Disruptor of the Day: Girish Mathrubootham’s Freshdesk – The Story of How He Brought The HelpDesk To The Cloud

Profiled By Bill Klump | Daily Disruption | December 20th, 2011

Girish Mathrubootham is the Founder and CEO of Freshdesk.  He’s 36 years old, married and lives with his wife and two boys in Chennai, India.  Today we are going to tell you how Girish quit his comfortable job and launched a startup that is changing the way organizations think about their customer service.

For the last 9 years Girish was fortunate to be an employee of Zoho Corporation (which was called AdventNet when he joined in 2001 as a PreSales Engineer) and in his last role he was VP of Product Management at the ManageEngine division of Zoho Corp.  Things were going great, he had a great team and the satisfaction of having built several successful products under the ManageEngine brand.  As a matter of fact Girish has been building on-premise helpdesk systems since 2004.  In fact he has experience with an ITIL helpdesk, a customer support helpdesk and a facilities helpdesk and knows a lot about these markets.  In addition to this he had a ringside view to all the action in cloud computing happening at Zoho.

Then it happened! Sometime in the middle of last year Girish was reading this article on Hacker News – http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1357592  The article was about Zendesk raising their prices 60 – 300% and how their users were unhappy about it.

I was just reading this as a news article and browsing through the comments on HN when a simple comment from user megamark caught my attention:

That comment was like a slap on my face. Here was an opportunity sitting right in front of me. I had the domain knowledge, know that the massive transition to cloud is happening and the spidey sense in me told me that I should throw in my hat into the ring.That was the exact moment that I decided that I should build something in the customer support market delivered as SAAS.

The next few weeks were actually pretty stressful.  Girish couldn’t sleep because of the excitement and the fear. (school fees, home mortgage etc.) he had not talked to anyone (not even his wife) about the idea but all the while he was researching all the companies in the space.

I actually read everything that was ever written on those companies on Hacker News.  The Hacker News Search (yes that tiny little link on the bottom of every HN page) is in my opinion an entrepreneur’s best resource. (If you are the type who prefers reading printed articles you should consider the Hacker Monthly)

He zeroed in on some potential domain names and found that freshdesk.com was actually expiring in a couple of weeks.  So he backordered it on Godaddy and waited and waited.  It was almost a month before the domain was officially transferred to him, but now it was his.

The time had come when Girish needed a co-founder.  He had talked to his good friend and colleague of several years, Shan – who is a great techie and he immediately agreed.
For a few weeks the pair tried working weekends and nights but since both had families and kids it was obvious to both of them that they had to do this full-time if they were serious.  So back in October of 2010 both Girish and Shan resigned from their jobs and went for it.  Now Freshdesk has a team of six people – (3 developers, 1 UI/UX designer, 1 QA / Customer support engineer and Girish as – the Product Manager / CEO)

No a little about the company:  Freshdesk is your answer to today’s customer support needs.  With Freshdesk there is nothing to download or install – you don’t have to babysit your helpdesk or worry about server upgrades and patches.  You focus on providing a great support experience to your customers and leave the rest to Freshdesk.

Unlike software that is too simple to be really useful or expensive bloatware, Freshdesk is software done right – Lots of features presented in a simple and intuitive way.  With Email to ticket conversion, self-service portal, knowledge base, SLAs and a host of other impressive features, Freshdesk is a support teams best friend!

To learn more about our “Disruptor of the Day”, please watch this short video, and be sure to visit their website at www.freshdesk.com