What's up, everyone? This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com and you are listening to
the IndieHackers podcast. On this show, I talked to the founders of profitable internet
businesses and I try to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes. How did they
get to where they are today? How do they make decisions both at their companies and in their
personal lives? And what makes their businesses tick?
Today, I am talking to Dez Trainor, one of the co-founders of Enochom and its chief strategy
officer. I'm a big fan of your Dez. I've watched more than a few of the talks that you've given
and read a lot of your articles as well. So I'm really excited to have you on the show.
Thank you so much for joining.
Thank you so much for having me, Cortland. I'm a huge fan of IndieHackers.
It's really cool to hear that. So Enochom is a suite of messaging first products that
pretty much any internet business can use to accelerate growth by directly talking with
their customers. Is that an accurate way to describe it?
That's very accurate, yeah.
How did you get started working on Enochom? It's funny. The reason we got started was
because of a pain we had with our previous product. Like, Enochom wasn't actually the
original plan. It sprang out of solving a personal pain that we had with the previous
software as a service business. So way back in 2010, well, starting in 2008, I guess,
we had a Ruby on Rails error tracker tool called Exceptional. And with Exceptional,
we had thousands of pain customers all over the world, very, very few in Ireland where
we were based. And we had no easy way to talk to them whatsoever. We would frequently, it
was my job to, you know, get an export of all the active users that we had and import
that into campaign monitor and send it an email like, hey, how's it going? Here's some
features we're working on. What would you like to see from us next? And then we'd get
all these replies into my Gmail, which I didn't have to forward around to various people,
like it was only a small team. There was four or five of us. And I'd be forwarding these
things around saying, should we work on this? Should we work on that? But it was like, it
was a really, really messy workflow. In fact, everything about running a SaaS business back
down was quite messy. There was no stripe. There was no like mixed panel. There was no
good tools or tooling or instrumentation. So we figured rather than like doing this
messy email flow, one day we decided, well, what if we just put a message inside of the
product instead? And the logo for Exceptional at the time was a little star and it sat in
the bottom right-hand corner of the screen. And one day a little speech bubble popped
out of the star saying, hey, here's some features we've recently released. What would you like
us to work on next, et cetera? And what was remarkable was the response to that was so
much higher and so much more engaging than anything we ever received from our email before.
And we started to think, shit, this is a much better way to speak to our users, like being
like a group of founders based in Ireland with customers all over the world, but very
few in Ireland. We did feel really disconnected from our customers. We felt we had no sort
of personal relationship with them. And this was the first sort of channel we felt that
let us speak through our product to them when they're in our product. So we started to iterate
on that. We made it easier for our customers to reply. We made it so that we could target
which customers could see the messages and which customers couldn't. Then it was simple
things like, show me who has been in the product and seen the message. And before you know,
we had this live sort of customer database with communication tools springing out of
the box. So we could then use to have real conversations with our customers, get them
using certain features, get feedback on other things, support them when they bump into bugs.
And from there, like I remember multiple customers saying to us, yo, I'm not really cool on this
exceptional thing. It's a bit, you know, it's not that exciting. But this weird thing that
you talk to me true, that's amazing. So like that was kind of the genesis of Intercom.
We eventually sold exceptional. It went on to become a part of Rackspace and we just
all went all in on Intercom. Our CEO own moved to San Francisco. We raised some money, we
hired some people. And it's been quite a roller coaster since then.
I was looking at the original blog post where you guys announced Intercom as a standalone
product that you posted on Hacker News back in I think 2011. And there's a section in
there that's titled, our MVP is bigger than your MVP.
Because it actually took you guys quite a while to build the product and get it out the
door. What did that process look like? And why did it take you so long?
Yeah, so the our MVP is bigger than your MVP comment was it was I think Owen wrote that
referencing that like every time we showed this product to anyone, the number one piece
of feedback was shit, you guys have built a lot of software. And if you recall 2011,
it was just around this sort of peak lean. Everyone was following Eric Ries' doctrine
on the minimum viable product, the lean startup, etc. And we had kind of gone the non lean
way in that we had built this like sales marketing and support tool with like live CRM attached
and like messaging and email and all sorts of stuff. And I think the stages were briefly
it was like, in a nutshell, we first of all built a way to push messages out, then we
built a way to see who had seen the messages, then we built a way to only send messages
to certain people based on criteria that they'd met. Then we built a live user list so you
could sort of see your users. Then we built in layers of automation so you could like
always target people when they met certain criteria. And then we built a fancy sort of
support based inbox. So if you're supporting a customer who's on your premium plan, you
can be extra implied or you can, you know, tell them about certain features that only
they would see or whatever. And then and then when we had all of that fully, not fully baked,
still not fully baked, but I guess when we felt that that like was all in a good place,
we launched email and I think there was a kind of a notable step change when we sort
of said, hey, all of these things that can appear in your product, you can also send
them as email. And when we did that, that was one of the first sort of I think like,
yeah, step change is probably the best word, where people were like, well, I can do a lot
of stuff with this, you can be my marketing, you can be my support, you can be my product
feedback, you can be my research, you can be my CRM. And we were like, yes, we can we
think we can be all of those things. I guess seven years later, I'm like realizing the
implications of those decisions. But yeah, it that was that was how we kind of stepped
it out. And it wasn't like the the driving force for each decision or each incremental
piece of functionality was simply, what did we want to do with the product? We, you know,
we expanded it until it bumped into the edges of what we thought made sense for customer
communication platform of sorts. Our mission all the way along, just to kind of give the
context to this is we always said we wanted to make internet business personal. And we
said that when we started in 2011, and we still say that today. For us, like the background
to this was, you know, some version of we believe all businesses will become internet
businesses. And we believe that a lot of revenue will definitely shift towards recurring revenue,
like subscription revenue of sorts. And, and subscriptions, whether it's Spotify, or whether
it's Amazon Prime, whatever, it's based on a positive experience and customer loyalty.
And customer loyalty is based on positive interactions with your customers. And we wanted
to build a tool that made it easy to have these really positive interactions that would
build their relationships that would build the loyalty that would grow the revenue. And
that was kind of, you know, so whenever we considered what was in scope or out of scope,
we simply asked ourselves, will this help make a personal relationship between a business
and the user because like the one direction we always have to say no to from the start
and we're big proponents of saying no, my general have admittedly said yes to some pretty
chunky pieces of software was like, people always wanted to pull an analytics tool out
of us because I think we were the first people to have like live user data in a sort of CRM
or at least the first people we were aware of. Whenever people can see all these rows
of people and we'd show their names and their current state and what they were doing, everyone
was like, Oh, I want to see this as a, you know, I want to see this as a cohort chart.
I want to see this as like, you know, it's sort of a retention chart or a cycle plot
or something like that. And we were always kind of hesitant because we're like, that's
a different product for us. And that was probably the biggest area we had to shy away from in
terms of like, in terms of where we drew the lines, we're like, we're not going to become
an analytics tool because at the time there was like mixed panel, there was kiss metrics,
all sort of coming up. And when we looked at them, we're like, they're specifically not
about making internet business personal. That's not to say they're bad tools, great tools,
but they were like going in a very different direction than us. And we were happy that
they were in a different direction than us. And we didn't want to also have to adopt that
direction too. So that's kind of how we sort of stacked the features up. The evolution
over time has actually been to just get more refined on exactly what it is we're doing.
