Zoho became a $1B company without external investment | Hacker News Reader

Zoho became a $1B company without external investment

techcrunch.com

263 pointsmikece102 comments

Sridhar Vembu, the founder, is famously responsible for training kids in rural India in software development and associated skills, hiring them post-training, and being responsible for long lasting careers of many youth who couldn't otherwise dream of a career in software development.

He established Zoho Schools (https://www.zohoschools.com/) that trains these kids and provides a stipend for them. The company has offices in Tenkasi, a small Tamilnadu town. His twitter handle (https://twitter.com/svembu) is worth a read for his thoughts on small towns, education, infrastructure, and social entrepreneurship in general.

Moved my google workspace accounts to Zoho after they retracted the grandfathered free plans a few months ago. Really quite pleasantly surprised. They are definitely a good option for people who want the same rough set of features. I am reassured to know that their business is real and not a ticking time bomb of the typical VC-funded customer acquisition growth-at-all costs operation.

Same, and wish I had sooner. Really slick mobile app, and great spam detection.

I moved one family member onto Zoho.

It has been a very positive experience so far.

You get an office system as part of the package.

Some cases of the spam filter being too aggressive.

I'd move myself if I wasn't so addicted to FastMail's beautiful web+mobile apps.

I love Fastmail. Switched earlier this year & now I don't lose sleep about my email maybe getting canceled.

I only have to keep an eye on what fresh authoritarian nightmares the Australian government is up to.

Not the worst thing ever, but it does seem all Western jurisdictions are ticking time bombs, and thanks to Five Eyes you're at the discretion of the worst one.

It's sad but this definitely was one of the factors (by far not the only one, probably not even the main one, however still significant) that dissuaded me from moving to FastMail.

Care to elaborate other factors?

You’re not wrong. I have to assume that someone is able to access & read my email if I’m not hosting it myself in my own home on my own hardware. Trade offs…

I sympathize with you. I'm not self hosting but I'm not using Gmail which is what most of the people I know or work with are using. And yet Google could read most of my mail by looking at the mailboxes of the people I'm exchanging mail with. And the company running the SMTP and POP3 servers I use could read all my messages. I guess you are as safe from snooping as I am.

> all Western jurisdictions are ticking time bombs

I'd consider anything based in the EU to at least be a step above anywhere 5eyes. They at least make an effort towards data privacy.

Hello, Glad to know about your liking towards Zoho and We strive to make it even better for you everyday. Regarding the Spam filter, we do have customisations available in Spam Control which can be set as your prefer for your account/Organisation. Hence, it would be of much help if you could share more details about the Spam Filtering concern you have mentioned, as an email to support<at>zohomail<dot>com. We will have it analysed and suggest the best solution possible. Looking forward to hear from you.

Regards, Zoho Mail Team

I started using it solely for a personal domain email, $1 a month, solid deal.

Eventually ended up using a bunch of its business features in time and moved the company email over, they hoovered me up real good.

I use Zoho Invoice for creating and sending invoices to my clients and it works well for my purpose.

Oh interesting I wasn’t aware they had an invoice service.

Just in case you weren’t aware, Google backed off and let the grandfathered plans remain for individuals.

I procrastinated my migration and it paid off!

Thanks - yes I did hear that, but sadly it isn't an option for me for some specific reasons

specifically: I moved countries in between and now they require entry of a credit card even though they would supposedly not bill it, but they decline all my credit cards (which they are not going to bill) because the billing country has to match the account country ... as usual the support options end in a dead end / python script etc. Which all just points back to, I'm dealing with a giant borg too big too care and moving is probably the right thing any way.

Do you have a link about the grandfathered plans? I added my card on file few weeks back when Google was incessantly mailing about shutting my account if I didn't upgrade to paid plan. Would like to know if it was unnecessary

I came across this discussion and was shocked as well. Turns out there's now a button here: https://support.google.com/a/answer/2855120?product_name=Unu...

"I used my account for personal use"

Thanks for this!

Hm, doesnt work for me unfortunately. it wants me to login but then only allows me to confirm the "Business Starter" Workspace it automatically selected.

