Y Combinator Startup Podcast - #53 - Be Wary of Solving a Small, Rare Problem - Des Traynor of Intercom

Episode Date: December 13, 2017

Des Traynor is the cofounder of Intercom.Here's his talk Product Strategy Means Saying No and the blog post.

Hey, what's up? This is Craig Cannon and you're listening to Y Combinators podcast. Today's episode is with Des Trainer. Des is the co-founder of Intercom and he's also given a bunch of talks about product. So many of you guys requested him as a guest. So Des came on to talk about product and he also talked a bunch about how he's changed roles since he co-founded Intercom and he shared a bunch of lessons that he's picked up along the way. All right, here we go. 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 and my PhD was an attempt to see if we could automatically measure how good a programmer is basically. So put them through a variety of sort of simulated code and ask them to say what the output would be. And, you know, we had some really interesting findings from that research, but I got bored. I got bored for two reasons. One is that 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're program because they can't tell me what this code outputs.

Oh, wow. 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, a university would mark a piece of code is they say, all right, we'll give them three points if they have a four loop and two points if they have any of statement. And people just learned that off.

So like the phenomena is like that template based marking encourages template based learning. So people, like know what a solution should look like, but they have no idea what it does, right? Much like learning off Latin or something. So anyway, I was kind of, that finding was became more and more comfortable for universities. And as I said, hey, I'd like to do some years, I study on your students. Here's my hypothesis. You're like, no thanks.

So I started writing a blog instead because that was the alternative to publishing was just to write about this stuff. And then I started writing about design and usability. And 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 like, you know, the people who worked on the internet. which is a small group and this is like 2006 and I went along and actually a funny story is I met own for the first time there who I went out to start intercom with I also met my wife

for the first time of that really that same meeting wow I fell you yeah it was exactly a good day's work yeah so I actually went and took a different job with a consultancy and then for one year me and own kind of kept in touch and then one day he mailed me to say hey I'm starting my own thing do you want to get involved so we started working we had an agency called Contrast. It was like a design agency. And then we were following the 37 signals model. We wanted to have a side project that we'd eventually pivot to.

So our side project was a tool called exceptional. It was a Ruby on Rails based error handler. And it would like alert developers and notified 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 and thousands of people using their product. But the product like was, you know, we were frequent.

perform slowly or fall over and we were we you know the state of the internet back in 2010 wasn't good like so the infrastructure wasn't there there was no strike you know we if we wanted to mail all of our paying customers to apologize for some downtime it was like log into the PayPal dashboard get an export of all your subscriptions run that truce and pearl to extract email addresses import the email addresses into campaign monitor or mailchimp send out a notification get all the replies and like you know and all the like auto replies and all that shit back into your own email, you know, resurrect your email after like two errors of going through trying to fix it up.

And all of that, we had to do 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-hand corner, bottom right-hand corner of the product saying, hey, we're sorry, we were down yesterday. Here's the changes we made, read our blog post. And people are like, oh, and we saw a lot of engagement on the blog post, much better we ever saw an email. And then we sort of started to riff from there.

Like, well, what if people could reply to us? Like, imagine talking to somebody when they're using your product. and letting them talk back. So, you know, we started adding these little bits and pieces of features. Another iteration was like, what if we could see everyone who's read the message and everyone who hasn't? That became the basis of what we call an active user list. Like, who's using your product right now?

All of this in 2017 is taken for granted, but this did not exist in 2011. And so we started 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 that 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 it. 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're like, maybe you should all go build that or something like that, right? And like obviously we had been like thinking that a lot, but like it was like the feedback we were getting for people really just pushed us and pushed us. So eventually we sold exceptional. It went on to become a part of rack space. And then we had this little thing for talking to users. We had new problem now we had no users.

So we had to go and build the back end if you like so that we could give it to other people so that we would have our own customers so that we would not. 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 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 going to love you for the rest of your lives, et cetera. If you're curious what happened to the old gang, they're off working on this thing called Intercom. Go check it out. And it was like July 1st, 2011, we got to like the top of Hacker News. for like, you know, Intercom, like a cool new product or whatever. And the engagement on that trade, I still read it. And then it was just kind of, that was the first one where I was like, I knew that other people had this problem. And was that the HN?

Was that your first push for signups? 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 we, my job in the early days was like literally mailing people every day and be 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'd jump on a Skype call with our CTO care on. He'd walked in through the installation. Like this is like, this is what I took back down. Like one by one we were winning customers.

