As a business email hosting customer, I have been very happy with Zoho for years. And on the rare occasion that I needed customer support, the experience has been very pleasant in comparison to almost every other tech company I depend on. Not only that, the pricing is very reasonable.
It's funny that in the tech world, providing a reliable service at a reasonable price for two decades (and with actual human customer service) is contrarian. I realize that's not the point of the article, but it does apply.
I have realized that you can take just about any SaaS company, no matter how saturated, and build a great product and overdeliver on customer service and succeed.
Hard to do obviously but you don’t need to strike gold on some new ideas or category.
Virtually every industry has some parallel "higher touch luxury version".
For a lot of industries, it seems like the existing players are able to service both markets. You've got the classic splits like "Toyota vs. Lexus" or where the same supermarket chain owns both the bougie foodie/organic brand and the ghetto brand.
In the tech space, we haven't seen that as much. There's no obvious technical reason the hyperscaler crowd couldn't offer a premium brand-- "GSuite Deluxe" or "AWS Deluxe" with quality live support. Presumably, their resources and pricing power could run a "freestanding' premium vendor like Zoho into the ground easily.
It seems like so far, this hasn't been in their corporate DNA. I wonder if it's due to a complete fixation on "we'll AI and algorithm as many people out of the process out to pursue higher margins and better scale", to the point they don't even recognize the premium market as worth pursuing. It could be that "we're not interested in a business that isn't a billion dollars/bajillion percent growth rate", even if it offers high margins/stickiness.
A more sinister thought might be that by deliberately discarding an "uninteresting" market, they can feign that their position is weaker when market-competition regulators come to town.
> In the tech space, we haven't seen that as much.
Yes, we have.
> There's no obvious technical reason the hyperscaler crowd couldn't offer a premium brand-- "GSuite Deluxe" or "AWS Deluxe" with quality live support
Google Workspace and AWS each have their own multi-level (3 for Google Workspace, 4 for AWS) progressive scale of how high-touch they are. (For Workspace, which also has product feature tiers, this is a separate axis of differentiation.)
This is quite common in software and online services.
> Presumably, their resources and pricing power could run a "freestanding' premium vendor like Zoho into the ground easily.
Just as Toyota having Lexus and Honda having Acura doesn’t squeeze out McLaren, there’s space in tech for standalone high-touch brands. But, yeah, the big names high-touch offerings are probably doing orders of magnitude more business.
> It seems like so far, this hasn't been in their corporate DNA
No, the difference is that, sincs its not a consumer but a B2B product, the high-touch version from a mass vendor is just differentiated by being high touch, not be having an entirely separate brand identity despite being the same vendor. In fact, the brand identity is kept because the ability to move up seemlessly as business needs evolve is a selling point.
>And on the rare occasion that I needed customer support, the experience has been very pleasant in comparison to almost every other tech company I depend on.
That's amazing, especially given that this is an Indian company, and "Indian customer service" is known throughout the English-speaking developed world as being terrible.
My Google Apps account does all I need for now, but I've heard enough good things about Zoho from you and others recently that it will be on the list of alternatives to check out.
I had the fortune of meeting with Mr. Vembu on a social occasion. He was delightfully unassuming & very disciplined man. I wish other SV VCs & technocrats took a leaf out of his playbook & focused on being pioneers instead of trying every single day of creating a Steve-Jobsian aura
I would love to hear how you determined on a single occasion that he is disciplined. Not trying to contradict you! I'm fascinated how that would become clear in such a short time.
Very punctual on time, polite in his preference that he expressed (food, servings etc), avoided business questions, kept his interactions to the point. He came across as someone very principled about how he went about his life.
I really like the companies that don't take too much vc money and don't try to chase that exponential growth when there's just not enough market left unless you start doing questionable things. I'm a happy zoho mail/invoice/desk user (still bitter about docs going away though) and things have been mostly pleasantly boring. I think I started paying them before I reached any plan threshold just because I appreciated the service and being treated well.
I've been curious about Zoho for a while, so I'm interested when you say "docs going away", because it looks like they have this: https://www.zoho.com/workdrive/ Is that not what you mean? I'd like something to entirely replace Google, including Docs - what was your experience?
