The Exchanges

Q So fairly, fairly, it's only about one year after your launch. Why did you decide kind of 12 months in that the right, the right path was going to be to go down the venture path?

A Yeah, that's a very interesting question. And, uh, and see, there are two things. One is in a SaaS business model. Um, the marketing costs are very front loaded. So I have to spend, let's say, for example, thousand dollars to acquire a customer who's paying me under dollars a month. So unless I have real word of mouth and virality, uh, which usually happens when you are like a new category creator, but when we started, we started in help desk, which was an existing category with multiple players. So it was important to kind of get funding In order to pay for the front loaded marketing costs. So, and, and get scale. And I think this is a question that many entrepreneurs ask us, ask me actually, should they be bootstrapping or should they get VC funded? So I think if you are in a, uh, category where there's a lot of competition and if some of your competition already funded, it's probably a better idea to get funding and scale rapidly because VCs are going to look for other players in the category. And if you are still bootstrapping, maybe others will get, uh, um, funded and, um, Build a superior product quickly and scale.

AI assessment note: “important to kind of get funding In order to pay for the front loaded marketing costs.”

Q And what, so what price, you know, when we had Brian Halligan on a HubSpot, he talked a lot about the different pricing axes they use to drive higher price, but number of seats, number of usage, number of contacts, things like that. What kind of pricing axes do you use inside your products to drive expansion revenue?

A So, so today it is, uh, broadly only two axes. One is when the customer grows in terms of number of seats. Uh, so that is definitely one. Um, and we see a lot in, in our mid-market and large enterprise business, we see a lot of expand, land and expand. Uh, so companies that start with say, 40, 50, uh, seats actually expand to 205 hundred, et cetera. So that's, uh, been one axis. The other axis is we also have a customer success program. Where we, uh, manage our, uh, like we have three tiered customer success program and, uh, for, for our top, like we speak to customers, understand their business challenges. We actually, uh, upgrade them to higher plans if, uh, what they need is something that we have built in the higher plan, but they're not aware of it and they're not using it. So today our account based expansion is much larger than our plan based expansion.

AI assessment note: “today it is, uh, broadly only two axes. One is when the customer grows”

Q And what, so what price, you know, when we had Brian Halligan on at HubSpot, he talked a lot about the different pricing axes they use to drive higher price, but number of seats, number of usage, number of contacts, things like that. What kind of pricing axes do you use inside your products to drive expansion revenue?

A So, so today it is, uh, broadly only two axes. One is when the customer grows in terms of number of seats. Uh, so that is definitely one. Um, and we see a lot in, in our mid-market and large enterprise business, we see a lot of expand, land and expand. Uh, so companies that start with say, 40, 50, uh, seats actually expand to 205 hundred, et cetera. So that's, uh, been one axis. The other axis is we also have, uh, a customer success program. Where we, uh, manage our, uh, like we have three tiered customer success program and, uh, for, for our top, like we speak to customers, understand their business challenges. We actually, uh, upgrade them to higher plans if, uh, what they need is something that we have built in the higher plan, but they're not aware of it and they're not using it. So today our account based expansion is much larger than our plan based expansion.

AI assessment note: “today it is, uh, broadly only two axes. One is when the customer grows”

Q So I actually, the best revenge is justice, right?

A Yeah. So I actually, uh, uh, shared my experience online on an online forum where I found the, uh, shipping company and I posted pictures of my TV and posted my story and the community started engaging. Um, The next day, the president of the company came and apologized, and the next day, money was in my bank. So I sensed that there was a paradigm shift happening in the world of customer support. This was February, 2010, when Twitter, Facebook, using Twitter for support was not mainstream yet. So I, I got this idea to build a fresh help desk, um, which, uh, helps companies to listen to customer complaints, not just On, uh, or email or phone call, but also on Facebook and Twitter and so on. So I think, uh, that was the original idea to build fresh, a fresh help desk and we called it fresh desk.

AI assessment note: “Yeah. So I actually, uh, uh, shared my experience online on an online forum”

Q Tell, tell, so tell me how you, one of the things I'm interested in is how you're doing core analysis across your customer basis, right? You have six different product lines, and I'm sure you have different cohorts in each of those different product lines. Walk me through how you, what kind of, kind of analysis you guys are doing on a quarterly or monthly basis with your executive team.

A So, so I think, uh, the context here is, uh, see fresh desk and fresh service are, uh, Uh, not really, uh, complementary products. One is focused on an entirely different buyer. So the external customer support and internal customer support. So there is not a lot of overlap between those two. Before I answer your question, uh, so FreshSales was the first product we got out, um, which really could be sold into our existing customer base. And, um, then The other four products we launched last year. So what we do is, again, as part of our, um, uh, board meetings and investor, uh, analysis, we do all this, uh, fancy, uh, I had to learn all of this stuff like the layer cake analysis and, and, uh, the net expansion into new products and so on. And, uh, I think what we see as a very big opportunity for us is the fact that, uh, I think less than only five percent of our customers actually use more than, uh, one product.

AI assessment note: “we do all this, uh, fancy, uh, I had to learn all of this stuff like the layer cake analysis”

Q Tell, tell, so tell me how you, one of the things I'm interested in is how you're doing core analysis across your customer basis, right? You have six different product lines, and I'm sure you have different cohorts in each of those different product lines. Walk me through how you, what kind of, kind of analysis you guys are doing on a quarterly or monthly basis with your executive team.

A So, so I think, uh, the context here is, uh, see fresh desk and fresh service are, uh, Not really, uh, complementary products. One is focused on an entirely different buyer. So the external customer support and internal customer support. So there is not a lot of overlap between those two. Before I answer your question, uh, so FreshSales was the first product we got out, um, which really could be sold into our existing customer base. And, um, then The other four products we launched last year. So what we do is again, as part of our, um, uh, board meetings and investor, uh, analysis, we do all this, uh, fancy, uh, I had to learn all of this stuff like the layer cake analysis and, and, uh, the net expansion into new products and so on. And, uh, I think what we see as a very big opportunity for us is the fact that, uh, I think less than only five percent of our customers actually use more than, uh, one product. Which is, uh, the fact that, um, all the products are new. And, uh, so we didn't want to put a cross sale team. Uh, I wanted to do product based auto discovery. So like two months ago, uh, I think we launched, um, uh, Freshworks, uh, unified experience with, uh, With an omnibar and a single sign on called fresh ID. So, so I am a product person. So I believe that, um, for our SMB customers, I want to do product led discovery, automatic discovery of products. Like how when you…

AI assessment note: “we do all this... stuff like the layer cake analysis and... net expansion”