YouSaid · the spoken record

Girish Mathrubootham

lines on the record: 53
first: 2024-04-19
most recent: 2024-04-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Jeff Bezos I always look up to the vision and the docity of how Amazon has grown and again from one product to multiple products starting from literally a garage like how we started. So I think a company that's product and engineering at its core, not sales or marketing.”
2024-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Three Core Lessons Scaling Freshworks to a $5.2BN Market Cap | Biggest Product and Pricing Lessons from Scaling to $597M in ARR | How India Can Compete Globally in Tech and AI with Girish Mathrubootham, Co-Founder @ Freshworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My biggest weakness is probably I don't hold people accountable. I like to inspire, I like to tell people what needs to be done, but I expect them to do it. I am not the kind of person who will hold the whip, like ask for status updates and make sure everything is tracked and I think that's not my style.”
2024-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Three Core Lessons Scaling Freshworks to a $5.2BN Market Cap | Biggest Product and Pricing Lessons from Scaling to $597M in ARR | How India Can Compete Globally in Tech and AI with Girish Mathrubootham, Co-Founder @ Freshworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They were all investing mistakes because the companies wound down. I lost money. Counted as an investing mistake. I don't regret my decision, but from an investment standpoint, I think, by the way, my one investment returned all my entire Angel portfolio, and I still have seven unicorns there.”
2024-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Three Core Lessons Scaling Freshworks to a $5.2BN Market Cap | Biggest Product and Pricing Lessons from Scaling to $597M in ARR | How India Can Compete Globally in Tech and AI with Girish Mathrubootham, Co-Founder @ Freshworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have also made many. When I was Angel investing, I'm a very optimistic person, right? And I love founders. And so it's hard to say no. So a lot of times I have given them checks just to help them even when I'm not 100% convinced that the idea would work. So then I realized that I'm not really helping them. So then I got my angel investing bar also to be a little bit higher.”
2024-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Three Core Lessons Scaling Freshworks to a $5.2BN Market Cap | Biggest Product and Pricing Lessons from Scaling to $597M in ARR | How India Can Compete Globally in Tech and AI with Girish Mathrubootham, Co-Founder @ Freshworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Product is not about you. Building a company is all about people. The great founders who go the distance are the ones who are able to build a great team. In my opinion, that's the most important part of the challenge. If you hire a great team, the work will get done. But if you have great ideas but you don't have a great team, then no matter what you do, you start”
2024-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Three Core Lessons Scaling Freshworks to a $5.2BN Market Cap | Biggest Product and Pricing Lessons from Scaling to $597M in ARR | How India Can Compete Globally in Tech and AI with Girish Mathrubootham, Co-Founder @ Freshworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or four things I don't know if it's not obvious or obvious. First thing is what gives them the right to win in that market? Because sometimes I meet founders who say, yeah, I evaluated 160 ideas and I picked this one based on these 70 parameters that I looked at. Super smart founders, but I don't get excited by those founders. So for me, you have to have spent a lot of time in the problem domain to be able to solve that problem. So what gives you the right to win in that market? That's number one. Number two, craftsmanship. Everything that they do, whether it's a deck that they send or a product mock that they have, can I see them to be world class? Because you cannot win in a global market without being a truly world-class product. And then their ability to hire a great team. While this may seem obvious, many times you see people hiring just younger folks fresh out of college. They don't have the ability to sell their vision when they don't have anything, right? But building a”
2024-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Three Core Lessons Scaling Freshworks to a $5.2BN Market Cap | Biggest Product and Pricing Lessons from Scaling to $597M in ARR | How India Can Compete Globally in Tech and AI with Girish Mathrubootham, Co-Founder @ Freshworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it is hard work, but I will say I am tired not stressed because it's like playing a game. See, I'm always anyway working with startups. Even when I made like 60 to 70 startup investments, I have spent time with startups. So I enjoy doing that. I learn a lot interacting with these younger founders. In terms of time, everybody has only 24 hours a day and I get my time to play tennis and do the other stuff that I like, which is watching movies. And so everything else is work. So it just keeps going.”
2024-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Three Core Lessons Scaling Freshworks to a $5.2BN Market Cap | Biggest Product and Pricing Lessons from Scaling to $597M in ARR | How India Can Compete Globally in Tech and AI with Girish Mathrubootham, Co-Founder @ Freshworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“operational expertise that any investor in India actually brought to the startups, which means you could end up with a good investor or a bad investor sometimes looking at Excel sheets and not really understanding how to help the startup. This is why when Mana and I, both of us co-founders Bumi, talked about this, he proposed this idea. At that time, there was not a single VC fund who was focused on B2B global SaaS products from India. Today everybody wants to invest there, right? But when we started the fund, even today we are the only operator led fund in India and we are the only fund that's focused on SaaS and AI investments only. Generally all the VC funds were sector agnostic like they would invest in consumer internet. They would invest in marketplaces. They would invest in fintech. They would invest in SaaS. We believe that we can build an operator network and truly help these startups really scale and that's how we can be a catalyst in that journey of creating the next few global product companies from India.”
