[HN Gopher] Zoho became a $1B company without external investment
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Zoho became a $1B company without external investment
Author : mikece
Score : 91 points
Date : 2022-09-10 19:26 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (techcrunch.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (techcrunch.com)
| jmconfuzeus wrote:
| They have one of the best customer support I've ever experience.
|
| However, I find their apps to be quite sluggish. I think they
| ought to spend more on engineering.
| sshine wrote:
| > I think they ought to spend more on engineering.
|
| Inevitably, yes.
|
| But the fact that they can even be competitive at so many
| things:
|
| Webmail, calendar, office, CRM, remote support, meet, chat,
| etc.
|
| ... and be among the cheapest total solution out there,
| justifies that they're not the best at any one thing.
| sujitjadhav wrote:
| I think Zoho's actual valuation is around $12 billion.
| inigoalonso wrote:
| I think the title references its annual revenue.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| Moved my google workspace accounts to Zoho after they retracted
| the grandfathered free plans a few months ago. Really quite
| pleasantly surprised. They are definitely a good option for
| people who want the same rough set of features. I am reassured to
| know that their business is real and not a ticking time bomb of
| the typical VC-funded customer acquisition growth-at-all costs
| operation.
| sshine wrote:
| I moved one family member onto Zoho.
|
| It has been a very positive experience so far.
|
| You get an office system as part of the package.
|
| Some cases of the spam filter being too aggressive.
|
| I'd move myself if I wasn't so addicted to FastMail's beautiful
| web+mobile apps.
| silisili wrote:
| Same, and wish I had sooner. Really slick mobile app, and great
| spam detection.
| notkurt wrote:
| What's Zoho like these days? My last company heavily relied on
| the entire Zoho suite for just about everything except email,
| spent half of my time putting out fires and migrating them to
| other products. The only thing that didn't cause too much trouble
| was their CRM product, but even then it had its issues.
| breitling wrote:
| The founder and CEO, Sridhar Vembu, is very much publically
| aligned with right wing extremists in India, where he lives.
|
| https://www.google.com/amp/s/m.thewire.in/article/economy/ac...
|
| Vote with your wallet and your conscience
| wzy wrote:
| Where do I go to vote for them since I have already been a
| customer of theirs for 10+ years?
| sgjohnson wrote:
| > Vote with your wallet and your conscience
|
| What alternative mail hosting provider do you recommend?
| Google? Microsoft?
|
| Google, in my humble opinion, is the single biggest evil in the
| digital world today.
| jacooper wrote:
| Email; ProtonMail, Tutanota
| sgjohnson wrote:
| ProtonMail is known for completely arbitrarily closing user
| accounts with 0 recourse.
|
| > Tutanota
|
| Never heard of them.
| sofixa wrote:
| > Google, in my humble opinion, is the single biggest evil in
| the digital world today.
|
| Palantir? Facebook? Google abuse user data for profit, but at
| least:
|
| a) their goal is only money
|
| b) they don't leak that data left and right, and don't leave
| themselves way too easy to be used for inciting genocides
|
| Facebook is by far worse.
| kube-system wrote:
| It's not a contest, but there are plenty of companies that
| are more evil. Besides companies that are straight up
| criminal, my vote would go to traditional data brokers.
| Google might abuse their wealth of data, but at least they
| won't happily sell it on the street corner.
| sgjohnson wrote:
| > but at least they won't happily sell it on the street
| corner.
|
| what do you imagine targetted advertising is? they will
| sell everything they know about you to basically anyone
| willing to pay in the form of "I'd like to target these
| particular audiences in my ad campaign", and then when you
| get conversions from that particular campaign, it's not
| exactly rocket science to dereference the click to a
| particular individual, provided that there's a conversion.
|
| and if you're a bit more nefarious than that, you don't
| even need a conversion.
| kube-system wrote:
| Yeah, I understand the privacy concerns with targeted
| advertising, and agree that it is a concern, but it's
| once-removed from the type of data you can get from a
| dedicated data broker. At a data broker you can simply
| ask for the data you want and they'll directly provide
| it.
|
| If Google is a chartered fishing expedition, a data
| broker is a fish market.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > it's not exactly rocket science to dereference the
| click to a particular individual
|
| How?
| srk_hn wrote:
| So India is a population of over 1B, and the US+UK is about
| 400m.
|
| Why should I assume I know better what the solution is for the
| problems plaguing a country in a completely different part of
| the world housing 1/8th the world population while living in
| the comforts of a 1st world country? Is the CEO advocating for
| genocide?
|
| Or perhaps we should get off our high horse and shouldn't judge
| other people for things we cannot possibly understand anything
| about?
| Ayesh wrote:
| Probably the only $1b company that didn't convert their playful
| logo into a 1D one-color generic looking logo. Good for them!
| Willox wrote:
| I've been using Zoho for my personal email since 2014 now. They
| haven't made me pay (yet) but I've definitely gotten them a
| _small_ amount of money through recommendations.
|
| I'd totally pay, though.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| On one hand, good for them! It seems like a fair company with no
| secret catch.
|
| On the other hand... each zoho product I have tried was "like
| some other thing, but worse". All the products are basically
| fine, but not excellent. But again it can find its customers
| nashashmi wrote:
| the one TC article I am actually yearning to read is behind a
| paywall!
| simonswords82 wrote:
| Zoho feels like the Walmart SaaS of the Internet. Still, an
| impressive annual run rate for a boot strapped business.
| randall wrote:
| So agree. The taste level of the products is terrible but they
| all interoperate and it's crazy.
| zdloft wrote:
| My first experience with Zoho was their Zoho mail when working at
| a small (2 people) civil engineering firm.
|
| At first I was turned off because I was used to either Google
| Workspace or Office but over time I got used to it and we started
| using more and more of their suite of products. It was really
| great to be able to add what we needed over time and not have to
| find multiple different vendors.
|
| Our focus was the civil engineering work so administrative tools
| like this was just something that we needed for decent cost and
| to work. Zoho provided that.
|
| It's amazing to see where they have come. Hope they keep growing
| and refining their product suite.
| sshine wrote:
| Zoho's office package feels like the Libre Office of web office
| packages.
|
| But honestly, for a lot of people myself included, that's all
| you need.
| raybb wrote:
| Is the text of the article available anywhere without a
| subscription?
| nabaraz wrote:
| I migrated three of my personal emails from name cheap email
| hosting to zoho and the spams i received went up by 20x. Out of
| curiosity, I went ahead and move one of them back to namecheap, I
| haven't received a single spam in the last week.
|
| Is this something to do with spam filter?
| sshine wrote:
| > Is this something to do with spam filter?
|
| Yes, that's my biggest problem with Zoho so far: Having a
| below-average quality spam filter sucks more than having a
| below-average quality anything else, since it makes the
| difference between receiving emails or not.
|
| I'm not convinced there is any reason why it's bad. They could
| up their game here.
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