We haven't really said yes to much areas of communication for businesses outside of the
sort of original scope.
So you guys wanted to make internet business personal. At what point did you actually sit
down and explicitly write this out as your vision? And also what did you hope to gain
by having such a clearly defined vision so early on in your company's life?
I remember when we did it, we had a very, very horrible office on the north side of
Dublin above a university in one of their sort of cheap rental spaces. And we had these
nine whiteboards and we basically moved from whiteboard to whiteboard, writing up everything
that we kind of believe. And a lot of what we believed was loyalty, personality, relationships,
et cetera. And from there, I can't remember the exact moment we distilled it down, but
I think we had a few different pops at it. And you can, you know, if you look at some
of my earlier writing, I think I wrote a piece for Smashing Magazine, which was called like
taking a customer from like to love or something like that. And that was like various different
stabs at coming up with a kind of a mantra or like a sort of a theme for the business.
I don't remember exactly when we settled on making internet business personal, but one
thing that we've always been firm on is like a kind of, you know, a mission and a vision
driven business is a really important thing when you want to bring other people on board
and when you want to have a sort of clarity of thought. And I think once we actually geographically
split up, it became phenomenally more important to make sure that we, you know, there's some
core axioms that we all believed from which we could infer the sort of decisions we should
be making. And I think, you know, as we scaled, we're now, we're now like 500 people ever.
And if you grab any random intercom raid from like London, Chicago, Sydney, San Francisco,
Dublin, and ask them what's intercom here to do, they will all say without hesitation
to make internet business personal. And that, you know, it trickles into everything like
our design, our design pattern library includes rules such as never talk about a user without
showing their face and their name. That's how you keep things personal. Like it leaks
into everything that we do. And I think that has been really powerful. It has also like,
you know, obviously every single meaningful opinion you hold has to be in some sense divisive,
like not everyone thinks it should be true. And at times we've had people push back and
say, I don't want to just be personal. I want this to be like mass market transactional
or whatever. And our attitude has always been, well, that's fine. That's just a different
product. That's not what we're here to do. And if you choose to progress with us, you're
going to be disappointed because we're going to ship a lot of features that will make things
more personal. And because we believe that's the best way to grow your business. And if
you disagree with that, you're not going to like what you see coming over the next couple
of years in terms of product. So we've always kind of believed you anchor a company around
a mission and a vision. You don't just kind of keep, that was one of my earlier sort of
frustrations with the lean startup idea was like, I always felt like there was a sense
of just keep throwing MVPs at a wall and see what sticks. And I've always felt, no, like
you have to start with some core things that you really fundamentally believe about the
world and use that as your kind of your basic sort of principles from which you extrapolate
hypotheses and products. But if you don't start from there, I always worry that like,
you're just going to become like, hey, we're a project management tool and now we're an
analytics tool and now we send email and now we take screenshots and annotate them. And
you know, you can just dance around, but never really get anywhere. I think it's one of those
areas where people confuse like movement with momentum. And it's always been like a frustration
of mine when I've seen companies flounder like that.
So one of the things that you guys did early on is you had to settle on intercom as a product
that you were going to get behind. And I think a lot of early stage founders struggle because
they're not sure if they should commit to what their current idea is. They might see
a few tendrils of traction, but they're not sure if it's significant enough. They see
a few people express interest, but not sure if it's sincere. How did you guys decide wholeheartedly
that intercom was a product you wanted to work on? And how can other early stage founders
read the clues to decide if what they're working on is really the right product or if they
should change to something else?
It's a great question. And I'll answer it a couple of different ways. The first thing
I'd say is like, it was for us, a real solution to an actually real problem that we had. When
I first saw the user dashboard that we'd created inside intercom, I really knew at the time
that we'd created something that was just fundamentally very, very valuable because
I'd never seen it before. And it was just this really visceral sense of here are my
users. These are the people who are paying me for my product. And that was just a moment
where I knew no matter what someone was going to make this thing successful, like it might
not be our version of it, but someone's going to make this idea of a live user list into
a product and it'll be popular. In the years since, obviously a lot of people have done
that. Then when we saw some of the response rates that we got to people, like when we
sent out our own messages to our users and they were applying in such crazy volume, I
was like, I just knew that it was the sort of strands of something there. The other thing
I'd say is in our beta, we invited a lot of our friends and family if you like type people.
One of them I remember having a really long Skype call with. You might know him as Garrett
Demon, who had a product called Sifter.
Oh yeah, I had him on the podcast.
Yeah. So I remember Garrett tried a pilot of intercom and he pushed the message live
to all of Sifter's users, saying some version of, hey, Garrett here, I'm the guy who works
on Sifter. I'm the only guy who works on Sifter. I'd love to know what you think of the product
and I'd love to know if there's any features you'd like me to work on.
That was what he did. He did a Skype call with us late one evening over here. It was
9 or 10 PM. We were in a shared office space. Literally, as soon as the Skype call connected,
he was like, holy shit, you guys, this is the most amazing product I've ever seen. I've
been typing all day to 2,000 customers. This is amazing. I've never been so connected to
my customers. We're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, what? He was showing us screenshots of what
was happening and where I was. I said, right, this thing is for real. It's definitely something
people really need and want. That was one way in which, so it was like, did it solve
our problem? And for somebody, and our problem was, as a SaaS business, can we connect to
our customers? Can we talk to our customers in easy ways and get, in some sense, get some
sort of value out of those conversations? And our beta hypothesis was, if we find other
people who are like us, will they react the same way that we did? And that proved that.
The last piece, I guess, that you always have to test with all is that both of those conditions
can be true, but you could still build a product that's worth very little. Let's say your whole
thing is, I don't know, like annotating screenshots or let's say it's like, I don't know. Let's
just say, I guess what I'm getting at here is a very, very small sliver of functionality
or a very, very rare sliver of functionality. Some of you don't need a lot. I think, in
general, if you're going to start a startup, if you're an entrepreneur out there, I think
it's a lot easier if you're tackling a problem you really know yourself. But if you're tackling
somebody else's problem, make sure there's a lot of other people like that in the world
and make sure that your beta kind of proves, like I'd say, still pick a customer and freeze
on them and make sure you're solving your problem and then try to extrapolate to like
your beta to find more customers like that. But the core question I always encourage people
to ask is like, is this a big common problem? And when I think of like big, meaning like
it's a substantial problem such that people will pay money for it to go away and common
meaning like does it happen a lot and does it happen to a lot of people? And if it's
a big common problem, then that's usually a good sign that you're onto something. So
like when I think of like say Stripe, payments is a big problem and every business on earth
needs to make money and they need to charge at the very least once a month. Slack, talking
to your colleagues is a problem and people talk to their colleagues all the time, especially
in a remote friendly world. Intercom, talking to your customers is something people need
to do and you need to do an awful lot for sales, marketing, product research, support,
you name it, reasons. So I always think they're just latch onto those kind of big common problems.
Make sure it solves your problem and if not your problem, make sure to have one really
tight reference customer. Make sure you're nailing their problem and then extrapolate
to form your hypothesis or in your beta. And if you can check those three boxes, I'm solving
my problem. My beta shows that I'm not a lunatic. I'm not the only person in the world like
this. And this problem is for real. It is big. It is common. It is out there. Then I
think you kind of have the bones of a great startup there. From that point, you just need
to play it out. Now there's a million challenges still to go, but I think that's the kind of
the ingredients you want to be looking for at the start.
