Omer (00:11.360)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host, Omer Khan and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
In this episode, I talked to Sree Ganesan, the director of Fresh Chat, a modern messaging software product that helps businesses to have marketing, sales and support conversations with customers.
Fresh Chat started out as Konotor, a startup which SRI founded with a couple of friends.
The founders originally set out to build a WhatsApp competitor, but realized that building a platform like that required a lot of capital.
So they pivoted and focused on a mobile user engagement platform for two way messaging inside apps.
Eventually, that product was acquired by freshdesk and became Fresh Chat.
In this interview, you're going to hear that story and discover some interesting lessons.
For example, SRI wasn't happy about how the sales guy on his team was pitching the product to customers.
He felt that the sales guy was underselling the product by pitching just one basic feature instead of communicating the full value of the product.
But in hindsight, that turned out to be a smart decision by the sales guy, and SRI shares what he learned from that experience.
Another example is when SRI shares how many customers kept asking for one particular feature.
But the founders didn't agree.
They had a vision for their product and felt that this feature would move them away from that vision, so they never built it.
But years later, after they were acquired, they did add that feature to their product and in three months they generated more revenue than they had in the last few years.
So we talk about how that feature, what that feature was, and the lessons the co founders learned from that particular experience.
It's a great interview and I hope you enjoy it.
Siri, welcome to the show.
Sri Ganesan (02:18.380)
If you hey.
Hi Omer.
Omer (02:20.150)
So I'm going to start with my usual icebreaker.
What gets you out of bed every day?
So is there a favorite quote that you have that maybe will give us an insight into what inspires or motivates you as you work on your business?
Sri Ganesan (02:32.710)
I think one of the things I really look forward to, you know, and what really motivates me is to try to get the best out of myself and the people around me.
One of the things I've been inspired by, it's not as much a quote as, you know, dialogue from the movie Ratatouille.
So Anton actually talks about right at the end of the movie, you know, he realizes what the chef meant by anyone can cook, right?
He says that it's not that anyone can cook, but rather that a good cook can come from anywhere or a good artist can come from anywhere.
Right.
And to me, you know, the parallel that I see at work, for instance, is that great ideas are sitting in all corners of your office.
Right.
I mean, I've made it one of my personal goals to make sure that you're building a great culture and a great work environment where everyone feels empowered to bring their ideas to the forum.
And, you know, we are really harnessing all these inputs and feedback from everyone to make sure that we're building the best product out there.
Omer (03:36.870)
Awesome.
And I love that movie, by the way.
I've seen it five or six times.
Sri Ganesan (03:40.390)
Same here.
Omer (03:42.630)
So let's talk about fresh chat.
And kind of really where the story starts, I guess, is several years ago when you launched your startup, Konotour.
So when you started out, what was the premise, what was the product?
What problem were you trying to solve and for whom?
Sri Ganesan (04:02.320)
When we started, actually, we didn't start right away with Conotur.
It was just three of us.
All of us from the B2C world worked at places like Verizon, Zynga, eBay, etc.
And we were actually trying to build a competitor to WhatsApp focused on voice messaging.
But at some point, we realized that taking on messaging app needed a lot of capital, and building that network was extremely hard.
And while we were building this messaging app, we saw that a lot of our initial customers who were trying out our app used to give us feedback right from within the app through voice messaging.
Because we were one of the first apps to introduce messaging through voice in a very easy, convenient way.
So we thought, hey, why not take this voice messaging piece and.
And add it to anyone's app, right?
So there were so many people back in 2013 who were jumping on the mobile app bandwagon, building new interesting apps, and we thought all of them can listen to their customers, literally.
And that's where really Conitor started as a way for a product team to get feedback through voice messages from right inside their app.
But of course, over a period of time, it evolved into more like a messaging experience inside the app rather than just one way.
It became WhatsApp of sorts within the app for a brand or a business to communicate with their customers.
Omer (05:36.520)
So how long did it take you to kind of have that insight?
How long were you building the product for?
Sri Ganesan (05:42.760)
Right.
So we built this messaging app for roughly eight to nine months.
Where we were iterating on was more out of, I would say the thought that, hey, let's build something B2B to support the B2C part of the business.
That's how it started thinking about, you know, what can we build which can make us some money.
And we thought, hey, you know, this is something that people are using with us that other businesses would want and should be using more than would want.
I think it was a lot of thought that they all should be using it.