Workdrive comes with support for a Google Docs alternative (with full parity and even more features) - https://writer.zoho.com
Note: I'm part of the team that makes Writer. Please feel free to reach out to support or write to me (my email is in the profile) in case you need help taking a test drive :)
They had a service called Docs which was explicitly about document storage, tagging, revisions. It got folded into WorkDrive a few weeks ago. It's kind of the same features, but not the same idea. I did want the document management system, rather that a dropbox clone.
Given the very poor quality/growing cost of Engineering Colleges in India, his Zoho Schools(zohoschools.com) concept of paying/training high school students for IT jobs, is looking way ahead of the curve.
On a tangent, my native language is not English and I very often find pieces written in 'Indian English' extremely hard to read. It gives the opposite feeling of reading a novel, NOT because it would be incorrect English, but because it seems to be stuffed with unnecessarily complicated constructs. Like double negations, long sentences interleaved with short ones, choice of nouns and verbs that are not the most common, while a common alternative exists, and so on. Does anybody share this feeling?
I am an Indian, and I share this feeling. We have some very good writers and lots of mediocre ones, not to comment about this particular post, which i have not read. Anyway, Indian schooling does not focus on writing as a skill, as much as they do on math and science.
Being proficient in English was seen as being among the elite in the colonial era.
This results in a premium being placed on complicated and convoluted phrases. Like in legal documents. This seems to be prevalent in the former British colonies in Africa too.
This actually makes sense, grammatically/mathematically correct does not necessarily mean readable. If Indian schooling does not have it in focus, the result is as expected.
I use Zoho and while it sucks, pretty much every other alternative sucks to the same degree (or more) than Zoho. (That is if you are looking for the full range of functionalities that Zoho offers).
It seems to be an industry-wise thing and I wonder if it's time for disruption.
But disruption in this space is not easy; these are massive and complex products; they look pretty trivial from the outside until you use them; there are 1000s of small features you need to have and support in all the workflows and api tools. I had to integrate the Freshworks/sales api a few weeks ago for instance, and that looks like a trivial thing to copy, until you start really looking into all it does under the hood.
It is ready for disruption but to do so, I think it would need a holistic base that is consistent with respect to and between programming language/implementation, infrastructure, api and gui tooling. Now these are mostly manually adapted between each other when stuff gets added and the end result is a lot of leaky abstractions, instability, issues scaling, bugs and inflated infra costs.
Feels like the disruption could be identifying a subset of the 1000s of features used that a cover a large enough part of the market and solely focusing on that.
Instead of 1000s of features, have 40 good features. Limits how many customers you can get, but should lower development costs as well. There's probably a sweet spot that works.
> identifying a subset of the 1000s of features used that a cover a large enough part of the market
Deceptively hard. The only way to make this happen is using telemetry, and users don't like that, understandably. My belief is that Excel and Word are so successful because EVERYONE uses a different subset of those thousands of features. A one-lawyer office will differ from a dozen-person firm, a big general contractor will use different features from a small one, etc.
You can't survey users about those features either. Users don't know what your surveys mean half the time. They will answer according to how they think you want them to answer instead of what they really do. Or they will be satisfied but name features they would never use because they heard about them at a conference once. They use different terminology from you, so signal gets lost either way. Ad nauseam.
Well, rather than telemetry, I suppose excellent domain knowledge may help? Experience in a particular field might help you choose a particular workflow that could work for a lot of users.
> When he returned to India from the Silicon Valley in 2019, he didn’t settle down in Chennai, the headquarters of Zoho, but in a village called Mathalamparai, 650 kilometres away in Tenkasi district in Tamil Nadu.
>The very idea of a billionaire moving to a village that's hardly known and hard to pronounce, and images of him pedalling a bicycle around paddy fields, driving an electric auto, or relaxing in a thinnai (shaded verandah) wearing a half-sleeved shirt and a white dhoti evoked curiosity.
Must been written by American, as European I find the village name very easy to pronounce. Same with finding exotic riding a bicycle.