One of the challenges that a lot of founders have to face is what is my business model
going to be? And in addition to the lean startup being sort of a popular movement background
2010, 2011, when you look at the big tech companies back then that everybody's revered
and held up as the standard of what you want it to be, it was Facebook and Twitter. There
was no Uber. There was no Airbnb or Instacart or Stripe. None of the big role model unicorn
companies were really charging customers money. How did you guys decide that you wanted to
charge for Intercom? And what did you guys want to ultimately become?
Our heroes growing up in the tech industry was Basecamp, AKA 37 signals when we were
growing up. I think we won't fully realize the impact that Jason Fried and DHH have had
on the industry for many, many years to come. When people look back and read the Getting
Real book and think of the amount of startups that launched, there are like many, many multi-billion
dollar startups that point to either Ruby on Rails or the book Getting Real or the Sigma
versus Noise blog as their starting point. The piece that made them feel that they too
could have a go at it and they too could actually start a business. They were always upfront
about if you want to run a business, you should charge some money.
For us, knowing that we were selling software to other, let's say at the time B2B SaaS companies,
today we sell to B2C and e-commerce and entertainment companies and media and gaming. But back then
our target customer was like the sifter or the Basecamp of the world. Back then, it was
very simple. It was like of course we're going to charge money. We're going to charge money
every month. It's going to be called a subscription because this is what we've seen those who
have had successful footsteps do. Actually, not ironically, just in full roundabout, myself
and Owen flew to Chicago to meet with Jason Fried specifically with the question, how
much money should we charge? He gave us great advice at the start and from that point onwards,
I think it was July 2012. We ran a free beta for quite a while. Then we introduced our
sort of beta pricing of like $50 a month, which was like I could tell you every single
reason why $50 a month was a terrible pricing decision and at the same time, the right decision
for where we were.
It's cool to hear this because Jason Fried and DHH over at Basecamp are also my biggest
role models around the exact same time period. I remember going to Y Combinator startup school
conference and hearing Jason talk and I'd never really heard anybody say that you don't
need to raise money if you're starting a startup. What you really need to do is solve a problem,
put a price tag on your product and customers will pay you a monthly fee and you can make
a living that way. It just wasn't mainstream opinion at the time.
Was it Jason or David? I remember like David had the whole like, he gave the infamous one
where it was like step one, step two, step three.
Yeah, I saw the YouTube video of that talk and then I went and Jason was speaking the
year that I went. That's also one of my favorite talks ever.
Yeah, mine too.
I think what's interesting about Entercom is that the Basecamp guys were very much charged
money for your products, but they're also somewhat anti-venture capital. They were against raising
money. With Entercom, you guys have done both. You've charged, you've raised. How did you
guys look at navigating that path?
I think we're not alone in that regard. I could name dozens of sales companies who both
charge and raise, if you know what I mean. I think in the consumer space, it makes a
lot more sense to not charge because you can't really like, most of these things are like
a marketplace-esque type situation where you need to grow an audience so that you can sell
ads to them, but you can't grow an audience from an ads-first perspective, so you have
to grow the audience on VC money and then you can then start bringing in the advertisers
and hopefully revenue from advertisers is greater than cost of running the service and
that's what you call a profit.
It's very, very different in the more traditional, let's sell software to businesses world where
you're delivering very obvious value on a monthly basis. You just need to find a price
point that proves that out. That's why we started charging. To flip side and probably
maybe the general thrust of your question is kind of, so why did we start raising?
I think as I said at the start, we've bitten off a large amount of software and to maintain
it all and grow it all to a point where it can deliver on its full value and its full
profit requires a lot of people or a lot of time, but generally speaking, you can reduce
the amount of time it takes to do something by bringing in some more people.
Now, at this point, people will usually go for and point me to various different like
softwaring laws like versions of nine people can't make a baby in a month, et cetera, but
it is true when you're trying to produce software for sales, marketing and support that if you
can have a team working in sort of in harmony, all with a shared vision and a shared mission,
that you can actually build more than one piece of software at a time and I don't think
anyone should really contest that, I think the piece that goes from there is like, we
obviously could have bootstrapped Intercom off the revenue, it just would have taken
a lot longer, a lot, lot longer, and I'm not like, you know, sitting here in 2018, I still,
I can't imagine a world where the company would be in the same position had we chosen
to take that route.
The competitive landscape typically heats up, there's like a lot of fragmentation in
the sort of marketing technology space when somebody hits onto a good idea and in general,
your ability to move fast is important and in all but a few circumstances, you can, you
know, if you're running a good company, you can move fast with more people, presumably
you can have like good sort of distinction of functions and roles, you can generally
speed up.
So it came down to a case of like, how much software do we want to build?
How quickly do we think we can get it done?
And do we think that more people will help us get it done quicker?
And in that case, in all cases, we felt like the answer was yes.
So we made the decision in 2012 to raise $1 million.
And from that point, we went from like just four founders to being, I think, a team of
12 people.
And we found that we had really sort of caught fire, like people were restarting to get into
the product, we started charging, revenue is starting to come in, we really felt like
the limiting factor on everything was just how quickly can we produce the rest of the
software that we need to produce, like, you know, to satisfy our current customers and
potentially expand into new areas.
And every single time it's that's been our sort of situation, we've been like, right,
we know that there's a lot more software to build, we know that we're very good at building
software, like that might sound arrogant, but I guess it's just self confidence in this
exact case.
And it would seem like a logical thing that like, if we could get cash, we could turn
that cash into product, and we could turn that product into cash in such a way that
would be like kind of worldwide positive.
So we figured we should do that.
And I think a general sort of point people often make is like, you know, oh, you should
have been like, you should have, you know, run it off revenue alone.
But like, I think that that's kind of a nonsense argument in that like the very second you
sit down with your fingers on a keyboard to write the first line of your like next product,
you're inherently in the red from a time perspective already, like as in you're already losing
money by the fact that you started working on something.
So like, everyone's familiar with the idea that you're not you're not profitable from day one,
it might take time to actually realize the true value of what you've created.
And in that world, like fundraising is just sort of it's, it's a financial decision you
make to fuel the sort of product development.
And there's loads of ways to feel a product development.
And that's just one of them.
And I think like, people I think, over index on the decision made, and like to sort of
the path, I think there are so many good examples of great companies that have raised money
to Shopify or New Relic or Zendesk or HubSpot, or you name it, gosh, campaign monitor, there's
plenty of like, you know, track records of people who've played at this path and played
it out well.
And like, that's kind of how we see it.
Let's talk about your role at Entercom for a little bit.
You are the chief strategy officer.
Out of the four co founders of Entercom, why were you the one to get that role?
And what exactly does it entail?
It's an abstract title to kind of reflect a diverse workload.
So at various times in Entercom, I started off working in product, then I moved on to
set up customer support, and I helped set up people operations, helped set up recruiting
in our Dublin office, then I moved on to marketing.
And post marketing, I moved on back to product, which is where I work now.
And I think like, the option was I could change my title every like nine to 12 months, or
I could just agree that, hey, like, I'll work in the areas where I think I can inform, guide
or occasionally create the strategy.
And as a result, chief strategy officer is kind of where we settled in terms of a position.
It's probably not 100% accurate at any given point, but it's more accurate than like the
constant shopping and changing, which would make for a messy LinkedIn, which is let's
be honest, what we all care about here.