So we took it to a bunch of product managers in our network, put it up on Hacker News, saw that people were responding positively to the idea.
So we said, hey, let's go ahead and do it.
And once we started on that journey, really, we weren't really looking at what we were doing before.
We focused just on building this aspect.
Omer (06:40.600)
And then did you just drop the B2C idea completely?
Sri Ganesan (06:43.880)
Absolutely.
So it was running on its own with no contributions from us for a while.
And one day when we realized that the certificate, you know, the SSL certificate had expired, we said, let's not bother to go and change that.
That's sort of done.
Omer (07:03.320)
That's so funny you say that.
Like, I had a product that I had kind of built as a side project many years ago and hadn't really been doing anything with it and didn't really want to shut it down.
And then I had that email come through about renewing the SSL certificate, and that's exactly what happened.
I was like, you know what, maybe this is just the time because I can't be bothered to go and update that certificate anymore.
I wonder how many people have gone through that.
Anyway, okay, so you've got this idea.
You've gone out there and spoken to some people in your network.
There seems to be some interest there.
Did you guys raise any money or was this kind of a bootstrapped business?
Sri Ganesan (07:47.740)
It started on the startup journey in September 2012.
It took us till December 2013 to get the first app to use, Konotor.
I mean, of course, we had been building connector actively from August 2013, right?
So.
But no money raised till that point in time.
We didn't even think about raising money for the messaging app because unless we hit a certain viral coefficient, we didn't plan to do it.
And that didn't happen with the B2B business.
The idea was to have it fund itself, really.
We wanted to bootstrap, though we didn't necessarily turn down conversations with VCs.
We would have those conversations.
Eventually we got into this accelerator program with Target, the retailer, and that gave us a little bit of cash to keep the business going.
Interestingly, towards the end of the accelerator program, we won this thing called the queue price by Qualcomm and Axle.
And that gave us shot in the arm that gave us like $125,000 more.
And we also got some customers by then who are paying us.
So we didn't formally go out there to raise money and raise money, but we had some money that came our way through different means.
The best money is, of course, money you get from customers, right?
Omer (09:14.960)
Totally.
Okay, so let's talk about growth.
What were you doing to find customers?
You mentioned earlier that you had been kind of going out in your and meeting people in organizations and trying to kind of recruit customers that way.
But beyond that, what else did you do that kind of worked for you guys?
Sri Ganesan (09:35.340)
I'd say the first phase was completely hustle, right?
Just going to events, meeting people, talking to VCs, to get intros into their portfolio.
Companies that are doing well, sharing with them how we could help those companies.
Actually, quite a few of them did make good intros for us, which resulted in good business.
Right.
So that was one of the primary channels.
I'd been a product manager before at different companies, and I bonded really well with the product people in these companies, and that was my route.
Go and pitch the product manager.
They're more likely to be excited about what we're doing because it's like a new way of talking to your customers.
Right.
And use that path to get someone to prioritize putting this in their app.
That was what we were doing.
We started off with smaller apps and slowly started to take our success from those smaller apps to bigger apps.
At some point, we also started doing a little bit of cold email outreach to businesses outside of our country.
So to take it to North America, to take it to Southeast Asia, et cetera, we were doing a bit of cold outreach.
The SDR model, if you've heard of it, from the following Predictable Revenue by Aaron Ross.
Right?
Omer (10:56.990)
Yeah.
So just kind of explain a little bit about that.
Sri Ganesan (10:59.790)
Right?
So the idea is to have an interesting mail which will get someone's attention.
So we used to build a list of, hey, these are apps we'd like to work with, right?
And then figure out who people are in those companies, guess their email IDs, verify them using, like, rapportive, and really start sending mails to them.
Right?
And mail usually would say, hey, you know what?
I've put together this personalized deck for you.
Would you like to see it?
And those that respond saying, yes, we then make those decks and send it across, of course, and then we get into a demo.
Right.
And that did give us a lot of good, positive conversations with a lot of globally promising app startups.
Of course, we were focused only on apps.
The other thing that really gave us some traction was a random post on Quora that I put up, which was like, 100 reasons why people will uninstall your app.
It was like a long list of every possible reason someone would uninstall the app.
And I think, again, the product manager audience liked that because they were all trying to solve that problem back in 2014.
Omer (12:12.160)
And it was just that one post.
And that was generating inbound leads for you?
