Chennai, Creme Brûlée and the story of Freshdesk
We met up after almost 3 years, college mates and big time foodies. She loved desserts and had tasted them in different parts of the world. Today, I had a point to prove — Chennai made desserts just as good as any other city in the world.
I learnt that creme brûlée was her favourite and she had tasted the best creme brûlée in New York. I knew it was a tough bet to win, but I bet her that Chennai’s creme brûlée would beat New York’s. So I took her to Ciclo Cafe, a lovely cafe that didn’t exist 3 years back but now sits just behind our college.
We started discussing life and, contrary to popular opinion, we both believe that life and work are not two entirely different things. So our conversation moved to work and I told her the story of Frilp’s acquisition and how we landed a rocketship called Freshdesk, that’s creating waves in the SaaS industry.
I was trying to explain to her why it makes good business sense to build a great SaaS company from India at this time. So, I went back 20 years, when software was installed on computers(“on-premise” is the jargon). So, companies building software products at that time needed to be closer to their customers who used their software. They had to be reachable for installation, maintenance and upgrades of their software.
So Indian companies found it hard to build products from here and sell to these customers who were generally located in developed countries. Hence, Indian companies back then(TCS, Infy..) took to software services, which was easier to do remotely from India.
Fast forward to 2016, most of the software we use — mail, office etc are already on the internet(“cloud”, technically). We don’t install any of these on our computers. The developers of these software don’t ever send us CDs or patches for installs or upgrades. They build and deploy software to the internet, we use them directly from the internet.
A similar transition is happening in enterprise software too. So you can build and sell software products from India, which was not easy 20 years back. I was telling her that Freshdesk took advantage of this transition and was building enterprise software that could be used online. A combination of many factors ensures that India is among the very few places in the world where you can build and sell world class software, yet keep the prices low.
Our dish was served. As she tasted the creme brûlée, I kept my fingers crossed and hoped that she’d love it more than what she considered the best creme brûlée — the one she had tasted at New York.
She was truly impressed and told me this — “This tastes exactly like the creme brûlée I had in New York.”
Damn! I had lost the best! She didn’t say it was “better”. I hoped to get some concession on the bet for matching the world’s best after all…
But a moment later she was like, “But, you don’t get anything like this for $3 in New York! For food and service this good, I should easily pay 5–10 times the price of this!”
I told her, “That’s quite the story of Freshdesk too.”