2024-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Three Core Lessons Scaling Freshworks to a $5.2BN Market Cap | Biggest Product and Pricing Lessons from Scaling to $597M in ARR | How India Can Compete Globally in Tech and AI with Girish Mathrubootham, Co-Founder @ Freshworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So I think I was Angel investing before starting the fund. I have made around 60 or 70 startup investments, but most of my investments are small, like $25,000 could be the average check size, right? So when we created SaaS Boomi, we started opening up our playbooks and sharing this with startups because the dream was about India as a product nation. See, when you look at it from outside, it looked like, hey, Girish is doing fresh works, he's doing SaaS Bumi, he's doing together fund, and also he's doing FC Madras. Why are you doing all these different things, right? Like in my mind, it's a unified connecting theme. How can I be a catalyst in creating world champions from India or world beaters from India? For the first three, it is India as a product nation. We still realize that our startups had to go for funding from traditional investors while they are very savvy financial investors. There was very little”
2024-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Three Core Lessons Scaling Freshworks to a $5.2BN Market Cap | Biggest Product and Pricing Lessons from Scaling to $597M in ARR | How India Can Compete Globally in Tech and AI with Girish Mathrubootham, Co-Founder @ Freshworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People think that we will build for India first and then go global as opposed to many of the Indian SaaS product companies are actually starting global on day one. And that I have found many times when I am talking to LPs and investors, they don't get it because a US company would sell in US and Australian company would sell in Australia first and then branch out. So they're all coming with that preconceived notion where we had to educate them saying, hey, these are global product companies that are getting customers internationally from day one and there is a playbook for that.”
2024-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Three Core Lessons Scaling Freshworks to a $5.2BN Market Cap | Biggest Product and Pricing Lessons from Scaling to $597M in ARR | How India Can Compete Globally in Tech and AI with Girish Mathrubootham, Co-Founder @ Freshworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's changing now. That's the old perception. So when you look at what has happened in the recent years, the flip Walmart acquisition of Flipkart showed that a very large M&A can happen in India. The Freshworks IPO on Nasdaq showed that, hey, you can take an Indian startup and actually list in the US. The local listings are actually even more attractive when you look at Zomato and PTM and so many other startups actually listing in India. So there have also been PE exits like PE backed exits. So all different kinds of liquidity has actually been demonstrated now. And yes, that was the complaint against India that, hey, there is no liquidity, but it is starting to change.”
2024-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Three Core Lessons Scaling Freshworks to a $5.2BN Market Cap | Biggest Product and Pricing Lessons from Scaling to $597M in ARR | How India Can Compete Globally in Tech and AI with Girish Mathrubootham, Co-Founder @ Freshworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is the time I would now say now is the time for Indian tech product companies and this is going to be the decade of India as a product nation. What I am seeing we are living the reason why I even started a fund called Together Fund and I'm a co-founder of an organization called SAS Bumi. We just had our annual event two weeks ago in Chennai. So in 2016 when we first came together as a bunch of founders there was a grand total of forty SAS companies building global products in India. We didn't find any ecosystem so we decided to create an ecosystem. Last year there were over 3500 companies in India and a thousand people, a thousand founders attended SASBumi. This year there are over I think 6,000 companies in SaaS and AI in India and 1600 of those founders were attending our event and so we are just seeing this tsunami of startups happening.”
2024-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Three Core Lessons Scaling Freshworks to a $5.2BN Market Cap | Biggest Product and Pricing Lessons from Scaling to $597M in ARR | How India Can Compete Globally in Tech and AI with Girish Mathrubootham, Co-Founder @ Freshworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think this is where the Maslow's need hierarchy has to play in. It is quite common for young folks to not worry about things like purpose because and I'm sure all of us are familiar with the Maslow's need hierarchy, right? First comes the physiological needs, then the safety needs, then the social needs and esteem needs. I think people have to go through the journey. And when you don't have enough for yourself, you're not going to be able to think about purpose. But I think it's okay. Like when I reflect back on my younger days, I did not actually have a lot of purpose. It was more about, hey, I need to first make money. I need to provide for my family. I need to do all these things. And then once you, it dawns on you, like once you become successful, once you make money and then you realize, okay, what do you want to do? There is time, it's okay.”