Sri Ganesan (12:16.640)
Yeah.
I mean, more often than not, that's how they would discover that we exist, then go on to read probably other posts that we had put up there, etc.
But I think that was one of those which caught people's interest because truly this was a period when you should know that a lot of apps were spending a lot of money to get ahead in the race of how many installs they have, how many downloads they have.
Right.
And they quickly realized that the download doesn't mean anything because people uninstall the app so quickly.
And hence I think there was a lot of interest in figuring out how to stop this, you know, leaky bucket.
Omer (12:55.700)
Okay, so.
So that started to get you some.
Some critical mass of customers.
And beyond sort of the hustling and Quora as, As a lead gen kind of vehicle, what else did you guys do that helped you grow?
Sri Ganesan (13:12.660)
So there are a couple of things.
One was we started adding a powered by at the bottom of our screen inside the app so people would notice and hence figure that, okay, there is this.
I mean, if there's a product manager using one of these apps, they're going to know who powers this feature in this other app that they're using.
Right.
And that gets their interest.
So that was one thing.
And we also figured that more by accident, I would say we got one of the largest on demand apps in India to work with us, and that automatically led to a lot more in that category, you know, reach out to us and engage with us.
So I think thinking about it now, people probably call it, you know, bowling pin strategy, where you knock over one and a lot more pins are bound to fall.
But that's something that worked well for us as well.
Of course, the fact that it's a very visible feature in the apps that we work with also made it easier, I think, in growing the product.
Omer (14:20.010)
Okay, cool.
And I know that there were a couple of changes that you've made with the product, which there was some resistance to in the early days.
Can you talk a little bit about those and share what you learned from that experience?
Sri Ganesan (14:40.130)
There's definitely a lot we learned along the way.
A couple of things we used to keep hearing from the market, right?
We're going out there talking to potential customers.
We built a bunch of features based on feedback.
Like initially it was about users giving feedback, then it also became about the business can reach out to you proactively and engage in conversation.
So one thing that was staring at us was a lot of customers would say, hey, you know what, I just want this piece of sending the proactive messages, the push notifications to the customer.
I don't think I'm ready yet to engage back and forth with them.
I don't think my customer service team wants to talk to the customer yet.
In fact, so much so that our first salesperson used to just go and pitch this part of the product saying, hey, you can send push notifications to your customers.
And I used to pull him up and say, hey, that's not what we are.
We are a messaging product in app, Messaging native, have this great SDK that enables all these features and you're just focusing on the wrong thing, right?
In reality, I think anyone who was just pushing forward on doing great push notification campaigns, marketing automation software for mobile back in 2014 was growing really, really fast.
And by not making that our focus, we probably lost out on a lot of potential growth we could have had.
And surprising, there's one more thing which we sort of didn't listen to, which again, came from big customers, right?
So big customers, global big customers as compared to the smaller Indian startups that we typically used to working with wanted us to focus more on mobile web.
And they were like, hey, I know that you guys have this great solution for apps, but we want one solution to work across web and mobile and mobile web as well, right?
And you know, we tried to talk them into trying it in the app first.
We tried to tell them, hey, you're not thinking the right way about your mobile app.
You're trying to use one solution across the board.
That's not the right way to do this.
Instead of going and building what they wanted, we were really battling with them about why they should focus more on the mobile app and pay attention to great service to their loyal customers on the app.
Omer (17:07.450)
I'm curious the first point that you made about the sales guy using the marketing automation as a way to sell the product.
Why was that an issue for you as a founder?
Was it because he wasn't getting sales or it was kind of more about.
You felt like the vision of the product wasn't being kind of fully communicated?
Sri Ganesan (17:29.700)
Yeah, it was the second one.
Right.
So we felt, hey, there's so much more to what we've built.
And we don't want people coming in the door for one part of the product and not the part that made us special because there were others doing push notifications.
Right.
So it was more about, hey, that's not our usp.
Maybe that's what was selling in, in.
In that period of time.
Omer (17:53.570)
Yeah, but it sounds like it was working, just focusing on that one feature that people could just get.
Sri Ganesan (18:02.050)
Absolutely, it was.
It got us a lot of conversations.
And then I guess I would come in and talk about the rest of it and complicate the sale.
Because now if I talk about customer service and you know, the product manager and the tech guy and get everyone involved now, they were like three teams that needed to buy into the idea.
