The 'SaaSy' InnovatorFreshdesk has been a global venture from day one, here's how!

Girish Mathrubootham had officially launched the cloud-based customer support platform Freshdesk in 2010. Over the years, the company has successfully brought onboard a marquee league of investors and has successfully grown from strength to strength.

Freshdesk, spearheaded by Mathrubootham, a Zoho protegee, has been a global venture from day one. "Our first six customers were spread across four continents. About catering to the foreign markets and Indian consumers, we believe that people from different countries are culturally diverse – some prefer to meet in person before closing deals, while others close deals over phone," Mathrubootham said.

"There is no "one size fits all' approach to selling. At Freshdesk, we try and understand each market demographic before we start selling there. What works for one market need not necessarily work for another, but at the end of the day everyone is just looking for a partner who can work with them to grow and scale their business," he added.

According to a joint research report by Google and the US VC firm Accel Partners, by 2025, India is likely to become a $10 billion revenue industry with eight per cent share of the global Software as a Service (SaaS) market. The SaaS innovation in India is about bringing affordable and easy-to-use business solutions based on cloud. Thanks to a fantastic talent pool combined with falling costs of data center infrastructure, Indian entrepreneurs are innovating at par with the west in SaaS.

Freshdesk, under Mathrubootham's leadership, has changed how one looks at customer success as a function and made it a highly a data-driven based service on its machine learning (ML) capabilities - innovating on features, on boarding practices, pricing strategies and based on very high quality segmentation. The company is using ML across the board in its products like sentiment analysis to help understand the customers better.

Its products complement each other to help high-growth businesses. Freshdesk has also been on the forefront in acquiring companies and integrating new technology into its offerings constantly.

Technology and product innovations include launching new products focused on mobile-first companies, an app-marketplace and building features that are firsts in collaboration in the customer support world.

Freshdesk today has 900 employees globally and helps over 100,000 businesses and organizations around the world to offer better, more personalized support to their customers.

(This article was first published in the May issue of Entrepreneur Magazine. To subscribe, clickhere)