A comment in Hacker News led Girish Mathrubootham to create Freshworks (2019)
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Freshworks (previously Freshdesk) files for IPO - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28335299 - Aug 2021 (1 comment)
Past related:
How Hacker News motivated me to resign my job and launch my own startup (2011) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4427728 - Aug 2012 (24 comments)
How a simple comment on Hacker News made me quit my job and launch a startup - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2340732 - March 2011 (92 comments)
"Whenever I read something like this I can't help but think "Here's a potential customer to whomever can get this right and at the right price". It seems like there's still a huge opening in this market for someone to come in and take all of ZenDesk and eSupport's customers." —megamark16
Zendesk raises their prices 60%-300%, users predictably revolt (2010), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1358398
Congratulations on a reverse-BrandonM, Mark.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28293146
(Maybe it's not new, but I hadn't noticed it before. It was a neat moment of "Wait... that's a feature, not a bug" followed by 2007 nostalgia.)
Thank you.
'It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?'
dhouston did remember to thank BrandonM for their feedback, so that's there too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16660140
1) when I started my own niche electron app I paid for Zendesk and the SOBs put a limit of like 2MB on attachments. So users would email large screenshots and I’d have to ask the user to email to me directly. I contact Zendesk about this and got a “sorry” shrug and something like “we can support this but you must upgrade to the 10x cost plan.”
Sometime in the last year they relaxed that, so that’s nice.
2) I’m a solo Dev. I’m hiring my first part time support folks. I want to automatically assign a ticket to me so I can assign to them. Sorry, it’s going to cost me another $600+ year to do that.
I mean, c’mon. I get it. But to go from $5/month to $40x3/month is just not a fun experiment.
I remember when they were the breath of fresh air in terms of online support, the disruptor.
Did they get worse? (Apart from prices increase) or did the expected standards increase and pass them by?
Circle of life.
Exactly this. But, it's funny how a brand's image sticks. I selected Zendesk for a business I ran years ago. And it was the slow-boiling frog experience, where it takes time to ultimately realize the rift between where you started and where you are. But we hobbled along due mainly to switching friction.
Still, I instinctively reached for them when evaluating support solutions recently, based on name and familiarity alone. But, with fresh eyes, it was immediately obvious that they were a complete nonstarter.
MailChimp's the same. They may not have ever been the lowest-priced solution, but time was they made it easy to get started and the value was there for a startup/small-biz. Now, they're trying to be quasi-enterprise with an over-priced bloated feature set.
These guys start disrupting by aiming for simplicity in a value-priced, pro-small customer offering. Then, in the pursuit of endless growth, they raise prices and become staunchly anti-customer in favor of their own economic objectives.
Would be nice to see companies continue to maintain their disposition to original customers and ethos, but pursue growth through new options that are truly optional and not subsidized by the entire user base. That, and adding new, complementary product lines that still retain that original ethos.
Or are you making a general comment on software, not specifically ZenDesk?
It's a general business/market life-cycle pattern.
The ones that don't have VCs pressuring them to turn what should have been a super successful lifestyle business into the next unicorn moonshot.
>I'd only say that about maybe one other thing, GitHub
Curious: what's your job function that has you both "working on ZenDesk all day" and also using GitHub?
Are you using the Jira integration to track tickets/bugs?
— Scott Farquhar
unlimited users and agents for the cost of a $5 a month VPS
The login flow to Freshworks is and has been confusing since they rebranded. I hope they fix it and sensitive the spam filtering better!
(Edited typo)