Omer (18:21.440)
What was the lesson there that you, you learned in terms of if somebody's listening, they have a product and, you know, maybe like you, they, they've kind of built something that they're, they're proud of.
And maybe it takes a little work to kind of really fully communicate what the product can do.
And maybe there is one feature that kind of represents 10% of the overall benefit, but it's something people get.
Is that something people should think about?
In terms of, is it better to go in with one simple idea that people can just get and use that as a way to kind of open the door or what did you learn from that experience?
Sri Ganesan (19:03.110)
I think you got it bang on.
Right.
So in terms of how it could have been done, it could have been about getting the door just through the push notification piece.
Offer that separately, even, perhaps.
Right.
And once you have all these customers, it's easier for you to then upsell the other aspects of your offering the other features.
Or if you want to call it a separate product, you call it a separate product.
Right.
And get your initial customer to convince their counterparts in the organization they're already using this great software and also offers these additional benefits.
I think one big lesson is, I mean, all of us working on startups, we're probably doing it in the prime of our life, right.
We're sort of spending our best years investing them in our startup.
And if there's an easy way to get Traction.
I think we should not be blind to that.
We should harness that, because the more growth and momentum you have, the more resources you can create for yourself and then, you know, go after your bigger vision.
It doesn't always have to start the hard way.
Right.
Especially if you're in an evangelistic market.
If there's something that's easier, more like a commodity, and sells a lot, maybe it makes sense to piggyback on the success of that, the market where you're seeing a lot of demand and then introduce the more evangelistic part of it.
Omer (20:37.810)
And then the same goes for the other thing that you were hearing from the market about not just focusing on mobile, having a web component as well.
And I mean, that's part of what you've done in Fresh Chat.
But it was never something that you guys followed up with in Konotor, right?
Sri Ganesan (20:55.630)
Absolutely.
The first time we introduced the web component was in September 2017, a long time after we heard it from the first bunch of customers who were asking us to go down that route.
I can tell you that the first three months of Fresh Chat made more revenue than the whole lifetime of the previous product.
Omer (21:20.670)
Wow.
So why do you think that you resisted offering a web component with Konotor?
I mean, was it just because there were like a couple of people asking for that, or were you hearing it fairly regularly from the market?
Sri Ganesan (21:38.050)
We did hear it fairly regularly from the larger customers.
And I think somewhere we discounted what we heard from them because we thought, you know, the big guys don't know yet.
They haven't succeeded on mobile yet.
And that's why they're thinking of it this way on the app side of things.
Right.
Because usually for the bigger companies, they were doing apps and faces.
They did their V1 of their app.
It wasn't a success.
Most of them in 2014 were thinking of their V2 differently.
They were finally getting to terms with, okay, app is not about just getting downloads.
People are not going to download me.
I need to think of the app as something for my loyal customers.
So they were also going through a journey of learning what they need to do on their app.
And to us, it felt like they're pushing us in the other direction because they haven't figured out their apps yet.
One more thing, probably at the back of our mind was Live Chat is a large market, and for whatever reason, doing a startup, we were shying away from large markets.
Instead, we were, you know, wanting to create a new market.
We thought that was when we truly have made a dent in the world.
Omer (22:49.150)
Right.
And you often hear the advice in terms of focus on a, on a niche within a market and dominate that.
And then you can kind of figure out, you know, how you kind of expand from there.
So what you were doing seemed to make a lot of sense, but this kind of feedback kept on coming back from the market.
And would it have been a lot of work for you guys to kind of support, have supported a web component or was it more based on principle that you guys just said, no, this is not something that we want to go down and we don't want to go down this road?
Sri Ganesan (23:28.710)
It probably wasn't a lot of work.
It was more of convincing ourselves that it was a good thing to do for the product.
I think partly it was about feeling doing something for the web will constrain what the offering is because back then web didn't have push notifications and we had this whole asynchronous mode of communication which we believe worked better for apps.
Right.
So it was based on principle, partly based on how we saw difference in the platforms themselves.
Though I think when you look at it today, today web supports push.
And we've also figured that you can still have async conversations on the web by falling back to email notifications, even if you don't have the ability to push to the end user.
So I think what we saw as distinct or representative of only mobile apps back then are no longer necessarily mobile only paradigms.
Like when you think of web today, your users on web are also distracted switching between different tabs, doing different things.
So even they prefer to be able to engage with the business asynchronously.