2024-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Three Core Lessons Scaling Freshworks to a $5.2BN Market Cap | Biggest Product and Pricing Lessons from Scaling to $597M in ARR | How India Can Compete Globally in Tech and AI with Girish Mathrubootham, Co-Founder @ Freshworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, money doesn't really change a person. It only amplifies who you really are. And also the other thing I believe is the purpose of money is to serve society. So beyond a certain need, I have no interest to kind of keep accumulating more. And so I believe it's more about giving and giving back. So for me to truly succeed in life, you need to unleash your purpose. We have this incredible opportunity to make an impact on so many lives, lives of our employees who have been with us for so many years. Now when they share their stories of them buying a home with cash or being able to spend for their siblings, weddings and things like that, or we have a softer academy where we take students who can't afford college, teach them software skills and then place them in companies. FC Madras is an example where we are helping young sports people build into athletes.”
2024-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Three Core Lessons Scaling Freshworks to a $5.2BN Market Cap | Biggest Product and Pricing Lessons from Scaling to $597M in ARR | How India Can Compete Globally in Tech and AI with Girish Mathrubootham, Co-Founder @ Freshworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In pockets as the company grows larger specifically around COVID, it was incredibly hard to build culture on Zoom. Like I felt that we had taken a few steps back like the next two, three years has been incredibly hard with nobody coming into office, people jumping from Zoom meeting to Zoom meeting. Why, I still don't know how to build culture when nobody's coming into the office.”
2024-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Three Core Lessons Scaling Freshworks to a $5.2BN Market Cap | Biggest Product and Pricing Lessons from Scaling to $597M in ARR | How India Can Compete Globally in Tech and AI with Girish Mathrubootham, Co-Founder @ Freshworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Happy with somebody. I just do it in private, but I actually tell them what didn't work out. I am still friends with all the people I've fired and let go also because it is never personal. It's all about having that open conversation, telling people why something is not working out and why we have to part ways. So creating that environment of performance means you need to act when you have made bad hires. You need to, I've also said in one of our early versions of a culture code that don't be a jerk, even if you're brilliant, don't be a brilliant jerk. And we have seen that it's about team winning, not about an individual superstar win.”
2024-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Three Core Lessons Scaling Freshworks to a $5.2BN Market Cap | Biggest Product and Pricing Lessons from Scaling to $597M in ARR | How India Can Compete Globally in Tech and AI with Girish Mathrubootham, Co-Founder @ Freshworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You find people who are passionate about what they do. That starts with our hiring process and the context in India you have to understand is everybody finishes computer science engineering and then figures out what they want to do in life, right? So I have folks working in sales in pre-sales and marketing who are all computer science engineers, right? So that's a very different context, which means our hiring actually identifies what are they really good at. Because if you are truly playing to your passion, you don't have to work for a day in your life. Somebody said that, right? So work becomes play. So that is core to getting the right people on the job, right? And that's the first thing for environmental performance. How do you treat people? We build genuine relationships or our manager training program is called lead with heart. Like if I am happy with somebody, I'll tell them I'm happy.”
2024-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Three Core Lessons Scaling Freshworks to a $5.2BN Market Cap | Biggest Product and Pricing Lessons from Scaling to $597M in ARR | How India Can Compete Globally in Tech and AI with Girish Mathrubootham, Co-Founder @ Freshworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the things I have always believed in is my job as a leader is to create an environment of performance, hire the right people and get out of the way. Personally, I am more like a jack of all trades, right? Like I don't write code. My style has always been believe in the power of a team, build the right team hire great people with a learning mindset and with the right passion to excel in whatever they are doing, create an environment of performance, get out of the way.”
2024-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Three Core Lessons Scaling Freshworks to a $5.2BN Market Cap | Biggest Product and Pricing Lessons from Scaling to $597M in ARR | How India Can Compete Globally in Tech and AI with Girish Mathrubootham, Co-Founder @ Freshworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you will know at the end of the day customer adoption will tell you pretty quickly whether it's working or not, right? And we knew that. So what we did was we conceded collaboration. So today our same fresh connect code that we built is integrating with Slack and Teams. So we conceded collaboration to teams in Slack.”