And then once we felt we had a relatively smooth sign up flow, we're like, well, let's tell the world and see what happens. Okay. Because you guys have 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 get attention so we could attract the clients and then later on it grow a user base for exceptional but when intercom was very it was you know we we knew we were good at it uh i specifically was my job uh so i was like right well the intercom you know today we're a lot more polished in terms of saying what we're actually selling but like uh 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 try and song this and that was like that was like the you know the very common question I guess what was the basis of your content strategy and I'm like write shit startup people read and then try and tell them about your product every now and then that was like and that was

what we did I wrote I think I wrote 93 of the first 100 posts whoa and it was all like here's how you grow user base here's how you should think about funding here's how you should name your product it was just anything that we felt we had any bit of expertise in yeah we'd like sort of write a post around it and every now and then we'd be like oh here's something else we added the Intercom. Yeah, because this is, that's 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, it's my number, like, basically you're totally correct. A lot of people's attempt at content marketing is, I want Intercom's user base. So they blog, so I just need to write about my product all the time. Whereas we actually took very much like, it's content first, marketing second, right? So it's like, the content has to be good. So the advice I'd give people is usually like, think about who your actual end 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.

And then every now and then, hopefully, if you're ideally aligned, your product also solves one of their problems for intercomments. Usually like you want to grow your web app or 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 the criteria we have is generally it should be like timeless content it should always be roughly true and uh and that's how we you know we have like you know very very big readership of our blog today and it's one of our you know it is our dominant traffic source but uh we 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 it definitely did not feel weird. I think like 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 here's a scale of $100 million error or company or 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 run intercom and exceptional. And it was like the lessons that we had learned. So I was always careful to kind of qualify like, hey, like we're at 6,000. active users. We were at zero four months ago. I can talk to you about the zero to six thousand thing. I

think that's relatively safe. Yeah. So and then like the, the areas where maybe it was, you know, slightly more if we talked about branding or say how to name your company or like how to think about your product vision, yeah, there are definitely better people in the industry, but they're not fucking writing these posts. So where what you get? Do you want it? At that time, did you consider yourself a strategist? No. No, I consider myself like a, a, a startup person, if you know what I mean. Because you were CS undergrad, right? Yeah, yeah, computer science, yeah, for sure. Okay. So were you the CTO at the time? No, no. So I was just computer science undergrad. In fact, all of the founders studied computer science, but our CEO and I

moved into, moved into design as our career. I was like a UX designer, you know, usability testing, interaction design, that sort of stuff. Own was primarily a visual designer. And then we had two or two, or two engineers, was like a person who built the front end of intercom, like the little messenger piece. And then our CTO, basically. owned the rest. Okay, got you. Um, because I was curious about what your role has been throughout the process. Like, how is it shifted? And we talked before you were on camera, uh, like, it's already shifting again. It will always shift. Uh, I, you know, I do kind of go to wherever the biggest problem that I think I can help what is. That's kind of what usually attracts me. It's like,

you know, I want an intercombe 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 sort of, tree jobs like work with own on kind of company vision strategy that sort of stuff i work with kiron and david on what they're actually building day today and then basically talk to users and you know try and help people find out about intercoms that i was blogging that was like you know i used to do webinars at like you know 7 p m in the evening in new lond for people over here i just do like live here let me talk to you about anything to do with the product like it was anywhere i was needed but in the early days it was very much like it was working on what we're

building and then trying to tell people about it and then as we grew we brought in like like more senior product folk. And then at some point, maybe around 25 people, I was like, right, product looks like it's in a good place. Okay. What's the next biggest thing? And what turns out we had no customer support at this time. Like I was also doing a bit of that and we had maybe one or two people.

So, so I jumped on customer support. I worked with Jeff, who's their director of support still today and built out that team. And there's other teams that came along since then we had maybe like people ops was the next thing. There are bits of recruiting were the next thing. And then about two years ago, it was marketing. So, you know, we kind of got to a point where, like, we think Intercom is definitely, the products definitely going to our place.

We would, we'd love to, like, kind of refine our ideas about, like, how we bring it to market, how we describe it, how we explain what it is, what's our relationship with the media, how do we pay for advertising, all that sort of stuff. So that's what I've been working on for two years. And as he said, you know, there'll be future problems, I'm sure. But it's so cool because so rarely founders shift roles in, like, 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. And I do agree, it's not like, it's not the default thing. Usually you find your corner and you stay in it like for a very good reason. It's what you're good at. I think like two years ago, I was, when I was starting a marketing, I felt a little intimidated because marketing itself, it's not really, like, there's no real like marketing 101 sort of thing. There's no like marketing for dummies.

there's no like there's no like pickax book for marketing you know well it's less quantifiable then like this code runs or this code doesn't run precisely and you and it's and if i said here name somebody who's good at marketing and you're not allowed say apple uh like everyone's opinion is kind of different right so so and like frankly like marketers don't really like write many articles about how to think about things uh or like how you structure things or you know i've talked to maybe 50 different vps of marketing at this point about how to marketing org are structured and they're all different like very like like not just different is new you put one person out but like substantively different like even like in terms of like sometimes brand design is inside

sometimes it's outside some of those communications reports to CEO some of those reports to a partner marketing you know all of that's different so I did find it quite intimidating early on and more so on the other areas where I felt there's a lot of literature and there's a lot of best practices out there marketing it was a challenge and I and the way I actually kind of learned was like I did get connected to great companies and basically sit and learn and absorb and see what worked and what didn't. And then I wouldn't say like I kicked ass in marketing and 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 there has been, you know, I definitely know a lot more today. And I feel like today I'd feel justified in applying for a marketing job somewhere.