Omer (24:49.640)
Right, Right.
Okay, let's talk about the acquisition.
So you guys were acquired by Freshdesk, when was it?
Sri Ganesan (24:59.650)
So this happened in December 2015, back when Freshworks was still Freshdesk.
Omer (25:06.450)
How did that come about?
Sri Ganesan (25:08.610)
I mean, it's pretty interesting story actually, where a friend of mine who was in the VC side of things reached out one day saying one of his portfolio companies was interested in talking to us because they were pivoting into our space.
And I was not really inclined to speak to them initially, but he insisted that we give them a chance and, you know, engage with them.
I went on to have a conversation, understood that this founder had met a bunch of people who had all talked about connotor to him when he talked about the pivot that they were doing.
So he was really, really eager to have us on board.
When I have, I was traveling to meet this founder.
I stayed with a friend And I happened to share with him my reason for being in, you know, visiting the city of Bangalore that day.
And he was like, hey, wait a minute.
You're building such a great business.
Don't even think about selling it.
Let's talk about you raising more money.
I know these other VCs, etc.
So we had a long conversation that night.
He pitched us to one of his VC friends who then got to talk to us.
They had invested in Fresh Desk before.
They said, hey, why don't you do this with Fresh Desk?
And at that point, within an hour, we were speaking to Girish, the CEO of freshworks.
And I think it was a lot about how.
How that conversation went.
Right.
So when in a conversation, the other party, the buying party, makes it feel like it's about having a great win for you and your team.
It made things a lot more interesting to us.
And we saw this as a great opportunity more because freshdesk, the product, had great synergy with what we were building.
And they really saw us as a team that can drive this whole mobile strategy for the company and ensure that we were winning in the right areas.
So for us, it felt like a great outcome for the product and the team, so we went ahead with it.
Omer (27:22.160)
How long did it take you guys to say yes?
Sri Ganesan (27:24.400)
I think it was just one breakfast conversation with the CEO where we really understood each other.
There was a lot of trust.
I mean, we had known each other before, we had met at events, etc.
So it wasn't, you know, strangers meeting.
But I just think somehow there was a lot of trust.
We figured that the cultures, though we were a small team, we were just 10 of us at that point.
We could see that there'll be a great cultural fit as well.
And of course, there's going to be space for us to continue down our path and make this product successful with more resources backing us.
Omer (28:04.740)
Okay, and then once you guys were acquired, the product was rebranded to Hotline IO.
Sri Ganesan (28:14.420)
That's right.
Omer (28:15.540)
What was the reasoning behind that?
Sri Ganesan (28:17.380)
Honestly, Konotor didn't mean anything.
So it was a very random name plucked out based on what?
One of my co founders, Deepak, his nephew, mispronounced a word as konator.
And we didn't even intend to keep that as the name of the product for long.
We just thought, let's not debate too much on the name.
Let's first make the product successful.
The domain is available.
Go for it.
Right.
And surprisingly, a lot of people like the name.
But.
But Hotline was about giving a little More meaning to what we were trying to do, which was by then we had a lot of apps that were of the on demand variety, which were using us globally.
Right.
So we thought it was all about fast paced engagement, solving issues for customers really fast, helping you scale your support without necessarily growing the team.
So we thought it's like a VIP hotline for your customer to reach out right to you and get a solution.
That was where that name came from.
Omer (29:20.900)
And then I guess about six months ago you did a pivot and then rebranded again.
So that's when the product became Fresh Chat.
Sri Ganesan (29:32.900)
Right, right.
So I think Fresh Chat has multiple reasons why we changed the name.
Of course, the company itself rebranded to freshworks and all the products were Fresh something except for Hotline.
So we knew it needed to be fresh something and we just went with the obvious, which was Fresh Chat.
To be honest, chat does not anymore describe what we're doing because in the new world people call this messaging, not chat.
Right.
So it's like chat is the old school traditional live chat products which are more session based.
Messaging is like this continuous interaction where you can have this conversation across days, persistent conversations with two parties like your messenger or iMessage or WhatsApp.
The way we thought of it though, the Gartners of the world and probably bigger customers know the difference between messaging and chat.
The smaller ones don't.
So for the smaller ones, what we're doing really is reinventing chat for them.
Right.
So messaging is chat reinvented.
So Fresh Chat is a nice name to go for that.
Omer (30:46.300)
Yeah.