I think that's correct. It should be free though.

Thanks very much for pointing this out. Really annoying, although not surprising, that I had to read this on a four-deep HN comment rather than this being flagged by Google.

I'm not sure 'paid off' is the correct takeaway. Moreso, Google as an organization has no idea what they are doing, quite literally. Promising free forever, then trying to force you to pay, then giving up is not the sign of a healthy host. That act alone led me to move all of my consumer spending away from Google(mainly drive space and yt premium).

I haven’t used the products in years but any SaaS company competing directly against Microsoft and Google and actually gaining traction deserves respect in my book and serves as inspiration for other startups hoping to do the same. We have a real risk of businesses only using FAANG products and services because it’s easier and safer and that is a terrible trend for startups.

On one hand, good for them! It seems like a fair company with no secret catch.

On the other hand… each zoho product I have tried was “like some other thing, but worse”. All the products are basically fine, but not excellent. But again it can find its customers

A small non-profit that I'm part of uses Zoho mail. In my opinion it is comparable to other webmail services like Gmail, Fastmail, and better than Outlook webmail. It's especially cool that using your own domain is free.

I haven't tried any other of their products.

My first experience with Zoho was their Zoho mail when working at a small (2 people) civil engineering firm.

At first I was turned off because I was used to either Google Workspace or Office but over time I got used to it and we started using more and more of their suite of products. It was really great to be able to add what we needed over time and not have to find multiple different vendors.

Our focus was the civil engineering work so administrative tools like this was just something that we needed for decent cost and to work. Zoho provided that.

It's amazing to see where they have come. Hope they keep growing and refining their product suite.

Zoho's office package feels like the Libre Office of web office packages.

But honestly, for a lot of people myself included, that's all you need.

I think it would probably suck in a large org, but for small companies it does the job perfectly fine.

Probably the only $1b company that didn't convert their playful logo into a 1D one-color generic looking logo. Good for them!

I've been using Zoho for my personal email since 2014 now. They haven't made me pay (yet) but I've definitely gotten them a _small_ amount of money through recommendations.

I'd totally pay, though.

That said, I'm not a big fan of their UI and I only really use the service through forwarding to my gmail address and send mail through gmail -> zoho smtp too.

As an Indian I'm proud of what Zoho has achieved. Mainly the founder Sridhar Vembu is down to earth & thinks for the well being of employees and society along with keeping customers in prime seat. Breaking conventional wisdom Zoho opened offices in tier 2 & tier 3 cities of India. Which made it possible for smaller cities to see growth induced by high earning employees of Zoho.

What are tier 2 and 3 cities refer to? I've never heard of cities referred to in this manner

There is no golden rule, but assume tier-2 cities mayn't have airport, no famous schools, less than 2 or 3 million people living in there.

Most of the tier-1 cities has direct international or national airways connectivity.

Tier-3 cities may not even have a single factory, it is hub for 100s villages, has decent bus-connectivity to nearest tier-2 city.

Apparently there is an official definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classification_of_Indian_citie...

Tier-1 cities are top 7-8 Indian cities based on population. Tier-2 and Tier-3 are smaller cities

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classification_of_Indian_citie...

Zoho feels like the Walmart SaaS of the Internet. Still, an impressive annual run rate for a boot strapped business.

So agree. The taste level of the products is terrible but they all interoperate and it’s crazy.

I think Zoho's actual valuation is around $12 billion.

I think the title references its annual revenue.

I migrated three of my personal emails from name cheap email hosting to zoho and the spams i received went up by 20x. Out of curiosity, I went ahead and move one of them back to namecheap, I haven't received a single spam in the last week.

Is this something to do with spam filter?

> Is this something to do with spam filter?

Yes, that's my biggest problem with Zoho so far: Having a below-average quality spam filter sucks more than having a below-average quality anything else, since it makes the difference between receiving emails or not.

I'm not convinced there is any reason why it's bad. They could up their game here.