2024-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Three Core Lessons Scaling Freshworks to a $5.2BN Market Cap | Biggest Product and Pricing Lessons from Scaling to $597M in ARR | How India Can Compete Globally in Tech and AI with Girish Mathrubootham, Co-Founder @ Freshworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The power of the model, then my early VC investor shaker from Axel said, Grish, what are all the products that you can build”
2024-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Three Core Lessons Scaling Freshworks to a $5.2BN Market Cap | Biggest Product and Pricing Lessons from Scaling to $597M in ARR | How India Can Compete Globally in Tech and AI with Girish Mathrubootham, Co-Founder @ Freshworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pivoting from customer service to marketing, and if you are going to raise your next round of VC funding, that investor will be confused on why you're doing this. So I actually killed the fresh marketer product that we built in 2012 because it was good advice. But then I actually convinced our board to let me build fresh service, which is today the 300 million dollar product, because fresh service, in a sense, was help desk for employees. Fresh desk was help desk for customers. So, and there was a company that Microsoft acquired called Parachure, which had done something like that. You had Parachure for IT and Parachore for CS, customer service. So in that sense, we are taking something that is already working, the ticketing knowledge base, self-service model, and what is working well for external customer service. We were trying to do the same thing for internal employee service. So I convinced our board to let me build this second product within that narrative of being a help desk for employees. And that product hit 1.5 million the first year and 6.5 million in the second year. And the board understood.”
2024-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Three Core Lessons Scaling Freshworks to a $5.2BN Market Cap | Biggest Product and Pricing Lessons from Scaling to $597M in ARR | How India Can Compete Globally in Tech and AI with Girish Mathrubootham, Co-Founder @ Freshworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the early years, the first decade as a VC funded company, see one of the things you have to understand in that inbound model, the secret source for freshworks was the business model disruption of being able to profitably serve the long tail of the global assembly from Chennai when I wasn't able to articulate it as early as twenty twelve when fresh desk, the first product had not even hit a million dollars, I was already working on the second product called Fresh Marketer. I had booked forty domains starting with fresh in twenty ten and twenty eleven. So my dream was to build a multiproduct company and use that inbound PLG motion across so many products. You also have to understand that when we took our first round of VC money and then we spoke to some of our investors, they actually gave me advice, which is good advice at the time, 2012. Girlish, your first product is not even a million dollars in revenue. If you build a second product now, you would be confusing the market. People will think you are.”
2024-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Three Core Lessons Scaling Freshworks to a $5.2BN Market Cap | Biggest Product and Pricing Lessons from Scaling to $597M in ARR | How India Can Compete Globally in Tech and AI with Girish Mathrubootham, Co-Founder @ Freshworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“twenty fifteen we were really really growing fast and we were hiring a lot of sales folks and the sales wheel was spinning faster than the engineering wheel we didn't hire enough engineers we added like thousand customers or something like that feature requests were coming flying in and our engineering team was actually involved in a Ruby and Rails upgrade so we couldn't even ship enough and so I realized that okay How do you balance hiring across the org and so we did not have a process to do headcount planning in advance looking at okay where are the revenue numbers going to be next year and how much now we have a full blown headcount planning process but but that was a big mistake that I did where I didn't hire product developers enough.”
2024-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Three Core Lessons Scaling Freshworks to a $5.2BN Market Cap | Biggest Product and Pricing Lessons from Scaling to $597M in ARR | How India Can Compete Globally in Tech and AI with Girish Mathrubootham, Co-Founder @ Freshworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Adaptation of that is as a new leader when you come with all your experience in a fast growing startup, you have to understand that there are already hundreds of cows that are fallen into ditches. So if you want to be successful at freshworks, you have to ask the question which cow which ditch which means where can you help? What are the top two or three most important priorities or problems that you can help solve? Go and help those cows from the ditches and then we will listen to you, give us a lecture on how to prevent cows from falling into ditches.”
2024-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Three Core Lessons Scaling Freshworks to a $5.2BN Market Cap | Biggest Product and Pricing Lessons from Scaling to $597M in ARR | How India Can Compete Globally in Tech and AI with Girish Mathrubootham, Co-Founder @ Freshworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll give you a couple of stories there. One, one of my friends, Chandar, who is the CMO of COPA, wrote a LinkedIn post recently. He said, when you're changing jobs, philosophies are portable, playbooks are not. You can bring your philosophies and values, but you cannot take, bring your playbook and use it as a template to run in the new company, right? And the way I used to tell that one of my first meetings with every new leader that I hire, this is an original management lesson from me. I said, I always ask the leader, you need to learn to ask which cow which ditch. There is an ancient Indian fable which says, hey, in a village, when a cow falls into a ditch, you first need to take the cow out of the ditch, and then you fill the ditch with sand, and then you go and educate the villagers on how to prevent cows from falling into ditches. And the sequence in which you do these things is important, right? And that is the original story.”
2024-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Three Core Lessons Scaling Freshworks to a $5.2BN Market Cap | Biggest Product and Pricing Lessons from Scaling to $597M in ARR | How India Can Compete Globally in Tech and AI with Girish Mathrubootham, Co-Founder @ Freshworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can be hands off the initial period of letting the leader transition and settle in. You have to be closely involved in all the big decisions, you have to be watchful of how they are treating their people. So one of my OKRs now or my performance subjectives is when I hire a new management team member, getting them to success is actually my OKR. So I need to make sure that.”
