[HN Gopher] Zoho became a $1B company without external investment ___________________________________________________________________ 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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-09-10 23:00 UTC)