Hi, we do understand your concern and we are here to help, make your experience with Zoho Mail, better. We are constantly working towards making our Spam Filter validate and deliver emails, as our customers prefer and we pride ourselves that the progress has so far been upward and steady. Having said that, we would like to get to the bottom of your concern and assist you with suggestions from the various Spam Control options we have or even come up with a better logic to address it. Hence, we request you to write to us at support<at>zohomail<dot>com with elaborate details about the issue. We will definitely have it analysed and sorted at the earliest. Thanks and Regards - Zoho Mail Team

I noticed this too, but it seems to have dropped off. In the month or so after I migrated from Google to Zoho I had a ton of spam, and was considering other options. But since then I haven't really gotten any more than I did with Google, maybe one obvious spam email every few weeks.

I would mark spam as spam during that initial period when there was a lot, so maybe there's just a learning process for new accounts as to what's actually spam?

Hi, Sorry to hear that. We would like to have you back on Zoho and address your concerns. Zoho's Spam Filter works on user preferences as well to ensure better spam filtering and Email delivery. In addition, we also have personalisations available to adjust the Spam Filtering for your accounts. Looking forward to have you back on Zoho Mail. Please write to support<at>zohomail<dot>com if you need assistance with any queries or concerns. Thank you. -Zoho Mail Team

They have one of the best customer support I've ever experience.

However, I find their apps to be quite sluggish. I think they ought to spend more on engineering.

> I think they ought to spend more on engineering.

Inevitably, yes.

But the fact that they can even be competitive at so many things:

Webmail, calendar, office, CRM, remote support, meet, chat, etc.

... and be among the cheapest total solution out there, justifies that they're not the best at any one thing.

Yes it's crazy. They have a product for almost every problem a small business can have.

Most companies would need a trillion dollars in funding before achieving the same thing.

For the sake of their stock price, it's easier to maintain the pretense that their single piece (cloud storage, document editing, etc) is world-changing in ways that their actual bottom line does not accurately represent, hence the need for said trillion dollars.

Is the text of the article available anywhere without a subscription?

Essentially they just made a clone of sap. You Dont need money to start up like that. For some unknown reason, even though both sap and Zoho are absolute rubbish, noone is releasing better software. There are just a bunch of companies that just copy each other. So all of them end up rubbish. The 80s and 90s business software was way more useful and user friendly.

This might be one of the only times I've seen the term "$1B company" refer to a billion in revenue, rather than a VC's made-up valuation ("unicorn"). Refreshing.

What's Zoho like these days? My last company heavily relied on the entire Zoho suite for just about everything except email, spent half of my time putting out fires and migrating them to other products. The only thing that didn't cause too much trouble was their CRM product, but even then it had its issues.

We use Books, it's okay, if you're relatively small, it will do the job.

Their biggest issue is that they focus on too many products, and interoperability between them. Necessary features take forever to be implemented years after they should have been.

Anything outside of Mail, CRM, Expense, Recruit, and maybe Desk is hair-pullingly terrible. They promise that all of their "apps" are interoperable, but these integrations are either half-assed to the point of uselessness or so full of bugs you can't rely on them.

Zoho Projects is the worst of the bunch—most of our teams are keeping secret Asana boards on the side just to avoid using it.

I remember soho as being a viable competitor to google docs, back when gdocs was new and exciting. And then they faded out and I kinda thought they had died.

Then a few months ago I started seeing zoho ads in all the elevators in Dubai.

I've been using zoho mail for a while now. Recently it stopped working on my Google pixel phone, throwing out an error about an invalid ssl cert. The cert seems valid though, maybe google noticed them just now.

the one TC article I am actually yearning to read is behind a paywall!

Fun fact. Zoho copied Zoto’s first logo design.

Pogo was (still is?) a famous kids channel in India. There was a lot of comments back then that it was taken from them. Zoho is a $1B without copyright issues on their logo. So it doesn't matter anyway.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:POGO-logo.svg

Wow, so refreshing to see

The founder and CEO, Sridhar Vembu, is very much publically aligned with right wing extremists in India, where he lives.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/m.thewire.in/article/economy/ac...