2024-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Three Core Lessons Scaling Freshworks to a $5.2BN Market Cap | Biggest Product and Pricing Lessons from Scaling to $597M in ARR | How India Can Compete Globally in Tech and AI with Girish Mathrubootham, Co-Founder @ Freshworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, so I think my biggest mistakes have been there. I'll give you three or four, right? Number one, I did not do ref checks on candidates who actually came through like investor referrals, costly mistake. I should have talked to people who reported into those leaders and got a style of their management style. On a couple of occasions have gotten carried away by the resume, like, hey, they work for a great company, went to a great college, they should be incredibly smart, and so obviously there will be a fit here. No, boom, didn't work out cultural misfits. My management style, I'm usually very hands off in terms of when I hire a new leader, we look at all the best candidates and then we hire the best possible candidate. Then I step out of the way and let them play the game. Also, a lot of us in India, like we have not been there, done that. So when you hire experienced talent, we assume that, okay, we are going to learn from this candidate, so we let them play, right? But what happens is one of the most important lessons I learned, which every CEO should do, is while”
2024-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Three Core Lessons Scaling Freshworks to a $5.2BN Market Cap | Biggest Product and Pricing Lessons from Scaling to $597M in ARR | How India Can Compete Globally in Tech and AI with Girish Mathrubootham, Co-Founder @ Freshworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So I think there are tons in every department. So the number one difference in product management is when building for an inbound user, you focus on intuitive do-it-yourself product. When you're building for the enterprise customer, they are not going to do it themselves. You need an SI partner who will be trained to use it. So product managers can actually build stuff that's not very user-friendly. My challenge internally is how do I drill into my product managers?”
2024-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Three Core Lessons Scaling Freshworks to a $5.2BN Market Cap | Biggest Product and Pricing Lessons from Scaling to $597M in ARR | How India Can Compete Globally in Tech and AI with Girish Mathrubootham, Co-Founder @ Freshworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Multi product company that is working in multiple segments, so our revenue is coming from like our second product recently crossed $300 million in ARR. So now we have two product lines north of 300 million in ARR. So when we are enjoying the fruits of that and the second product fresh service is squarely winning in mid-market, it's the most affordable alternative. We are winning enterprise customers every day, every quarter. And so when you are enjoying the fruits of that, we should learn to live with the challenges and frustrations that come with that.”
2024-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Three Core Lessons Scaling Freshworks to a $5.2BN Market Cap | Biggest Product and Pricing Lessons from Scaling to $597M in ARR | How India Can Compete Globally in Tech and AI with Girish Mathrubootham, Co-Founder @ Freshworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, first of all, I'll tell you, clarify that when we layered on a second go-to-market motion, we were focused on mid-market, not necessarily enterprise. So mid-market we define as 500 employees to 5,000 employees because we found that, hey, that segment of the TAM is huge. They are probably not big enough to have budgets in the millions of dollars for the enterprise systems, and their needs are similar. And so the sweet spot for us could be in the 500 to 5,000 employees. So that's when we overlaid the second good market motion of now what we call as a twin engine model. One of the life lessons that I've had is you have to learn to live with the consequences of additions, right? I will tell you the number one challenge for freshworks is, or for any company, for the matter is balancing this to go-to-market motions, right? The needs are different, the friction, as you rightly said, product management channel, product management becomes hard, but we are also enjoying the fruits of that decision.”
2024-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Three Core Lessons Scaling Freshworks to a $5.2BN Market Cap | Biggest Product and Pricing Lessons from Scaling to $597M in ARR | How India Can Compete Globally in Tech and AI with Girish Mathrubootham, Co-Founder @ Freshworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you have to do it when your first product is actually doing well. What we have done at Freshworks always is when you have one product that's like the wheels are spinning fast, money is coming in, so while you're continuing that I always say that my job as product manager, I have to worry about the revenue that's going to come in 26 and 27. My sales VP or my president can worry about the revenue that's going to come this quarter and next quarter, right? So product person has to worry two, three years down the line and do the work now because when you do the work now, you will probably launch it next year and then it will start to build slowly and then for you to get momentum it'll take to three years.”
