The Freshdesk blog

On March 18 2011 we published a blog post on the Freshdesk story and I submitted it to HN. Within an hour it became the top story on HN and stayed as the top story for over 6 hours and in the top 10 for 24 hours and on the first page for around 36 hours. This was a dream come true for our team and we were on a high during those few hours of limelight that Freshdesk was enjoying on Hacker News.

One of the comments on Hacker News (user – themonk) asked if I can share what difference being the top story on HN made in terms of traffic to our blog. So here we go-

 The blog post had 28K page views and 25K uniques (For comparison from Mar 1st to Mar 17th we had only around 1500 pageviews total)

Hacker News was the top referrer to the blog and google analytics attributed 16K visits to HN but I am pretty sure the other 10K plus was also primarily because of HN.

Our Home page had more than 5500 views, the Pricing and the Features page had more than 2000 views and the signup page had around 1450 views.

We had 150 new signups – too bad we didn’t have the product ready. I think we could have had much more if we had the product ready instead of having people signup and wait for the beta. 

These were some interesting visitors to our blog who want to engage with us now

A renowned Silicon Valley VC on Sand Hill road

An prolific and influential angel investor 

An angel investor from Europe

Two India focused VC firms

and most importantly

We got lots of genuine feedback from prospective customers who are now evaluating Freshdesk in the private beta program.

This experience  has given the entire team a shot in the arm in terms of confidence and belief.

It doesn’t matter now that we are sitting in a remote corner of the world, earning less money than what we were making last year, struggling with Internet and electricity problems every week and sacrificing quality time with family and kids. We now believe that if we build something good and make it world class it is possible to win over the hearts and minds of smart customers from all over the world.

I would like to thank Noah Kagan of Appsumo for the Lean Startup Challenge which is what prompted me to write the Freshdesk story in the first place and our entire team is now taking a bow to say -

Thank you Hacker News! Thank you for making a huge difference in the world of startups and the life of entrepreneurs!