How To Go Thermonuclear in a Twitter Fight
Ever get tired of ankle-biting haters on Twitter? Freshdesk did, and responded with a dedicated website that called the critics out for, variously, being racist, being jealous, shilling, and tolling. Thus the company went from boring business-services startup to flamewar champion of the month.
The key to Freshdesk's victory over its enemies: Its Twitter-fight website, RipoffOrNot.org, which took the CEO of its competitor ZenDesk to task for calling India-based Freshdesk "a freaking ripoff" for making similar customer support web apps and for having the word "desk" in its name. "Does Zendesk own the english word 'desk'?" wrote Freshdesk CEO Girish Mathrubootham on RipoffOrNot.org. "Then what about companies like estreamdesk, ReadyDesk, Tremendesk, Wonderdesk and TopDesk? Are they all ripoffs too? Too bad you can't accuse them because many of these companies were founded before Zendesk." BURN!
But Mathrubootham didn't stop there. He also revealed that one Twitter critic, Ben Kepes, called Mathrubootham "an unethical troll" even as he himself failed to mention that he worked as a paid consultant/blogger for Zendesk . (Kepes replied that he hadn't taken money from Zendesk for a year or so.)
He highlighted how another critic, a consultant out of Sydney, Australia, got racial and nasty by deriding Freshdesk as a "bunch of Indian cowboys."
And he outlined the real reason for the mass conspiracy against Freshdesk:
With all the customers who have been switching over from Zendesk and our recent funding from Accel Partners, they probably realize we are not going to go away anytime soon. So they came up with this brilliant, half-baked social strategy of bad-mouthing us on Twitter.
The Freshdesk CEO then closed none too humbly with a quote from Mahatma Gandhi. You know the one: "First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win." Translation: We are hated for being awesome.
"FreshDesk 1; ZenDesk 0," wrote tech blogger Lindsay O'Neal.
You don't want to bring a knife to a gunfight. But bringing a gun to a knifefight? Wise! As Freshdesk showed. The lesson: if you want to win a battle on Twitter, take if off Twitter and onto a real fucking website. That's how, like, Gandhi would play it, I'm reasonably certain.