No, but I'm joking.
Yeah, no, it's like, that was the reason behind the title.
And why were you suited to be the chief strategy officer, as opposed to your partners, who
I assume are sticking with more traditional roles for longer periods of time?
Yeah, fair point.
So like, own was always our CEO, and I was the CEO of a previous business, and it's always
been like that.
And that's always been the working relationship I've had with own here on was our CTO.
And here on is still our CTO.
He was an engineer, I'm not an engineer.
And David Bart was our lead front end developer.
So intercom was like two very obvious half, just the messenger that you see on everyone
else's site, and then there's the back end, where you go and control everything and talk
to users and all that sort of stuff.
And broadly speaking, early days, the messenger and everything you see on the front end was
controlled by David, and the back end was controlled entirely by Kieran.
And my job was, honestly, I was like, talking to customers every day, I was trying to get
us more customers, taking feedback from the beta.
And I think we didn't, we didn't really have titles at the very start, because it actually
didn't matter, like, who are we talking to, such the titles would matter.
But it was as we kind of moved through the gears of forming a company, it became clear
to kind of define roles and responsibilities.
And I guess it's fair to say, like, when we looked around, everyone kind of had a role,
except for, in a sense, me.
I had, like, multiple bits of roles and loads of things I could contribute to.
And the only sort of unifying thing we could probably point to was, like, as I said, like,
some sense of, like, strategic involvement, or kind of making sure that we have a strategy,
or if there is a strategy, making sure that it has all the context and information and
input that it needs from all parts of the company.
That's kind of how we settled on me, it probably roughly matches my skill set.
But yeah, that was how it started.
Let's talk about those early days before you guys had titles, I've heard you describe them
as you guys sitting down and contacting customers, one at a time trying as hard as you could
to convince them to sign up for intercom and use it and eventually become paying customers.
And a lot of people listening in are in a similar phase with their business where they
don't really have any paying customers and they're trying to get their first customers
in the door.
Do you remember any specifics about what that process was like for you guys and what you
learned as a result?
Oh, yeah, I remember all the specifics that was like, that was they would have heard this.
We had a list of people who we knew through the industry.
And they had like, a girth demon would have been amongst them.
People who are like reasonably popular products.
And our attitude was they all need to use intercom.
And every day I would go to work and I'd pick off five or 10 of them and I'd write a very
personal email sort of saying like, hey, big fan of your tool.
I love project management, the way you do it as well over here.
We used to use your product in this case, I'm working on a tool called intercom.
It's going to connect you with your customers.
Here's what it would look like in your product.
Here's what your user list would look like.
Here's what you'll see when you log into intercom.
This is all one long flowing email, very, very bespoke to each individual.
And all I was ever looking for was either a customer or good feedback on what I could
do right for the next customer.
And we had to win them over like one by one by one.
It was, you know, genuinely like 10 customers a day was kind of our goal.
But because I was in Dublin and most of our customers are in San Francisco, you generally
find out throughout the evening.
So I'd be maybe awake till like 2am, making sure that no customer was left behind.
And like genuinely I would like jump on Skype calls at 2, 3am if there was any confusion.
So would Kieran or CTO, he had to manually onboard people or anything was in any way
atypical.
We would do whatever the hell it took to get people up and running because we needed to
learn and you know, it's hard to design say, for example, a good onboarding experience
until you know exactly what people are trying to do or trying to achieve.
And then you can start to tailor what, you know, you can start to then automate pieces
of what's actually what you're doing as a human.
Like the experiences was like every day I would read my email and it would be like six
slaps in the face, which would look like no, not now, or I can't see the point, or I could
build this myself in a weekend.
I remember that particular customer who was so confident they could build it in a weekend.
And I was like, right.
Yeah.
And I often think I like thinking about mailing them now, but I'm not that bitter, although
I do remember and like you read all sorts of all sorts of stuff and like some, you know,
like I think I said this before somewhere, but like, I think this is necessary.
Like I have friends who've started, we're starting companies these days and I'm one
of the biggest fears I have for them is that, you know, that intercom maybe didn't teach
them everything that, um, that I could have because the gritty work is so important and
so relentless, but also it's, it's important beyond just that's how you win a customer.
I think it's really valuable to actually taste the pain of defeat and be fueled by the sort
of fire of success whenever someone was like, you know what, I'll give it a try.
And I knew the very second I could get them looking at their active user list, I was like,
you're over the line now.
You'd pay a hundred dollars a month for us, you know, now that you've seen the value.
So my whole job was just getting them from a first email where they either had never
heard from me or hadn't heard from me in quite a while to the point of them seeing their
user list.
And I really took it as like, I felt I was almost being altruistic because I knew if
I got them there, they'd absolutely love it.
So that was what I would do.
Whatever it took.
I remember like I had, um, one customer who was in Hyderabad in India and they basically
like they were all set.
There was like a company of like 18 people and they were like, okay, look, Des, I'm sold,
but I need you to sell our CTO, our CIO, and our VPN or something like that.
Can you jump on a call at like, I think it's somewhat innocuous, he said, like say 10 PM,
but it turned out it was actually gonna be like four 30 AM for me.
So I went home thinking, yep, set my arm for four 30 AM.
And then I woke up in a sort of, you know, cold sweat and panic at three 30 AM realizing
I hadn't brought my laptop home.
So I had to like jump into my car and speed, literally speed, like break every law of the
Irish roads I've ever fucking known, uh, to get to the office, to jump on this call at
the last second, just walk these people through an intercom experience and they signed up.
And not only did they sign up, one of them left the company two months later and joined
what went on to become like a hundred million dollar company in India.
And they became a customer.
And of course, when they became a customer, a lot of other people started to see us on
their website or in their product.
And then it fueled this whole new wave of people going, well, what is this thing?
Intercom.
And today, like, I mean, it's, it's totally over indexing here to say this, but like today
we have a lot of customers in Hyderabad in India.
And that to me, like, I can't say that that was all Des, but I'd say like that you plant
those seeds, you're maximizing your opportunity.
I mean, as another example, I, I used to like, I think it was like around about midnight,
uh, was the right time for a New Zealand where there's this like incubator we're calling
it's called like lightning or something like that.
Uh, anyway, they, um, I used to give them a webinar every quarter on why they should
all use intercom, inter startups.
A few of them went on to become very big, very successful New Zealand startups, uh,
who are like, you know, wildly, uh, wildly large intercom spending customers now.
And it's just, you know, I figured, you know, it wasn't going to be easy.
There was going to, it was going to require a lot of the things that don't scale, but
they all worked, you know, like we probably planted the tails and seeds and maybe only
500 trees grew, but that's a lot of trees and it turned out to be a lot of customers
for us.
I talked to a lot of founders, programmers, especially who have this dream that they're
going to build an amazing app, an amazing product.
And then it's just going to sell itself and they're never going to have to hop on the
phone.
They're never going to have to jump in a webinar.
They're never going to have to send a cold email.
It's all just going to work out on its own.
But then I listened to your story and here you have intercom, which turned out to obviously
be an amazing and useful product for a lot of people.
And you still had to put in all of that hard work to get your first customers in the door
and really create that ground swell.
So hopefully people are listening and when they start their companies, they won't delude
themselves.
And they're thinking it's smart to try to skip out on doing all this scrappy work of
having one-on-one conversations with customers.