Vote with your wallet and your conscience

> Vote with your wallet and your conscience

What alternative mail hosting provider do you recommend? Google? Microsoft?

Google, in my humble opinion, is the single biggest evil in the digital world today.

It’s not a contest, but there are plenty of companies that are more evil. Besides companies that are straight up criminal, my vote would go to traditional data brokers. Google might abuse their wealth of data, but at least they won’t happily sell it on the street corner.

> but at least they won’t happily sell it on the street corner.

what do you imagine targetted advertising is? they will sell everything they know about you to basically anyone willing to pay in the form of "I'd like to target these particular audiences in my ad campaign", and then when you get conversions from that particular campaign, it's not exactly rocket science to dereference the click to a particular individual, provided that there's a conversion.

and if you're a bit more nefarious than that, you don't even need a conversion.

Yeah, I understand the privacy concerns with targeted advertising, and agree that it is a concern, but it’s once-removed from the type of data you can get from a dedicated data broker. At a data broker you can simply ask for the data you want and they’ll directly provide it.

If Google is a chartered fishing expedition, a data broker is a fish market.

> it's not exactly rocket science to dereference the click to a particular individual

How?

Email; ProtonMail, Tutanota

ProtonMail is known for completely arbitrarily closing user accounts with 0 recourse.

> Tutanota

Never heard of them.

Tutanota have been around for a bit over a decade. They close unused free accounts after six months inactivity.

Their main focus is end-to-end encrypted email. When sending encrypted emails outside of their ecosystem, they used to send a link to a temporary account, so as to reduce the chance of a leak.

They've never been hugely popular, but their name pops up a fair bit in circles where legality of things might be a bit gray. Like countries where certain human rights are suppressed, or where Tor is needed to workaround only getting government approved sites, etc.

> ProtonMail is known for completely arbitrarily closing user accounts with 0 recourse

Never had an issue with them personally.

> Google, in my humble opinion, is the single biggest evil in the digital world today.

Palantir? Facebook? Google abuse user data for profit, but at least:

a) their goal is only money

b) they don't leak that data left and right, and don't leave themselves way too easy to be used for inciting genocides

Facebook is by far worse.

So India is a population of over 1B, and the US+UK is about 400m.

Why should I assume I know better what the solution is for the problems plaguing a country in a completely different part of the world housing 1/8th the world population while living in the comforts of a 1st world country? Is the CEO advocating for genocide?

Or perhaps we should get off our high horse and shouldn't judge other people for things we cannot possibly understand anything about?

Experts have been warning about genocide in India[1][2][3] because Hindu nationalists and right-wing extremists in power have been persecuting minorities and stoking anti-Muslim sentiment.

This has directly led to violence and death, as well[4][5]. RSS, the party that held the event the CEO was going to go to, has also be directly attributed to violence against Muslims[6].

Exactly what problems are plaguing the country where the solution is discrimination, violence, death and potentially genocide?

Here's what the political rhetoric looks like, from an article titled "India's Hindu extremists are calling for genocide against Muslims"[3]:

> At a conference in India last month, a Hindu extremist dressed head-to-toe in the religion's holy color, saffron, called on her supporters to kill Muslims and "protect" the country.

> "If 100 of us become soldiers and are prepared to kill 2 million (Muslims), then we will win ... protect India, and make it a Hindu nation," said Pooja Shakun Pandey, a senior member of the right-wing Hindu Mahasabha political party, according to a video of the event.

> Her words and calls for violence from other religious leaders were met with a roar of applause from the large audience, a video from the three-day conference in the northern Indian city of Haridwar shows.

Here's what the actions that stem from the persecution and politics look like[5]:

> The 2020 Delhi riots, or North East Delhi riots, were multiple waves of bloodshed, property destruction, and rioting in North East Delhi, beginning on 23 February 2020 and caused chiefly by Hindu mobs attacking Muslims. Of the 53 people killed, two-thirds were Muslims who were shot, slashed with repeated blows, or set on fire. The dead also included a policeman, an intelligence officer and over a dozen Hindus, who were shot or assaulted. More than a week after the violence had ended, hundreds of wounded were languishing in inadequately staffed medical facilities and corpses were being found in open drains. By mid-March many Muslims had remained missing.

