers. So today, 60% of our revenue for Freshworks comes from mid market, what we call as mid market enterprise companies, which is companies from 250 to 5,000 and 5,000 and above enterprise. Okay, one more lesson before we go to the big bet again, right? So especially I'm, I'm saying this after overlaying the field sales motion is because, see as a founder, when, when your teams or employees are coming and talking to you, you have to learn the kaleidoscope lesson. What I mean by that is, hey, there are so many different lenses and you should be aware of these lenses through which people speak because you have to understand where they are coming from. Like, I'll give you a very famous story which will illustrate the point. I once had my sales leader, a field sales leader come and tell me that, gee, we have to stop these day passes. We used to have a concept of a day pass where people instead of buying a named user license for a month, they could buy a flexible day pass, which means you can come and access the product for a day. So we had that for seasonal users or for managers who wanted to come and take a look at a report or things like that. So it was a feature that customers loved and they were buying day passes as and when they needed it. And they could buy like 100, 200 day passes and use it like Skype credit or Skype. So one day I had my head of sales come and say, we need to stop these day passes. It's actually customers are abusing it and we have to push people to name license. Now when your head of sales is saying something like this, you immediately start up a team, right? So I had a program started where we had engineers, data analysts, everybody looking at all the data, looking at which customers were abusing it. How much revenue would we lose if we were going to do day pass? How can we make up for that revenue? So it became a big project and we had like 10 people in a meeting room actually talking about the impact of stopping day passes, right? And engineering had to work on that. We had to change our billing systems to stop that. Like our finance teams have to be informed. So it's a big project. But then finally when we looked at the customer data, like there was only one customer who was using a lot of day passes, and that is a customer that I had personally given in the early days when we didn't have certain functionality, we said, okay, you use more day passes to compensate for that. So there was no real abuse. So then as we were peeling the onion, finally we got the real reason that our sales compensation plan did not actually compensate people for selling day passes. So that was not uncovered. And it came to me as customers are abusing day passes and we have to stop selling it, right? So I think I'm giving you this as a real example because a lot of times you will see there's a product lens like product managers should want to increase adoption. Salespeople will want to make their commission this month or this quarter, which is all fair. But you as the CEO or founder have to be aware of all these different lenses and understand where people are coming from. And so I thought it's a good lesson to share, especially when you have these different go to market motions, like for example, product marketing for large enterprise and SMB inbound is very, very different. Okay, last bet. So how do you know where the fish is going to be? Like how do you stay ahead of the curve? So I think what we did well in Freshworks was see today we all talk about gen AI and ChatGPT. So we asked ourselves this question in 2016 or 17 that hey, what could really kill us and where is our opportunity? Where is our threat? Right? What could kill us? So clearly AI was the biggest threat that we were not looking at any of our competition that's going to crush us. So we didn't find a threat in our competition, but AI was the threat. So we invested early. We launched our Freddy AI in 2018. So we have customers using our bots and AI for several years now. But with Gen AI, there's a lot more excitement. There's a lot more. There's a refresh of Freddy AI that we presented two months ago, which is getting a lot of excitement. But you have to be knowing what's coming. So you have to ask that question, like what can kill you? What's changing in the landscape? Same way we took a big bet on customer360 because your AI is only as good as your underlying data. So when we saw the bet on AI, it was not just a technology bet. And you know that we have companies that do AI work only on telephony data. Companies that do AI work only on marketing, adwords, spend data. There are companies that do AI work only on chat data. So but we said, okay, where is the real value for a business for AI going to come from? It's going to come from understanding everything about the customer. So that's where the customer360 made sense. So it's not just about the UI for a support person or a salesperson, it's all about the AI. So this is Freddie. We chose Freddie to be again in 2018. There was a lot of fear in customer support teams that AI is going to replace the agents jobs. I think the fear still persists, but we wanted our Freddy to be like a friend to the human. So. So no better representation than a dog. So fresh test buddy is short. The short form is ready. So we launched. This is 2018. And by the way, I'll also share another story. It's not like all the big bets that happen sometimes, you also need a little bit of luck. And this is a story that many of you may know. When we were a really young startup, 2011, we had, I think at that point of time, 200 SMB customers. We were just going to announce or we just announced a $1 million funding from Accel. And the next day we were attacked on Twitter to be a ripoff of Zendesk. And I can see our friends at Zendesk are in the booth here, so please go and visit them and show them some love. But in 2011, so we were attacked to be a ripoff. What we figured out was again, the story you can go and read on rippofornot.org, they had employed a paid blogger to talk bad about us. But the lesson here is sometimes as a startup, you also get a stroke of luck. That happens. It's sent by God. Right? So this moment where instead of fighting on Twitter, we responded with the website, we exposed what was happening and the whole Internet community, we were on hacker news for 30 hours as the top and for three days on the top page, the entire community supported us. And from that point onwards, like freshdesk was the alternative to Zendesk and the entire pr. Thank you. So that's where I would say, if you're a small startup, don't worry, it's not about the size of the dog in the fight, it's about the fight and the dog. So all publicity is good publicity. You have to set yourself up in the minds of customers as who are you fighting against? Right. So I think that is a story and a lesson that I want to share. And with that I think I'll just summarize quickly and then we can move on to Q and A. So these are the five big bets that work for freshworks. We went after a large market casting our net wide, going global, betting on inbound. Our hiring strategy focused on hiring young people with a learning mindset, but mapping their core talent to whatever job that they would be doing. We went multi product early on, when things were good, that's the time to go multi product. So we overlaid a field sales motion because we saw that our product was working well in larger companies. So we can go and acquire more larger companies and then also staying ahead, thinking about what would be the next big opportunity or what could kill you and being ready for that. So when a chatgpt moment happens, you're ready to take advantage of that. So with that, I would like to say thank you and we can have some Q and A.