Or writing a marketing blog post. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. But two years ago, I, you know, I was aware of two things. I was aware that like,

you know, we tried hiring marketers and, we hadn't worked out well. So I figured at the very least, if I can learn enough to know what good looks like, that'd be great, you know. Were there a couple rules that you've kind of, um,

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,

well, the engineers approach to marketing is like, we're going to hire a marketer and they're going to find a keywords that are KAC LTV positive. That is the customer acquisition cost is less than the LTV. And we're going to dump all of our $50 million into that. And it's going to spit out $100 million. And like basically that never happens.

Right. And I really like, someone's going to be like, I'm sorry, Des. I have one case where it. It never happens like for all intents and purposes. And so I think like, you know, whenever you have someone promising you that, it's usually absolute horse shit. The next, I guess, um, the, let me just take, like, see. So aside from that, like the next piece I think is, um, understanding how people buy your product is more important than selling your product, if you know what I mean.

Uh, so one big eye opener for me was that like, uh, some people come shopping for intercom. Some people come shopping for a chat widget on a website, right? Some people come looking for a solution to their growth challenges, all right? And they're all actually looking for intercom. And what I mean is like there are various levels of abstraction, uh, various, ways people can buy your product. So like I think a lot of times companies get sucked into selling their product one particular way. Yeah. And maybe they like, you know, maybe they pick one of those things. And like, we are, you know, live chat. It's like, yes, you're live chat. And some people

know that they need live chat. As in they've gone to the doctors, they've gotten the diagnosis. And they're like, we need live chat. They talk to their friend and their friend. Yeah, totally. And like, so you have this brand one, which is like your friend says install intercom. Yeah. Then you have this like maybe, you know, you've changed marketing leaders and like, hey, we need live chat on a site that worked in the old place and they're like okay now you go 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 in our homepage now at this point like should they install optimisely should they install

intercom should they redesign their 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 so I think like one of the big lessons for us in intercom has been like learning to be out to like to put our hand up in all of those different shopping journeys. So like that was like one, whenever I speak to other people who were maybe like earlier on in the marketing career and they're looking for guidance. Typically what they find is like in their Google advertising, they're bidding on their own company name.

And I'm like, that's cool, but that's actually not where to, 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 a YC is is pretty high. Yes. And we can convince them to do YC. see possibly. Then there are other people that have no idea what a startup is or have this vague

notion. We have to speak to them as well. 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 this is this is kind of a core of how we think about it. So so when you have somebody who say is, you know, obviously YC has a brand. So like so some people are just shop for YC and maybe maybe you're so dominant you don't even need to bid on that because they're going to find you anyway but also like you know in some sense you know there is no substitute right as you take a step back like some people just want the money right and say like i'll take yc i'll take tech stars 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 should you should you try and say we are better and here's why we are better than them if you're shopping for both come check this out right that's like the sort of competitive angle to marketing right and and and if you can pull that off you now get to like compete for all the superset of the traffic not just the yc shoppers anymore right and then you have to people who like who have a startup and they don't know if they want money or not in which case now these people aren't googling right they're not going you know hypothetically if i was to start a startup what i want you know like that we could own that long search term yeah yeah yeah you'd be you'd be the only person bidding on and that'd be you testing it like you so like so like so and basically

what happens is like the amount, the size of the, 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. So, but at the same time, like your likelihood of conversion is going down, right? It is in, you know, someone looking for YC is going to convert somebody who's like thinking about taking incubator money. They might not cover it. Your pitch needs to be more all inclusive at the sort of far side. So you can't, you can't start.

If I'm saying, hey, I'm thinking about taking some incubator money, you can't. start with well 12 weeks you're going to have dinners with founders we had Joel Spolsky in last you know you I need to be like whoa talk to me about the concept of incubation first of all you know get me buying that thing first and then I'll learn why you're best right so so for intercom like 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 and we can get people on board with that yep then we're like okay we've built one bridge the next bridge we'd like to talk to you about is why messaging is a great way to build a

relationship. So we'll, well, none of these pitches individually convert, right? They're all like, this is where people are like, why the fuck do you write this shit does? And I'm like, so like, so you write a whole piece that's effusive about my messaging is the future. I'm messaging your customers is important. People are like, okay. So I get the relationships are important. I get that messaging builds relationships. I'm like, okay, cool. Now do you get, now they talked about intercomas messaging and our philosophy to messaging. And you see, you have sort of this like cascading series of like thought leadership, these sort of style ideas that bring you from in our world like, I would like to grow a big user base all the way true to I need intercom yesterday.