>> "Must been written by American, as European I find the village name very easy to pronounce. Same with finding exotic riding a bicycle."
I'm going to go out on a limb and say a guy named N S Ramnath who lives in Bangalore (Twitter bio) is probably not American.
edit to add: As a European, you might be making faulty assumptions about the pronunciation, while he's aware of numerous pitfalls that vex people who don't know the language. As an American, I see this a lot from Europeans who try to pronounce place names from indigenous languages that we take for granted. I've heard some hilarious verbal renderings of Okefenokee, for example.
Non-English native European here - now I'm curious, what's the correct pronunciation of Okefenokee? I found a video [1] which pretty much matches how I'd expect it to be pronounced
Haven’t watched the video but i live near that swamp and we call it “OH-key-fen-OH-key”
Not sure how the native way to say it was, but a lot of natural features in South Georgia were taken, nominatively & literally, from the Muskogee people (“Creek Indians”)
then he is making as false assumptions as me, because at least by Latin transcription Matha-lampa-rai is nothing hard to pronounce (I would assume H is silent and everything else read phonetically, all As as A in Alphabet, with last I read as Y in Yes), someone please prove me wrong about this pronunciation, I don't care about nuances in local Indian languages but by transcription I would assume this pronunciation and if it's not correct then it's issue with transcription and not me
the ones usually messing pronunciation of foreign names are native English speakers who are not using phonetical languages, as European speaking phonetic language I've had never problem to read correctly names of Chinese, Vietnamese, Indian, Malaysian or Thai cities as intended since we don't give special pronunciation to each letter as illogical English language
as for Okefenokee I don't really care about transcriptions made by native English speakers which are usually hilariously bad
that doesn't really make any sense (friend's proununciation, yours/mine is the logical one), which OTOH is not surprising at all with how "logical" is English language, but I have higher expectations from non-native English speaking nations transcriptions, where I expect better accuracy than from English speaker's nonsense
I'm Indian, though not a Tamil-speaker, and I couldn't tell you with 100% certainty the correct pronunciation of that village name. At least not when written in the English/Latin alphabet. I can think of 2 different pronunciations for at least 4 of the syllables in it.
I'm a Tamil speaker (but raised in Canada so, not as fluent as a native speaker), and agree, there's a lot of information loss when going from Tamil to English simply because there's multiple letters that either have no English equivalent, or are aren't distinguished in English.
I would translate மத்தளம்பாறை as MaththalampaaRai, rather than Mathalamparai. The a's have different lengths, so single a's are short (as in "ma"), and double a's are long. Double consonants like "த்த" are pronounced separately, so "Matha-" should be "Maththa". And finally, the "R" at the end is a rolling r, distinguished from the regular r "ர" - a good example of a Tamil letter with no equivalent letter in English!
And, I know this is unrelated, but in terms of syntax, I find Tamil to English translation really suffers from the way Tamil reverse subject object verb order (Tamil is to Reverse Polish Notation (RPA) as English is to regular, clunky, bracket notation), and the option multiple words into a single verb with recursively adding suffixes. Tamil basically offers a lot more degrees of freedom then English, which makes it far more expressive, but also adds a lot of cost to mastering correct grammar. The majority of 1st generation Tamils can only speak a simpler subset of the language. Personally, I find Tamil tends to be less clunky, and have quicker, more pleasing rhythm, then any English equivalent.
Sridhar Vembu built Zoho by questioning the conventional wisdom. For the longest time, no one took much notice. But now people are curious about what makes him—and Zoho—tick
As a business email hosting customer, I have been very happy with Zoho for years. And on the rare occasion that I needed customer support, the experience has been very pleasant in comparison to almost every other tech company I depend on. Not only that, the pricing is very reasonable.
It's funny that in the tech world, providing a reliable service at a reasonable price for two decades (and with actual human customer service) is contrarian. I realize that's not the point of the article, but it does apply.
I have realized that you can take just about any SaaS company, no matter how saturated, and build a great product and overdeliver on customer service and succeed.
Hard to do obviously but you don’t need to strike gold on some new ideas or category.
