Turning a no-name challenger into a $10B category force
Freshworks
Challenge
Freshworks was a no-name Indian CRM company in a market flooded with companies all claiming to be "better than Salesforce." The category sounded the same everywhere --- and the incumbent was a $100B gorilla. They needed to stand out and scale credibility quickly.
Big Idea
Instead of competing on features, we redefined the category. CRM software was built for management. We repositioned Freshworks as Customer-for-Life software — built for the humans actually using it. Then we picked a public fight to make the point unmissable: we flew a #failsforce blimp around Salesforce Tower during their 200,000-person Dreamforce conference.
Results
4 days: $1.5M in earned media, 3,000+ leads. Mark Benioff reached out to congratulate and discuss acquisition.
6 months: Unaided awareness grew from low single digits to 8%
2 years: 20% unaided awareness, $10B IPO valuation (13x market cap increase)
Case Study
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