Be Wary of Solving a Small, Rare Problem - Des Traynor of Intercom
How did you meet your co-founder and decide to get going?
Sure. So I was originally a computer science student, and I started a PhD. You know, my PhD was an attempt to see if we could automatically measure how good a programmer is, basically. So I put some true a variety of simulated code and asked them to say what the output would be. And you know, we had some really interesting findings from our research, but I got bored. I got bored for a few reasons.
One, as some of the findings were slightly uncomfortable for some universities, because I was basically saying that, “Hey, this person you’re saying is getting a 65% score, I actually don’t think they can program because they can’t tell me what this code outputs.” Oh, and people don’t want to hear that, obviously, just because they figured out how to take exams.
Well, yes, precisely. So typically, the way—and this is true worldwide, I think—the way like people in universities would mark a piece of code is, “Sarah will give them entry points” if they have a for loop, and “two points if it’s Tiffany’s statement.” And people just learned that off. So, like, the phenomenon is that template-based marking encourages template-based learning.
Yeah, people like know what a solution should look like, but they have no idea what it does. Right. Saying which, like learning off Latin or something. So, yeah, that finding became more and more controversial for universities. And as I said, “Hey, I’d like to do some study on your students. Here’s my hypothesis.” They’re like, “No, thanks.”
So I started writing a blog instead, because that was the alternative to publishing—was just to write effective stuff. And then I started writing about design and usability. One day, somebody commented on my blog. His name was Owen McCabe and he was organizing this coffee morning in Dublin City for like all the people who worked on the Internet, which is a small group. And this is like 2006. I went along, and actually, a funny story is I met Owen for the first time, Derek, who I went on to start Intercom with, and I also met my wife for the first time that day.
Really? That same day?
Wow! Yeah, I know, I fell in love. Yeah, it was exactly a good day’s work.
Yeah, so I actually went on to take a different job with a consultancy, and then for one year we kept in touch. And then one day he emailed me and said, “Hey, I’m starting my own thing. Do you wanna get involved?” So we started working together. We had an agency called Contrast. It was like a design agency.
And then we were following the 37signals model; we wanted to have a side project that we’d eventually pivot to. So our side project was a tool called Exceptional, a Ruby on Rails-based error handler.
And it would like alert developers and notify them: “Hey, this piece went wrong, and here’s who was affected.” And that was like, you know, so that was the normal trajectory. And then one day we were like, we were getting really frustrated trying to communicate with our users because we had, like, thousands of people using the product, but the product, like, was, you know, we—it was frequently performing slowly or would fall over.
And we were, you know, the state of the internet back in 2010 wasn’t good. Like, so the infrastructure also wasn’t great. You know, if we wanted to mail all of our paying customers to apologize for some downtime, it was like log in to the PayPal dashboard, get an export of all your subscriptions, run a script to extract the email addresses, import the email addresses into Campaign Monitor or MailChimp, send out a notification, get all the replies, and like, you know, all that like auto replies and all that back into your own email.
You know, resurrect your email after like two hours of going through or trying to fix all of that. We had to do that every single time we wanted to say anything to our customers. That was the norm. So one day we had this little message pop up in the bottom right-hand corner of the product saying, “Hey, we’re sorry. We were down yesterday. Here are the changes you made. Read our blog post.”
And people—and we saw a lot of engagement on the blog post, much better than an email. And then we sort of started to riff from there. A lot of people could reply to us like imagine talking to somebody while you’re using your product and letting them talk back.
So, then we started adding these little bits and pieces of features. Another iteration was like, “What if we could see everyone who read the message and see who hasn’t?” That became the basis of what we call an active user mystic—who’s using the product right now. All of this in 2017 is taken for granted, but this did not exist in 2011.
And so we said, and then it was like, “What if we could send a message to some people but not all people? What if we could send at a specific time?” Today we call that like behavioral marketing automation, but back then we were just like, “This just seems like it makes sense.”
So I remember distinctly reading one comment going like, “I’m not actually much of a fan of your product, but this little chat thing is amazing!” We were like, “Maybe you should go build that.” And like, obviously, we’d been thinking that a lot, but, like, it was like the feedback we were getting just pushed this.
And pushed this. So eventually we sold Exceptional, and it went on to become a part of Rackspace. And then we had this little thing for talking to users. We had a new problem here—we had no users, so we had to go and build the backend, if you like, so that we could give it to other people so that we would have our own customers.
So I was wondering if you were just going to steal all the users from Exceptional and move over? Because this was maybe the most asked question for you.
Yes, so I would—the folks who acquired Exceptional they were actually kind enough to use Intercom to push one last message out to sort of say, “Hey, we’re the new owners, like, we’re here; we’re great; we’re gonna love you for the rest of your lives,” etc. If you’re curious, “What happened to the old gang? They’re off working on this thing called Intercom. Go check it out.”
And I think it was like July 1st, 2011, we got to like the top of Hacker News for like, you know, “Intercom—a cool new product” or whatever. And the engagement on that was just phenomenal. I still read it today, and then it was just kinda—that was the first one where I was like, “Oh, new order! People have this problem!”
Was that the first push for sign-ups?
Yeah, pretty much. So we had like a reasonable sort of contact list from people who had used our previous products. People who we knew from conferences or people who had read our old blog. So we had an audience of sorts. And my job in the early days was literally mailing people every day. I mean, like, “Here’s what Intercom could look like inside your product. Do you want to give it a try?” One by one, like literally one by one, we were onboarding people.
If they said yes, they jumped on a Skype call with our CTO Kieran. He’d walk them through the installation. Like this, you know, this is what it’s about. Day one, I’m like—one by one we were winning customers. And then once we felt we had a relatively smooth signup flow, we’re like, “Well, let’s tell the world and see what happens.”
Because you guys had made a giant content push; was that going on previously with the other company?
Yeah, so when we were a consultancy, content was the way we would try and like get attention so we could attract clients, and then later on it grew a user base for Exceptional. But what Intercom was doing was, you know, we knew we were good at it. Our specific—it was my job. So I was like right, well for Intercom, you know, today we’re a lot more polished in terms of saying what our she sounded like. But back then it was just like—we need cool startup folks to read this, and then if we can win their trust, then we’ll be like, “Hey, trust us.”
And that was like—that was what we did. I think I wrote 93 of the first 100 posts, and it was all like, “Here’s how to grow your user base. Here’s how you should think about funneling. Here’s how you should name your product.”
It was just anything that we felt we had a bit of expertise in, we’d like sort of write a post. And, and every now and then we’d be like, “Oh, here’s something else about Intercom.”
Yeah, because this is—this is a critical understanding that we could blow right past. So many people in their content just try and do sales pitches over and over, and it never works, and they can’t figure out why.
Yeah, it’s my number one—basically, you’re totally correct. A lot of people’s attempts at content marketing is, “I want Intercom’s user base.” So they blog, so they just need to write about their product all the time. Whereas we actually took it very much like, it’s content first, marketing second.