And in your world, I might be like, I'm curious about incubator cash. And you want to catch them at that point. And maybe the blog post you're right there is like how to think about early financing or maybe it's like why you should move to the valley or like, 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 there's obviously no other choice. Why on earth wouldn't you go at YC? right. And that's the actual approach that we've, you know, we've played out in Intercom. Like retrospectively, I can tell you that has been our content marketing strategy, but we didn't

start with the thinking wasn't that crisp at the start. No. And are you tracking someone throughout this journey? Kind of. We're not doing a great job on that, to be honest. We will get there. We've just made some good new hires in marketing who will kind of improve that sort of side of things. But we do know like that, yes, we can see the amount of repeat readers we have and we can see the most popular articles and we can see the articles that convert most. Now, like, this is exactly where like the, the maybe 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 the warm-ups

to get them to there. 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 cent and it 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 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, who. Basically, he ran like paid marketing for a very, very big sort of sports gambling for him.

And, and he kicked ass one year. He ran all his campaigns phenomenally well. CEO looks at like sort of the brand spend and looks at the online digital attributable spend. And CEO says, hmm, I'm going to give you all the budget because you're the one who's performant. So next year, what happens? So you've got all the budget per brand person's got nothing. So you go absolutely batch shit heavy on like spending everything you can. But all your conversion rates are dropping.

You're like, what's going on here? And it turns out that your conversion rates are dropping because you don't have the same brand penetration that you did. And like this is why like you need to like think about this thing 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? Because they're cashing in on, I don't want to say it's easy. It's an 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 share our heads on Facebook or something like that, it's like just target people who say the word 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 shower, you know, like, but yeah, most of us, specifically in our industry, we're not selling fast movements and we're not selling necessarily obvious things either. Like,

it's not a given that you have to install like a podcast plug in or, well, so that was a thing I was literally dealing with this morning before we met up. There's an issue with one of the audio files and 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 know what the fucking word is. And I'm sure that's the case with Intercom. I'm sure that's the case with YC. And so like we have to figure out what the synonyms are. Totally. People don't know they need it yet, right? And yeah, precisely.

And the other marketing principle, I'd say, is like you can't sell somebody in 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 of it is you need, until you have that problem, you're not even, you don't give a shit, right? So like, so finding those moments is really, is a really important challenge as well.

And like, and then as you said, like this synonyms just casting a wide net. It's like 10 ways to describe a problem for like intercom. It could be like retention is suffering or it could be like, we need to accelerate user growth. Or it's like, how do we maintain user growth? Or it's like, 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 about that 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 and not just like point them to, this is the other mistake people make, pointing them like, hey, all right, so I got the bid term, I'm going to point them at the homepage. That doesn't work because if someone says, I want to onboard my users better because onboarding conversion rates are per and we're like, yeah, we can bid on all that.

We know we're good and all that. But if we point you to intercom. We're going to say, we're an all-on-one marketing platform, where our mission is to make an internet business person. Wait, back, back, back. Sorry, hang on, I thought I was onto something there. you know, we actually need to be like, you want to onboard, you're in the right place. Yeah.

And 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 going to help you with the onboarding problem. And I'm going to be like, okay. And the very end of all you'd be like, oh, by the way, this whole thing, Intercom. You know, that's how that works, unfortunately? 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? 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. Okay.

So like, so to give you an example, one core idea in Intercom is like sending the right message to the right person at the right time and the right place. and we have Ruby code that does that. And 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. 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 on how they help, why it matters, what the big vision for the meet is. And as we've evolved our product, we've had to like,

bring more ideas into the fold. At the very core, like Intercom, we're about making internet business personal. So as long as 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 bring,

so we launched a new product in December of last year called Educate. And it was basically, it's 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 marketing. I'm like, all right, well, we need to work out. What are the core ideas here? And, right, events. What are we going to do? Books. Are we going to do books? Are we going to get this in a podcast?

What are the landing pages for this? What are all the different ways people bid on this? Media. How are we going to talk to the press about this? 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 and your product and your marketing are out. sync. So as in 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 fucking trouble basically, right? But similarly, I think, so that's the first challenge. 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 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, so you can't, you know, I often think of, you know, Michelin, the people who do Michelin Star Restaurants. Sure, yeah. You know, it's a tire company. I do. Yeah. So, like, I often think like that's like, you know, orthogonal brands in a lot of ways. It's like no one finishes their meal and goes, mm, I'm going to buy some tires.

You know, like, uh, like, I do worry. I see a lot of startups, like specifically people who are who, say something like, say, Stripes brand and like, are we, we want to be cool with developers too. Yeah. You're like, that's great, but you're selling an online writing app. Developers aren't your thing. They don't care. But they have this really cool tech blog.

