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Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders

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Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders

#141

Post by alephnerd »

mihaic wrote: post #135

One sweetspot Zoho I think has been in more from fortunate circumstances was grinding away as a GSuite competitor for years on years without the wasteful budgets or engineering egos of Silicon Valley. This way they naturally had to focus on core features more, which they did well enough, and understanding vertical integration as one of the main pillars of their organizational culture.

> engineering egos of Silicon Valley

They started off in Pleasanton and still have a massive presence there. Zoho ads are very common on Bart as well.

Most companies in the Bay Area are similar in style to Zoho. The ego driven OpenAIs tend to be outliers.

Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders

#142

Post by Archelaos »

filoleg wrote: post #127
usrbinbash wrote: post #113

[flagged]

> WHY IN HELL IS EUROPE, WITH ITS INCREDIBLE AMOUNT OF AVAILABLE RESOURCES NOT DOING TH SAME?!? Probably because Euro is much more stable (relative to dollar) than Naira (the official currency of Nigeria). So european companies don’t feel the need to compromise for an inferior service (this claim comes from the article linked in the OP, not from me) or bother creating their own one. If EU countries had an ongoing inf…

> If EU countries had an ongoing inflation rate of 30%+, which would result in GCP/AWS costs for european companies go up insanely every year

Inflation would mean that the nominal revenues of EU companies would also increase to the same extent. Thus, the affordability of the foreign service would, ceteris paribus, remain the same.

Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders

#144

Post by tiffanyh »

alephnerd wrote: post #140
tiffanyh wrote: post #136

Zoho is hugely underrated. They have a massive suite of capabilities, so much so a SMB (most of the worlds businesses) could run their entire company off of Zoho. Because it isn't a Bay Area company, or making exciting products - makes them overlooked far too much. For those who use Zoho, they love it because it-just-works.

> it isn't a Bay Area company They started off in Pleasanton and still have a massive presence there. Zoho ads are very common on Bart as well.

> They started off in Pleasanton

That's not correct.

"In the 1990s, in a small apartment located in the suburbs of Chennai in southern India"

https://www.zoho.com/ourstory.html#:~:text=In%20the%201990s,...

Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders

#146

Post by melodyogonna »

sjm-lbm wrote: post #126

It's not covered in the article, but I wonder if inflation has much to do with this. Nigerian inflation in March was 33.2%, and is still trending upward[1]. Pricing in Naira moves some inflationary risk to Zoho, right? At the same time, if US-based competitors have priced their product in a constant amount of dollars, those products are now costing several times what they cost a few years ago. (I have no idea about i…

Yup. Nigerian currency has taken massive hits these last few years relative to USD.

Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders

#147

Post by Archelaos »

tossandthrow wrote: post #128
usrbinbash wrote: post #113

[flagged]

What is it that Africa does? Choose the cheaper alternative they can pay with their own currency? How can the EU (Remember, Europe also has large parts of Russia and other countries) do to mimic that? Become much poorer and change the public currency to something Google does not want.

Lower vages in developing countries have always been one of the major drives for outsourcing. Without market ristrictions, as long as there is no other advantage that an industrialised country can provide, the business will in the long run move to the developing country.

Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders

#148

Post by vitalurk »

6510 wrote: post #124
erremerre wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zoho support is neat when you compare against any other big tech. They are kind of slow at developing features, for instance you can't set up new tags/folders for email in the phone app, only on desktop, and this has been like that since beginning of times.

Thats great. The "I want to do everything on my phone" folk need to be told NO at some point. A somewhat cluttered but usable desktop interface cramped fully onto a tiny phone screen will have to much nested menu options to be able to discover things. I went into this dead end more often than I should have, wasted a lot of time until I finally started wondering what the hell I was thinking. The funniest was a long si…

"Don't you guys have laptops". Maybe it's about your customers and the devices they use!

Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders

#149

Post by superturkey650 »

m_fayer wrote: post #40

I had Zoho set up on the lowest tier for a side-hustle project years ago. It did it's job smoothly and without much intrusion. Then the project ended and I forgot about the Zoho account, changed phone numbers, lost the 2fa keys - all of it. Totally my fault. Their support quickly and competently handheld me through the shutdown process. I can't imagine the nightmare Google would've forced me through to shut down a po…

I made a similar mistake with AWS where I have $0.50 monthly charge. I called and they want me to go through a lengthy processes including getting documents notarized to handle it. So instead, I just canceled the card and am patiently waiting for them to shut down the account from failed charges. It’s been about a year now though and it’s still going.

Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders

#150

Post by freedomben »

m_fayer wrote: post #40

I had Zoho set up on the lowest tier for a side-hustle project years ago. It did it's job smoothly and without much intrusion. Then the project ended and I forgot about the Zoho account, changed phone numbers, lost the 2fa keys - all of it. Totally my fault. Their support quickly and competently handheld me through the shutdown process. I can't imagine the nightmare Google would've forced me through to shut down a po…

I've also had great customer service experience with Zoho. In both cases it was my fault but they helped me anyway.

I was very pleased with their product. They are one of the few companies who are actively adding settings and options to their products, and they are very thorough with their designs! You can do almost anything you want to do between the settings and the API they offer.

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