Q&A: SaaS superstar Girish Mathrubootham on ambitions, fears, and secret strategies

Girish Mathrubootham is one of India’s most respected startup founders. Photo credit: Freshworks.

India’s best known SaaS startup Freshdesk rebranded itself Freshworks today. Under this umbrella will be multiple business software products, including customer support software Freshdesk that shook up global rivals soon after its launch in 2011.

Tweeters from American rival Zendesk dubbed it a “freaking rip-off” by a bunch of “Indian cowboys.” But it caught up with its rival and emerged a global leader in helpdesk software, before taking on the big gorilla Salesforce with the launch of Freshsales last year.

Its restructuring has been quietly in the works since early last year when Freshdesk bought the Freshworks domain. But a lot of back and forth went on before the company eventually decided to go ahead with the new name.

“There was a lot going on and we were also afraid. We didn’t know if Freshworks was the right way to go. We had a well-established brand with Freshdesk, so should we stick to it? The conventional wisdom is that you just use that brand and then rename the products,” founder and CEO Girish Mathrubootham tells me. “This was a strategic move for the company and we didn’t want to make a mistake. After a lot of deliberation, we finally realized that this was the right way to go.”

Currently, Freshworks has four products: Freshdesk, Freshservice, Freshsales, and Freshcaller – all designed to work “together to increase collaboration and help teams better connect and communicate with their customers and co-workers.”

Here are excerpts from an interview with Girish on the evolution of Freshdesk into a multi-product company, the thought behind its rebranding to Freshworks, and tips for entrepreneurs building product-driven companies.

Girish Mathrubootham, CEO and founder of Freshdesk, at the Tech In Asia Bangalore 2016.

Has Freshdesk outgrown its name for the company?

When we started in 2010, we wanted to build a fresh helpdesk, and that is why we called the company and the product Freshdesk. We always wanted to build a multi-product company, but in the early days we did not give away our strategy. We needed to do well with one product before we could embark on the next one.

Over the years, we saw that more than 23 percent of our customers were using Freshdesk for internal team support, so we launched Freshservice. Last year, we launched Freshsales. Today, we have tens of thousands of customers using Freshservice and Freshsales. And we saw that with the name Freshdesk, though it is a great brand now, everybody thought of us as a customer support or helpdesk brand. We wanted to create a brand which allows us to tell people that we are a multi-product company and not just one product. So now we have Freshworks which will be the umbrella brand and Freshdesk will continue as a product.

Like Google rebranding to Alphabet?

Google is way bigger than us. They had large businesses that didn’t fall under the Google umbrella, so they came up with Alphabet. You can’t really compare our move to Google’s.