Kyle Poyar’s Growth Unhinged

Kyle Poyar’s Growth Unhinged

You can't win

How Freshworks rewrote the traditional SaaS growth playbook

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Kyle Poyar
Sep 14, 2021
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👋 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:

  • How could they differentiate in (extremely) crowded markets?

  • How could they compete against far larger, better funded competitors?

  • How could they build a global SaaS company from India?

Fast forward to today. Freshworks set IPO terms on Monday, September 13 that would value the company at $8.9 billion. Some quick stats:

  • $308M in LTM (last 12 months) revenue

  • 49% LTM growth rate

  • $35M LTM cash from operations

  • 118% NDR

  • Two products - Freshdesk & Freshservice - each…

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