2024-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Three Core Lessons Scaling Freshworks to a $5.2BN Market Cap | Biggest Product and Pricing Lessons from Scaling to $597M in ARR | How India Can Compete Globally in Tech and AI with Girish Mathrubootham, Co-Founder @ Freshworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We are always looking for optimal ways to find customers who are higher value customers, but it is the nature of the game. Like when you are dealing with search globally, you will attract all kinds of customers, right? So we have our sales processes and our marketing fine-tuning to take us towards the right customers, but also we are here to remember that Freshworks is a multi-product company. Pretty much all of our $5,000 customers probably started off paying us $100 or $50 or whatever. And even some of our $50,000 plus customers are actually SMB customers who have adopted three, four products from us. So this strategy of keeping the long tail open, feeding it, and then letting customers grow and use multiple products and give us more value as work well for us.”
2024-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Three Core Lessons Scaling Freshworks to a $5.2BN Market Cap | Biggest Product and Pricing Lessons from Scaling to $597M in ARR | How India Can Compete Globally in Tech and AI with Girish Mathrubootham, Co-Founder @ Freshworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is hard, see, if it was easy, everybody would have done it, right? See, today freshworks has over 67,000 customers and more than two thousand plus customers actually pay us over $50,000 a year. So we have a long tail of SMB customers, like 87, I think 87% of our revenue comes from customers who pay us over $5,000 a year. And so we have that long tail and we have a few big whales.”
2024-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Three Core Lessons Scaling Freshworks to a $5.2BN Market Cap | Biggest Product and Pricing Lessons from Scaling to $597M in ARR | How India Can Compete Globally in Tech and AI with Girish Mathrubootham, Co-Founder @ Freshworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They were almost paying us a million dollars a year but under thirteen different invoices so the CFO was not even looking at us in the top ten vendors by payment. So we were flying under the radar because all these teams were using the product. Packaging is an answer or a tool we use to kind of segregate the SMB players with limited feature set. And we put all the enterprise features like sandbox, audit logs and all the other stuff into an enterprise plan so that larger companies can actually migrate towards that. We have to remove the complexity. That's in short. You have to keep the experience consumer like but all the advanced features need to move away and surface itself at the right time.”
2024-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Three Core Lessons Scaling Freshworks to a $5.2BN Market Cap | Biggest Product and Pricing Lessons from Scaling to $597M in ARR | How India Can Compete Globally in Tech and AI with Girish Mathrubootham, Co-Founder @ Freshworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the tools that we have used in product marketing, that's a great question, by the way. A lot of times in the early years, right, when you are getting traffic to come to your website, you are not really controlling who's coming in. It could be a 5% company or it could be a team member from a 5,000 company who's trying to come and buy something. So we, as early as 2013, we closed enterprise customers like Burger King, DHL, Pearson. So all these teams of users from these companies came online, looked at the product, it solved for their use case. Of course, it was not an enterprise-wide deal, but it was for one team within a larger enterprise. If you remember, there was a company that Tesla bought, another Elon Musk company called SolarCity. So we entered Solar City, I think, with a 25C deal two years later when we hired our first president of sales in the US, he went and spoke to Solar City. We found out that thirteen different teams were using it more than thousand licenses”
2024-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Three Core Lessons Scaling Freshworks to a $5.2BN Market Cap | Biggest Product and Pricing Lessons from Scaling to $597M in ARR | How India Can Compete Globally in Tech and AI with Girish Mathrubootham, Co-Founder @ Freshworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the end of the day, pricing is all about who are you selling to, what do they care about, what is your entry wedge into the market. So if I have something that can solve a great problem for a large enterprise and I can increase my prices and charge whatever I want, then that could be the strategy that Mark Andreessen is saying. But if I am the 601st help desk, like when we started fresh desk, there were 600 help desks already in the market. There is a website called helpdesks dot com where you can go and filter and search what kind of help desk you want. So for us, we wanted to win by superior execution with better design, better UI, and a great price, and then build our brand and then raise prices. Of course, today we have customers who pay us a couple of million dollars a year. Also, many customers who pay us over a million dollars a year. But we also have customers who start off paying $29 a month.”
2024-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Three Core Lessons Scaling Freshworks to a $5.2BN Market Cap | Biggest Product and Pricing Lessons from Scaling to $597M in ARR | How India Can Compete Globally in Tech and AI with Girish Mathrubootham, Co-Founder @ Freshworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, I've started doing that. A lot of employees have started doing that. I'm sure you have probably started doing that. Are you going to ChatGPT more often now? If that is true, when we have questions, we want answers. So we have moved from a world of search for keywords and get a bunch of links to, hey, I have a question. Give me the answer, right? So I think that is a very fascinating world.”
2024-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Three Core Lessons Scaling Freshworks to a $5.2BN Market Cap | Biggest Product and Pricing Lessons from Scaling to $597M in ARR | How India Can Compete Globally in Tech and AI with Girish Mathrubootham, Co-Founder @ Freshworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It still plays its part, right? So I'll also tell you some of the areas of research where we are working on like search engine optimization. Now we have generative engine optimization, right? Like a lot of people are going to go to chat GPT and ask about, hey, which software should I use? How do we make sure that the AI models are trained to tell customers that Freshworks is a great product? That is where the future is going if Google people are not going to Google for search, but they're going to chat GPT. So we need to do that.”