Virtually every industry has some parallel "higher touch luxury version".
For a lot of industries, it seems like the existing players are able to service both markets. You've got the classic splits like "Toyota vs. Lexus" or where the same supermarket chain owns both the bougie foodie/organic brand and the ghetto brand.
In the tech space, we haven't seen that as much. There's no obvious technical reason the hyperscaler crowd couldn't offer a premium brand-- "GSuite Deluxe" or "AWS Deluxe" with quality live support. Presumably, their resources and pricing power could run a "freestanding' premium vendor like Zoho into the ground easily.
It seems like so far, this hasn't been in their corporate DNA. I wonder if it's due to a complete fixation on "we'll AI and algorithm as many people out of the process out to pursue higher margins and better scale", to the point they don't even recognize the premium market as worth pursuing. It could be that "we're not interested in a business that isn't a billion dollars/bajillion percent growth rate", even if it offers high margins/stickiness.
A more sinister thought might be that by deliberately discarding an "uninteresting" market, they can feign that their position is weaker when market-competition regulators come to town.
> In the tech space, we haven't seen that as much.
Yes, we have.
> There's no obvious technical reason the hyperscaler crowd couldn't offer a premium brand-- "GSuite Deluxe" or "AWS Deluxe" with quality live support
Google Workspace and AWS each have their own multi-level (3 for Google Workspace, 4 for AWS) progressive scale of how high-touch they are. (For Workspace, which also has product feature tiers, this is a separate axis of differentiation.)
This is quite common in software and online services.
> Presumably, their resources and pricing power could run a "freestanding' premium vendor like Zoho into the ground easily.
Just as Toyota having Lexus and Honda having Acura doesn’t squeeze out McLaren, there’s space in tech for standalone high-touch brands. But, yeah, the big names high-touch offerings are probably doing orders of magnitude more business.
> It seems like so far, this hasn't been in their corporate DNA
No, the difference is that, sincs its not a consumer but a B2B product, the high-touch version from a mass vendor is just differentiated by being high touch, not be having an entirely separate brand identity despite being the same vendor. In fact, the brand identity is kept because the ability to move up seemlessly as business needs evolve is a selling point.
>And on the rare occasion that I needed customer support, the experience has been very pleasant in comparison to almost every other tech company I depend on.
That's amazing, especially given that this is an Indian company, and "Indian customer service" is known throughout the English-speaking developed world as being terrible.
My Google Apps account does all I need for now, but I've heard enough good things about Zoho from you and others recently that it will be on the list of alternatives to check out.
+1 here.
I had the fortune of meeting with Mr. Vembu on a social occasion. He was delightfully unassuming & very disciplined man. I wish other SV VCs & technocrats took a leaf out of his playbook & focused on being pioneers instead of trying every single day of creating a Steve-Jobsian aura
I would love to hear how you determined on a single occasion that he is disciplined. Not trying to contradict you! I'm fascinated how that would become clear in such a short time.
Very punctual on time, polite in his preference that he expressed (food, servings etc), avoided business questions, kept his interactions to the point. He came across as someone very principled about how he went about his life.
Thanks much!
I really like the companies that don't take too much vc money and don't try to chase that exponential growth when there's just not enough market left unless you start doing questionable things. I'm a happy zoho mail/invoice/desk user (still bitter about docs going away though) and things have been mostly pleasantly boring. I think I started paying them before I reached any plan threshold just because I appreciated the service and being treated well.
I've been curious about Zoho for a while, so I'm interested when you say "docs going away", because it looks like they have this: https://www.zoho.com/workdrive/ Is that not what you mean? I'd like something to entirely replace Google, including Docs - what was your experience?
Workdrive comes with support for a Google Docs alternative (with full parity and even more features) - https://writer.zoho.com
Note: I'm part of the team that makes Writer. Please feel free to reach out to support or write to me (my email is in the profile) in case you need help taking a test drive :)
They had a service called Docs which was explicitly about document storage, tagging, revisions. It got folded into WorkDrive a few weeks ago. It's kind of the same features, but not the same idea. I did want the document management system, rather that a dropbox clone.