I'm like, but that's literally, it's not against what you're doing, but it's just totally orthodox. It's just like it also happens to happen at the same time. 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 and your brand? So at the very, very start, we've kind of, we set our stall out. to say we're our mission is to make internet business personal right so so at the very core anytime we have to like make a decision about what or not we do a product we ask ourselves does this make business more personal on the internet right um so you can sort of say like would we release a tool that made it easy to spam people you've never talked to before well no because that's that's that's that's totally opposite would we release a tool that lets you stream soccer lives to your mobile phone no because that's i didn't read that in an interview though

yeah i wish you would be working Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But like, so like that's kind of our core sort of guardrail for like the product is just basically, does it do that? And then within there, like, then we have other like sort of, you know, let's say rubrics for like, what's the next most important way we could tackle the impersonality of digital business, right? And so we kind of move through it like that. And, you know, the, you know, every change we make in product has to trigger changes in. product marketing product design you know brand content marketing sales etc yeah um so you

you have to have this sort of like inside out sort of thing we're like at the very core we decide all right we're now also going to you know do like push notifications all right well why are they personal okay well let's expand from there right and then it has to weep out into everything otherwise your product your marketing and your brand to get out of sync and that's when bad things happen and really truly we've talked about this in the context of hiring and in growth right because you become out of sync and then it kind of expound or rather goes exponentially. Yes. If you start hiring the wrong people.

Yeah. Totally. Yeah. It's so easy to, yeah. The point I make exactly in a, in sort of hiring is like if you hire one person who's not on the same page and you let them hire people, they're going to hire people. They're going to hire people on the same page. And I think of the whole wings of the company working against you in bad ways. And they don't think they're being malicious.

They think they're helping. But, you know, sometimes they can be doing the exact. wrong thing, but more often they're just doing something that's literally not helping. So it's not hurting, but it's just, you know, they may as well like not be doing it. Right. It's just not working. Yeah, whatever. Yeah. Just playing games. Um, how do you guard against that? Alignment is like, I think it's like doing it. So we had a big event here two nights ago, uh, inside intercom. Um, it's like our blog on tour. We like a thousand people and one of the talks, I was me that gave, it was all about like keeping people aligned. Um, I think like basically like

the things that, you know, that when companies go through these really fast growth periods, there's a few things that always, always get left behind. One of them is like new hire onboarding. So like person number five joining a four person company has like full access to everyone and basically absolute immersion therapy. They learn 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 is any differently. So they're just like, oh, well, you know, so like the logical conclusion is that the company goes off course. So we invested, and like we made versions of this mistake, you know, quite a lot in the early days. Yeah.

Today we obsess over new hire onboarding. Like when I leave here, I'll be headed back to Dublin and like Tuesday morning. Like that's all I'm doing is just meeting people and letting them know, like, what are we doing? You know, what are we actually doing here? Why are we doing it? Why do we care? What is the problem space? Why is it matter to us?

How do we do it? Like, how do we actually work? Like, how does work happen at Intercom? In some practical terms, this means a one-on-one meeting with you, just talking. Yeah, it starts, it'll be a combination of, sort of, first of us, so it's a bunch of new hires. It'll be a presentation for me about, like, walking trip, see everything. And then, then we'll be one-on-one 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 then be with their manager to kind of keep that going. But it's, like, I would say that I still believe that we're probably not even doing. enough but I think most companies don't do enough like they don't they don't really don't think about what what's the experience of being person number 397 at your company yeah and then they act somehow shocked and like I can't believe they thought it was okay to ship that you're like well show me the guardrails that stopped or like you know how on earth were they supposed to work that out yeah absolutely and yeah you can't like really blame them I mean we do it we need to do a better job here as well uh Andy cook asked a question related to this um so in addition to hiring uh what is

been the biggest challenge with scaling the organization. Yeah. I guess there's a few ones that have, you know, they're probably more typical, but like when eventually you're, you end up hiring into areas that you don't understand well. Yeah. And, and your best bet at that point is to kind of like go and find somebody who you think is doing a good job at it. And, but like you, you know, you're still, you know, it's still a version of the same flawed logic, which is I think I can work this out. You know, right. They wrote a blog post about this. So it's so they, so they, you know, you know, They probably know it all, right? Like, you know, it's 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 land, 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 that comes to you sells you on the role. You know, like that's, you know, that, you know, that, you know, it's obvious in hindsight sort of thing. But I think like, you know, it's genuinely tough to break outside of, outside of your own area of expertise and hire well there. But like, you will learn it. But it just, it's, it takes longer and you don't get the same immersion that you did from like, say, studying computer science or something like that. 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 two. Yeah. But that's been a challenge, like working out like the right head can't say the right places. We now have four offices. We're in like Dublin, London.

