Chennai: In a bid to solve the rising cost of quality resources – such as office space, access to CRM softwares etc – which are unaffordable at times for bootstrapped, early stage startups, their established well-funded counterparts such as Freshdesk, Zarget, Chargebee and CloudCherry have come together to form a community to share resources.
Initiated by Zarget, the community, which is in its initial stages, can go on to rope in other startups in the space. The startups can post offers or requests on a website. “We are funded now, and access to resources is affordable. But we struggled during our bootstrapped days. We had to cut corners to keep pushing on with the dream of building an all-in-one CRO suite. We did not have access to paid tools and had to make compromises which hurt productivity. With funding, things changed but memories of the early struggle are still afresh in our minds.” said Arvind Parthiban, CEO, Zarget. The company will be reaching out to startup communities, Y Combinator and others to rope in more companies.
To ease it for startups, CloudCherry is currently offering free office space for a stipulated period of time and Freshdesk is offering free CRM software for six months. On a platform called Respect Startups, companies share offers ranging from trial software, free access to services, products, office space or even coupons.
“This will help early stage startups save time and money – both precious resources. By making premium products available for early stage startups, it creates a win-win situation. Instead of building in-house, they can avail bundled solutions that are already proven to work. We are offering, a free tier for early and growth stage startups where they can use Chargebee for free up to first $50,000 USD in aggregate revenue, so that they don’t have to worry about the nitty gritties of billing and invoicing,” said Krish Subramanian, Co-Founder, Chargebee.
Startups giving out offers have set criteria to prevent established companies from grabbing them. Freshdesk, for instance, has an offer open for startups making a revenue of less than $ 1 million and Cloudcherry offers office space for startups with fewer than five members.
Currently with seven startups coming on board, early-stage startups in tier 2, tier 3 cities have found offers through the community. “We are a bootstrapped startup based out of a tier II city and we did not have the capacity to afford such resources,” said Aswin Vayiravan, CEO & Co-Founder, Deducely, a SAAS startup.
Source: Times of India