Right. You know, so it’s—yes, the content has to be good. Yeah, so the advice I’d give people is usually like think about who your actual target user is and think of all the problems in their life that you can help them with, and then try to help them as much as you can.
Mm-hmm.
And then every now and then, hopefully, if you’re ideally aligned, your product also solves one of their problems. From Intercom, it’s usually like, “Do you want to grow your web app or do you want to grow your user base? We can do that.” But we know to get your attention, we have to plant many seeds.
So we’ll talk about design, we’ll talk about product, we’ll talk about product strategy, we’ll talk about like, you know, tech news—whatever makes sense to us we’ll talk about. As long as it—the criteria we have is generally it should be like timeless content that should always be roughly true.
And that’s how we, I mean, we have like, you know, a very, very big readership of our blog today, and it’s one of our, you know, it is our dominant traffic source. But, you know, that wasn’t true for the first 100 posts.
Well, I was wondering, were you punching above your weight at that time? Did it feel weird writing these kind of authoritative posts?
So I think, um, I definitely didn't—did not feel weird. I think the reason I would say I felt confident to do it is because we—it was never—I was never trying to say, like, “Here’s how you, you know, like a, you know, scale a $100,000,000 company.”
Whatever. And I hate when people try to do that. We were always talking about, like, you know, all of our experiences were based on the two products we had—on Intercom and Exceptional. And it was like the lessons that we had learned.
So I was always careful to kind of qualify like, “Hey, we’re at six thousand active users. We were at zero four months ago. I can talk to you about the zero to six.”
You know, something I think that’s relatively safe.
Yeah, so and then like the areas where maybe it was, you know, slightly more if we talked about broadening or say how to name your company right or like how to think about your product vision.
Yeah, there are definitely better people than you, and if you put—you know, if I can write these posts, then you must get it.
So were you, at that time, did you consider yourself a strategist?
No. No, I consider myself like a startup person, if you know what I mean.
Like, as you were a CS undergrad? Right?
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Okay, so were you the CTO?
No, no.
So is that computer science undergrad?
All of the founders studied computer science, but our CEO and I moved into design as our career. I was a UX designer, usability testing, interaction design—that sort of stuff. Owen was primarily a visual designer, and then we had our two engineers: like, the person who built the front end of Intercom, like their little messenger piece, and then our CTO basically owned the rest.
Okay, gotcha. Because I was curious about what your role has been throughout the process. Like, how has it shifted? And we talked before you were on camera like it’s already shifting again.
Mm-hmm.
It will always just—I, you know, I do kind of go to wherever the biggest problem that I think I can help with is. That’s kind of what usually attracts me. It’s like, you know, I want Intercom to be a world-class company, and wherever I see areas where I think I can help level up, I’ll jump in.
In the very early days I worked—you know, my—I’d sort of three jobs: like work on the company vision, strategy, that sort of stuff; I worked with Kieran and David on what the rush you building day to day; and then basically I talked to users and, you know, tried to help people find out about Intercom. And I was blogging.
That was a—that he always used to do webinars or like, you know, 7 PM in the evening, and I would move people over here—I'd just do like live, you know, let me talk to you, but anything to do with the product. It was like anywhere I was needed. But in the early days, it was very much like I was working on what we were building and then trying to tell people about us.
And then as we grew, we brought in more senior product folks. And then, yeah, and then at some point, maybe around 25 people, I was like, “Great! Product looks like it’s in a good place.”
Okay, what’s the next biggest thing?
And what turned out, we had no customer support at this time. Like, I was also doing the support, and we had maybe like one or two people. So I jumped on customer support. I worked with Jeff, who is their director of support still today, and built that team.
And his other teams came along since then. We had maybe like—people up. So it’s the next thing. It’s a recruiting or the next thing. And then about two years ago, it was marketing.
So, you know, we’ve kind of gone through a clinic we think Intercom was definitely the product. Have we gone right? Price—we looked at it. I kind of refined our ideas about how we bring it to market, how we describe it, explain what it is, what’s our relationship with the media, how do we pay for advertising and all that sort of stuff.
So that’s what I’ve been working on for two years. And as he said, there will be future problems, I’m sure.
But it’s so cool because so rarely founders shift roles in entirely separate categories. Right. It’s very common when you start a company to like start doing everything and then focus, but to shift roles between groups is different.
How do you learn those skills?
Yeah, that is a good question. I do agree it’s not like—it’s not the default thing. Usually, you find your corner and you stay in it for a very good reason. That’s what you’re good at.
I think, like, two years ago, I was when I was starting in marketing, I felt a little intimidated because marketing itself is not really a—like there’s no real marketing 101 sort of thing. There’s no like marketing for dummies. There’s no like pickaxe book for marketing, you know.
Well, it’s less quantifiable than like—yeah, just how it runs or this code doesn’t run.
Precisely. Yeah, and you can emit sound. If I said, “Here, name someone who’s good at marketing,” and you’re not allowed to—you know, everyone’s opinion is kind of different. Right?
So I’m like—I’m frankly like marketers don’t really like write many articles about how to think about things or any structure teams or—you know, I’ve talked to maybe 50 different VPs in marketing at this point of a head of marketing organization structure, and they’re all different.
Like, very—I think not just different as a newbie, but substantively different. Like even like in terms of like some of those Brian designers inside some of these headsets and moments. Communications reports to the CEO; some of them report to a part of marketing. You know, all of that’s different.
So I did find it quite intimidating early on, and more so than the other areas where I felt there’s a lot of literature and there are a lot of best practices in marketing. It was a challenge, and the way I actually kind of learned was like I did get connected to great companies and basically sat and learned and absorbed and see what worked and what didn’t.
And then I wouldn’t say like I kicked ass in marketing at Intercom, either. I’ve made plenty of mistakes there as well, fundamentally based on misunderstanding what roles will work, what types of people will work, what approaches will work.
So would there have been a couple rules that you’ve kind of maybe learned just through experience over the past couple years that you could share about rules of marketing?
Yeah, I guess, um, there’s definitely like principles I’ve just picked up over time. One is like the, you know, the general narrative about marketing is people will tell you, “Well, the engineer’s approach to marketing is like we’re gonna hire a marketer, and they’re gonna find keywords that are KLTB positive, that is the customer boss asking the LTV, and we’re gonna dump all of our $50 million into that, and it’s gonna spit out $100 million.”
I’m like basically that never happens.
Right?
Like, I really like someone’s like, “I’m sorry, Des. I have one case.” It never happens. Like, for all intents and purposes.
And so I think, like, you know, whenever you have someone promising it, it’s usually absolute horseshit.
Then the next, I guess, let me just take—like say, so, from my dialect, the next piece I think is understanding how people buy your product is more important than selling your product, if you know what I mean.