in San Francisco and Chicago and we're so spread and it makes some some things really tricky like today we had like a show and tell sort of thing wherever and everyone who works on any sort of aspect anyone who's going to anything to show basically they kicked ass they closed the great sales deal built a great piece of product or whatever they all line up to present but like orchestrating that is so hard across all the time zones across all the offices it's just it's it's it's far from easy and and you have to do these sort of sort of little rituals to keep the whole company on the same page. But maintaining that is it's hard and it was hard for us from very start. Today we can spend a lot of money on video conferencing and shit like that. But early on it was rough. Do you spend money like

flying people around to hang out with each other? You do like any kind of everyone comes together 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 to four times a year depending on the type of team. Then like the leadership level on the level we do like six times zero smart out so like this versions of it like for for me what that means is if I get on flight number yeah one four seven everyone knows me because which is never like you know you don't want to be like on four square like the mayor of the lounges in the airports and all that but like sale of ee like yeah um what hasn't worked

out what's been really hard for you personally uh I think marketing has been tough the stuff I've really struggled with is um hiring senior leader is in a function where you don't understand it well is tough it's a it's a big challenge and and they're never bad people like they're always at this when you're when you're going shopping for like directors and senior directors and vPs you're only really talking to accomplished people um so like it's not like you know it's not like you get them in and it turns out they can they don't know how to write code or something like it's like it's like it's very much uh the feedback period to what or not their strategy is correct for the company can be six months to a year uh which is you know which is long right

the impact if they're going the wrong direction can be negative because you have to bet on them, which means you have to like impair them to hire, impair them to do everything that they need to do, impair them to spend the budget, et cetera. 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 money mistakes per se, but I've just paid quite an emotional tax. I've just kind of a great degree of like fear and anxiety in the recruiting process. And then I guess, honestly, post-hire, you're kind of like, well, like, you know, I need to do everything I can to make this a success. So I think that's genuinely, like, that's something I've struggled with. Learning a lot of people stuff has been hard. Like so learning how to like ensure that we actually have a good policy for, say, performance management.

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 stuff like that. Totally. 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 like openly discussed and like and you know professional conversations by people who know what they're doing getting there like genuinely I think every start I talk to it takes them way too long and I think you know if I was to do it all again of course you'd be more familiar but like a but I think yeah you know there's a lot of obvious pitfalls and and yet I don't think you can necessarily preempt every mistake. as in even if I told somebody who's just starting to first start up, here's everything I know about this.

Like some of it's kind of like, yeah, that doesn't apply to me. And they're not going to, you know, it's back to that point I said earlier, like you're not going to buy the solution until you've bought the problem. And, you know, 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 whole myself before I could really learn it. But were there any books or podcasts that really helped you figure out how to manage people better?

Ranz 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 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 Harvitz, but like it's every story, they're almost like fortune cookies. When you think about it for a second, like, shit, I have been in that situation or, or 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 with first time managers is, 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 realize there's an actual whole craft here that they need to perfect to be, to take the next steps in her career. I think it's a great book for that, but it's also a book. I think the third time you read it,

you probably start picking up better lessons than you did the first time. Okay. And so just to shift gears back to the product again. Yeah, cool. If someone is just getting started out, like what do you advise them on thinking about product, 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, and like, it sounds fluffy and known, like, you know, people want to start writing code on day one. But 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, like, keeping everyone in line and stuff as well.

You need to have, like, to have everyone in 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. So they might say, like, you know, a lot of people email themselves to do's. I'm going to fix that. And I'm like, okay. And I can see how you might have 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's your, what do you believe of productivity that no one else believes? And I might be like, 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. Whatever. I'm like, okay. So we're going to 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 productify, if you know what I mean? Like it has a 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 client, but it's actually a do list, maybe. 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? And like when people pitch me on like a new weather app or whatever, I'm like, but like what's your belief? about weather and they're like, well, I just think they all look ugly. And I'm like, okay, so you believe that beautiful weather will do what? And they're like, I just like designing weather apps, man. And I'm like, I thought that's what it was. So like maybe you shouldn't be raising

around. So that's the kind of the like the base, the platform, denham. Yeah. The next piece I would say to people is like you have to find, you know, be really wary of solving a small, rare problem. You can solve a big problem. You can solve a rare problem. You can solve a rare 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's, it's never works. I've never, and these products can be effing beautiful, right? But what I mean by this is that basically like, 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 blah, blah, blah. And this is a whole big project. I'm only going to

do it once a year, but it's a big enough thing. Okay, fine. You can probably build a product around that and probably make some money because there's enough value. It's a big. It's a big. And I'm enough problem in your life that if we can fix it, you'll pay some money or we'll take some commission or something. So that's the size spectrum. Then there's things that happen every year or things that happen every day. And the things that happen every day, typically like you'll have a lot of engagement. So the product will bury its way into your life. However, if you're something that no one really cares about that often, sorry, no one really cares about and they don't have that problem that often. Let's say over the last two years, there was a large amount of apps that

They're all now defunct. They were saying, you know the way Mark Andreessen splits up his tweets? We'll help you do that. And they designed these like typographically stunning products, as in anyone who looks at this up like, yes, that is a beautiful product. It's a perfect piece of product. It solves a very rare problem that is very small in nature. And now that's the extreme case.