I would 100% agree.
I also just think it's just, it's the feedback loop that you miss as well.
It's not even that, it's not even that, you know, I think it's the right thing to do because
it's the right thing full stop, but you get like so much feedback from like failing on
trying to convince people to use your product and listening to why it doesn't resonate and
adapting and getting a better pitch and a better pitch and all of that adds up to like
better marketing site copy and better like introductory emails and better like onboarding
for your users.
Because you know what the common pain points are and you can sort of preempt them and I'm
sort of like, you know, speak to them before they occur.
And then also like, I've also like, you know, worked with other startups over the last,
I guess, like a couple of years where like, I've encouraged them to do all of this.
And it has really helped them fail very quickly.
And I think that's just as valuable a thing like as an entrepreneur, as a young founder,
forget young as a founder, I guess like as maybe inexperienced is what I meant when I
said young.
The thing you have, the only thing you have is your time and something that breaks my
heart is people who piss away one, two, three years on an idea, scared to bring it to anyone
in reality, lest they say no, but they don't realize that that decision is also a decision
to like waste so many of your, probably like your limited amount of years on this planet.
So I think like it's necessary to kind of, as I said earlier, like taste that pain of
rejection and understand how much of these obstacles are surmountable or how much of
them are like perpetual.
And really, it'll help you understand whether or not you have a business worth investing
the best years of your life.
And then if you do, then magnificent, but if you don't, then gosh, you'll be glad you
really found out quickly by talking to all these people.
You mentioned that you guys started by charging $50 a month.
And that for so many reasons, that was the wrong price to start at, but it was also the
right one.
What does that mean?
Right decision, I'd say.
Yeah, so I'd say it was wrong price, right decision.
So a few different thoughts.
One, we were running around in circles, kind of, we had like multiple different ways we
could consider charging for Intercom, but we didn't really know which would make sense
and which wouldn't.
We had never really been faced with this dilemma before, and we knew that we'd gotten pricing
wrong as most people, you know, pricing is always wrong.
We knew we'd got it quite wrong with our previous business.
So we were really like hesitant.
We wanted, we wanted to be informed on like making this decision as well as we could.
So we, we spoke to Jason and we outlined all the different ways he was thinking about,
we were thinking about it.
And he stared at our options for a reasonable while and concluded, yeah, basically this
wasn't his words, but the message was effectively screw all that charge $50 and we'll come back
to this problem later.
And that to me was kind of like, at the time it was like such a breath of fresh air because
everything we were, everything we were about to do sounded messy or complicated.
And this sounded straightforward and also I liked the fact that we just come back to
this problem.
And I think the core insight in what he said was that pricing will basically always change.
Your product is going to get more valuable over time.
You know, as a simple example, I'd say indie hackers was not as valuable to say, put post
an advert on after you had one podcast as it is now that you have hundreds.
Intercom was not as good at sending tens of millions of emails in 2011 as it is today.
And products get more valuable, which means your pricing will probably have to change
to reflect a new value.
And that was the kind of the key insight that kind of unlocked our thinking and sort of
said, right, for now, let's just say it's $50.
Let's just say it's beta pricing and we'll see what happens and we'll come back.
And what happened was really interesting.
We, we anticipated we'd lose quite a few of our customers once you start charging, you
know, this is like mythical penny gap.
The very second you charge anything for a free product, you lose so many people.
I can't remember what our exact drop off was, but it wasn't as high as we had anticipated.
It was maybe like we lost maybe 30 or 20% or something like that.
But what was really shocking to me was the feedback and the feature requests we got totally
changed after that fact.
The way I summed up this insight at the time was that like free users want more software
and paying users want better software.
So all of our free customers wanted us to expand our offering to do more things for
free.
And all of our paying users who like kind of stuck around after all of them were like,
Hey, I want you to be, I want to be able to send more in ops or I want more types of this,
or I want to be able to customize how this appears.
It wasn't like, I want you also to be a reports tool on a survey tool and an analytics tool.
Right.
And that was, there was a real sort of division.
So I think like the pieces that were made it right where like it unlocked their thinking,
but also brought us these insights and let us refine our product better for those who
were using us in a real business, valuable way.
It's funny going back and looking at the history of your pricing changes with intercom, I found
a thread where there were some complainers who weren't too happy about some of your changes.
And they were complaining about how the $50 a month plan now was going to include a little
message on your widget that would say powered by intercom.
And this commenter in particular decided that he was going to go off and build his own version
of intercom.
And I can only assume that he went off and attempted to do that.
I hope they did.
There's an interesting piece here in that in general, like, and I think probably the
worst trade off you can make if you're starting a business is to roll your own anything to
save 50 bucks a month, because most of you, like, you know, most businesses are in the,
like, you know, if you're starting off, what do you have?
You have time to produce product.
So why so that the product can produce money?
So why on earth would you instead produce product that can save you money, but still
not have you build product?
Like it's, it's, it's literally the most pathological running in circles thing I can
imagine early stage straps to do.
Yet it's very, very common.
And I've seen this in multiple cases.
People are, I'm going to build my own buffer because I scheduling tweets for $9 a month
is a ripoff.
I'm like, okay, but like, you know, if you, you know, in what world is spending, even
if it is only like the allegations you might hear is like, Oh, it'd only take me a weekend
to build intercom.
Even if that was true, which it definitely isn't, is that still the best use of a weekend?
Like, you know, given that it's like $50, is that like, you know, in what world does
that calculus actually add up?
It's it anyway, I don't, it's, I get frustrated about that because it's, it's the most broken
trade off you can make as an early stage startup.
It's almost exclusively programmers who get lured into that trap, which is interesting
because as developers, we should have more knowledge of how long it takes to build things.
But I think we get overly competent.
Yeah, and you should have some respect for the value of software.
But anyway, that's a different conversation, I guess.
So this powered by intercom link that you were putting on your widget is interesting
to me because it's very clearly a growth and a marketing strategy.
How well did that work?
And what are some other strategies you tried around the same time to bring in more customers
at a higher volume?
It works well.
It's kind of like in general, especially so we relaunched our messenger in I think April
or March of this year, and it's like really quite visually distinct and unique from everything
else that's out there.
And it has like its own platform so you can build products on top of the messenger that
can sit inside the messenger so you can, like you can, for example, like indie hackers could
like sell a t shirt inside a conversation with a with a visitor or something like that.
Right.
And it's been very cool.
But what we find is like, people really love like, you know, people really love the new
experiences we're creating, which means the powered by thing is even more important because
it's like, what the hell is this magic and that they send people true overall?
I think that was a good decision to paired by if I could if I could do it all again,
I'd probably go harder on it as in maybe make it more expensive to get rid of it or something
like that.
The other strategies we tried at the time, we built a sort of native tell your friend
about intercom to save yourself and you'll get a discount type widget.
I think that it's a modest success, but not great success, frankly.
We also one thing that was successful for a while, but we recently killed it because
it's kind of less relevant.
We built a way like to share parts of intercom so you could share one of the features intercom
had back in the day was a user map where you could show see your users all over the world.
And then we built a public version of that where you could basically have a public link
day to, you know, early stage startups could tweet like we have users in 500 500 cities
across 100 countries or something like that.
And it would be a beautiful looking map that like everyone could then tweet and Facebook
and LinkedIn and and that worked because people were like, well, this intercom thing looks
cool, I didn't realize you could get this map out of it.