So one big eye-opener for me is that like some people come shopping for Intercom; some people come shopping for a chat widget on our website. Right?
So we become looking for a solution to their growth challenges. Alright? And they’re all actually looking for Intercom.
And what I mean is, like, you are varying this abstraction at various ways people can buy your product. So like, I think a lot of times companies get sucked into selling a product one particular way.
Yeah.
And maybe they like, you know, maybe they pick one of those things, and I’m like, we are—you know live chat. It’s like, yes, you’re live chat, and some people know that they need life chalice and they’ve gone to the doctors, they’ve gone the diagnosis like we need live chat, they talked to their friend, and they’re like, “So you have this brand.”
One, which is like your friend says install an intercom.
Yeah.
Then you have this like maybe, you know, you’ve changed market leaders. “Okay, we need live chat on our site. That worked in the old place.”
Okay, now you’re shopping for live chat.
So we need to be in that shopping for live chat.
Then we have people who are like, “Hey, I’ve just joined a new company, and one of the challenges is actually we’re not converting leads on our homepage.”
Now at this point, like, should they install Optimizely? Should they install Intercom? Should they redesign our homepage? Should they hire a better designer?
We’re now in a much bigger fight, but we still need to put our hand up and say, “Hey, that’s actually a business problem we can affect, too.”
So, I think one of the big lessons for us in their home has been like learning to be able to—we can put our hand up in all of those different shopping journeys.
So that was like one. Whenever I speak to other people who maybe like early on in their marketing career and they’re looking for guidance, typically what they find is like, you know, enter Google advertising. They’re bidding on their own company name, and I’m like, “That’s cool, but that’s actually not worth it.”
You know, that’s not what people are shopping for.
Well, it’s a challenge that we have at YC, you know, like for people in the tech industry who know they want to do an accelerator, like the likelihood that they know YC is pretty high.
And we can convince them to do YC, possibly. Then there are other people that have no idea what a startup is, you have this vague notion, and we have to speak to them as well.
Yeah, and so what strategies do you guys use to appeal to that type of person or each of those people without alienating the others?
Yes, so, and this is kind of a core of what we—how we think about it. So, when you have somebody who say is, you know, obviously YC has a broad audience.
Yeah, like so some people just shop for YC, and maybe you’re so dominant, you don’t even need to bid on that because they’re gonna find you anyway. But also, like, you know, in some sense, there is no substitute, right?
As you take a step back, you’re like: some people just want the money. Right?
Put my car, I’ll take YC. I’ll take Techstars. I’ll take 500 startups. Whatever, right?
And now you’re into an actual brand war. Now the question is, “Should you bid on 500 startups the keyword, right?” And should you—should you try and say, “We are better than them, here’s why we are better than them, if you’re shopping for both come check us out?”
Right?
That’s like the sort of too competitive angle to marketing, right?
And if you can pull that off, you now get to compete for all the superset of the traffic, not just the YC shoppers anymore.
And then you have two people who have a startup and they don’t know if they want money or not, in which case no—these people aren’t Googling.
Right? They’re not going—you know, hypothetically, if I was to start a startup, I would want to, you know, exactly do that.
Long term, yeah.
You’d be the only person bidding on it, that’d be you testing it.
So like, this is so dynamic. Basically, what happens is like the amount—the size of the addressable market is getting bigger each time, right?
There are more people who are thinking about starting a startup than there are people looking for YC today.
Yeah, totally.
But at the same time, like, your likelihood of conversion is going down. Right? As in, like, someone looking for YC is gonna convert somebody who’s like thinking about taking incubator money.
They might knock over your pitch, and your needs to be more all-inclusive at this sort of far side.
So you can’t start—if I’m saying “Hey, I’m thinking about taking some incubator money,” you can’t start with “Well, twelve weeks, you’re gonna have dinners with founders. We had Joel Spolsky and last…” you know, you— I need to be like, “Whoa! Talk to you about the concept of incubation.”
Well, you know, get me buying that thing first, and then I’ll learn what your base is.
Right?
So for Intercom, what that looks like is we need to convince you that you should care about your customers.
Right?
If you care about your customers and you care about the value of a customer relationship—we can get people on board with that.
You know, they’re more like “Okay, we’ve built one bridge.” The next bridge would be like, “Let’s talk to you about why messaging is a great way to build a relationship.”
So, well, none of these pitches individually convert, right? They’re all like—this is where people buy quite a bit, right?
So you have like, you write a whole piece that’s a—you say “my messaging is the future, I’m messaging your customers, it’s important.”
So, okay, so I get that relationships are important. I get that messaging builds relationships.
I’m like, “Okay, cool. Now do you get—”
And now they talk about Intercoms messaging, and then our philosophy to messaging, and you see you have sort of this cascading series of like thought leadership style ideas that bring you from—in our world, like, “I’d like to grow a big user base,” all the way to “I need Intercom yesterday.”
And in your world, it might be like, “I’m curious about incubator cash.”
Oh, and you want to catch them at that point.
And maybe that blog post you write there is like, “How do you think about early financing?” or maybe it’s like, “Why you should move to the valley?”
Or, you know, whatever it is. And you want to catch them at that point, and then you can walk them down the logical path where like, “This is obviously not a choice.”
So why would you go?
“Oh, I see.”
Right? And that’s a—you know, that’s the actual approach that we’ve, you know, we’ve played at Intercom.
And like retrospectively, I can tell you that’s been our content marketing strategy, but we didn’t think it wasn’t that crisp.
No.
And are you tracking someone throughout this journey?
Kind of not. We’re not doing a great job, and I’d have to be honest, we will get there.
Yeah.
We’ve just made some good new hires in marketing who’ll kind of improve that sort of side of things.
But we do know, like yes, we can see that we matter in terms of repeat visitors we have, and we can see the most popular articles and we can see the articles that convert the most.
Now, this is exactly where, like, it may be slightly more “Fisher-Price” approach to marketing would be like, “Hey, yes, I’ve noticed that the piece about Intercom’s new messenger converts a lot. Why don’t you write a lot more of those posts?”
And it doesn’t actually work that way, right?
You have to do two warm-ups to get them to their—you know.
So I think that’s like, that’s the piece that people don’t necessarily get.
Like, in general, the marketing world is one where you move from like, “This is really hard to attribute, and it costs a lot of money,” down to like, “Hey, we spent seven cents and I kicked ass.”
Right?
But that whole thing is a spectrum, and you have to be willing to do the unattributable things and let them—you know, to kind of, you know, grow awareness or whatever.
And then on the far side, yes, the attributable stuff, which looks really, really successful, works. But if you only do that, everything suffers.
So one example, I have a friend—who like, who basically he ran like paid marketing for a very, very big sort of sports gambling firm and he kicked ass one year here on all campaigns phenomenally well.
CEO looks at like sort of the brand spend and looks at the online digital attributable spend and the CEO says, “Hmm, I’m gonna give you all the budget because you’re doing is performant.”