But there are versions of this like you can imagine a loads of B to B things that happen occasionally and not that are not that big a deal. And then on the other extreme, you've got problems that occur all the time and are pretty big. Workplace communication, you know, charging your customers money, talking to your customers, right? It's like big problem. And you do it every all the time. They're like the places where like the Slack stripes and intercoms whatever can play. Like 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, oh, I guess we're going to change platform provider or whatever payment provider. It's like, no, you're not. You're locked in. Yeah. 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 most. I think we deified products so much that people just thought, if you have a great product, that that's it.

I'm like, the product itself will match with a problem. That's great products match problems. Does it match with 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 think your Facebook to your Instagram and we can do X and OI and then it spits out a Shopify app. And I'm like, yeah, I just don't see it. a problem that often in someone's life. So that's the kind of the next wave. Then there's other like

little philosophies I'd say is like if you're going to 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 like fake traction where like they handhold a lot of their early customers like doing the like the YC famed like Collison install type thing. But they actually don't have a bridge towards a world where that can't where that isn't necessary. And I'm trying to say like, if you're going to spend 30 minutes talking to every single customer he needs to install and you've no bigger picture as to how you're not going to be necessary you need to be charging more than $9 a month.

And that's just, you know, it sounds obvious, but you'll find a lot of people like who have a very high, let's call like an adjusted customer acquisition cost, right, when you factor in the founder involvement and all that. They have a high cack and they literally have no plan to get away from it. And yet they have traction because they can point to like, the nine grand a month that they're making. Yeah, exactly. But it's just, it's not scalable, you know.

And that's another sort of dangerous area, I feel is that people can. And another example, this might be like, my product's 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 as part of the service, I'm going to jump in and write all your emails. And I'm like, well, that's what people are buying you. You're a consultant.

Like, no, I'm not in a software provider. And I'm like, that's not how it works. Yeah, it's dangerous. What about markets that are growing? So like something entirely new. How do you think about that in the context of, you know, frequency, rare, small, big? Yeah. So I think, you know, it's, I wouldn't say essential, but it's really, really useful if you're selling into a growing market.

But everything I still said, I still needs to apply. 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 addressable market it's still the fact that the small and rarest it means that they're very unincline to pay any real money because like the fact that they're in a market doesn't change how much money they have right um so so like that's one problem you have there and then the usual uh knee jerk reaction of how we're going to get out of this is oh well we won't charge users we'll go with ads instead and I'm like but the ads won't work

because if it's a rare problem they're not going to launch the app or not going to visit your page all time so you don't have the engagement to get the eyeball you. to get the actual like the revenue for your publishers so um or for your advertisers so like you know it you know in some sense 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 going to work yeah they're never going to pay you enough yeah um so there were a couple questions

about intercom specifically in your future goals. So what are, so Fossey Bear on Twitter, 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 Fossey Bear what exactly what the definition of a growth initiative is. I guess like the things I'm keen to do over the next two years as get our marketing to a place where we are comfortable being slightly more direct. I think we've done a really good job from like a thought 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. And I think that's an area where we have a lot of maturing to do. 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. Which is true.

It's true, right? But, 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 and we're like well if you love your users you're going to stick or they're like sh shh shh don't care about any of that 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 value. So that's one whole area that I'm quite invested in. And the second one for me is, the Intercom brand is quite big. We had like, you know, we had 1,200 people show up to our event here on Wednesday. We felt like 6,000 people attend our tour. 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 like kind of connect the dots a little bit better

between like intercom the the content phenomena of sorts and an intercom of software and that's so that's something else I'll be working on I don't know if that qualifies as a growth initiative I mean it's a challenge that we have too right because like we have things like hN you have this podcast you have our YouTube channel and I was just talking to michael sybil yesterday like you know we've doubled our YouTube channel in like six months and that's awesome how many of those people know what yc is totally yeah it actually works exactly no and 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 in that way you know and I think that's a that's a challenge like you know as in you might it could well be I'd hope it's not but it could well be the case that there are like hundreds of thousands of people who really love YC but they when they go shopping for the incubator they'd rather go to their local incubator shop or whatever and like and it's because no one's you know, you know, you know, You know, it's because almost, you know, in both senses, intercomboise,

maybe being a bit too demure or standoffish. I'm like, okay, come to us when you're ready, but we're not coming to you. You know, like, and like maybe that suits the brand. Maybe it doesn't. But like, I can see how it's a challenge on your side. Well, because on, I mean, in large part, we're just making stuff that we want. 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'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, you're the director of marketing. You do want to think that you're actually doing something as well, right? So, and like, yeah, there's a really interesting spectrum, right, that I often talk to people about when you're like, you know, in the early stages of a startup.

Like, if you were to say, like, let's say why Combinator's product is the actual incubator, right? is in like it's it's it's cash for equity in high potential startups. Uh, if you were to literally only invest on making sure that everyone knows about that, uh, you'll become known as a type of bank or something like it'll be like, oh, why come they are the financial model?

