How a Chennai Startup Made Zendesk Look Expensive and Salesforce Look Slow
There's a test for whether a B2B company has actually built a brand. Not market cap. Not logo recognition. It's this: when someone from that company walks into a room, do people assume they're good before they've said a word?
Freshworks passed that test a long time ago. If you're from Freshworks, people trust your talent by default. Freshworks sitting in a far-off corner in Chennai built it — selling customer support software to small businesses around the world.
This is the story of how they got there.
A comment started Freshdesk.
I'd want you to go read the origin story from the man himself instead of me repeating it in a hundred different ways. There are a lot of takeaways on the internet about this. But for me, it is simple: the internet was powerful then, the internet is powerful now. It just knows how to do its magic.
Read the Freshdesk story here.
Long story short — one of his posts about Zendesk, the competitor, went viral. And one of the comments on that post put the seed in his mind.
In October 2010, Girish and Shan Krishnasamy — both from Zoho — quit their jobs and started building Freshdesk out of a 700 sq ft warehouse in Chennai. The initial team was six people: three developers, one designer, one QA person who doubled as customer support.
They spent eight months building before going to market. No fancy launch. No Product Hunt in those days. Just a product that worked, priced for the people Zendesk had just alienated.
Three GTM principles from their first 100 days.
01 / Your story is your first campaign.
Girish posted the Freshdesk origin story on Hacker News. The story of why he built it — the anger at Zendesk, the broken customer experience, the opportunity. It went to 30,000 visitors in 2 days and brought in 175 signups. The lesson: people don't share product announcements. They share stories. If your founding story has a villain and a reason to exist, that's your first piece of content marketing.
If you're doing this nowA LinkedIn post or Twitter thread about why you're building what you're building. Not “excited to announce.” The real version — the frustration, the gap, the thing that made you quit your job. That's the post that goes viral.
02 / Validate demand before you ship.
Before Freshdesk was even complete, they entered an AppSumo contest and got 300 signups. Proof that people wanted this thing to exist. Most founders wait until the product is perfect to show it to anyone. Freshdesk validated demand while they were still building. If 300 strangers sign up for something that isn't ready, you're probably building the right thing.
If you're doing this nowA landing page with a waitlist. A Typeform survey in a Slack community. A quick Loom demo of a Figma prototype shared in a WhatsApp group. You don't need a product to test if people want it.
03 / Your competitor's name is your first keyword.
Freshdesk won $40,000 from Microsoft BizSpark. Most founders would have spread that across category keywords — “helpdesk software,” “customer support tool.” Girish went straight for the competitor. Every ad targeted people searching for Zendesk. They got 70 customers from that one bet.
If you're doing this nowSkip “best [category] software.” Start with “[Competitor] alternative.” Someone else already did the work of creating that search volume. Ride it.
Customers in 100 days. From a Chennai warehouse, selling to the world.