So next year what happens?
So he’s got all the budget for brand; person’s got nothing.
So you go absolutely batshit heavy on like spending every account but all your conversion rates are dropping. You’re not—you’re good at that.
And it turns out that your conversion rates are dropping because you don’t have the same brand penetration that you did.
Yeah.
And I’m like this is why I like—you need to think about this. Think holistically.
You need to ask yourself, are we building the brand?
Are we creating the right brand resonance and relevance that we can cash in on?
Cashing in on, I don’t want to say it’s easier to absolute expertise, but it sits on a platform of work that has to be done before it.
The only exception is when you’ve got like a fast-moving consumer good. Right?
Like if you’re like selling shareware or heads on Facebook or something like, “Just target people who say the word ‘share,’” or hit them hard.
You know, we don’t need to like—you know, we don’t need to create this whole big sort of movement around sharing. People already share it.
You know, but yeah, most of us is—especially in our industry, we’re not selling fast-moving to earth, and we’re not selling necessarily obvious things—either.
Like it’s not a given that you have to install like a podcast plugin or a thing.
I was literally dealing with this morning before we met up, there’s an issue with one of the audio files in a podcast I’m editing, right?
And I don’t know the word for what’s going wrong with it.
I know there must be some effect that I can apply to fix it, but I don’t even—I don’t know the words for it, right?
And I’m sure that’s the case with Intercom.
Yeah, and so like we have to figure out what the synonyms are.
Totally.
People don’t know they need it yet, right?
Like it—yeah, and yes, precisely. On a donor marketing principle, it’s like you can’t sell somebody on the solution until they’ve bought the problem.
Right?
So like me trying to pitch you on like the audio worker or whatever the hell it is you need, until you have that problem, you’re not even—you don’t give a shit.
Right?
This is like—finding those moments is really an important challenge as well.
And like, as you said, those synonyms are just casting a wide net.
So it’s like ten ways to describe a problem for like Intercom. It could be like, “Retention is suffering” or “We need to accelerate user growth” or “How do we maintain user growth?”
Through—“How do I influence customer engagement?”
They’re all actually looking for the same thing, which might be like, “I want to speak to my users, but at specific times to get them to take the right action so that they can move forward.”
They’re all shopping for the exact same thing, but they have a million different ways to describe it, and we need to be there and put our hand up for every single one of those.
I’m not just—I point them to this. This is your mistake—people make pointing at.
Okay, alright, so I got the bid term; I’m gonna point them at that homepage that doesn’t work because if someone says, “I want to onboard my users better because my onboarding conversion rates are poor,”
And we’re like, “Yeah, we can bid on all that! We know we’re good at all that.”
But if we point you to intercom.com, we’re gonna say we’re an all-in-one marketing platform where our mission is to make mistakes persuade.
I’m sorry, I thought I was on to something there.
You know, we actually need to be like, “You want to onboard? You’re in the right place.”
Yeah.
I’m like, and at that point, Intercom isn’t actually the big deal.
We’re just like, “Let’s just keep the message about onboarding here. Let me hold your hand and walk you through how we’re gonna help you with the onboarding problem.”
And if you break—okay?
And they’d randomly be like, “Oh, by the way, this holding is Intercom.”
Yeah.
That’s how that works.
So a lot of people wanted you to talk about product.
How do you think about all this content marketing effort in the context of, you know, your product shifting and evolving over time?
Like how do you merge those two things?
If you know Intercom is known for one thing, yeah, and you have this whole history and all this SEO around that, when your product starts shifting, how do you think about it?
So as long as, you know, basically, you know, every product—I’ve often said like, you know, product and marketing and code and design are all like—they’re all renderings of the same core idea.
Looks so like, so to give an example, one core idea Intercom, it’s like sending the right message to the right person at the right time in the right place.
And we have Ruby code that does that. You know, we have a designed screen called the campaign editor that does that. And I have a blog post that does this, and I have a whole conference talk that I do this as well. Right?
They’re all carrying the same message in different ideas.
So at the core of every one of our products—educate, respond, and engage. We have these like core ideas, and we have loads of different ways to sort of talk about them.
Case studies and how they help, why it matters, what’s the big vision for them, each is. And, and as we’ve evolved our products, we’ve had to like bring more ideas into the fold that at the very core—like Intercom, we’re about making internet business personal.
So we can never bring something in that is the opposite of that, right?
But, we can certainly have a collection of ideas that we can represent.
So when we launch a new product, in December of last year I called “Educate,” and it was basically our take on a knowledge base for like basically offering proactively offering educational content to your customers.
And what that meant was I, you know, I sit down with my team and we work—well, we need to work out what are the core ideas here, and write events content, what we’re gonna do for books, how we gonna get this in a podcast, once it’s gonna one of the landing pages for us, what are all the different ways people bid on this?
You know, media—how are we gonna talk to the press about this? You know?
And you’re kind of looking for like everyone, “Here’s the core idea. You’re all welcome to take your own lens or your own flavor of it, but we all need to push on this idea.”
And so the bad things happen, I think, when either your product—or sorry, your product and your marketing are out of sync.
So isn’t Karen Peacock, who’s our CEO – she always says, “Build what you sell, sell what you build.”
If you’re not doing both of those things, you’re in fucken trouble, basically, right?
But similarly, I think—so that’s the first challenge is if we’re selling onboarding and you think you’re building like auto mailing, we’re in trouble.
Right? And then similarly the piece that like that I think a lot of startups—and we’ve had to like fight to get this right, is making sure your brand is also resonant with the same ideas.
Like, you know, I often think of, you know, Michelin—the people who do Michelin star restaurant—
Yeah, you know it’s a tire company.
I do.
Yeah. So like I often like that’s like, you know, orthogonal brands in another way.
So, you know, and no one finishes your meal goes, “Boom! Gonna buy some tires!”
You know? Like, I do worry—I see a lot of startups, like specific people who folks who try to copy, say, something like Stripe’s brand, and we want to be cool with developers, too.
Yeah, Rick, that’s great. But you’re selling an online restaurant to developers.
Right?
Aren’t your thing? You know? Okay, so, and what they have is this really cool tech blog and write, but that’s literally—it’s not against what you’re doing, but it’s just totally wrong.
It’s just—it also happens to happen at the same time, right?
It’s not helping you at all, right?
Well, how do you think about product in that way then? Because obviously you guys are a big company now.
You could release a ton of products. Yes.
How do you figure out like what’s going to resonate with your customers in your brand?
So at the very, very start, we kind of—we set our stall out to say, “We’re our mission is to make internet business personal.”
Right?
So that’s very core anytime we have to like make a decision about whether or not we do a product, we ask ourselves does this make business more personal in the internet?
Right?
And so you can sort of say, like, would we release the tool that made it easy to spam people you've never talked to before?
