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girishm's comments

girishm | 12 years ago | on: Why we are not afraid of Microsoft

Freshdesk has had both XML and JSON APIs from day 1. Maybe it was not so obvious as the documentation was done for XML and it was probably assumed that since it is exactly similar for json it was not required. Thanks for the feedback. We will fix the docs.

girishm | 12 years ago | on: Why we are not afraid of Microsoft

"If I were a Freshdesk customer, I'd me more confident if the reasons listed were a better customer support, better user experience, being likely to stay in business for longer..."

Fair points, but our existing customers already know about our user experience and customer support. And if I am going to talk about that, it is not going to be very credible anyway as I am biased :) But a quick review of our Google apps marketplace review will tell you that's exactly what our customers love about us.

girishm | 12 years ago | on: They Acquire, Acquire, Acquire While We Build, Build, Build

I am the co-founder and CEO of freshdesk. I want to clarify here that I spent close to ten years at Zoho and I thoroughly enjoyed every bit of it. There was absolutely no frustration leading to the creation of freshdesk. Zoho has been a great place to experiment and learn and I owe a lot of what I learnt to Zoho. Regarding hiring school students, I think the media has hyped it beyond reality. I have seen first-hand on how it changes lives of kids who would otherwise have had no access to college education and would have been pushed into poverty. Having been a Senior manager at Zoho for several years I know that Zoho pays it's star performers reasonably well, but anyone who leaves Zoho always commands a premium in the market.(That speaks volumes about the quality of the experience that we pick up there)

girishm | 13 years ago | on: How Hacker News motivated me to resign my job and launch my own startup (2011)

We have changed much of the old site design developed by getmefast after we had the bandwidth and resources to have an inhouse team. Our experience was good enough to get started with a website. However for a start just getting some good templates from themeforest may do the job also for a lower cost till you can afford to hire a top notch team.

girishm | 13 years ago | on: How to incorporate a US Corporation from outside the USA?

Hi Sean - When you are looking to incorporate from abroad, Delaware seemed the most obvious and had a good ecosystem around it. You can pay the Franchise tax online and pretty much get most of what you want from the State of Delaware online. Once you are successful and have money we can always change things but as a startup getting up and running quickly was essential and Delaware incorporation was a breeze.

girishm | 14 years ago | on: Zendesk CEO calls Freshdesk a freaking rip off - Freshdesk responds

@teyc - I will take what you have said as a huge compliment. I wish I was as smart as you say I am. When this happened, we considered our options -

1. We ignore the comments. But that will seem that anyone can say anything and get away with it. It is wrong.

2. We could engage in a war of words on Twitter. It seemed stupid to go that route.

3.Write the entire story and present how we felt about the whole thing. - That is what we did.

We did not consider SEO or link juice to setup a separate site. Our blog uses Posterous and to my knowledge Posterous does not support embeddable Twitter widgets. So we went the separate domain route. I was actually of the opinion that a post on our blog is better SEO. I posted this on social networks to publicize our response. I posted it on HN for a meaningful discussion which I think happened and I learnt some good things and some mistakes.

I definitely don't want the Australian - Indian racism debate anymore than you do. I think it is disgusting. We were attacked for no reason and we wanted to respond. It's Monday morning here in India and we are back to work on improving our Product.

girishm | 15 years ago | on: How a simple comment on Hacker News made me quit my job and launch a startup

Definitely no. Zoho(AdventNet) was the best thing that happened to me in my (work) life. It's an amazing company with over 1200 employees with very smart engineers and a kick-ass product culture. I owe everything that I learned in Product Management to AdventNet. It's a huge playground for people who are not afraid to try new things. I used to tell my team members that working in Zoho is like getting an MBA on how to build a Product Business.
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