Secrets to scaling up globally from hot Indian startup Freshdesk

Indian customer support software maker Freshdesk is rated on par with global leaders in its space. It has customers in 145 countries and its number one market is the US, which is also the home of its biggest competitor, Zendesk. How it cracked the US market holds the key to its scaling up success. This attracted US$50 million in fresh funding from Tiger Global, Accel Partners, and Google Capital, announced today.

It’s not easy for an Indian company to make it big in a mature, competitive market like the US, and Freshdesk had to figure out the nuances of adapting to different markets.

Girish Mathrubootham, founder and CEO of Freshdesk, shares with Tech in Asia just what it took to succeed globally, in the course of a chat about its latest series E round of funding. Here’s what you can learn from the Freshdesk experience.

Think global, act local

Initially, Freshdesk was doing everything – from generating sales leads to closing deals – from Chennai. It got many early adopters among technology startups and was receiving enough inbound requests from larger companies in the US and UK. But many of these larger deals didn’t materialize because they expected a Freshdesk team to meet them to close it.

“If we ever lose a potential customer we try to find out why we lost. We lost a few big leads in the UK; that’s when we figured out that they need to meet someone personally to find out more. It was hurting us a bit that we were not present in the local market. That is why we opened an office in San Francisco, and then another one in the UK and later, Sydney,” Mathrubootham says, adding that the decision helped Freshdesk bag many big-ticket accounts.

Over the last two years, his team also built a strong reseller network of over 100 across its big markets. This helped it beat the language barrier in the non-English-speaking markets where it couldn’t sell remotely from India. For example, in Brazil and France, Freshdesk partnered with very good local resellers. “For the resellers in the non-English-speaking markets, we generate the sales lead and pass it on to them. They would speak to the customers in the local language and close the deal.” In the English-speaking markets like Australia or the UK, Freshdesk again has resellers but they generate their own leads and close them.

Treat the small guys well

Most businesses who offer customer support to their clients ignore the smaller clients, even if they are paying customers. This is something Freshdesk noted early on. “Right from the beginning, we said we have to set the gold standard in customer support because we are a customer support company. So we gave all our customers, including those who were on a free plan with us, full support.” Mathrubootham says it gave Freshdesk a boost. “I would say it was a big reason for our popularity. We have had so many instances where our free customers were so amazed by our customer support that they didn’t want it for free and opted for our paid plans.”

Indian entrepreneurs often sound irked when they talk about how the developed markets perceive products from India. Many say buyers from the US, Japan, and other mature markets are skeptical about the quality. But Mathrubootham begs to differ.