Leaping Into A Leap Year
For the Freshworks Developer Platform, 2019 has been a year we heavily invested into the foundations of our platform in preparation for greater things in 2020. We also witnessed significant contributions to our platform from our developer community — you! We do hope you had a progressively awesome 2019, like we believe we did.
We would like to kick off the new year by thanking you — our community of developers — for everything you gave us in 2019,
- The apps you built and published on our platform to help our wonderful customers
- The feedback that we actually fed back into our work
- Above all, the patience you have displayed as we continue to figure out how best to run this show for you guys.
So, thank you!
While we are at it, we would like to take you through a quick tour of the major themes from 2019 that we believe form the foundation of a leap forward for our platform and our community in the leap year 2020.
All Aboard!
Entering 2019, we had 3 Freshworks products on our Marketplace — Freshdesk, Freshservice and Freshsales. We exit the year having literally doubled-down, with FreshChat, FreshCaller and FreshTeam onboard. Behind the scenes, there was a lot of code refactoring and interface clean-up involved. A streamlined product integration process was operationalized, before it became a breeze for us to add new products onto the platform.
Will we add more in 2020? These investments imply we can now make that call on a whim. So yes — bring them on!
For our developer community, new business lines, new customers, and new use-cases, have all opened up on the same FDK with the same familiar developer experience.We are only getting started with the new products we have brought onboard — 2020 should see a lot more interesting use-cases that we will open up for you to crack for our customers.
A Worthy Abode
In the quest to declare that our Marketplace has finally arrived, we decided we needed a progressively designed, modern experience that works across web and mobile, and looks and feels the same both within our products and publicly on the Internet. Our new app gallery experience was built from the ground-up — backend and frontend included — because our developers and customers deserve no less. We reimagined this across multiple design iterations, established VueJS as the framework of choice, and discovered the virtues of server-side rendering to serve a rich, website experience your apps will love to be a part of.
New discovery and adoption initiatives were built into this experience. More is to come in 2020, as we work together to enable more adoption opportunities for your apps.
Scoreboard
Our platform and our Marketplace cannot escape the growth story that Freshworks itself is. 2019 saw us break new ground with respect to the scale at which our platform has catered to our developers and our customers. A few salient highlights include,
- From 50M serverless invocations served in Dec 2018, we broke past 200M a month in Dec 2019. The chatter of millions of conversations Freshchat witnesses every single day is about to be unleashed on our serverless platform. 2020 could not be more exciting.
- Traffic served by the platform for front-end apps grew 5-fold in the calendar year, thanks to the increasing use of features like data storage, SMI, and OAuth.
- Paying Freshworks customers today actively use close to 2000 custom apps, all built and maintained with love by developers like you. Up from 700 at the turn of last year this translated into hundreds of new projects for developers this year.
- App reviews for our Marketplace Apps have undergone a sea change in efficiency, bringing the turnaround times for app approvals down from an average of 30 days to under 8 days. This has helped us edge closer to the 1000 apps benchmark, while more importantly, aiding developers with faster and clearer feedback loops for their apps.
Springboard
A growing developer community needs nurture, support, and engagement — an effort beyond what our engineering team could offer. In 2019 we kickstarted our Developer Relations program, with a team that solely focuses on building tools for you, engaging with you, and in general, enabling you to build great apps for our customers. You have probably already interacted with them through support interactions, at a FreshHuddle, or on a Meet-a-DevRel call.
The DevRel team has already refactored and updated our existing sample apps, established a training program for new developers, launched a certification program for experienced developers, and engaged with some of you across the 3 FreshHuddle events in 2019. 2020 is set to be kicked off with a tutorial portal launch and the long-awaited online Freshworks community! You can also look forward to more opportunities to engage with our DevRel team, in more locations around the globe.
Ring in the New
We are excited by the prospects of a new year and look forward to reaping the rewards of our investments from last year. We hope you are excited to see us bring new features, tools, tutorials, events, and engagement opportunities to you. Consider yourself invited aboard the Freshworks rocketship!
From everyone here on the Freshworks Developer Platform team, we wish you and yours a happy and prosperous new year!
