The $100M ARR Club | Hacker News Reader

The $100M ARR Club

techcrunch.com

WalkMe's and Druva's humble beginning [0][1] remind me of two of my personal favourite $100M+ ARR companies, Madras-based start-ups that did not seek investments for a long-time: Zoho [2] and Freshworks [3]. The latter was co-founded by u/girishm after being inspired by a comment on news.yc [4].

Zoho, founded by u/sridharvembu, a competitor to GSuite and Salesforce [5], has a unique recruitment strategy: Educate and train small-town teenagers, who typically cannot afford higher education, at Zoho University, for whatever career it is they want to take up at the organization [6].

I sometimes wonder if u/girishm applied to YC and didn't make it?

---

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2012/04/02/walkme-walks-you-through-w...

[1] https://www.druva.com/about/

[2] https://inc42.com/buzz/sridhar-vembu-shares-the-secret-sauce...

[3] https://inc42.com/buzz/freshworks-launches-freshworks-360-as...

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2340732

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5836569

[6] https://qz.com/india/1029316/zoho-corporation-is-building-a-...

Zoho is my goto example for bootstrapping and Mr. Sridhar Vembu's quote about it when it comes to Indian startup ecosystem.

>Go outside your home and see the coconut vendor or the chaiwala(tea seller). They are bootstrapped. - Sridhar Vembu[1]

This is true for a developing startup ecosystem like India, where startups have been treated just like any other Business and Valley philosophies need not necessarily apply.

>Madras-based start-ups

At the same time, I refrain from quoting Zoho as the rule-book for Indian startups as starting AdventNet(Zoho's original name) in California by a Princeton Alumni accelerated it to become what it is now and I don't want misrepresent facts by telling Zoho as 'Slum dog millionaire' story(Not directly relating to your statement).

Zoho has re-established itself as an Indian company after the IT Boom and as an Indian Startup in the ongoing Startup boom.

>unique recruitment strategy: They educate and train small-town teenagers, who typically cannot afford higher education, at Zoho University,

It's truly unique. But it wasn't completely altruistic(it needn't be) because, recruitment in India is done on the basis of degrees and in the early days; those graduated from the Zoho university(not real univ) without proper degree were bound to work there and so extremely low attrition.

[1]https://inc42.com/buzz/bootstrapping-for-21-years-worked-for...

P.S. Your archive of HN threads and users (from your profile) is very impressive. Do you have any tools in place to store and monitor them?

Thanks. I wish I could tell there was a sophisticated workflow behind it all... but it simply involves a lot of rote, time spent searching and reading.

> Your archive of HN threads

Thread discovery is usually through https://hn.algolia.com, recalling from memory, looking at a user's past submissions and comments, and bookmarks; in that order.

> (from your profile)

I tend to research a lot on tech I am interested in by looking at comments on news.yc (hn.algolia is pretty good for this), and it isn't long before I find the same set of users expertly discussing things on the said tech. I, then, note those users down in my profile [0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19556720

If you are an entrepreneur reading this and having ARR much lesser than this but you are profitable to the point you can sustain your business -- you have my respect. Its a feat to just be profitable enough to keep the business running.

Lets not let these headlines demotivate you. $500K ARR is equally cool.

Net Income is cooler

It all depends on the profit margin. $500K ARR is easier achievable if you run some kind of marketplace where you have 20-30% margin than SaaS with 90%.

All these 'extra crunch' articles seem very high quality, but it's beyond annoying that I haven't been able to ready any of them.

I understand why services like Netflix are only available in some countries, but an online publication? That's just crazy. Take my money already!

I'm curous. I'm from one country that gets a "Sorry, a potential security risk was detected in your submitted request. The Webmaster has been alerted." when visiting senate.gov, but I can nevertheless visit techcrunch.com without a problem.

Have you tried clearing cookies you get on techcrunch.com? The little lock in the address bar, then Cookies, then clicking "Remove" until they're wiped out, then refresh.