I think there's a good lesson there as well in terms of what you call the product.
And I think you're right.
If you were looking at like the Gartner Magic Quadrant or something, you'd have to.
There's a certain category that your product would be described to fit into, but your typical customer probably doesn't care about that.
Right.
And probably chat is something that you don't have to spend a lot of time explaining to them.
If nothing else, it tells them, okay, I can communicate with my customers.
Sri Ganesan (31:14.790)
Right.
Omer (31:15.750)
Did you make any changes to the product as well when you, when you rebranded to Fresh Chat?
Sri Ganesan (31:21.430)
Yes, we pretty much, I would say web became as much a first class citizen as in app when we launched Fresh Chat.
Yeah, finally.
Omer (31:35.130)
Yeah.
And then.
And that's when you started to see sort of that hockey.
Hockey stick kind of growth.
Sri Ganesan (31:41.050)
Absolutely.
It made the biggest difference because honestly, adding chat to your website is so much easier than integrating an SDK into your app.
And I Think that alone makes it possible for a lot more people to try it out.
I think globally we're seeing a lot of people move from your typical call center and email based engagement to trying out something that's right there, fast paced, instant.
And that's where chat is winning really.
It's also about, I think a lot of SaaS businesses are looking at messaging and chat as a way to engage their leads on their site.
As soon as people sign up in their product.
Right.
So have that icon right there, have it so accessible, have a doubt, they just ping you right there.
There's no inertia to reach out anymore.
Omer (32:36.570)
Yeah.
So I'm curious about when you rebranded to Fresh Chat and you made web, as you said, a first class citizen alongside mobile.
So you saw the growth in revenue and I'm wondering did that all come from people signing up for the web piece of this or did it also drive the mobile piece?
Right, because what I'm trying to get to is did you just see that growth because there's a bigger market for, for the web and you were now offering that and you were able to tap into that market or the fact that people started using your web product and as you said was easier to adopt, did that help to drive adoption of the mobile product as well?
Sri Ganesan (33:31.350)
I would say it's still probably 70% of these are.
I mean the growth is coming from just purely web.
It's just a market thing.
Right.
Such a big market as compared to people trying to add in app customer support.
But there are cases where people find it easy to try it out on the web are cases where people wanted a single solution across web and mobile.
So both of these also exist, but I think largely it is just the web part of it.
Omer (34:03.320)
Okay, so a while back you wrote a post called the Market Trumps All Else.
My biggest startup lesson a year after freshdesk acquired us, and it's a fairly long article so I'll include a link to it in the show notes.
But just tell us a little bit about what's the basic premise of what you wrote there.
Sri Ganesan (34:27.960)
I was thinking of what we were doing with Konatar and contrasting it with the kind of growth that Fresh Desk and the other fresh products had been seen.
And it became very apparent to me that shying away from a market just because there are other competitors, many other competitors, is a very wrong way to look at things.
There's a reason why there are so many competitors and all of them are doing well.
And that's because there's a huge market out there, while probably the reason why it's just you and a bunch of, you know, fewer competitors, none of whom are probably growing as fast as they should be in your current market, is probably because you're not in the right market.
And as entrepreneurs, we sort of fail to see that.
We think of it as, yeah, I'm going to create this market, I'm going to educate the market, and we sort of are stuck in that loop, right?
We're, we are growing and that growth gives us the shot in the arm, but really we're not growing as fast as we should be.
And unless you have this stark contrast visible in front of you, I think you're just stuck in your own bubble.
And I did see a bunch of other startups who were in a similar phase as to what I was in with Conitor.
And I really wanted to help them realize that they need to think again about which market they're chasing.
And they need to think about is it a hard market that they are in, or is it a market where they can grow faster and when by just changing a few things around, how they're doing their business or how they're doing their go to market or about the product.
Right.
And I actually wrote a draft of this, sent it to a couple of entrepreneur friends who I felt were stuck.
And once I heard back from them, you know, I really heard the article really resonated with them.
That made me feel that I should put it out to more people in front of more people, and that other startups will benefit from reading about this journey and reflecting upon where they are and what kind of a market they are playing in.
Omer (36:45.330)
So if somebody's listening to this and they're in that position right now, are kind of feeling stuck, and maybe their thinking is kind of where you were, Right.
