"Whenever I read something like this I can't help but think "Here's a potential customer to whomever can get this right and at the right price". It seems like there's still a huge opening in this market for someone to come in and take all of ZenDesk and eSupport's customers." —megamark16
While we're offtopic, I noticed that if you visit the original comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 both BrandonM and dhouston show up as green. I just wanted to say, it's really cool you keep adding little details like that to HN over the years.
(Maybe it's not new, but I hadn't noticed it before. It was a neat moment of "Wait... that's a feature, not a bug" followed by 2007 nostalgia.)
Agree but I want to clarify I put it as a reverse-BrandonM (aside from its notoriety) because BrandonM (and the rest of news.yc agreed with them by voting the comment to the top) at the time wrote:
'It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?'
>Enter market, disrupt, get fat and lazy, raise prices, drop quality
Exactly this. But, it's funny how a brand's image sticks. I selected Zendesk for a business I ran years ago. And it was the slow-boiling frog experience, where it takes time to ultimately realize the rift between where you started and where you are. But we hobbled along due mainly to switching friction.
Still, I instinctively reached for them when evaluating support solutions recently, based on name and familiarity alone. But, with fresh eyes, it was immediately obvious that they were a complete nonstarter.
MailChimp's the same. They may not have ever been the lowest-priced solution, but time was they made it easy to get started and the value was there for a startup/small-biz. Now, they're trying to be quasi-enterprise with an over-priced bloated feature set.
These guys start disrupting by aiming for simplicity in a value-priced, pro-small customer offering. Then, in the pursuit of endless growth, they raise prices and become staunchly anti-customer in favor of their own economic objectives.
Would be nice to see companies continue to maintain their disposition to original customers and ethos, but pursue growth through new options that are truly optional and not subsidized by the entire user base. That, and adding new, complementary product lines that still retain that original ethos.
I work on ZenDesk all day every day, and it's the ONLY thing that I've fought to keep. As far as I'm concerned, it's awesome, and I think I'd only say that about maybe one other thing, GitHub. Of course, I don't pay for it, but it does what I want it to do, it functions perfect for what I need, and I can't say that about many other things. I don't think anything has happened to it, been a happy user for 7 years now.
I'm a... jerk of all trades I guess? I do a bunch of different things, the biggest are support and sys admin stuff. I guess it's a devops/support job. So I deal with support in ZD and then do the work in GH. As much as I love ZD, I hate Jira an equal amount. Thankfully I don't need to do much in Jira.
Last 2 companies I worked at, we used zendesk for support tickets, and the support folks were pretty happy with it. However pricing is definitely an issue - at both these companies us engineers did not have individual zendesk accounts as it was deemed too expensive. So we couldn't check the ticket ourselves for details. Jira-zendesk integration mitigated this to some extent though.
Why not full Jira? Jira Service Desk + Jira Software, because as long as things are tickets, even if you are not an “agent”, you can still see the JSD tickets.
We just started using freshdesk to field support calls a few weeks ago and I love it. The ability to update tickets with notes or direct communication with the user who logged the ticket is just nothing short of a miracle. Fantastic product.
We tried fresh desk, but left disappointed. We now use Zammad, written in ruby by one of the lead devs of otrs, which used to be awesome before it went closed source (ish).
unlimited users and agents for the cost of a $5 a month VPS
I’m so upset at this. Not anything about Freshworks. But just how disappointed I am in Zendesk.
1) when I started my own niche electron app I paid for Zendesk and the SOBs put a limit of like 2MB on attachments. So users would email large screenshots and I’d have to ask the user to email to me directly. I contact Zendesk about this and got a “sorry” shrug and something like “we can support this but you must upgrade to the 10x cost plan.”
Sometime in the last year they relaxed that, so that’s nice.
2) I’m a solo Dev. I’m hiring my first part time support folks. I want to automatically assign a ticket to me so I can assign to them. Sorry, it’s going to cost me another $600+ year to do that.
I mean, c’mon. I get it. But to go from $5/month to $40x3/month is just not a fun experiment.
34 comments
[ 9.3 ms ] story [ 84.5 ms ] threadFreshworks (previously Freshdesk) files for IPO - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28335299 - Aug 2021 (1 comment)
Past related:
How Hacker News motivated me to resign my job and launch my own startup (2011) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4427728 - Aug 2012 (24 comments)
How a simple comment on Hacker News made me quit my job and launch a startup - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2340732 - March 2011 (92 comments)
"Whenever I read something like this I can't help but think "Here's a potential customer to whomever can get this right and at the right price". It seems like there's still a huge opening in this market for someone to come in and take all of ZenDesk and eSupport's customers." —megamark16
Zendesk raises their prices 60%-300%, users predictably revolt (2010), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1358398
Congratulations on a reverse-BrandonM, Mark.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28293146
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27068148
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23229275
(Maybe it's not new, but I hadn't noticed it before. It was a neat moment of "Wait... that's a feature, not a bug" followed by 2007 nostalgia.)
Thank you.
'It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?'
dhouston did remember to thank BrandonM for their feedback, so that's there too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16660140
>>> and has more than 2,000 employees and 1.5 lakh clients.
lakh = 100K
So please work out the total customers yourself. Revert back to me when you have the needful done.
I remember when they were the breath of fresh air in terms of online support, the disruptor.
Did they get worse? (Apart from prices increase) or did the expected standards increase and pass them by?
Circle of life.
Exactly this. But, it's funny how a brand's image sticks. I selected Zendesk for a business I ran years ago. And it was the slow-boiling frog experience, where it takes time to ultimately realize the rift between where you started and where you are. But we hobbled along due mainly to switching friction.
Still, I instinctively reached for them when evaluating support solutions recently, based on name and familiarity alone. But, with fresh eyes, it was immediately obvious that they were a complete nonstarter.
MailChimp's the same. They may not have ever been the lowest-priced solution, but time was they made it easy to get started and the value was there for a startup/small-biz. Now, they're trying to be quasi-enterprise with an over-priced bloated feature set.
These guys start disrupting by aiming for simplicity in a value-priced, pro-small customer offering. Then, in the pursuit of endless growth, they raise prices and become staunchly anti-customer in favor of their own economic objectives.
Would be nice to see companies continue to maintain their disposition to original customers and ethos, but pursue growth through new options that are truly optional and not subsidized by the entire user base. That, and adding new, complementary product lines that still retain that original ethos.
Or are you making a general comment on software, not specifically ZenDesk?
It's a general business/market life-cycle pattern.
The ones that don't have VCs pressuring them to turn what should have been a super successful lifestyle business into the next unicorn moonshot.
>I'd only say that about maybe one other thing, GitHub
Curious: what's your job function that has you both "working on ZenDesk all day" and also using GitHub?
Are you using the Jira integration to track tickets/bugs?
— Scott Farquhar
(Edited typo)
unlimited users and agents for the cost of a $5 a month VPS
1) when I started my own niche electron app I paid for Zendesk and the SOBs put a limit of like 2MB on attachments. So users would email large screenshots and I’d have to ask the user to email to me directly. I contact Zendesk about this and got a “sorry” shrug and something like “we can support this but you must upgrade to the 10x cost plan.”
Sometime in the last year they relaxed that, so that’s nice.
2) I’m a solo Dev. I’m hiring my first part time support folks. I want to automatically assign a ticket to me so I can assign to them. Sorry, it’s going to cost me another $600+ year to do that.
I mean, c’mon. I get it. But to go from $5/month to $40x3/month is just not a fun experiment.
The login flow to Freshworks is and has been confusing since they rebranded. I hope they fix it and sensitive the spam filtering better!