Earlier quoted context omitted.
This kind of stuff, especially Twitter-spamming, really rubs me the wrong way. Some people call it hustle, but I just think it's dirty. I'm much less likely to sign up for FreshDesk in the future if it comes across my desk now.
I agree. I interned for a company that was kind of competing with [fairly big startup that most of you have heard of]. At the time, Company was way smaller than it is now, but was still bigger than us. (We had very few customers; no one had heard of us whereas I'd already seen mentions of Company on HN several times; they had fulltime employees other than the founders and we did not.) Despite this, any time anyone me…
That's nonsense -- a variation on the "Field of Dreams" fallacy of "build it and they will come". Customer acquisition, which PR and marketing feed into, is absolutely essential.
In fact, your advice is the opposite of what most programmer-founded startups should do. You don't win by having a better product that nobody's heard of. And I think anyone that's been hanging around startup-y folks for a while can tell you about a handful of friends who misunderstood that point to their own peril.
All that this post really did for me was make me hear FreshBook's name again. In fact, the ZenDesk naming spat is more likely to make me actually remember the name. And that's probably enough that if my company is looking for a SaaS support tool in the future, that we'll give them a look as well. Which is assume is exactly what they were hoping for.
For all the talk of what they're doing to their pristine brand here and blah, blah, I don't think anyone serious is going to hold this move against them in a purchasing decision. Bringing in new infrastructure software is not done on a whim.