> Muslims were marked as targets for violence. In order to have their religion ascertained, Muslim males—who unlike Hindus are commonly circumcised—were at times forced to remove their lower garments before being brutalised. Among the injuries recorded in one hospital were lacerated genitals. The properties destroyed were disproportionately Muslim-owned and included four mosques, which were set ablaze by rioters. By the end of February, many Muslims had left these neighbourhoods. Even in areas of Delhi untouched by the violence, some Muslims had left for their ancestral villages, fearful for their personal safety in India's capital.

[1] https://www.genocidewatch.com/single-post/india-genocide-eme...

[2] https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2022/1/16/expert-warns-of...

[3] https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/14/asia/india-hindu-extremist-gr...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Jawaharlal_Nehru_Universi...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Delhi_riots

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_against_Muslims_in_In...

> corpses were being found in open drains

Let’s see multiple legitimate sources for this one. Police reports are public too. I’d like to see this confirmed. regional language sources are also fine.

Did you even bother to look before making this knee-jerk reaction post?

https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/delhi/northeast-del...

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/3-more-bodies...

https://www.opindia.com/2020/03/delhi-riots-chand-bagh-drain...

https://www.opindia.com/2020/02/four-bodies-recovered-drains...

https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/floating-graveyar...

https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/delhi-situation-peacef...

https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/delhi/delhi-riots-hc-denie...

https://www.newslaundry.com/2020/03/21/delhi-carnage-the-sto...

https://www.npr.org/2020/03/07/812193930/delhi-riots-afterma...

https://www.business-standard.com/about/what-is-delhi-riots-...

Experts cited are Islamic or have Islamic leanings. Can you cite some neutral sources?

Something tells me you had a knee-jerk reaction to an Al Jazeera URL, and then didn't even bother to read any of the citations.

If you had read them, you would have seen that the experts cited in the CNN article, like Gilles Verniers[1], a Catholic, certainly are not Muslim.

Either way, this is the classic ad hominem fallacy.

[1] https://www.ashoka.edu.in/profile/gilles-verniers/

i wouldnt trust al jazeera nor cnn as they have a hinduphobic stance. yes, i dont bother even opening their links. case in point - check these sites how much they have spoken about hindu massacres in moplah, bengal or kashmir or any of the innumerable instances of hindus being victims. the answer is most likely zero(dont trust me, do a search), they arent neutral but simply parroting an agenda.

so yea any other sources?

Yeah, I'm not doing your homework for you. If you want to assert that your ad hominem attack on sources is legitimate, instead of engaging with the content of those sources, you're free to prove it. Your feelings on the matter, however, are not proof.

Where do I go to vote for them since I have already been a customer of theirs for 10+ years?

I thought these loonies were on Reddit; HN has also seen an influx of them. What has the political affiliations of an individual got to do with a product? The discussion is about Zoho Office Suite. How does the "right-wing" feature in here? Please keep the discussions on course.

I for one like to know what I'm supporting when I buy a product or a service.

But the argument isn't "this company supports/promotoes/whatever something bad", but rather, "someone important in this company supports something bad", and that's a very different thing.

> vote

It seems like people are doing exactly that, just the results are not to your liking.

Everyone that says “vote” as some action that will definitely all your ailments really just means “I’m an ideologue and you had better join me”.

They don’t actually care about voting participation.

This is relevant information. IMO the secondary consequences of buying a product are important to discussions of that product: e.g. effects on the environment, climate, labor conditions, human rights and society.

Closer to this thread: Any discussion of a MyPillow product is incomplete without a mention that part of the purchase price might go into undermining democracy in the US.

The parent's argument seems similar: the founder/owner participates a hindu-supremacist organization known as the RSS, which has been implicated in religious violence; part of what you pay for a Zoho subscription may therefore go into funding these activities.

p.s. perhaps the parent could explain it better: the link is broken for me on Firerox, perhaps use a non-AMP URL?

Lol. The Wire!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com