Hi, my question is around the headquarters, when you decide to go global, how those dynamics work in terms of moving the headquarters to sort of a global location and then building the team, Was it all from India and then sales teams in other countries?

So Freshworks was structurally headquartered in the U.S. it was incorporated as a U.S. company, Delaware C Corp. On day one. So we had India also as a separate company. When we didn't have funding, we were waiting for VC funding to see where it happens. So once we had the funding in the US so we made the India company as a subsidiary to the US company. But it wasn't until 2015 till we actually had an office in the US and hired like a head of sales and a sales team here. Hi, you mentioned casting a wide net.

How do you differentiate staying focused and avoiding distraction while casting a wide net?

So again it's a great question and it's important to understand the context in which I'm saying casting a wide net. So we were not playing in a category creation market. We were playing in an old established commoditized market called customer service where the innovation came from building social customer service. So we wanted to ride on the keywords search volume. So there were so many people searching online for like help destigating software, customer service software. So and the beauty with Inbound is it's a self selection mechanism. So if you have the right product, if you can cater to a good chunk of the audience, the others will come and try the product and go like select center out. So that takes care of the focus aspect of that. But if you're going outbound and if you're really building for a specific customer set, then it makes sense. Like I don't know if you've read the book Crossing the Chasm where he gives the example of Documentum focusing on only one domain, one specific vertical like legal research or whatever and then winning that as a bowling pin strategy. First get the beach head and then go to the other. So it depends on your go to market strategy.

Thank you for doing this and also being an inspiration to like Indian founders everywhere. My question is, you know you're a solo founder, right? And running a startup is like as difficult as it is. So was there ever any temptation to like have like other co founders and.

How did you deal with that? No, no, I was not a solo founder. I had a co founder, Shan who was CTO of the company till very recently. So he decided to take a break. So two of us were there and then we had four early employees who we treat as co founders who joined before the accel funding. So they are all now in their own entrepreneurial journey. So. Got it.

The other question I had was you also spoke about how much of your SMB revenue is coming from inbound.

Right.

So can you talk a Little bit about how your channels kind of matured as you folks grew at different new products or revenue ranges.

Thank you. Yeah, so today if you look at our inbound, contributes to 45% of our new business field, contributes to 30% and then partners, we also have a partner channel. Like partners source around 25% of our new business. So. So I think the mix has changed over time. In 2016, we were 85% SMB revenue. Today we are 40% SMB, 60% mid market.

Hey Girish, thank you very much. I think I really admire your work because it wasn't easy sitting in India and making going after the market like a desk, help desk software. There was a million of them and still you've been so successful and what you build is just amazing. But one question would be sitting in India, you are going after the global market. How did you deal with this user experience, cultural experience in the application? Because people sitting in India has one way of looking at things and color choice and everything. There's a huge difference. How did you deal with that? Thank you.

Yeah, so first of all, there were 600 help desk when I started Freshdesk, not million. So there was a website called helpdesk.com. so it's a great question. But again, end of the day, you have to understand in today's world, if you have to compete in a global market, product design being world class is table stakes. Like you have to be appealing and these are things that you can easily see. For example, in India, if you get more brighter colors, you want more blues and pastel greens. Okay. Somebody in the team has to have an eye for that. Like in our case it would. Me and my designer, both of us know, like I've spent 10 years before Freshworks working at Zoho. So we built global products. So we know what who are we competing against and what world class design looks like. So you have to inculcate in the team. And also believe me, your team just needs guidance. Like if you are willing to work with them, give them feedback, they will learn and adapt quickly.

Hi, is it okay if I go next?

Hi Girish.

Oh, sorry, I didn't.

Can I go first?

Okay. Meaning.

Okay, let me go first. So. Hi Girish. I'm from India and I run a user experience design company specializing in SaaS. And my heart swells with pride when I see you here just before India is going to be Bharat. So big round of applause for you for being that iconic inspiration for everybody across India.

Thank you.

So guys, clap.

Thank you.

So Girish what are your greatest challenges at freshworks now?