This article is exclusive to their subscribers ($150/year), which is only available in US, Canada, UK, France, Germany, and Spain as per their website.

Is the full text of the article available for you? Because for me (and others) only a teaser segment is available.

Sorry. I spoke too early, I didn't see the "Extra Crunch" thing and thought the whole post was paywalled for you. I also have a paywall after many paragraphs.

https://outline.com/MaMput Also easier to read on mobile.

Edit: Ahh yeah, sorry. Gets cut off at the same point. I didn't understand the paywall kicks in pretty far into the article. At least the folks getting the regional block can read the teaser portion.

Indeed! Much better mobile layout!

But still seems to be missing stuff in the end... Unless it was meant to end abruptly.

No, these articles are usually pretty long, so the point where it gets off is only at the beginning of the article.

It doesn’t seem high quality to me but my standards might be too high. To me, these articles should be what the regular content should be.

One publication that is doing premium content correctly is Business insider. They seem to get the scoop on things that genuinely seem insightful like Behind the scenes into WeWork’s fallout or behind the scenes into an acquisition.

"We’re sorry. Extra Crunch membership is currently only available for readers in the US, Canada, UK, France, Germany, and Spain".

Well, I'm not in any of these countries. I am in Switzerland. And for some stupid reason I can't read this.

The Internet was supposed to transcend the national boundaries, but they seem to persist. We need to either fix this Internet, or build the new better one.

It’s not the Internet that’s the problem here though, it’s a combination of stupidity/laziness (the easiest part to fix) and bad incentives, business practices and regulations.

The latter part is very hard to fix, because it reflects very diverse human motivations...

I'll add that internet is also in many ways a combination of "stupidity/laziness (the easiest part to fix) and bad incentives, business practices and regulations". Actually, you might be able to say that about any public resource, because the bad parts of most things are some configuration of those problems.

I wish HN would just ban links to paywalled sites altogether. I am so frustrated I no longer read NYT, WashPost, the frigg'n LA Times, even my local newspaper. The content web is seriously broken. Even Medium is paywalled now. I hope Wired stays open. Otherwise we will be down to BBC, NPR, and TV News sites, which are so plastered with ads you have to grit your teeth before clicking on a link.

Serious question - how do you expect news sites to deliver their content without you either paying them directly or them showing you ads?

I think it's reasonable to ask with respect to HN policy. It's hard to have a meaningful discussion when only a small percentage of the people on HN can read the full article.

What percentage of HN visitors do you think can read the full text of this article? 1% seems like a high estimate.

I beg to differ. HN’ers can always find something so abstracted from the article to debate about. This thread now, “Should news sites have paywalls?” “Should we ban pay walled news sources from HN?”. HN’ers are always down for a good debate!

No the parent, but... I think there's nothing wrong with paywalls. But this is not an ordinary one: I can't even pay, because their overpriced subscription is not available in my country.

I wouldn't mind paying if that meant i was free from all forms of tracking, selling my data, and ads.

Which isn't the case as folks paying for such services are the most valuable to advertisers.

I’m not sure why this is downvoted. It’s not straight up complaining about pay walled articles.

Proposing a solution (ban then from HN) is worth considering. If most HNers can’t read enough of an article to discuss it with some degree of depth, what is the point of allowing them here?

You can always try the extensions available to open those paywalls.

I've considered a service which I sent a link to, and retrieves the text and saves it for later reading or something of sorts

It should at least be flagged in the title as paywalled, to save me the time clicking/half reading before giving up at the wall

This article isn't available on the world wide web, only on specific countrywebs.

Can we please [tag] articles like this, and the GDPR 'not available in your country' stuff?

Paywalls are one thing; this is literally impossible to view for me without signing up for a VPN.

Difficult for the poster to look up every country the link works for, don't you think?

Right, so it can be changed when someone reports it.

There are also some domains that are well known to just block the entire EU for the bants, for example.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com