👋 Hi, I’m Kyle and welcome to my newsletter, Growth Unhinged. Every other week I take a closer look at what drives a SaaS company’s growth. Expect deep dive takes on SaaS pricing, product-led growth, public company benchmarks, and much more.
“You Can’t Win”
That’s how Freshworks Founder & CEO Girish Mathrubootham started out his opening letter in the company’s recent S-1 filing.1
From a traditional SaaS growth perspective, it’s hard to see how Freshworks - the help desk, CRM & IT service management company - could possibly break through:
Fast forward to today. Freshworks set IPO terms on Monday, September 13 that would value the company at $8.9 billion. Some quick stats:
Girish attributes Freshworks’ success to being unconventional from the beginning. A big piece of that was pioneering a product-led growth (PLG) strategy targeted at an underserved part of a large market.
Let’s dive in.
“We didn’t target large enterprises. We didn’t have access to a been-there-done-that talent pool. We designed our products for the people actually using them. We offered a ‘fresh’ approach relying on efficient, product-led, low-cost, and low-touch sales; and we targeted massive, underserved markets.” - Freshworks S-1
Thankfully for Freshworks, they picked up on plenty of shortfalls from 'legacy SaaS' vendors (can you feel the knife twisting in?). First among them was that legacy vendors weren’t purpose-built to meet users’ needs.
Freshworks’ user is the frontline employee who’s interacting with customers everyday. These folks have come to expect consumer-like experiences similar to what they used in their personal lives.