Gotcha - thanks.
Given the very poor quality/growing cost of Engineering Colleges in India, his Zoho Schools(zohoschools.com) concept of paying/training high school students for IT jobs, is looking way ahead of the curve.
On a tangent, my native language is not English and I very often find pieces written in 'Indian English' extremely hard to read. It gives the opposite feeling of reading a novel, NOT because it would be incorrect English, but because it seems to be stuffed with unnecessarily complicated constructs. Like double negations, long sentences interleaved with short ones, choice of nouns and verbs that are not the most common, while a common alternative exists, and so on. Does anybody share this feeling?
I am an Indian, and I share this feeling. We have some very good writers and lots of mediocre ones, not to comment about this particular post, which i have not read. Anyway, Indian schooling does not focus on writing as a skill, as much as they do on math and science.
Being proficient in English was seen as being among the elite in the colonial era.
This results in a premium being placed on complicated and convoluted phrases. Like in legal documents. This seems to be prevalent in the former British colonies in Africa too.
Thanks for this insight!
This actually makes sense, grammatically/mathematically correct does not necessarily mean readable. If Indian schooling does not have it in focus, the result is as expected.
After building a business with Zoho functions, blueprints and if-this-than-that flow -
I can tell you conventional wisdom missing in Zoho like version-control and testing is very much needed.
I use Zoho and while it sucks, pretty much every other alternative sucks to the same degree (or more) than Zoho. (That is if you are looking for the full range of functionalities that Zoho offers).
It seems to be an industry-wise thing and I wonder if it's time for disruption.
But disruption in this space is not easy; these are massive and complex products; they look pretty trivial from the outside until you use them; there are 1000s of small features you need to have and support in all the workflows and api tools. I had to integrate the Freshworks/sales api a few weeks ago for instance, and that looks like a trivial thing to copy, until you start really looking into all it does under the hood.
It is ready for disruption but to do so, I think it would need a holistic base that is consistent with respect to and between programming language/implementation, infrastructure, api and gui tooling. Now these are mostly manually adapted between each other when stuff gets added and the end result is a lot of leaky abstractions, instability, issues scaling, bugs and inflated infra costs.
Feels like the disruption could be identifying a subset of the 1000s of features used that a cover a large enough part of the market and solely focusing on that.
Instead of 1000s of features, have 40 good features. Limits how many customers you can get, but should lower development costs as well. There's probably a sweet spot that works.
> identifying a subset of the 1000s of features used that a cover a large enough part of the market
Deceptively hard. The only way to make this happen is using telemetry, and users don't like that, understandably. My belief is that Excel and Word are so successful because EVERYONE uses a different subset of those thousands of features. A one-lawyer office will differ from a dozen-person firm, a big general contractor will use different features from a small one, etc.
You can't survey users about those features either. Users don't know what your surveys mean half the time. They will answer according to how they think you want them to answer instead of what they really do. Or they will be satisfied but name features they would never use because they heard about them at a conference once. They use different terminology from you, so signal gets lost either way. Ad nauseam.
Well, rather than telemetry, I suppose excellent domain knowledge may help? Experience in a particular field might help you choose a particular workflow that could work for a lot of users.
I worked at Microsoft for years and no one ever cracked that nut.
50% net profit Margins - amazing.
Can confidently say theres no business in the US at that scale ($600M+ revenue) with those margins. Ridiculous.
There doesn't seem to be much literature in estimating gross profit margin.
Receipe: hire in India sell in US/Europe
Not even India. Indian villages; essentially a different planet.
He trains them for $3000 for 2 years and then probably pats them $10k per year for first 2 years or less.
> When he returned to India from the Silicon Valley in 2019, he didn’t settle down in Chennai, the headquarters of Zoho, but in a village called Mathalamparai, 650 kilometres away in Tenkasi district in Tamil Nadu.
>The very idea of a billionaire moving to a village that's hardly known and hard to pronounce, and images of him pedalling a bicycle around paddy fields, driving an electric auto, or relaxing in a thinnai (shaded verandah) wearing a half-sleeved shirt and a white dhoti evoked curiosity.
