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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

#161

Post by kardianos »

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…

Agreed. I setup zoho voice, ported from Google business voice, and had an issue where SMS wasn't going through even though it said it was. Zoho's issue or some porting issue. But I quickly chatted with a human, they resolved it and let me know when it was fixed. I have no idea how to even start a conversation with a Google rep from any of their interface. Zoho had it easy to find.

Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders

#162

Post by cqqxo4zV46cp »

superturkey650 wrote: post #149
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.

Related: AWS has an unwritten policy of giving customers one get out of jail free card when they inevitably fuck up. I’ve called upon this once, completely my fault, at work. AWS refunded me over $2,000 USD (at a company small enough for that to be a big number).

Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders

#163

Post by maeil »

Nicholas_C wrote: post #151
jiveturkey wrote: post #125

Clickbait headline for a zoho ad. It's not clear at all how much penetration they have in Africa. It's likely unmeasurable vs Google.

I was wondering if Zoho paid to have this article written. And then all these positive comments make me paranoid they’re paying for that too. Maybe I’m too much of a skeptic but companies definitely pay agencies to astroturf like this.

Companies definitely do and they may have had a hand in the article but I can vouch that most comments here are probably genuine (or maybe I'm just another astroturfer!).

It helps that Zoho's main competitor is GSuite. That's what a lot of us are comparing them against and it's just not very difficult to beat Google's "non-existent unless you spend $millions on ads" support, they could literally have a cat answer support and it'd be an improvement. Anyone who has had to deal with trying and failing to get anything answered by Google and then tried the same with Zoho will have something good to say about them regardless of their product overall.

Zoho's products are also a bit more "traditional" in the way that people on HN tend to enjoy. Their UIs, configuration, features and all aren't very 2024 glittery but they're good for getting shit done and setting stuff up yourself.

And then they're also cheap which HN tends to be sensitive to, here you see many contemplate self-hosting things every time a SaaS increases their pricing. Or write about moving back from Big Cloud to bare metal or Hetzner and co. to save $.

Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders

#164

Post by hosh »

vitalurk wrote: post #148
6510 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

If you care more about land-grabbing users to aggregate demand (https://stratechery.com/aggregation-theory/) then you can develop what users wants, get them onboard, and then start squeezing profits out of that. That is what Google, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Facebook et al did. Here we are with ads on freemium products, and now the data we generate are more valuable to feed to train AIs.

If you're trying to sustainably develop features to support users, even if the pace of the feature development is very slow, I think that is what we are seeing with Zoho.

Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders

#165

Post by azemetre »

freedomben wrote: post #152
superturkey650 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh man, be very careful with that. I don't know about AWS specifically, but many of those big tech companies have powerful ways to get you, and they often use them. You may be silently blacklisting yourself from being an AWS customer in the future. As they are fond of saying, cancelling the card is not cancelling the service. You still owe the money!

These fears are why I never use AWS, GCP, Azure, etc and prefer something simple like DigitalOcean where I just add money to my funds via PayPal. If I exceed the limit, they shut down my account. Highly preferable than accidentally getting banned from say Google and losing my gmail where I access incredibly important things like healthcare, finances, utilities, etc.

Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders

#166

Post by sangnoir »

alephnerd wrote: post #154
tiffanyh wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,...

He lived in Palo Alto and Pleasanton for several years and still has a ranch/mansion in Tassajara.

Be that as it may - it wasn't started in Palo Alto or Pleasanton. Their about page[1] mentions the predecessor company was founded in New Jersey (1996), before moving to San Jose (1998), then Pleasanton (2000)

1. https://www.zoho.com/aboutus.html

Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders

#167

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders

#168

Post by whalesalad »

Definitely disgruntled by the way Google Apps went from being free for the last decade of my life to costing ~$120/mo for myself and my family. I don't think I can leave Google at this point, but if I was strapped for cash I would choose a different platform. Otherwise, I would still go with Google just due to their dominance in this space and integration with other companies. Calendar invites, meet etc being the primary thing

My current company is using Proton for mail/calendar but we still need Google accounts in order to access things like Google Cloud. We have Google Calendar but not Email. So there is this frustrating bifurcation between mail and some calendar on Proton and then some Calendar items on Google. I wish that Calendar sharing/sync was a more solved problem these days because keeping them syncronized is a nightmare.

Anyway glad to hear from the thread here that Zoho is a worthy competitor and might consider it in the future. They have been around for a very long time.

Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders

#169

Post by geocrasher »

Zoho's biggest asset is that it's generally Good Enough. I was an early adopter of their remote desktop software, and it went from being Good Enough to Good. They're responsive to feedback and generally good folks. We recommend them at work for their email on a regular basis (context: managed WordPress hosting)

Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders

#170

Post by hosh »

sangnoir wrote: post #166
alephnerd wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He lived in Palo Alto and Pleasanton for several years and still has a ranch/mansion in Tassajara.

Be that as it may - it wasn't started in Palo Alto or Pleasanton. Their about page[1] mentions the predecessor company was founded in New Jersey (1996), before moving to San Jose (1998), then Pleasanton (2000) 1. https://www.zoho.com/aboutus.html

I don't see that information on that link.

On this link "Our Story" (https://www.zoho.com/ourstory.html?ireft=nhome&src=aboutus-d...) I see:

"In the 1990s, in a small apartment located in the suburbs of Chennai in southern India, a simple, yet revolutionary idea was born: "Build smart technology to help businesses work better." This idea evolved to become the world-class technology company we're known as today."

According to Wikipedia:

"From 1996 to 2011, the company was known as AdventNet, Inc. and initially provided network management software.[8][9]

AdventNet expanded operations into Japan in 2001 and shifted focus to small and medium businesses (SMBs).[9]

Zoho CRM was released in 2005, along with Zoho Writer, the company's first Office suite product.[9] Zoho Projects, Creator, Sheet, and Show were released in 2006.[9] Zoho expanded into the collaboration space with the release of Zoho Docs and Zoho Meeting in 2007. In 2008, the company added invoicing and mail applications, reaching one million users by August of that year."

So they were not providing SMB office software until 2005.

It's weird to me that there are these two narratives. Are we talking about the same Zoho, or is there more to it to either of these stories? Was it a case of shifting origin stories? One of the 2009 articles announcing the change in name from AdventNet to Zoho included mentioning the corporate HQ in Pleasanton.

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