Well, no, because that’s—that’s totally opposite.
Would we release a tool that lets you stream soccer live to your mobile phone?
No, because I said—you don’t read that in an interview though.
But like, is it so like—that’s kind of our core sort of guardrail for like the product is just basically does it do that?
And then when we’re like—then we have other like sort of, you know, let’s say rubrics for like what’s my what’s the next most important way we could tackle the impersonality of digital business, right?
And so we kind of moved to like that.
But, and you know, every change we make in product has to trigger changes in product marketing, you know, design, you know, brand, content marketing, sales, etc.
Yeah.
And so you do have to have this sort of like inside-out sort of thing where like at the very core, we decide, “Alright, we’re now also gonna, you know, do like push notifications.”
Alright, well why are they personal?
Okay, well, let’s expand from there.
Alright, and how does it have to bleed out into everything?
What was your product? Your marketing? And your brand?
Don’t want to get out of sync, and that’s when bad things happen.
And we really truly— we’ve talked about this in the context of hiring and growth, right? Because you’d like—you become out of sync and then it kind of expands, or rather goes exponentially.
Yes?
If you don’t start hiring the wrong people.
Yeah, totally. Yeah, it’s so easy too, yeah.
The point I make exactly in a sort of hiring is like if you hire one person who’s not on the same page area and you let them hire people, they’re gonna hire more people in the same page, and you know, the whole wings of the company working against you, and they in bad ways.
And they don’t think you’re being malicious.
Yeah.
They do—they think they’re helping.
But you know, sometimes they can be doing these after wrong team, but more often, they’re just doing something that’s literally not helping.
It’s not hurting, but it’s just—it’s you know, they may as well, can not be doing—not working.
Yeah, whatever, playing games.
How do you guard against that?
Alignment is like, I think it’s doing it.
So we had a big event here two nights ago inside Intercom. It’s like our blog on terror. We had, like I said, people and one of the talks I was made a day if it was all about keeping people aligned.
I think like basically, like the thing was that, you know, when companies go through these really fast growth periods, there are a few things that always, always get left behind.
Yeah, one of them is like new hire onboarding. It’s like person number five joining a four-person company has like full access to everyone and basically absolute immersion therapy, right?
I already learned everything by osmosis.
Person number 66 joining a 65-person company gets access to three people, each of whom have been there less than a year.
Right?
It’s not the same thing.
No, but almost always, no one’s designed any differently.
So they’re just like, oh, well, you know.
So the logical conclusion is that the company goes off course.
So we invested in like—we made versions of this mistake, you know, quite a lot in the early days.
Yeah.
And today, we obsess over new hire onboarding.
Yeah.
Like when I leave here, I’ll be headed back to Dublin. Like, Tuesday morning, that’s all I’m doing is just meeting people in that even though like what are we doing?
You know what are we actually doing here, why are we doing, why do we care, what are the problems faced, why is the matter to us, how do we do it?
Like how do we actually work?
How does work happen, that Intercom?
In certain practical terms, this means a one-on-one meeting with you just talking?
Yeah, it starts—it’ll be a combination of so first and so it’s a bunch of new hires.
It’ll be a presentation for me, a bit like walking you through, see everything.
And then, then it will be multiple normal meetings.
And then it’ll be; you know, we’ll take it from there.
You know, because they’re not all reporting to me in this case, so they’ll be with their manager to kind of keep that going.
But it’s them, like I would say that I still believe that we’re probably not even doing enough.
Like, but I think most companies don’t do enough.
Like, you know, they don’t really don’t think about what’s the experience of being person number 397 or your company, yeah?
And then they are somehow shocked, and like, “I can’t believe I thought it was okay to ship down.”
You’re like, “Look, show me the guardrails that stopped her!”
Like, how on earth were they supposed to work that out?
Yeah, absolutely. And then you can’t like really blame them.
I mean, we do need to do a better job here as well.
Andy Kork asked a question related to this.
So in addition to hiring, what has been the biggest challenge with scaling the organization?
Yeah, I guess, like there are a few of them that have, you know, they’re probably more typical, but like when you eventually end up hiring in an area you don’t understand, well, your best bet at that point is to kind of like go find somebody who you think is doing a good job.
But you still—you know, it’s still a version of the same flawed logic, which is I think I can work this out.
You know, write a blog post about this, so they probably know it all, right?
Like, you know, it’s—just some version of that.
And it’s very easy when you’re dipping your toes in areas that you really don’t understand to basically be bullshitted.
I think, specifically in marketing and sales, and this is more common, marketers and salespeople are good at marketing to you and selling to you.
So if you’ve never hired a salesperson before, don’t be shocked if the first person to come see you sells you on the role.
Like, that’s, you know, you know, that’s obvious in hindsight, sort of thing for them.
I think, like, you know, it’s genuinely tough to break outside of a sort of your own area of expertise and hire well there.
But lucky you will learn it, but it’s just—it takes longer and you don’t get the same immersion that you did from like say studying computer science or some other.
So that’s definitely one.
I think we probably more than other companies, we started with two offices.
So in some sense, we never had to deal with, you know, with the like, “Oh my God, there were two offices!” We were always—
Yeah, but that’s been a challenge, like working out like the right head counts in the right places.
We now have four offices. We’re in like Dublin, London, San Francisco, and Chicago, and we’re sort of spread.
And it makes things really tricky.
Like today we had like a show and tell sort of thing, everywhere—everyone who works on any sort of aspect—anyone who’s running the show, basically, they kick off their clothes, their tails, the ability, right?
Piece of product or whatever, they all line up to present.
But like orchestrating that is so hard across all the time zones and across all the offices.
It’s just—it’s far from easy.
And you have to do these sort of little rituals to keep the whole company on the same page, but maintaining that is—it's hard for us.
In recent years, we can spend a lot of money on video conferencing and thought, put that—but early on, it was, “Roughly do you spend money flying people around to hang out with each other?”
Mm-hmm.
You do.
Like any kind, everyone comes together.
We have—we haven’t done a sort of all-company All Hands, I think, in like two and a half, three years.
But we definitely do like versions of it.
So any team that’s distributed will always come together once, once to four times a year, depending on the type of team.
Okay.
Then like leadership level and exactly what we do, like think six times a year.
So for me, what that means is if I get on flight number, I one four seven, everyone knows me because, which is never like, you know, you don’t want to be like on Foursquare, like the mayor of the lounges in the airports and all that—like c’est la vie.
What hasn’t worked out? What’s been really hard for you personally?
I think marketing has been tough. Just—still, I’ve really struggled with ISM hiring senior leaders in a function when you don’t understand it well, is tough.
It’s a big challenge on it and they’re never bad people.
Like, they’re always—at this, when you’re going shopping for like directors and senior directors and VPs, you’re only really talking to accomplished people.
Hmm.
So like it’s not like, you know, it’s not like you get them in and it turns out they can’t— they don’t know how to write code or something.