Must been written by American, as European I find the village name very easy to pronounce. Same with finding exotic riding a bicycle.
>> "Must been written by American, as European I find the village name very easy to pronounce. Same with finding exotic riding a bicycle."
I'm going to go out on a limb and say a guy named N S Ramnath who lives in Bangalore (Twitter bio) is probably not American.
edit to add: As a European, you might be making faulty assumptions about the pronunciation, while he's aware of numerous pitfalls that vex people who don't know the language. As an American, I see this a lot from Europeans who try to pronounce place names from indigenous languages that we take for granted. I've heard some hilarious verbal renderings of Okefenokee, for example.
Non-English native European here - now I'm curious, what's the correct pronunciation of Okefenokee? I found a video [1] which pretty much matches how I'd expect it to be pronounced
[1] https://youtu.be/TMzoTPWBQ2Y
Haven’t watched the video but i live near that swamp and we call it “OH-key-fen-OH-key”
Not sure how the native way to say it was, but a lot of natural features in South Georgia were taken, nominatively & literally, from the Muskogee people (“Creek Indians”)
then he is making as false assumptions as me, because at least by Latin transcription Matha-lampa-rai is nothing hard to pronounce (I would assume H is silent and everything else read phonetically, all As as A in Alphabet, with last I read as Y in Yes), someone please prove me wrong about this pronunciation, I don't care about nuances in local Indian languages but by transcription I would assume this pronunciation and if it's not correct then it's issue with transcription and not me
the ones usually messing pronunciation of foreign names are native English speakers who are not using phonetical languages, as European speaking phonetic language I've had never problem to read correctly names of Chinese, Vietnamese, Indian, Malaysian or Thai cities as intended since we don't give special pronunciation to each letter as illogical English language
as for Okefenokee I don't really care about transcriptions made by native English speakers which are usually hilariously bad
You can go for a simpler case such as the city of Tucson.
I pronounced it "takson", and my American friend had a laugh. He said it is obviously "tiuzon"
that doesn't really make any sense (friend's proununciation, yours/mine is the logical one), which OTOH is not surprising at all with how "logical" is English language, but I have higher expectations from non-native English speaking nations transcriptions, where I expect better accuracy than from English speaker's nonsense
> I find the village name very easy to pronounce
I'm Indian, though not a Tamil-speaker, and I couldn't tell you with 100% certainty the correct pronunciation of that village name. At least not when written in the English/Latin alphabet. I can think of 2 different pronunciations for at least 4 of the syllables in it.
I'm a Tamil speaker (but raised in Canada so, not as fluent as a native speaker), and agree, there's a lot of information loss when going from Tamil to English simply because there's multiple letters that either have no English equivalent, or are aren't distinguished in English.
I would translate மத்தளம்பாறை as MaththalampaaRai, rather than Mathalamparai. The a's have different lengths, so single a's are short (as in "ma"), and double a's are long. Double consonants like "த்த" are pronounced separately, so "Matha-" should be "Maththa". And finally, the "R" at the end is a rolling r, distinguished from the regular r "ர" - a good example of a Tamil letter with no equivalent letter in English!
And, I know this is unrelated, but in terms of syntax, I find Tamil to English translation really suffers from the way Tamil reverse subject object verb order (Tamil is to Reverse Polish Notation (RPA) as English is to regular, clunky, bracket notation), and the option multiple words into a single verb with recursively adding suffixes. Tamil basically offers a lot more degrees of freedom then English, which makes it far more expressive, but also adds a lot of cost to mastering correct grammar. The majority of 1st generation Tamils can only speak a simpler subset of the language. Personally, I find Tamil tends to be less clunky, and have quicker, more pleasing rhythm, then any English equivalent.
"thth" wasn't one of the options I'd thought of. I would have never guessed that pronunciation!
> Same with finding exotic riding a bicycle.
how many european billionaires ride a bicycle as a form of transport rather than exercise?
Sridhar Vembu built Zoho by questioning the conventional wisdom. For the longest time, no one took much notice. But now people are curious about what makes him—and Zoho—tick