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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

#171

Post by RussianCow »

geocrasher wrote: post #169

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)

I can't speak highly enough about the responsiveness. I've had a few issues with their products (for example, they locked me out of my email account while traveling abroad) and they resolved all of them very quickly. I also once suggested a very small UX improvement, expecting my request to fall into the ether, and was surprised when they implemented it about 2-3 weeks later.

Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders

#172

Post by alephnerd »

hosh wrote: post #170
sangnoir wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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." Ac…

> It's weird to me that there are these two narratives.

Company narratives are often crafted by marketing teams.

Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders

#173

Post by drewda »

pandorasbox wrote: post #51
1oooqooq wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> bootstraped i think they got a big injection when yahoo bought them, tried to dogfood in lieu of exchange, failed and sold for pennies back to the founders

I think you're confusing Zoho for Zimbra. Zoho was never bought and they intend to stay private. In fact, the co-founder is very vocal about it.

I haven't heard the name Zimbra in a long time... I had mixed experiences administering a deployment of that :)

Anyway, thanks to this and the other comments reminding me to read up at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimbra

Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders

#174

Post by bdcravens »

Our company (B2B, a SaaS without a static billing model) has used Zoho for a few years, mostly as an outgrowth of the use of CRM. None of the apps are the best in breed, but the price is great, and it's more than adequate for small companies like ours. Many alternate solutions are far too complex, as they're trying to capture more enterprise customers.

That said, we do use still Google for Gmail and Drive.

Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders

#175

Post by Optimal_Persona »

RussianCow wrote: post #171
geocrasher wrote: post #169

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)

I can't speak highly enough about the responsiveness. I've had a few issues with their products (for example, they locked me out of my email account while traveling abroad) and they resolved all of them very quickly. I also once suggested a very small UX improvement, expecting my request to fall into the ether, and was surprised when they implemented it about 2-3 weeks later.

Zoho Analytics came bundled with an electronic health record we use. Support has been very responsive, and I attended a 2-3 day intensive data reporting training with some of their Indian data team who were absolutely fantastic, experts in the system and fun to work with.

Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders

#176

Post by ganeshkrishnan »

beezlebroxxxxxx wrote: post #99
max_ wrote: post #88

I am an African based in Uganda and I am currently working on my project https://labour.quest I wanted to start by using Google Workplace. But then switched to Zoho for the generous free tier. I am so glad I did. Zoho has so many tools that a project needs to run "built in". For example I was thinking of signing up for the services below but Zoho already had these built in. SendGrid - Zepto Mail MailChimp - Zoho Camp…

I'm sure you're aware, but you have to be careful with being very reliant on free-tier products. Once a magnitude of people are "locked in" then they'll start to do some of the pricing and licensing shenanigans where once common features or bundled products get hidden under a fee or broken up after an update. (Interesting project BTW, I'd just recommend having a screenshot or 2 of one of the resumes if you're explici…

This sentence gives me PTSD. We got the startup "90% discount" from Hubspot but what they don't tell you is that it's 5 users plan which you are locked in to. Then they lock you on to min 5 users for sales for the next two years where you are spending up to $500 per month which you cannot break out of.

To cancel it you have to notify them ON THE DAY of renewal because it's yearly contract.

We only had one sales person in our startup and all our customer data was locked in Hubspot + we were using their chat+ email.

I spent a weekend writing up scripts and moving to self hosted service (TileDesk!) and I had to cancel my credit card; there was no way out because you sign the "contract" when you take up their startup plan (https://mvpgrow.com/hubspot-for-startups/)

Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders

#177

Post by ahepp »

alephnerd wrote: post #7
mionhe wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the key word there was 'primary'. I think it's okay to have a main audience in mind that isn't the entire world.

Primary implies the lack of localization, and localization is a critical piece of innovation, as it forces you to consider additional user experience enhancements. From a typography standpoint, think about how you would represent Hudum versus Latin fonts on a mobile app or PWA now that Mongolia is deprecating Cyrillic script. On the Cloud side, a lot of major K8s orchestration and edge computing innovations were spar…

> On the Cloud side, a lot of major K8s orchestration and edge computing innovations were sparked by Chinese telcos and tech vendors trying to work around GFW related latency issues.

Is there publicly available information on this?

Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders

#178

Post by vram22 »

nsoonhui wrote: post #83

Zoho prices strategically. For example, it ensures that the price for the help desk product, ZohoDesk is the lowest in the market; across all tier it is priced at USD 1/month cheaper than the next cheapest competitor, FreshDesk.

Also, IIRC, the CEO of Freshworks (company behind FreshDesk) was heading product management at Zoho earlier.

Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders

#179

Post by sangnoir »

hosh wrote: post #170
sangnoir wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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." Ac…

> I don't see that information on that link.

I may have been overzealous is removing what I thought were tracking parameters. If you click on "about us" in the footer and scroll all the way to the bottom or click on 1996 - you'll find the text about AdventNet, which I suppose is the source for Wikipedia

https://www.zoho.com/aboutus.html?ireft=nhome&src=ourstory-f...

Re: Zoho is attracting the attention of African startup founders

#180

Post by dimask »

beezlebroxxxxxx wrote: post #99
max_ wrote: post #88

I am an African based in Uganda and I am currently working on my project https://labour.quest I wanted to start by using Google Workplace. But then switched to Zoho for the generous free tier. I am so glad I did. Zoho has so many tools that a project needs to run "built in". For example I was thinking of signing up for the services below but Zoho already had these built in. SendGrid - Zepto Mail MailChimp - Zoho Camp…

I'm sure you're aware, but you have to be careful with being very reliant on free-tier products. Once a magnitude of people are "locked in" then they'll start to do some of the pricing and licensing shenanigans where once common features or bundled products get hidden under a fee or broken up after an update. (Interesting project BTW, I'd just recommend having a screenshot or 2 of one of the resumes if you're explici…

To be fair, while they did introduce new restrictions in the past, for example disabling imap support for free email accounts, the restrictions did not apply to older accounts that had already these features activated. Ie if you were using imap before the change, you would not have to pay to continue using it.

Ime zoho has been very reliable. Not relying on venture capital [0] and seemingly working on longer than shorter term profit makes it imo also less likely to resort to this type of strategies.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/10/how-zoho-became-1b-company...

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