No, I think first of all, being a public company CEO is very different from being a startup CEO. That transformation is happening and it's actually, you have to also understand it comes with all the responsibilities. So as any startup that has taken VC funding, you have to understand that there are only two possible outcomes that are good outcomes. One, you have to have a strategic exit or you have to take the company public. I don't know. These are the good outcomes. Right. So. And taking the company public, making it profitable and growing is what makes a company the gold standard. Like I spoke about this in the ipo, that it's like India winning a gold medal in the Olympics. Right now, after winning a medal, you don't go and sleep. You have to continue practicing and continue playing. So that transformation. As a startup founder, you are always optimistic and you always want to give the biggest number that you can project. As a public company CEO, you always want to set expectations, right. And then exceed those expectations. So you always have to think about, see, today I was probably not being a public company CEO when I spoke here because I thought there's a lot of founders, so let me come and speak from heart. But when I'm speaking to investors, I have to be very scripted. I have to be like, really, when I say scripted, I mean, be careful about what you say because it's important. Like a lot of people can make money or lose money depending on what I say, and it cannot be information asymmetry. Right. So I think this is a transformation and I wish all of you go through that. I wish all of you succeed your companies take it public and then you will learn and we can share stories on that.

But in terms of organization challenges, what is specific would you call your greatest challenge as of now?

See, running a VC funded startup company, if you have got funding, I think that's actually, in hindsight, I can tell you that's not challenging at all. Right. Because there was never any speaking from freshworks experience. Like, we didn't have any constraints on budgeting, we didn't have any constraints on hiring. If you want to hire 100 new people, we could hire. We had the money. Like, if you want to build two new products, we could build, no questions asked. If you want to open an office, open an office, right? So a VC fund company, you say yes more often than you say no. As a public company, you have to be very clear on what you want to do. And that's not always easy or happy for everybody involved, right? Like, but, but you realize why you are doing it. So and, and this is like fitness. So you need to know what you put in in terms of carbs or protein or whatever and then what you will get for it. And I can tell you as somebody who's been on that fitness journey, I think it's, it's actually much more healthier to know what's going in in terms of capital and what you're getting for it. And actually that's a phenomenal learning opportunity.

Thank you.

Thank you. Yeah. So let's. Hi.

The first integration that we built for our product was actually with freshworks and it happened out of a meeting a couple years ago at Faster. So I appreciate the partnership over the years.

Thank you.

We're about to launch our second product and my question is about, you're thinking about whether we do it with a tiger team that has its own marketing and sales versus training all of our core sales and marketing who know our core product, first product really well to also tackle that second new product.

So I think without knowing much about the product, what I would say is if it's the same buyer, then you should go with your existing team. If it's a completely different buyer, the sales like the messaging is completely different, then probably going with the tiger team is better. Thank you. Hi Girish, thank you for the inspirational talk. My question is what are the top items from your checklist to decide which products, which product or which market to go after next? See, for us our checklist was always about large markets, good search volume, presence of a large profiteering enterprise vendor like whose really overcharging customers and. Usually in the business application workflow space. Enterprise application space. So because it fits into our existing go to market of both inbound and field. Thank you so much for that. Thank you. Hi.

My question is when and why you decided to invest in creating a partner or distributor channel and your best advice on it.

Yeah, so we did that very early. Like we started in 2013, as soon as the product hit $1 million. Because like we knew that. Okay. We are going to be successful and we will need a partner channel and we'll start now. Right. And my advice, a couple of advice I'll give you is whoever you put as your channel manager, hire somebody who's great in rapport building because initially partners are not going to get excited about your small company. So you need they need to be believing in the people in the leadership and they need a strong rapport builder who can you want them to work with you initially believing on your vision and on the people. And later on you will deliver results and revenue for them. But they have to make the investment. So if you have a partner in Europe, you have to understand it's a sizable investment. Even if they're hiring one or two people to work on your product. Like you're talking about hundreds of thousands of euros. Right. So for a partner to make that commitment, you need to really help them with a strong channel manager who can be their friend and rooting for their success and you selling that vision as a founder.

Thank you.

Hi.

And be okay with partners not getting super excited to work with you. So usually what happens, another good strategy is give them some leads early on to let them taste some success so that they get a feeling that hey, I can do more of this. So what we did was some of our inbound leads in non English speaking markets, we actually gave it to the partners to close. So once they saw the revenue, then they got excited about this. And so.

How do you think about like in finance terms about the cac? Was it more expensive in the long term, like lifetime time reduction or something?

So your commissions, you can actually. So there are two ways to account for it, right? So let's say partner gets 20, 25% commission. What you could do is you can account for your revenue net of the partnership commission. So which means it doesn't impact your cac.

Hi. Freshwork started quite some time back, focused and you know, was immensely successful in SMB. Then you moved up market. Would you do the same thing today if you were starting out or would you do anything differently? Maybe look at only enterprise or you know, something else.

So I'll clarify again. We were not immensely successful in SMB. We were immensely successful inbound. And I told you that even as 2013, we had all these larger customers. So yeah, I would do it. In fact, I would still try to do only inbound for a longer time and then layer on outbound later or so. Because you can see when you see the latest news, you see companies like HubSpot, you see klaviyo file for S1, you can see the power of inbound.

Right, Got it. Thank you.

Okay, thank you.