Like it’s very much the feedback period around strategy is correct for the company can be six months to a year, which is, you know, which is a lot of—alright—that the impact if they’re going in the wrong direction can be negatively critical.
Because you have to bet on them, which means you have to like empower them to hire and pair them to do everything that you need to do and perform, spend the budget, etc.
Yeah.
And then you get to find out like in quite a while if all this pays back.
And so I think like it’s the piece that’s hard.
I actually don’t think I’ve made that many mistakes per se, but I’ve just paid quite an emotional tax.
So it’s just kind of a great degree of like fear and anxiety in the recruiting process and then—and then, like, I guess, I’m honestly post-hire, like, I’m like, “Well, like, did you know? I need to do everything I can to make this a success.”
So I mean, that’s genuinely like—that’s something I’ve struggled with.
Learning a lot of people stuff has been hard.
So learning how to ensure that we actually have a good process for performance monitoring—I think those conversations—and even on podcasts like this, it’s easier for me to not talk about stuff, but like, yes, of course companies have to fire people and do all sorts of dull things.
Yeah, no one ever wants to hear it, of course.
But like, I think, you know, getting to a place where you understand that these things should be openly discussed in—like, professional conversations by people who know what they’re doing—and getting there, like, genuinely, I think every startup we talked to takes them way too long.
Mm-hmm.
And I—you know, if I was to do it all again, of course you’d be more familiar, but like, but I think, yeah, you know, there’s a lot of obvious pitfalls, and yet I don’t think you necessarily preempt every mistake.
As in, even if I told somebody he was just starting the first sort of, “Here’s everything I know,” but it’s like, it’s some of it’s kind of like, “Yeah, that doesn’t apply to me,” and they’re not gonna—you know?
Yeah.
It’s back to that point I was saying earlier: like, you’re not gonna buy the solution until you’ve bought the problem.
Right?
And, you know, I’m trying to—I’m trying to force-feed them like, you know.
Yeah.
Were there any books or anything? Because I feel similarly, like so many people have given me advice, and I’ve had to fall into the hole myself before I could really learn it.
But were there any, you know, books or podcasts that really helped you figure out how to manage people better?
Rands has a book called “Managing Humans,” and I thought that was—it’s written entirely in story form, so it’s not preachy.
It’s not like, here’s, like, you know—it’s very much like here’s stories from his time.
Now I’m sure they’re either fake or embellished or modified to protect the innocent, but it’s written in a very sort of conversational tone where it kind of reminds me of the “Hard Thing About Hard Things” with Ben Horowitz.
But like, it’s every story; they’re almost like fortune cookies when you take per second of like, “I have been in that situation,” or “I was there,” “I put somebody in that situation,” “or I was that guy.”
And I think like it’s a great book for that reason.
I think at the very least what it does, what I see it do, like a first-time managers is, it opens their eyes to the idea that there's more going on to managing than just being really good at engineering.
You know, like they realized there’s an actual whole craft here that they need to perfect to be able to take the next steps in their career, and I think it’s a great book for that.
But it’s also a book—eh, the third time you read it, you probably start picking up better lessons than you did the first time.
Mm-hmm.
Okay, and so just to shift gears back to the product.
Yeah.
If someone is just getting started out, like what do you advise them on thinking about products?
Just framing the entire company?
Yeah, where do you have them start?
I guess like I’ve always sort of said like startups need a strong vision.
So you do—like it sounds fluffy, you know, people want to start writing code on day one, for them there’s a sense that you need to have a good strong sense of purpose for your company and that it’s so important for hiring and for keeping a trend line and stuff as well.
You need time—like you need to have everyone on the same page. You need a page!
You know, so I think like oftentimes I think people start maybe two or three steps down the path that it might say, like, you know, a lot of people email themselves to dues.
“I’m gonna fix that.”
And I’m like, okay, I can see how you might’ve had a brilliant idea, like specifically around that, but it’s kind of like what’s the bigger landscape that this sits in?
Like are you trying to change productivity?
You know, what do you believe the productivity that no one else believes?
“Oh, I believe it shouldn’t be siloed,” or “I believe it should be a part of everyday life,” or “I believe that you shouldn’t be able to take on more than one thing at a time.”
Or it could be, “Okay, well, so that’s gonna form the basis of a philosophy for you.”
And your problem domain, and then we’ll work out what pieces do you think you can uniquely product.
If I—if you’re not, I mean like, you know, in program that program and you know, codify, and then that will form the basis of your product.
And maybe that happens to look like your tool that looks like an email comment, but it’s actually a to-do list maybe, and but like, let’s take a step back first.
So that’s kind of the first conversation I try to have is kind of like, let’s just appraise the whole environment here and work out what unique thing are you saying.
I’m like, when people pitch me like a new weather app or whatever, I’m like, “But like, what’s your belief about weather?”
And I’m like, “I just think they all look ugly.”
And I’m like, “Okay, so you believe that a beautiful weather app will do what?”
You’re like, “I just like design my app.”
So like maybe you shouldn’t be raising around, so that’s the kind of like the basic platform.
Yeah, the next piece I would say that people is like you have to find—you be really wary of solving a small rare problem. You can solve a big problem; you can solve a rare problem.
Sorry, you can solve a small problem, fine. A rare problem, fine. But small and rare is just—it never works.
I’ve never—and these products can be fucking beautiful, right?
But what I mean by this is that basically problems in your life, right, are big or small.
Okay? A big problem might be like, “Hey, me and seven of my friends want to book a group holiday to Alaska, and we have to do blood by gar.” And this is a whole big project I’m only gonna do it once a year.
But it’s a big enough thing.
Okay, fine, you could probably build a product around that and probably make some money because there’s enough value—it’s a big enough problem in your life that if we can fix it, you’ll pay some money, or we will take some commission or something, right?
Then, so that’s the size spectrum.
Then this thing isn’t happening every year or thinks it up every day, and the things that happen every day typically like you’ll have a lot of engagement.
So, if we product will bury its way into your life, however, if you’re solving something that no one really cares with at often—sorry, nobody cares about—and they don’t have that problem that often—and let’s say over the last two years—there’s a large amount of apps that are all—no default, there was a saying, you know, “Marc Andreessen splits up his tweets.”
“Will help you do that!”
And they designed these like typographically stunning products, as in anyone who looks at your blogs, yes, that is a beautiful product!
It’s a perfect piece of product. It solves a very rare problem.
The data is very small in nature.
And that’s the extreme case, but there are versions of this like you can imagine loads of B2B things that happen occasionally and not—not that big a deal.
And then on the other extreme, you’ve got the problems that occur all the time and are pretty big.
Mm-hmm.
Workplace communication, you know, charging your customers money, talking to your customers, right?
It’s like a big problem, you know, you do it every—all the time.
They’re like the places where like the stock stripes and Intercoms, whatever can play.