2024-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Three Core Lessons Scaling Freshworks to a $5.2BN Market Cap | Biggest Product and Pricing Lessons from Scaling to $597M in ARR | How India Can Compete Globally in Tech and AI with Girish Mathrubootham, Co-Founder @ Freshworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“on my own, and the pricing is here. You can put your credit card on file. There's no back and forth contract negotiation, no redlining of contracts, no non-disclosure agreements. Okay, I like it. It's $29 a month or $19 a month for three seats. I'll just put my credit card and buy and go.”
2024-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Three Core Lessons Scaling Freshworks to a $5.2BN Market Cap | Biggest Product and Pricing Lessons from Scaling to $597M in ARR | How India Can Compete Globally in Tech and AI with Girish Mathrubootham, Co-Founder @ Freshworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have to understand the whole unit economics of if you break down the cak, the customer acquisition cost for a SaaS startup that is being built in India versus the US. Since in the US, the CAC would be two thirds sales and one third marketing. Because salespeople are so expensive, if you're sitting in San Francisco or even London for that matter. What we did was what is today known as product-led growth. So we actually do a lot of SEO work and Google Ads and stuff like that and look at the keyword density. So we make sure that we are able to drive traffic from people who are searching for all those keywords. The website is designed to get the customer into the product quickly without talking to anybody in sales. So the pricing is open and the products are built to be intuitive, do it yourself kind of product. So the online buyer who's coming in feels like, hey, I'm trying to do this and it feels simple enough, easy enough.”
2024-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Three Core Lessons Scaling Freshworks to a $5.2BN Market Cap | Biggest Product and Pricing Lessons from Scaling to $597M in ARR | How India Can Compete Globally in Tech and AI with Girish Mathrubootham, Co-Founder @ Freshworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would do exactly the same thing because at the end of the day, one of the reasons for freshwork success is the market, right? So when you are servicing a large market and you're able to service it with the right unit economics, that's the best formula for a startup to win, even if you have, let's say, average CEOs like me”
2024-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Three Core Lessons Scaling Freshworks to a $5.2BN Market Cap | Biggest Product and Pricing Lessons from Scaling to $597M in ARR | How India Can Compete Globally in Tech and AI with Girish Mathrubootham, Co-Founder @ Freshworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think to some extent that could be true, but also Indian customers are used to a services mindset. Like if you go to US or Australia, customers there know that they are buying a shrink wrap product. They know that, hey, the product is the product. If I like it, I'll buy it. If I don't like it, I don't buy it. If I have some feedback, I'll give the feedback. If I need a feature, I'll ask and wait. Imagine going to Microsoft Office and asking for a feature. Like when are you going to get it? So I think global customers have that awareness. Indian customers have been used to a lot of services mindset where they would say, hey, why don't you come to my office? I'll tell you what needs to be built and you build it.”
2024-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Three Core Lessons Scaling Freshworks to a $5.2BN Market Cap | Biggest Product and Pricing Lessons from Scaling to $597M in ARR | How India Can Compete Globally in Tech and AI with Girish Mathrubootham, Co-Founder @ Freshworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. See, the fundamental lesson that I learned in life was taught to me by my boss. He said, Girish, it's easier to earn one dollar than earn one rupee. You have to have worked with Indian customers to really understand how hard it is to do business with customers in India, right? Especially when you are an early stage product, your roadmap will go for, they would hijack your roadmap, right? But if we win globally and then go to India, the chances of success are actually even better. Like if you see most of the even Indian startups are doing well, like I would say browser stack, charge B, they're all global companies who first won globally and then went in India.”
2024-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Three Core Lessons Scaling Freshworks to a $5.2BN Market Cap | Biggest Product and Pricing Lessons from Scaling to $597M in ARR | How India Can Compete Globally in Tech and AI with Girish Mathrubootham, Co-Founder @ Freshworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“O start high and go down never works in the history of software you can tell me which company has succeeded in starting at Enterprise and actually winning in SMB. It's not happened. But if you look at many companies including Salesforce and Freshworks, we have all, and now you can see Hubspot and most of the companies always start small and then it is possible to build over time and go up.”