In terms of if we just hang in there long enough, this market will kind of catch up, or we just need to do a better job at educating the market about the product and what we're doing here other than kind of going and reading the post, which I think people should do anyway, what's kind of one takeaway that you could kind of share with them to maybe start?
Sri Ganesan (37:20.380)
I would say if you're not in a position to educate the market at scale, right?
If you're not in a position where you can make so much noise that the market that you're chasing, the changes you expect in the market would be accelerated, if you don't see that happening through your own proactive measures, then you have no business you know, waiting around for it to happen.
Omer (37:45.940)
Yeah, good advice.
Okay, so if you could kind of go back to when you started with Conotour and kind of give yourself some advice on what you should do differently, what would you tell yourself?
Sri Ganesan (38:05.760)
Maybe build for the web first.
But yeah, I think we did a bunch of things wrong.
We looked at competitors and said, hey, if you.
If they're pricing so much for their product, ours is better.
We need to price more.
We didn't take the time to find a repeatable, scalable model to sell.
Rather, we focused too much on depending on hustle.
And I think if we did believe it was going to happen, we should have gone all out, raised a lot of money, made a lot of noise, and tried to change things in the market if we really believe that it was going to happen.
Omer (38:46.410)
Yeah, it's interesting how things turn out.
And I guess the only question really is, could that have accelerated things for you guys and maybe helped you get to where you are now faster?
Sri Ganesan (39:00.430)
Right.
Omer (39:00.830)
But who knows, Right?
Could have, would have, should have.
Right?
Sri Ganesan (39:03.310)
Exactly.
Omer (39:04.110)
All right, so let's get on to the lightning round.
I'm going to ask you seven questions.
Just try to answer them as quickly as you can.
Sri Ganesan (39:09.950)
Are you ready?
Sure.
Omer (39:11.710)
Okay.
What's the best piece of business advice
Sri Ganesan (39:14.750)
you've ever received to chase market momentum?
Omer (39:19.480)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Sri Ganesan (39:23.480)
I love the book, Creativity Inc.
It really talks a lot about daily challenges we encounter in creative environments like software startups and how you should think about leading better and how do you foster a culture of innovation and creativity.
Omer (39:41.000)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?
Sri Ganesan (39:47.200)
I think it's, you know, perseverance and really making your own luck.
Omer (39:52.800)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Sri Ganesan (39:57.760)
One would definitely be standing meetings to make sure that we are fast with meetings.
I think the other thing is, you know, being organized through your day, keeping certain times of the day for work that's not so critical, or, you know, the writing you want to do, etc.
Versus things that require some manual effort or just tasks, you know, get them done at a certain time of the day, etc.
Omer (40:26.090)
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?
Sri Ganesan (40:31.210)
Because I've been in this, you know, startup space for a while, often pitching to startups, selling to startups.
As an early stage startup myself, I think one of the things I've wondered about was what if there were a private simulated stock market for startup stocks.
There's so much news that we're all hungry for around these startups as well, right?
So when there's negative news about maybe Uber, everyone's, you know, carrying that negative sentiment around the startup at that point in time.
And I wonder how, you know, simulated startup stock market would be interesting idea.
Omer (41:09.110)
What's interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Sri Ganesan (41:13.350)
One of the things which I think a lot of people can't accept when I tell them is that I'm a really risk averse person.
I base a lot of my biggest decisions on what's the worst that can happen.
And the only good part is I take a long term view on what's the worst that can happen.
But yeah, I think that's a fun fact.
Omer (41:36.540)
And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Sri Ganesan (41:40.860)
I would say it's just learning, right?
I mean, learning from different people, even learning from characters I come across in books or TV shows.
I think I'm always thinking about decisions that others are making and thinking about how I would have made those decisions.
What can I learn from what happened in someone's experience, whether it's in a book or movie or whatever.
Omer (42:04.640)
Awesome.
You successfully made it through the lightning round.
Sri Ganesan (42:09.280)
Thank you.
Omer (42:10.160)
All right, so sri, it's been a pleasure.
So thanks for joining me and sharing your story.
If people want to check out Fresh Chat, they can go to freshchat.com and if people want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Sri Ganesan (42:25.610)
I'm sri@freshworks.com.
that's sri@freshworks.com.
feel free to reach out.
Omer (42:33.050)
Awesome.
Cool.
It's been a pleasure and I wish you all the best.
Sri Ganesan (42:38.650)
Thanks Omar.
Likewise.
Bye.
Bye.