We also built ways to share a conversation, publish an email, etc.
There were some of the best ways that we found to make intercom, I would say pseudo viral.
But the biggest step change we probably ever had in growth, and we've talked about this
before is we built like so the whole gist of intercom like, you know, it has in some
sense, you know, this is one of the hardest onboarding challenges ever, we need to take
a credit card off somebody which every business has to do.
But then we also need them to install JavaScript in the footer of their application.
And that JavaScript involves writing some actual code because you need to connect it
to a database or something like that.
So it's not just pasting like Google Analytics, it's actually some work to send our user data.
And that was like the hardest step to make easy.
And we tried everything to make that a better throughput step in the funnel.
But as we kind of evolved and built out our tool, we ended up building this tool called
an importer, which was that we built this not for a new customers, but actually for
existing customers, which was a way to say, how can I have a, you know, user base of old
customers, how can I slurp them into intercom, so we built this like, sort of, it will import
a spreadsheet, basically, but then we realized maybe that would be an easier way to start
people off.
So rather than having them install JavaScript to step one, maybe we put a upload your spreadsheet
of your users, if you have it, a step one, and doing that produced a significant like
maybe like a 30% increase in throughput for that step of the funnel.
Oh, wow.
Which, which was, you know, literally trajectory defining impact.
And I think that was probably one of the biggest wins we ever had.
We had a growth team in SF who were working on that.
And I think it was like genuinely like, you can see the bump in intercom's growth, where
that team kicked in, it was all net new revenue, like it wasn't like cannibalizing our existing
JavaScript people.
Of course, our developer audience were always going to install the JavaScript, but everyone
else, the marketers, the sales people, the, you know, the product research people, etc.,
they wanted some way to get past this step.
And now we had unlocked all that growth and it was huge.
That's awesome.
It's really cool to hear about how you were able to identify these kinks in your funnel,
see what's holding you back and then sort of unkink them and unlock literally new levels
of growth.
I think a lot of early stage founders struggle with this because there are hundreds of options
for how you can increase your business's revenue, how you can bring more customers in the door.
And as an early stage founder, you don't have that much time, you're pretty constrained
on resources.
And so it turns into this prioritization issue, where you have to figure out what you're going
to work on now and what kinds of things can wait until later.
And you've got to make these decisions with very little information to go on.
How did you guys handle making decisions and prioritizing what you're going to work on
in the early days of intercom?
I think there's a few different ways we think about it.
One of them we've always sort of said is like, for any given team where they have a variety
of conflicting outcomes, conflicting in the sense that they all need the same developer
time, we create a prioritization rule and the most common one we use is RICE, which is
which impacts confidence and effort, which basically says how many people will this affect?
It will affect all our users or just some of our users or all of our website visitors
or just some or whatever impact, which is like, what do we think?
What's the best case scenario of this confidence?
How likely is it that we could do this?
And then effort, is this like a week or is this a year?
And that's generally how we tend to prioritize.
And there's a whole blog post on our blog, obviously, about the RICE framework.
The other sort of general, maybe simpler rule we have is like, we say like, it's a phrase
from Hunter Walk, but we always just avoid any team ever snacking.
We say like, you can work on stuff that is low effort, high impact.
That generally tends to be low hanging fruit and it tends to be not a lot of it, unfortunately,
the quick wins, if you like.
You can work on stuff that's high effort, high impact.
That's the majority of your roadmap.
You should avoid working on things that are high effort, low impact.
Just like when somebody turns around and says, oh, I think we should rewrite the whole product
in Erlang for the fun.
And it generally tends to not achieve anything, which just take a lot of time.
And like, everyone's good at avoiding that.
However, the thing people aren't good at avoiding is the stuff that's low effort, low impact.
Because it has this weird cyclical sort of justification logic, which is, hey, that thing
did nothing for us.
Yeah, but it only took us 10 minutes to set up.
And then if you interrogate it from the other side, you say, why are we only spending 10
minutes on this?
You're like, oh, well, because of what?
We won't do anything.
You can piss away a whole week working on things that are low effort, low impact.
As in, they basically achieve nothing.
And they don't aggregate.
They don't multiply in any real sense.
And I think that's always been a sign of a team that's lacking a strategy, is that they
default to things that are low effort, low impact.
And so we've always avoided that.
But in general, for prioritization of the things we think that will change the trajectory
of the company, it's always been some version of that Rice framework.
That's how we've always thought about it.
It has usually served us well.
There's obviously a slight slight of hand in that it implies that we can know all of
these variables in advance, like how many people will this hit?
How big will the impact be?
How confident are we?
But I think it forces the kind of hard trade offs that you need to have such that you don't
just kind of like, you know, work on the easiest thing first, which is I think kind of the
bias a lot of a lot of teams will have, or you might work on the things that get you
the quickest results the soonest.
The only other piece of advice I have there is, I think a lot of early stage startups
tend to like look up the market for like what are, you know, oh, look, Amazon changed this
button color and it got them an extra hundred million dollars in revenue.
I think in general, as a startup, especially in the earlier years, you're probably dealing
with like website traffic in the thousands or maybe even in the hundreds, if you're super
early stage.
And then if you look at the magnitude of the changes that people tend to look at, they're
like, Oh, let's try a red button instead of a green button.
The reality is like, there will be a difference between red and green or between like buy
now or buy for free or whatever, whatever copy tweaks you want to try.
But it's going to be a really small difference.
And because it's a really small difference on a really low website, a really low traffic
website, it could take months, maybe years to actually reach statistical significance.
And I think it's such a misallocation of resources to look for these tiny, tiny infinitesimal
incremental little bits and pieces of wins when you're actually staring death in the
face, which is actually what most startups are doing.
I think you need to like kind of play for bigger things.
And I'd encourage people to like, let's go for something that's going to be hard to achieve.
But if we do achieve it, it'll be a lot bigger.
I think, you know, versus let's iterate to the perfect version of a home of a website
homepage.
And the sad reality is, if your product is any good, your homepage conversion is going
to be somewhere between like zero and 3%.
And getting from like 2.1 to 2.3 isn't going to be the thing that makes you successful.
It's either going to be the amount of revenue people are paying you or the amount of like
web visitors you're getting to your site.
And they're the variables you actually really have to play with.
The conversion stuff is all optimization.
So when you look up market and you see that like Facebook have tweaked their button colors
or they've, you know, played with some copy, and you try to borrow that idea and bring
it on to your own sort of business, it's like putting on some of these glasses and helping
and making you think that they're going to help you see straight.
It doesn't make sense.
And that's one of the ideas behind ND hackers itself.
People end up copying these behemoths, they end up copying what they see Amazon doing,
what they see Google doing, because they don't know that these companies look very different
when they're small.
They don't have any insight into what smaller businesses are doing to grow because they
don't have any examples to look at.
And that's hopefully a problem that ND hackers is helping to solve.
Absolutely.
Let's talk about the opposite problem.
What are some things you think founders wait too long to do that they should be doing earlier
and their businesses?
I would say in no particular order, I think take your brand more seriously than you are
today.
Because it will become the it does have the potential to be something of a most for you.
But also, you can't grow it in three years time.
You have to start growing it now.
And that might mean maybe it's how you advertise, maybe it's how you blog or podcast, or maybe
it's what your site looks like, or what your logo is, or even what your company is called,
or how you communicate, or your tone of voice, or your newsletter.
