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Building a Global SaaS Empire: Freshworks Founder & CEO Girish Mathrubootham on His Biggest Bets

Girish Mathrubootham · YouTube Free Intermediate India

Building a Global SaaS Empire: Freshworks Founder & CEO Girish Mathrubootham on His Biggest Bets

Mathrubootham built Freshworks by watching frustrated Zendesk users complain online and designing for them first, an Indian SaaS founder's account of betting on the user side of the equation and letting the paying decision follow. Useful if you are building B2B SaaS out of India and want a homegrown version of this playbook.

  • Freshworks started by directly targeting the pain of frustrated end users of an incumbent product, not IT buyers
  • Winning globally, not just in India, was the strategy from day one for an India-built SaaS product
  • Scaling from $1M to $100M ARR required treating user delight as the engine behind renewal, not a nice-to-have
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The question it answers

  1. Should my ideal customer be the person who pays or the person who uses the product?

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