Re: Freshworks - Yes we had a ton of learning from there and the plan was to execute something similar. Had lot of advantages in terms of cost. This was also a

Re: Freshworks - Yes we had a ton of learning from there and the plan was to execute something similar. Had lot of advantages in terms of cost. This was also a serious part of the business plan. Re: Selling to customers: This was not easy as we thought. Most people just doesn't switch to a new product based on features. Either the new product needs to be substantially better - so that it overcomes the pain of the switch. This means we had to build a product that is much better than existing products - and we failed placing our product correctly. Marketing is an area with a lot of verticals. Content, Digital, Email etc. We tried to do a lot of things at the same time. For example we could have focused on just email marketing, or just content marketing. Instead we tried to do all of these together and they were mediocre. I guess that was not enough to force the switch. After a point we couldn't tell who were we competing against - The email marketing solution, the push notification solution or the enterprise marketing solution. If I were to rebuild it today I would have focused on a single thing and built a great product out of it. About mentorship - I'd say I didn't have enough "access" to mentors or the network due to several "internal reasons" (Slightly touching upon this on the decision imbalance) If it was solely up to me, there are things I would have done different back then too. At least now, I have wonderful people helping me through my startup journeys. And I'm a big believer of having the right mentor. At the startup I co-founded last (Carrom - which was acquired https://money.yahoo.com/oyster-acquires-carrom-accelerate-global-100000172.html https://money.yahoo.com/oyster-acquires-carrom-accelerate-gl...) I had the opportunity to work with some great people and this was something I did right in terms of mentorship.