It’s like, it creates that sort of, you know, no one ever, you know, no one ever, you know, threatens to like idly like, you know, guess we’re going to change platform provider or whatever; they’re locked in.
Yeah.
And so, like, I—you know, that’s the next piece which is I think people can—and you know, Intercom might have been responsible for the misery.
I think we defined products and watched the people just thought, if you have a great product, that’s it.
The product itself will match with a problem that’s—but does it match problems?
Does it match a big problem or a frequent problem or ideally a big frequent problem?
That’s the next big test.
I think a lot of startups fall down there when they’re like, “Oh, we sync your Facebook to your Instagram and we can do X Y.”
And then it spits out a Shopify app.
I’m like, “Yeah, I just don’t see it being a problem that often in someone’s life.”
So, that’s the kind of the next waved and disorder.
Like, if you’re gonna charge it not a lot of money, it needs to be self-serve, and it needs to be entirely frictionless for the users.
And I see a lot of people get what I call “fake traction.”
Where, like, they’ve handled a lot of early customers like doing—they’re like “the YC fame”—yeah, this whole awesome install type thing.
But they actually don’t have a bridge towards a world where word count—where that isn’t necessary, and I’m trying to say, like, if you’re gonna spend 30 minutes talking to every single customer and you need to install, and you’ve no bigger picture as to how you’re not gonna be necessary, you need to be charging more than $9 a month.
Yeah.
And—and that’s just, you know, it sounds obvious, but I—you’ll find a lot of people like whoever very high, let’s call it adjusted customer acquisition cost, right?
When you factor in the founder’s involvement a lot—they have a high CAC, and they literally have no plan to get away from it.
And yet they have traction because they can point to like the 9 grand a month to make working.
Yeah!
Exactly! But it’s just—it’s not scalable, you know?
That’s another sort of dangerous area I feel is that people from another example, this might be like, “My product kind of good, but I actually layer in a lot of free consulting time with me.”
Right?
So like this is like, “Hey, I’ve built a way to, you know, automatically email your customers,” and—and as part of the service, I’m gonna could jump in and write all your emails.
And I’m like, “Well, that’s what people are buying! You’re a consultant, right? You’re not a software provider!”
I’m like, that’s not how it works. It’s dangerous.
Yeah.
What about markets that are growing?
So you like something entirely new.
Mm-hmm.
How do you think about that in the context?
So, you know, frequency, rare, all big?
Yeah, so I think, you know, it’s—it wouldn’t say essential, but it’s really, really useful if you’re selling into a growing market.
But everything I still said still needs to apply, right?
So like the addressable market is kind of one variable in the formula here.
But ultimately, like if it’s a small rare problem, it’s still like—you could have a billion people in the, in addressable market.
It’s still the fact that it’s rare.
In a market, that doesn’t change in which one you did have, right?
And so, so that’s one problem you’re not there.
And then the usual knee-jerk reaction of how we’re gonna get out of this is, “Oh, we won’t charge users; we’ll go with ads instead.”
And I’m like, “The ads won’t work because if it’s a rare problem, they’re not gonna load yet!”
But we’re not gonna Vizio page 11, so you don’t have the engagement to get the eyeballs to get the actual, like the revenue for your publishers, so—and, or for your advertisers.
So like, you know, you know in some sense you—you know it is, you know, in some abstract sense possible to have a product that all of the world uses.
Like seven billion people use.
But if they actually don’t care about it at all, it’s not—not important in their lives.
They could take it or leave it.
And on top of that, they can take it or leave it once a year when the actual problem occurs.
It’s just not gonna work.
You know, they’re never gonna pay you enough.
Yeah, so there were a couple questions about Intercom specifically and your future goals. So what are—so Fozzie Bear on Twitter asks, “What are your top two growth initiatives for Intercom in the next two years?”
So I have to like—you know I’d love to ask Crossly but exactly what the definition of a growth initiative is.
I guess like the things I’m keen to do over the next two years is get our marketing to a place where we’re comfortable being slightly more direct.
I think we’ve done a really good job from okay so on leadership perspective of getting the attention of a lot of people who should use this B2B and B2C.
But I think we need to learn to be more direct and upfront about say, the ROI of Intercom.
I think that’s an area where we have a lot of maturing to do.
The Intercom helps all sorts of businesses, you know, deliver like multi-million dollar results, but we never tell anyone that.
We’re telling people, “Like, you should love your users and treat them really well, and good things will happen to your business.”
And that works true, it’s true, right?
But like, you know, I think at some point as you move up through the market, the onus is on you to say basically businesses at some scale care about two things: how much money they spend, and how much money they make.
Yeah.
So when you try to pitch them something, they just say, “Hey, here’s my two numbers. Which one of these are you changing?”
And I think, you know, when we show up, we’re like, “Well, if you love your users, you’re gonna stick around.”
Direct!
Shh, don’t care about any of us!
Are you going to make me money or save me money?
And we need to get better at answering that question, and we need to have better evidence to answer that question.
We need to surface more case studies, and we have all the material.
We just need to be more intentional, I think, about being upfront about that volume.
So that’s one whole area that I’m quite invested in.
And the second one for me is I think the Intercom brand is quite big.
We had like, you know, 1200 people show up to our event here on Wednesday.
We had like 6000 people attend Retur.
We have like, you know, obviously a widely popular podcast, books, blogs, etc, but I—you know, a piece I’m keen to do is I kind of connect the dots a little bit better between like Intercom, the content phenomenon of sorts, and Intercom, software.
And that’s—I don’t know if that qualifies as a growth initiative itself, but I would—hope it could strengthen our lead.
You know, you have things like “HN podcasts,” you have our YouTube channel, and I was just talking to Michael Seibel yesterday, like you know, we’ve doubled our YouTube channel in like six months, and that’s awesome—how many of those people know Intercom and what we do?
Is it actually working?
Exactly.
I’m like we have that like, um, you know, I think a lot of brands get stuck in this sort of ambiguous place where like people know them and love them.
But when it comes to shopping for software or shopping for incubators, they just don’t see them that way, you know?
And I think that’s a—that’s a challenge.
Like, you know, as in you might, like, could well, but I would hope it’s not, but it could well be the case that there are like hundreds of thousands of people who really know who “I see,” but they when they go shopping for the incubator, they’d rather go to their local incubator shop or whatever.
I’m like—and it’s because no one’s—you know, it’s because almost, you know, in both senses Intercom, oh, I see, maybe you’ve been a bit too demure or standoffish.
Okay, come to us when you’re ready, but we’re not coming to you.
You know, like, I like maybe that suits the brand, maybe it doesn’t, but I could see how it’s a challenge.
Well, because I mean, in large part, we’re just making stuff that we want.
Mm-hmm.
And at least me, I don’t really consume the super sales forward content, and even like blogs and podcasts that are all about throwing their brand down your throat.
