freshdesk – Startup Story

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Freshdesk is an online help desk platform that allows companies to support customers over email, phone, chat and also through new social channels like Facebook, Twitter, etc etc.

Before starting freshdesk, Girish Mathrubootham was VP of Product Management at the ManageEngine division of Zoho Corp and had experience with an ITIL helpdesk, a customer support helpdesk, a facilities helpdesk, cloud computing and know a lot about those markets. One day he read an article on Hacker News about Zendesk (Zendesk is a SaaS-based customer support/help desk product) raising their prices 60 – 300% and how their users were unhappy about it. A commenter on that discussion stated that most of the other options available were also not that good and there was space in this market for someone who comes in and does a good job. He had the exact same feeling and that comment motivated him to launch his own startup. The next few weeks he was researching and reading details of all the companies in online-support space.

He talked to his friend Shan Krishnasamy to start freshdesk and he agreed. For a few weeks they tried working weekends and nights on it as part time but then both resigned from well paying job. They put up the website with standard helpdesk features and started advertising on Google adwords, Facebook and LinkedIn. They also wrote some blog posts which got some decent views. Today freshdesk is one of the leading cloud customer support software provider.