Girish Mathrubootham: Biggest Product and Pricing Lessons from Scaling to $597M in ARR | E1142

The first thing is, what gives them the right to win in that market? You have to have spent a lot of time in the problem domain to be able to solve that problem. Number two, craftsmanship. Everything that they do, whether it's a deck that they send or a product mark that they have, can I see them to be world-class? Because you cannot win in a global market without being truly world-class products. And then their ability to hire a great team. The great founders who go the distance are the ones who are able to build a great team. If you hire a great team, the work will get done.

Ready to go? Girish, I am so looking forward to this. I have spoken to so many mutual friends before we do this. So thank you first for joining me today.

Oh, thank you for having me.

Now, I- I think that great entrepreneurs are shaped early, Girish, and so I want to hear, how would your parents and how would your teachers have described a young Girish?

I don't think they would be very fond, uh, of me at that time. Uh, I- I was always, uh, the naughty, the revolutionary, uh, uh, kid, uh, like who wouldn't fit in. I've been, uh, pulled up by my teachers, uh, several times. Uh, like, I've been asked to leave the class in engineering, uh, so- so I think, uh, I- I was always the one who didn't fit in, or- or at least, uh, didn't try too hard.

(laughs) Well, listen, I- I think naughty boy is always a good start to any schooling career. Uh, we look at FreshWorks today, and it's this incredible business. Every business starts somewhere. 2010, it was not obvious. (laughs) Take me to the founding moment of FreshWorks. How did- how did that come to be, and what was that origin story?

Before the origin story is, uh, I- I spent almost 10 years of my career building products. Uh, I was an accidental product manager. My boss, uh, threw a challenge to me saying, "Hey, Girish, you're an authoritative person. You're in marketing, which is a very concentrative role, so you should try building products." I went and Googled for the term product manager roles and responsibilities in 2001, and- and, uh, or 2002, I think, and- and that's how I stumbled upon being a product manager, and I really fell in love and created multiple products. Uh, the FreshWorks origin story, I think, uh, there are two stories in it. One, uh, in 2009, I was moving back from Austin, Texas to, uh, Chennai, India, and, um, I- I was shipping all my household goods, uh, back, and, uh, amongst them was my prized possession, a 40-inch Samsung LCD TV. And, uh, long story short, two and a half months later, my stuff arrives, the TV comes broken. I thought, okay, I've bought shipping insurance, so it should be fairly easy to, uh- uh, kind of, uh, call the shipping company and get the insurance process claimed. And, uh, five and a half months of back and forth submitting multiple documents, they simply wouldn't, uh- uh, process the claim. And, uh, so I went and shared my experience on, uh, uh, an online forum, which is where I originally got the reference for the shipping company. So I wanted to really, uh- uh, hurt their lead gen, uh, because I had a bad experience. And, uh, as expected, the community started engaging, and, uh, um, the president of the company came and apologized the same day, and the next day money was in my bank. Backstory here is, uh, in my career, uh, I have built, uh, four customer support help desks in different, uh, categories, all on prem, and what happened to me in my life was something which was intriguing. Because, you know, in customer support, when you call a call center, when you call your cable company, as a user, you always feel powerless, right? Like, you- it's you, one person, against a big, uh, giant company. But here, what happened in my life was, hey, I was able to take on a much bigger company, share my story, get other users to come and, uh- uh, see what's happening, and then force the company do the right thing. So, uh, I sensed a paradigm shift in the power dynamics here. So when I started researching, uh, I- I ... The first thing I found was, on YouTube, there was, uh- uh, United Airlines Breaks Guitars. There was a song by a musician, I don't know if you've seen that, it's called United Breaks Guitars. Uh, so, uh, this was happening on YouTube, this was happening on blogs, so that's where the idea to build a fresh help desk came about. That's why the first product and the company was called Freshdesk. And- and, uh, so they- we launched in, uh, 2010.