I just like—I’m not into it.
I unsubscribe.
I just get out of it.
So for me, that’s a thing, but then on the other hand, I’m like, “Okay, there has to be some growth strategy here.”
But you’re precisely right. You’re the director of marketing!
You didn’t want to think that you’re right!
Like, so I think it’s a really interesting spectrum that I often talk to people about.
Like, you know, in the early stage, say, to do a startup, like, if you were to say, like, um, say, let’s say Y Combinator’s product is, is the actual incubator, right?
It’s in like it’s cash for equity in high potential startups.
If you were to literally only invest on making sure that everyone knows about that, you’ll become known as a type of banker someday.
Like, you’re like, “Are YC the Financial Model?”
You know.
Like—and if you really drive for that, then what happens is everyone forgets about all everything else.
And you don’t appeal to people under any other grounds whatsoever.
It’s just a go—if you need money, go to them.
And that’s actually not your message, right?
Oh no, it would be a commodity, which you get worst case, precisely right.
So—and your and your value property for 8% or something, right?
Like, yeah.
And then the very second you quantify it, someone else comes in and says, “We’re 60 K for 7%.”
Don’t know, you’ve lost a fight because you’ve made it so quantifiable.
You’ve taken brand and all that other stuff out of it that you’ve basically sold the seed of your own destruction.
On the other extreme, right, you can have like “Y Combinator” as their global phenomenon, right?
Like, where we barely tell you that we do anything, other than it just evoke magnificence.
And like the challenge there is then like—you know, you know, you’re so abstract that no one actually realizes you what you do.
And like you’re genuinely—like your money—like big brands that have become—they’ve spread themselves—like I hate to pick on people who’ve become big brands, but they stand like he thinks someone’s a huge consulting house or whatever, like—or some of these huge software firms like, “No one really knows exactly what they do, but like, but everyone knows who they are.”
Right.
And I think that’s—that’s no use.
I derided becoming one of the biggest brands in the world that no one can—I kind of explain for a moment what the hell you do.
They’re becoming one of these people that’s so associated with your product, that you can never do anything else except for your product.
Yeah, absolutely. That—and like, so an example I see is like, you know, someone pages me like a start-up and they’re like, “Oh, we track tickets for help desks.”
And what are you called?
“Ticket Tracker.”
And I’m like, “Okay!”
You do realize that you’re basically saying over the next ten years you’re only ever going to track tickets and stuff.
It’s not like—you’re comfortable having—like I can see how the value is strong for you today because no one’s gonna ask you about this ticket record here, right?
And no one’s gonna take a tracker—what’s doing—you know, wait a minute!
So, like you’ve sold yourself the seeds of your own sort of destruction because you can’t grow that brand in any way.
You know, it’s—you know if you’re like, you know, hotels.com or do you do—you know?
Okay, that’s cool.
But now you see our hotels, our come and we also sell flights.
And you’re like, “Huh.”
Yeah, totally!
So like, it’s hard to expand a brand that has a high degree of specificity.
It’s hard to convert a brand that has a high degree of ambiguity.
And that’s the sort of spectrum that we dance in.
You know?
And what are those—how do you connect those dots effectively and in a way that makes sense for your users or would-be users?
Yeah, so like first of all is it’s like finding the point on the spectrum that you’re comfortable in.
Like is in so like Intercom, you know, at its core, like you know the idea is it’s an Intercom, but it’s like you want to talk to people, right?
The logo is like eyes and a mouth, you can see and talk to your users.
And, and so on our mission is to make internet business personal.
So that’s kind of like we’ve picked a relatively abstract point, is in another version of “Introduced Intercom” and what are being called like website messenger, you know.
Right?
And, and you know, we would struggle then to sell like marketing software or something, you know.
So I think for us it’s like finding the right level of abstraction such that we can, you know, do the brand umbrella can kind of cover all of your needs, all of the things you want to do.
And to do that right, like—and this is something otherwise all people do, you need to read up on concepts like brand architecture and understand the difference between an endorser brand and like, it’s a primary brand.
And you know what Simmons did, branded house and a house of brands and all that sort of stuff.
That’s all like really worth doing.
And then when you’ve done all that, then it’s like, “Okay, so for, if you’re deliberately going for a slightly bigger tailor, you know, you could be selling like cheap flights.com or you could say ‘A V8 will take you to your destination.’”
Right?
And you have to like, work—you know, at the starting point is anyone who has an internet business, right?
So from that point to job one, create an audience of people who are interested in internet businesses under problems.
And then job two is then sort of specify in to the problems in your home.
So, so we primarily solve go-to-market-type problems.
So it’s like sales, marketing, and support software.
That’s basically where Intercom plays.
So talk about the problems for those people, and we also talk about product problems, just ‘cause it’s an easier—’cause basically in the early stage startups, everyone does everything.
So it’s usually a product person is also to market.
So, um, so then we sort of start building the—you know, first of all grow the audience, then you get this specificity by like talking about specific problems, on my way I say talking, and my mind goes to content, but it’s worth saying this can be media campaigns, it can be ads, it can be sponsorships of events.
So think—they’re basically pushing at the messages that you want, and ultimately get people to the landing pages that represent the things that you want to sell.
And then obviously try and convert to more and start talking to them and say, “Hey, what were you shopping for?”
Like, yeah, this is what probably—this thing we did most in year today is intercom—when someone signed up, but like out of curiosity, what did you think you were getting when you bought an Intercom?
And it was a great question!
Because it helps us unravel a lot of stuff.
Like I see some questions here.
But yeah, well David Confit asked about like, why did we split up our product into like we used to be just one Intercom thing and there were a suite of things?
That’s entirely the result of this.
It was—it was basically realizing we were selling Intercom, but people were buying a helpdesk, or people were crying.
And I’m like, this is back to Karen’s pointer like build, we sell.
So we’re like okay, some people love Intercom because it’s a great way to support your customers, and that’s one of the most visible to use cases.
I’m not—that’s why you see it in other sites and when we set when we meet them again on our website, we need to let them find the thing they want.
So if job one of that is import a CSV of all your targets and we’ll set up campaigns, say, “Dude, I came here to what for me! Right?”
Yeah.
So we need to talk to those folks over marketing.
I’m just trying to support people.
Yeah.
So we actually did, what we ended up doing is we split up our product into like, into the things we knew it was used for, which is primarily supporting your customers and marketing to your customers.
And that led us to being really much more specific about when we could pitch Intercom.
And then we could say, here’s what Intercom does for support teams.
And then if you sign up for the support product, we could say, “Okay, here are the onboarding steps for support,” and we wouldn’t talk to marketing at all, because you’re not a marketer.
In the old world, we were trying to, like, charge you and get you to use everything at the same time, so we seemed kind of expensive.
And also we were trying to, like, what was it like a 12-step configuration because we hate you!
Hot to do everything!
And that actually made sense