But take it seriously.
It's an area of investment that only pays off over the long time.
But when it does pay off, it's so valuable.
So I get asked all the time, versions of how can we have a blog like Intercoms?
And the answer is go back seven years and start writing a post.
I wrote like 92 of the first 100 posts on the Intercom blog.
I tried to write three a week.
That was what I did.
I was just this consistent stream was part of my job, along with email and customers.
But it's just, you have to take it seriously from the start.
And that's, it's not just, I'm not just talking about the blog here, I'm talking about your
whole brand.
So like, I think it's not something that can come later.
So that's one area where like, you know, I think it's really, really hard to work out
exactly how much damage you do to yourself when you just, you know, really just screw
this up.
But I think it's really, really important.
And like, if you think of any of the like, the truly iconic breakout tech startups of
this generation, they actually have a well considered brand and it's not an accident.
So that's one area.
I think other, another obvious area I would say is, I think like people don't think about
pricing enough.
I think there's still too much of a temptation to stick like a $9 price tag on something
and think that if I make it really cheap, then everyone will buy it under the grounds
of a kind of screw it.
Why not?
It's only $9 type attitude.
I think you really need to understand like the basics of like value based pricing.
Understand that your price needs to be higher than the coffee round on your developer team,
which is one good asset test I often use.
Understand that your pricing needs to change and evolve.
Understand that like over time, you're going to basically make your product better and
better and if you don't have ways to capture that value, you're going to struggle because
you're going to, developers aren't getting any cheaper and the team size generally only
gets bigger.
So if you're like average revenue per account is like flatlining at $9 a month, you're really
going to struggle.
Unless you're Spotify and the captive market is your entire world, but PS, you're not Spotify.
So you guys don't share your revenue numbers today, I don't believe, but you have shared
revenue numbers in the past.
What's the most recent number that you've shared?
In January of last year, sorry, last year, we shared that we were at $50 million in annual
recurring revenue and that we had gone from $1 million in ARR to $50 million in three
years.
Yeah, that's super quick.
It's obviously a lot of money as well.
I think it's interesting because the bigger you get, the fewer peers and role models you
have to learn from.
Is there any particular playbook that doesn't exist that you really wish had existed while
you're building Intercom?
Oh, yeah, I think like anywhere I felt that I've ventured outside my own ability or my
own experience, I think I've made mistakes.
So when I worked in marketing, I made a lot of mistakes.
I didn't understand enough about marketing and in general, like a lot of your listeners
who will face this challenge in the future, like when you go to start building your marketing
team, you're probably going to screw up and there aren't many great playbooks out there
because honestly speaking, there aren't many great non-consumer tech companies that are
particularly good at marketing.
But you will make a lot of mistakes and it will be hard.
If there was a playbook, I think it will be useful.
In general, I tend to be ever so slightly cynical of the idea that there's a playbook
such that as in this one specific way, it'll work forever.
But for sure, if there was good war stories or case studies on how this or that startup
brought in marketing and it was a success, I would have loved to have read them two,
three years ago.
Honestly, I'd be happy to read them now, but it's more of a morbid curiosity at this point
because we've brought in a CMO and we're kind of like things are getting better for us.
But then on the other side, same with sales, right?
I never really knew anything about sales.
We have an awesome sales leader today.
I've learned so much from her, but we didn't know what we were doing at the start or at
least I certainly didn't.
I should really only speak for myself, but it was all net new stuff.
I had no idea how any of this worked and there are people out there that do and I think again,
there's not really a great like, so you have a successful B2B startup, here's how to add
sales to the mix.
If somebody had published a playbook, I certainly would have loved to have read it a long time
ago as well.
They're like, you know, but you're totally correct as the business scales, the number
of relevant and resonant examples that you can look to get thinner and thinner.
That's just the nature of growing up though, I think.
What would you put in a sales or marketing playbook for a super early stage founder who
doesn't really have that much experience herself yet?
I would probably advise her, in the marketing world, I think you need to like, there's a
lot of homework you need to do to understand them, you know, here's how naive I was.
I thought marketing was one team.
Marketing in most companies is between seven and 10 teams.
You're talking about product marketing, product education, demand generation, content marketing,
PR and analyst communications, you're talking about brand design, potentially partnerships,
resellers, and all of these, and I've probably also, by the way, forgotten a team that's
already in intercom at this stage.
Marketing ops would be one, lifecycle marketing, et cetera.
Understanding that there's a lot going on in marketing that you have never thought about
or have the first clue about is the first step I would advise any young founder to think
about.
Secondly, I think a lot of people think of marketing from, you know, if you think of
the proverbial funnel, where on the left you have like, you know, your sources of demand
and on the right you have your happy customer.
A lot of people think about marketing from the outside in, so they're like, all right,
we've got the product, let's start buying ads.
I think that's really not a great way to do things.
I would always advise people to go the direction.
Have you really got the product?
Is your churn and your attention metrics good?
Are you happy that your revenue expands when a customer sticks around for like years versus
shrinks, et cetera?
Then I'd be like, okay, let's look at your product marketing.
Is the product well positioned in the market?
Do people know what it is?
Do people understand it?
Yes.
Great.
Wonderful.
Have we reflected all of that on our product marketing website?
You know, do you carry the brand promise, et cetera?
Then is the connection between the website where somebody wants to sign up and the product
itself where somebody is successful, is that connection smooth?
Have you worked on your funnel?
And when you get all that right, then you can take a step back and be like, no, now
that we're pretty sure we have a good system here, how do we work out how to reach different
people in the industry?
Everyone's first move in a B2B world is like, oh, well, now we just go to content marketing.
It doesn't always work.
As an example, I have a friend who runs a website where they build software for dentists.
Her first move was content marketing.
It wasn't working.
Do you know why it wasn't working?
Because actually it turns out dentists don't read tech blogs, which, you know, shock her.
But I think like you have to match your channel to your audience.
So I think, you know, you have to, but like the, you know, and I could go further and
say like, what type of adverts would work?
Maybe you need to be at dentistry conferences because maybe they don't even look at ads
online at all.
Maybe there's no easy way to retarget a dentist, you know, all of the, you have to pick your
channel to choose your battle if you like.
So what I'd say to any young founder is kind of that, that like draw your funnel where
like on one end, you've got a happy customer paying you a lot of money.
On the other end, you have somebody who's never ever heard of you, but is in your target
market and then starting over at the happy customer, work backwards and that's a much
more efficient way to make sure that you don't piss away all your money on ads or blog posts
or articles or like paid media placements, driving traffic to an ineffective website,
or maybe the website's brilliant, but they all get in and they all churn out on month
one.
You have to go out due to direction that that's probably the biggest piece of advice I'd give
somebody in marketing.
And as I said, it's taken me seven years to get there.
So much good advice in all of these areas and one of the challenges of being a founder
is even when good advice hits you square between the eyes, sometimes you're just not in the
right position to internalize it.
You don't really understand it or other things seem more urgent so you don't follow it.
Is there any advice that you yourself have found that you've gotten over and over over
the years, but it took you a while to really start capitalizing on it?
All of the truisms around focus and all of that shit is definitely true.
But I think there's not a lot of deep insight there.
The stuff where I think it's really easy to get unfocused or to take your eye off the
ball, as it were, is the importance of really knowing your customer.
