Jason M. LemkinCEO, SaaStr · Co-Founder of SaaStr AI, SaaStr Fund, Adobe Sign

Unleashing the Power of Fresh Desk: From Help Desk to Multi-Product Marvel! with Freshworks' CEO

3 Nov 2023 · 1 min

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0:51

Monologue from a YouTube interview (uploaded Nov 3, 2023) in which the speaker—Freshworks' CEO—describes the origin and early growth of Freshdesk (launched 2011) and his ambition to build a multi-product company. He recounts booking domain names in 2010, convincing investors to allow a second product before Freshdesk hit $1M ARR, and observing early adoption patterns (by 2012, ~1-in-4 or 1-in-5 customers used Freshdesk as an internal employee help desk).

Chapters

I always wanted to build a multi product company. I'd actually booked 40 domains starting with fresh in 2010. So I had experienced people with three, four years. 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.