2024-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Three Core Lessons Scaling Freshworks to a $5.2BN Market Cap | Biggest Product and Pricing Lessons from Scaling to $597M in ARR | How India Can Compete Globally in Tech and AI with Girish Mathrubootham, Co-Founder @ Freshworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“minimum viable product, I call it minimum desirable product, something that will work well. People are happy with the UI, they are happy with the price, and not surprisingly, many of the early customers that we got were really small SMB customers or educational institutes who didn't have large budgets. And my learning as a product manager has been that you can always grow into a much higher price point. You can build more features and create all these enterprise versions. But when we started, we were really solving for that SMB customer with the basic product.”
2024-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Three Core Lessons Scaling Freshworks to a $5.2BN Market Cap | Biggest Product and Pricing Lessons from Scaling to $597M in ARR | How India Can Compete Globally in Tech and AI with Girish Mathrubootham, Co-Founder @ Freshworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I actually was terrified with the alpha release that we put out. I'll tell you, even though we had like 300, 400 users who had signed up, I was worried that the product would crash. So I first sent it out to five people who had signed up way back in October, and then nothing happened. Nobody came and then I sent it to 15 people, and then I sent it to 30 people. So I was trying to see, make sure that, hey, the servers wouldn't crash because suddenly 100 people are coming in, right? And I wouldn't say I was embarrassed, but today if you look at the product and if you look at what was there, yes, you could say that. One of the things that worked well for us was we had priced our product very low. So we were fishing in a very different pond. So our product was priced at $9, $19.29 per agent per month. That was the highest. Our competition, the lowest price was $29 a month to get started, right? So which means we had basic functionality that did its job, like you can call it.”
2024-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Three Core Lessons Scaling Freshworks to a $5.2BN Market Cap | Biggest Product and Pricing Lessons from Scaling to $597M in ARR | How India Can Compete Globally in Tech and AI with Girish Mathrubootham, Co-Founder @ Freshworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hacker news, and I had a website with a simple woof form, the product was not ready. There were so many people who were coming in and filling those woofo forms like hundreds of users had already signed up.”
2024-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Three Core Lessons Scaling Freshworks to a $5.2BN Market Cap | Biggest Product and Pricing Lessons from Scaling to $597M in ARR | How India Can Compete Globally in Tech and AI with Girish Mathrubootham, Co-Founder @ Freshworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I launched the company in twenty ten, we launched the product in june twenty eleven. I'll tell you what happened march eighteenth and nineteenth were very, very important days where we were a small team of six people and I was not coding. I was doing everything else, right? So one of the things I was doing was I was trying to participate in an APSU contest called the Lean Startup Contest where the price was $50,000 if you write a blog post on how your startup is a lean startup. So while I was waiting for the product to get ready, I was as the CEO and marketer I was trying to do these things to see if I could get some money. I actually wrote a nice post on hacker news on how a simple comment on hacker news made me quit my comfortable job and start a startup. So I shared that story and posted on Hacker News. It went viral on March 18th. It stayed on as the first post for like three, four hours and on the top page for like more than a day, which is pretty incredible.”
2024-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Three Core Lessons Scaling Freshworks to a $5.2BN Market Cap | Biggest Product and Pricing Lessons from Scaling to $597M in ARR | How India Can Compete Globally in Tech and AI with Girish Mathrubootham, Co-Founder @ Freshworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Come and see what's happening and then force the company to the right thing. So I sensed a paradigm shift in the power dynamics here. So and I started researching the first thing I found was on YouTube there was a United Airlines Breaks Guitars. There was a song by a musician. I don't know if you have seen that. It's called United Breaks Guitars. This was happening on YouTube. This is happening on blogs. So that's where the idea to build a fresh help desk came about. That's why the first product and the company was called Fresh Desk. And so we launched in 2010.”
2024-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Three Core Lessons Scaling Freshworks to a $5.2BN Market Cap | Biggest Product and Pricing Lessons from Scaling to $597M in ARR | How India Can Compete Globally in Tech and AI with Girish Mathrubootham, Co-Founder @ Freshworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and five and a half months of back and forth submitting multiple documents, they simply wouldn't process the claim. And so I went and shared my experience on an online forum, which is where I originally got the reference for the shipping company. So I wanted to really hurt their lead gen because I had a bad experience. As expected, the community started engaging and the president of the company came and apologized the same day. And the next day, money was in my back. And the back story here is in my career, I have built four customer support help desks in different categories, all on-prem. And what happened to me in my life was something which was intriguing because you know in customer support when you call a call center, when you call your cable company. As a user, you always feel powerless, right? Like you one person against a big giant company. But here what happened in my life was, hey, I was able to take on a much bigger company, share my story, get other users to.”
2024-04-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Three Core Lessons Scaling Freshworks to a $5.2BN Market Cap | Biggest Product and Pricing Lessons from Scaling to $597M in ARR | How India Can Compete Globally in Tech and AI with Girish Mathrubootham, Co-Founder @ Freshworks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source