I think a lot of businesses, once they hit any sort of initial sort of traction, they
kind of think, right, got it.
The product is ready.
Now we just need to work on everything else and they stop connecting with their customers.
Not realizing that at any given point there are tectonic shifts in the industry that changes
what is and isn't possible.
In our world that's tense.
We think it's like AI or ML or chatbots or augmentation of human intelligence or you
name it, right?
These are trends that happen with or without us that we need to be aware of and bake in.
But also your customers change because you start moving upmarket and you start moving
into more verticals.
As a result, in your head you still have these perfectly happy customers that you last spoke
with two and a half years ago, but that might not be the reality.
So I think in general I've always found, I've been shocked at the amount of times I've had
to remind myself, you need to go and talk to customers again, Des.
And honestly, I think that's a piece where everyone who's listening to this and nodding
their heads and saying, damn right, trainer, I can't believe you forgot to do that.
I guarantee you they haven't talked to their customers in a couple of weeks and again,
this is not a sales pitch for Intercom, but Intercom is one of the ways that we'll unlock
a bit of that.
So I myself definitely have made this mistake far too many times, like an embarrassing number
of times I've let it go like three, four, five months without talking to a single customer.
Hearing the pain and hearing the joy and kind of having the shocking depression of having
an extreme empathy for what they're trying to do and combined with an extreme optimism
of knowing it's possible, but somehow we're not doing it.
But also getting fueled by the passion and joy when people come up and high five me at
a conference and they say, yo, your tool is rocking.
It's the reason that we were able to grow our business or whatever.
We kind of need to stay in that sort of emotional cycle of knowing things need to get better,
but also knowing that you're doing a lot of good in the world while you have and your
customers are a great source of both of those sort of highs and lows.
I think it's also difficult for people to follow advice when they don't see what the
immediate return will be.
If you fix a bug, you say, okay, well, now people stop complaining about this bug.
That feels great.
If you add a feature, you say, well, now people stop asking for this feature.
That's great.
You're, I don't know, working on marketing your brand as an early stage founder.
It's like, well, you know, when is this really going to pay off?
If you're talking to customers, you think, well, I've learned a few things here, but
what is this actually going to result in something tangible?
How do you strike that balance as a founder, especially if you're in the early phases,
you know, you might be out of business in six months if you don't handle some of the
more urgent issues.
Yeah.
The way I think about your early years, certainly, because obviously in Intercom, we're pretty
comfortable.
We'll be around next quarter.
However, in the early days, that wasn't guaranteed.
I think you basically have a list of like, you know, you have to kind of blend the things
we need to do to stay alive with the things we need to do such that if we are alive, we're
in a good place.
I liken this kind of like to growing up in a sense, like the stuff you need to do to
make sure you grow up.
But then also you want, if you do grow up, you want to make sure you still have a good
life when you get there.
For us, it was like, you know, winning customers, getting revenue, making the business actually
work, making the product good.
They're all things with like, with like a, you know, a short to maybe midterm payoff.
But the question you have to ask yourself is kind of what's it all for?
Like, if you get there, like, you're kind of like just running on a treadmill, if like,
if things haven't gotten better and stronger, you won't become a better business simply
by doing exactly what you did, you know, this year and next year, you need to kind of like
be adding more to your like capacity, whether that's growing your brand or growing your
influence or making your users happy or increasing your MPS or growing your revenue or something.
Like this isn't the sort of manic grow at all costs pitch, but it's like strengthen
yourself at all costs.
And I think, you know, it's a hard one to blend the short term with the long term.
And it's like, you know, people who struggle with it, I mean, this is a real life concern
too.
Like there are things that are, you know, fun to do in the short term, but like bad ideas
in the long term, whether it's like alcohol or drugs or whatever, I think in a business
to business version of of those things is like cheap, hacky growth hacks that will get
me an extra boost of endorphins this month versus things that won't necessarily pay off
this month.
But in the year's time, we're going to look back and we're like, shit, look at how all
this is added up.
As an example, like of that strategy, like people will often, again, go back to the content
marketing piece, like we would write blog posts with an idea that they should be relevant
for years, not for like weeks or days.
So we just didn't cover tech news.
We're not writing about scooters in San Francisco on our blog right now when we didn't write
about like, I don't know, gamification in 2011 when it was hot shit.
We've always kind of tried to have this long term horizon with just a knowledge that we
also need to stay alive to get there.
And that's kind of reflected in how we trade off these priorities against each other.
If we ever felt that, you know, death was getting a little bit too close or the wolves
throughout the door.
Yeah, we'd have to sort of sacrifice some of the long term thinking to make sure we'd
get ourselves out of the mix and like what that realistically would look like in intercom
terms would be like, Hey, the performance of the product is degraded.
We need to take engineers off new features to have them work on performance or whatever.
But that would be like the example of the like the long term, short term trade offs
that we have to make frequently just to make sure that we stay alive.
But it's, it's about understanding the types of risks that you're up against.
And as I said, just always keeping an eye on like, if we get to like month six of this
business, do we want to be exactly where we are today treading water?
Or do we want to have actually created something that is a new asset that we didn't have six
months ago?
And I'd always choose the latter if you actually want to have a sustainable sort of business
because otherwise, it's just too manic what you have to do to keep going.
You guys are now seven years into running intercom and I'm sure you've hit at least
some parts of the vision and some of the goals that you've set for yourself early on.
What does the future look like?
I mean, we have a big strong idea that we want to change the way every person talks
to every internet business.
We want to change the very nature of what it means to transact online.
And we believe that all businesses will become web businesses and we want to be the way in
which web businesses connect with our internet businesses connect with our customers.
So we're not in any way from a product development point of view, we're not even close to being
complete.
We have to hit every business, we have to hit every type of conversation people have,
we have to hit every channel people talk to, and we have to, as I said, observe all these
tectonic shifts that happen along the way and make sure that we stay relevant to each
of them.
So there's a long road to go there to become what we think we can be, which is, you could
think of it as maybe like, imagine if Salesforce was built for internet businesses.
Maybe that's the sort of order of magnitude that we're thinking about achieving.
But I say that more from an actual net impact on how business is done more so than I do
anything to do with Salesforce's head counter evaluation or anything like that.
We really like, that is like what we're playing for.
We take that very seriously.
We're very intently determined to give this our opposite best.
And should we fail, I'm okay with if we fall short.
As you said, we've clearly gotten to some point of success already.
But the piece I'd never be okay with is not giving it our absolute best, because I think
the opportunity is there.
I think the mission matters.
I think the vision is real, and we've a long way to go.
So when I hang up this call, I'll be going straight back to my desk and getting back
to it.
Well, best of luck, Des.
Thanks so much for coming on the show.
Can you tell listeners where they can go to find out more about Intercom and about what
you're up to personally?
Sure.
Intercom is just at intercom.com.
And you'll find us.
Our blog is there.
It's blog.intercom.com and all the other books and our starter guides and our book on getting
started specifically, which is all about starting up.
It's called Intercom on Starting Up, a really original name.
You can find all of that there.
My name is Des Trainer.
It's D-E-S-T-R-A-Y-N-O-R, and I'm on Twitter as Des Trainer, and basically every single
network you can imagine as Des Trainer, and it's just Des at intercom.com if anyone ever
wanted to talk to me.
All right.
Thanks so much, Des.
Thank you, Carlin.
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