Chargebee Gets Funded: Journey Hurdles and Introspection

From the very beginning, the founders believed that a strong foundation of the team was indispensable for the growth of a company, it is with this belief that the team which started with zero managed to give India its 11th unicorn in 2021 and raised $125 million in its recent Series G funding. The road from point A to today was not straight and smooth, it took a lot of patience and hardwork to successfully make it past the curves and tunnels.

In October 2012, Chargebee raised its first angel round of investment, however, this was a year before the company received its first major funding from Accel. The company was introduced to Shekhar Kirani from Accel via Freshworks. For a very long time, whenever Shekhar used to take a flight to Chennai to meet the Freshworks team, his day would start with a short breakfast meeting with the Chargebee team at a vegetarian restaurant recommended by Subramanian.

Shekhar Kirani wrote in one of his blogs about one thing that Rajaraman said that he still remembers. Rajaraman said that one day Kirani would visit Chennai to specifically meet the Chargebee team and they would then be the one’s offering the breakfast slot to some other start-up.

While in the meeting Shekhar always urged Chargebee to ask deeper questions like, who is interested in buying the product within an organisation? How did they discover Chargebee? What tools/systems did they use before this? It was the ‘why’ questions Shekhar asked that got them to think about the recurring value proposition and arrive at several crucial insights. The founders of Chargebee believe that the questions Kirani raised and the problems he presented really led the company to introspect, work its way to the solutions and therefore it helped them majorly in getting the basics right. In 2012, after a lot of grilling, Shekhar finally invested in Chargebee and this happened only when the company had figured out what it was, who it was for, and why the customers should choose it and not someone else.

Since then, the company has been growing at an exponential rate with every funding series. It raised $5 million in 2015, $14 million in 2019, $55 million in 2020, and finally earned the unicorn status with $125 million raised this year. Its major investors are Accel, Insight Venture Partners, Steadview Capital, and Tiger Global Management.

Chargebee’s Identity and Clout

The Chargebee team wanted to be a company whose main focus was the success of its customers. This was accomplished by making sure that they are available for their customers 24/7. Secondly, the team at a very initial stage understood that since the product relied heavily on working with other products, the Application Programming Interface should not be just as smooth as butter but also ridiculously easy.

Lastly, they realised how crucial their company is for the customers. If Chargebee went down, even for a small while, customers were hit where it hurts most that is their revenues. To make sure this doesn’t happen the team integrated with several payment gateways like Paypal, Amazon Pay, GoCardless, and many more across 150+ countries so that their crashes wouldn’t affect the functioning Chargebee.

The founders of the company have also seamlessly integrated with firms like Mail Chimp, Google Analytics, Slack, Salesforce, to make their operations efficient across different departments such as Sales, Finance, Marketing, etc.

Surviving and Thriving In A Sea Full Of Competition

The company, since its inception, has survived against behemoths like Stripe, a company valued at $95 billion, and other giants like Chargify, Zuora, Braintree, a few names from a long list. One thing that has helped the company sail through these competition-heavy waters is a clear understanding of its purpose and what the customer is expecting from the other end. However, at an initial stage what motivated Chargebee to compete with such big firms was the fact that they started working with very few overheads because of AWS. Chargebee’s entire server load was zero in its first year and cost $100 per month. As a SaaS-based model, it didn’t have to dump all its savings into infrastructure and this meant that it could still compete with large companies who already had millions of dollars in funding. Chargebee and Stripe who compete in the market also work with each other, which helps meet the strategic objectives of both companies.

One of the main advantages of Chargebee, when compared to other companies, is its user-friendly interface, its flexibility, and its customization options. The company has created the option of creating custom fields for the Customer and Subscription objects. This option can be used to track additional information about a customer or their subscription. Chargebee has always kept its approach flexible, it accommodates all the sudden pricing changes a company might have to go through. Through it, companies can run their entire recurring billing process on auto-pilot. All they have to do is schedule calendar billing dates and the Chargebee team takes care of the rest whether it is – proration, taxation, invoice consolidation.

In 2020, the customer reviews ranked Chargebee the number one finance software, not only this, over the next five years the company is predicted to grow at a rate of 17.5 per cent.

Freshworks with Google: Strong Competition to Industry Giants

Headquartered in California, United States, Freshworks had been ambitious from the very beginning by setting up its start-up in an industry which was dominated by giants like Zoho, Zendesk, Microsoft etc. Presently, not only Freshworks is coming up with novel and innovative customer-centric products, but is also aiming to serve big-sized companies, including the SMB segment.

Since Freshworks has always been about better customer experience, it focused a lot on its digital marketing which coupled with its global inside-sales model, lowered its cost of selling. Aided by Google Search advertising, Freshworks quickly garnered interest and a strong customer base which was built across the United States of America and Europe. This only further aided in bettering its services in comparison to some of the biggest competitors of the industry.

Using other Google tools like Google Analytics and Google Ads, strategic campaigns were easily designed and targeted, which further helped its ranking through Google Search and aided its fast growth across the globe. Since 2016, Freshworks has also been using YouTube and Google Marketing Platform to strategize its branding.

When it comes to product comparison, Freshworks CRM is preferred by the majority of customers over Zoho CRM because of the better quality, greater feature updates and roadmaps provided by Freshworks. Customer reviews have rated Freshworks’ CRM higher than the competition’s CRM due to its comprehensive, uncomplicated and integrated services with ensured scalability. Freshworks’ CRM is a guaranteed first choice majorly amongst consumers as compared to other competitors due to ease of use, contextual conversations, zero manual intervention and affordable rates. Consumers swear by Freshworks 360, in comparison to that of the other competitors in the market who are established giants, because of its modern and integrated services, affordability and ease of use. Additionally, Freshworks boasts of a range of 24/5 customer care services through call, mail, text and other mediums, suitable to their customers without any hassle. As observable, in an industry with such big competitors, Freshworks has managed to carve out its SaaS product niche by focusing on customer satisfaction and ease of operation and scalability. This has been their biggest plus point in taking over the industry and getting ahead of the competition in such a short time.

Why Is Digital Infrastructure Important to Your Business Overall?

Digital infrastructure and digital platform modernization have become more of a necessity today than an option. It helps a business become smarter whilst enabling the organisation to enhance the quality of experiences and production in order to meet customer demands and employee productivity. As we read earlier, consumers across the globe are switching to the internet like never before. They are becoming increasingly hyper-connected and catching up with the technological changes.

Everyone wants the latest thing on the market, everyone wants more of everything. If your business or venture cannot keep up with consumer demand, there will be another company that will step in to fill that gap.

Now is the best time to invest in infrastructure, security servers and cloud-computing platforms, before it’s too late and you get left behind while everyone else moves ahead. Research more on your digital infrastructure strategy and include micro-services and lightweight API-led application interfaces, etc to keep up with the latest trends in technology.

How can Modernizing Digital Infrastructure help improve business and add value for customers?

The crux of any entrepreneurship model is to provide solutions to certain problems of consumers such that it optimises consumer satisfaction as well as producer profits. Modernizing your ventures with the latest technology is one step towards achieving that optimisation. The digital infrastructure allows businesses to connect and share relevant data through responsive platforms and mobile apps thus increasing their customer base and sales. This also improves the user experience for your customers as they can avail services conveniently and easily without even stepping out from the comforts of their home. Employees also improve their productivity with improvement in technology as when labour is amalgamated with digital technology, it improves the efficiency of working. The digitalization helps increase engagement and interlinks consumers and producers making the market a more trustworthy landscape where proper relations are maintained.