The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 32 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Ben Congleton: Zendesk Hasn't Evolved Its Chat Product in Four Years
“Our chat is far superior to these bolt on chat products, like say HubSpot or, you know, Zendesk hasn't evolved their chat in like four years since they bought Zopim.”
Chellappa: Big tech hires showed no performance difference compared to startup hires
“I've hired people from Salesforce, Zendesk, I've hired people from big brand companies, and I've seen no difference in performance from somebody who might have just worked for a smaller startup or run their own mom and pop business in the past.”
Golden: Zendesk Should Not Be on Loro Piana's E-Commerce Store
“Personally, I didn't feel like Zendesk should be on the e-commerce store of Laura Piana”
Price: Largest SaaS customers are outliers needing dedicated service layers
“Largest customers tend to be outliers and have very unique requirements in which case you need to overlay certain levels or levels of
Service on top of that.”
Weisberg: Acquisition value is defined by acquirer distribution, not standalone TAM
“The biggest lesson I think I took from this experience is that we had thought about pointing our infrastructure at the marketing landscape. Zendesk came along and was so valuable that your value in an acquisition is what can this particular company do with you…”
Weisberg: Operational profitability prevents runway pressure and unlocks M&A leverage
“So remember at this point that we were profitable. And so you can't kind of run you know, it's easy when you're talking to VCs or you're trying to get acquired to run out of time. And that's really your worst time is your worst enemy. If you're running out of …”
Olson: I still monitor Zendesk and work support tickets at Pendo
“Folks, I still am in the Zendesk queue, and actually, even this morning, I was communicating with my VP of support. We're looking at doing a sprint to burn down our backlog, and I volunteered to go into the tickets and burn down the backlog with our support te…”
Grant: SMBs do not care about multi-system data integrations, enterprises do
“From a technical standpoint, we can integrate into multiple data systems, and we can create apps that have data from Oracle and SAP and Salesforce and Zendesk, and the minute you say that, you realize, like, No SMB gives a crap. They just want their one thing.…”
Zendesk Holds Over 20% Market Share in Help Desk Software
“I think if you take revenue, for example, like Zendesk and help desk space has 20 plus percent of the market share.”
Major helpdesk platforms underinvest in their bundled knowledge base products
“At the moment, the customers might use something from bundled along with your help desk products like Zendesk, Pressdesk, or Intercom. But the problem is they don't invest enough on the knowledge base side of things.”
Olson: Pendo and Intercom don't compete; Intercom targets Zendesk
“I see them trying to disrupt the support tools like Zendesk and Freshdesk more so than attacking Pendo. So I think there's plenty of room in the market for Intercom and Pendo to coexist. So I don't actually see them as competitive at all.”
Price: Bundling unwanted free features makes customers feel they are overpaying
“Sometimes putting things in as free can actually add complexity to the customer if they're not going to want to use it and also makes them feel that there may be over overpaying because they're getting things that they actually don't want to use.”
Price: Zendesk avoids costly consulting to drive enterprise software growth
“And that's what we try and do today with, even as we move more up market, we try and make our software such you don't need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on consulting, but you know, you can deploy it very quickly. And that's where a lot of the ente…”
Price: Long-tail features with narrow utility enable premium SaaS pricing
“Typically where a long tail exists, then there's an opportunity to actually add the premium price to those into those features because they have very specific utility to a small number of customers.”
Price: Zendesk acquired first 10,000 customers with zero salespeople
“Zendesk got its first 10,000 customers without any salespeople, and what they figured out was a way to actually take something that was Kind of simple that everybody needed, which was customer service, but cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and loads of con…”
Price: Deep cohort analysis of 100 customers beats top-down metrics
“So actually you can get probably more intelligence a lot of time out of taking a hundred, a sample of a hundred customers and looking deep into what those customers are doing, whether it's when did they adopt, what features are they doing? You've got a big eno…”
Zoom serves over 850,000 unique business domains including Uber and Tesla
“We have a little bit over 800 or 50,000 unique business domains, you know, like Uber, like a Tesla, you know, like a Zendesk, Okta, you know.”
Zendesk quadrupled lead volume using Mariana IQ without increasing costs
“These guys are people who spend something like 50 bucks a click to all the way up to a hundred bucks a click on on Google AdWords for something like Helter software, and they were able to increase their lead volume, like, four times, based on Mariana, while ho…”
Okonkwo: Chatdesk uses helpdesk integrations to spot unserviced tickets for upsells
“We use our own platform to do that, so for example, we do automatic tagging, so we know, ok, the company has 10,000 tickets, because we're connected to their Zendesk, or they're gorgeous, and we know that we're only doing 10,005 thousand of those tickets, what…”
Okonkwo: Chatdesk charged $500/month to build custom Zendesk tag integration
“One example is a client that, one of our largest clients, we did automatic tagging for them, so they, we ingest all their customer service tickets and they get this dashboard. And so they ask, can you put the tags back into Zendesk? I said, sure. How much are …”
TestBox Landed ProfitWell as Its First Customer Buying Zendesk
“So, it was Zendesk, and it was a company called ProfitWell, who I think you've spoken to before in your podcast.”
TestBox Relies on Software Comparison SEO Pages to Acquire Users
“Yeah, that's exactly what we're doing at the moment.”
SignalFire Connected TestBox to Zendesk Security Leadership to Fix Bot Issues
“So we were having some interesting challenges with the security protocols that Zendesk has on their platform. Basically, like, they're just creating some bot detection issues, and so they actually went straight to the chief of security at Zendesk and help us r…”
SupportBee Ranks Above Zendesk and HubSpot for 'Support Ticket Software'
“You're number one organic, and you're beating HubSpot and Zendesk and others.”
Price: Over a third of Zendesk MRR comes from 100-agent accounts
“You know, our, I think over a third of our MRR now comes from customers with more than a hundred agents, and we are investing all the time in order to add capabilities within that area, but at the same time, keep the product super simple to deploy and configur…”
Price: Dollar Shave Club used AnswerBot to improve service, not cut headcount
“I mean, what's interesting on AnswerBot, which is our product, one of our earlier customers was Dollar Shave Club. And actually what they did was, even though that they were freeing up time, even though that we are answering more, more solutions, they decided …”
Price: Zendesk charges $1 per AnswerBot resolution to capture $10-$20 value
“The value to a customer of them not having to have that question go to a support agent, which tends to cost, you know, can cost tens, 15, tens, 20 dollars is very, very high. So we decided to price that separately, and we charge one dollar per resolution on th…”
Weisberg: Outbound.io generated over $30k MRR prior to Zendesk acquisition
“Sure, yeah, yeah. We were, yeah, we were definitely above that.”
Alionço: Pipefy raised a $2.4M seed round from Trinity and Redpoint
“We raised a 2.4 million from really good investors, like the founders of Zendesk, Trinity Ventures, Redpoint, eVentures, Valor Capital, and we ran two syndicates at Funders Club and at AngelList as well.”
Aircall paid zero revenue share on its software marketplace integrations
“So all our integrations today exclude revenue sharing, right?”
Price: Zendesk built AnswerBot in-house rather than acquiring AI startups
“Our machine, latest machine learning product, AnswerBot. We built ourselves you know, and you know, we have data scientists on staff, and because a lot of the work on that is how does it integrate, integrate very, very smoothly into the other products that you…”