You know, like, uh, and if you really drive for that, then what happens is everyone forgets about all, everything else and, and you don't appeal to people under any other grounds whatsoever. It's just like,

oh, if you need money, go to them. And that's actually not your message, right? Oh, no. messages. Because then we'd be a commodity, which would be the worst case. Precisely, right? And your value prop is 50K for 8% or something, right?

And then the very second you quantified all like that, someone else can be to say, well, we're 60K for 7%. And now you've just lost the fight because you've made it so quantifiable and you've taken brand and all that sort of stuff out of it, that you've basically sowed this easier on destruction. On the other extreme, right, you can have like, why accommodate it? The global phenomena, right? Like we barely tell you that we do anything other than just evoke magnificence.

And like the challenge there is then like, you know, you're so abstract that no one actually realizes what you do. And like they're genuine like there are many like big brands that have become they've spread themselves. And like I hate to pick on people. I hate to pick on big brands. But they stand like, you can think of some of the huge consulting houses or whatever like or some of the 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 that's no use either. Right. Becoming one of one of. the biggest brands in the world that no one can kind of explain for a moment what the hell you do or 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 and uh and like so an example i see as like you know someone pitches me not like a startup and it's like oh we're 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 10 years you're only ever going to track tickets is that is that like are you comfortable having like i i can see how the value uh is strong for you today because

no one's going to ask you what this ticket tracker do, right? No one's going, ooh, ticket tracker, what's the, you know, when you really sell? But like, you've sowed yourself to seeds of your own, the sort of destruction, because you can't grow that brand in any way, you know, if you're like, you know, hotels.com, well, what do you do? Oh, will we sell hotel? Okay, that's cool. But now you see like, hotels.com, 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 is 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, it's like finding the point on the spectrum that you're comfortable with. Like it's in so like intercom, you know, at its core, like, you know, the idea is it's an intercom. It's like, you want to talk to people, right? The logo is like eyes and them out. You can see and talk to your users. And so our mission is to make internet business personal. So that's kind of like we've picked a relatively abstract point as in another version of intercom would have been called. like website messenger, you know, right? 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, the right level of abstraction such that we can, you know, the brand umbrella can kind of cover all of your needs, all of the things you want, you might want to do. And to do that right, like, and this is something

I would advise all people to do. You need to read up on concepts like brand architecture and understand the difference between an endorse their brand and, like I say, primary brand and, you know, what's the between a 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 if you're deliberately going for a slightly bigger thing, right, you know, you could be selling like cheapflights.com or you could say avate, we will take you to your destination, right? And you have to like, we're, you know, so avate's a harder one to convert, cheapfights.com is a harder one to expand. So you find your level. And then it's, that tells you

the starting point in your funnel. So our starting point is anyone who has an internet business. right so so from that point you do job one create an audience of people who are interested in internet businesses and their problems and then job two is then sort of specify into the problems intercom solves so we primarily solve go-to-market to 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 um we also talk about product problems just because it's the needs to it because basically in early stage startups everyone does everything so it's usually the product person is also the market so um so um So then we sort of start building the, first of all, grow the audience. Then you get the specificity by like talking about specific problems. And by way, I say talking and my mind goes to content, but it's worth saying this can be media campaigns. It can be ad buyers. It can be sponsorships of events. So they're basically pushing out 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 them and start talking to them and say, hey, what were you shopping for? Like this is probably the thing we did most in the early days intercom. When someone signed up, we'd be like, out of curiosity what did you think you were getting when you bought an intercom and it was a great question because because it helps us unravel a lot of stuff like i see someone had a question here about yeah what uh david uh asked about like why did we split up our product into like we used to be like just one intercom thing and there were a suite of things that was entirely result of this it was it was it was basically realizing we were selling intercom but people were buying a help desk or people

were buying uh and and like this is back to caran's point or like build we sell sell what you build 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 use cases on it. That's why you see it in all the sites. And when we meet them 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 some campaigns, you're like, dude, I came here to support my YouTube. This is a lot for me right now. Yeah. It's like you need to talk to those folks over marketing. I'm just trying to support people.

Yeah. So what 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 let us be 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's the onboarding steps for support and we wouldn't talk to about 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

So we were trying to like, it was like a 12 step configuration because we had you had to do everything. And that actually made sense when we were talking to two person startups and stuff way back. Right. But these days we're generally talking to functions, not whole companies. So so we had to kind of help people find the exact sort of their own home within the product. So that's where we split the product up.

And that's and that comes back to that question of like as we got more specific, we had to get, you know, give every single person who's shopping for a different thing, their own tailored experience to find the exact part of intercom they need. Yeah, and so when someone is shopping on your site, what have been the things that have been most effective in actually converting them right there? We haven't done a great degree of like AB. I mean, there's a certain amount of your listeners

are going to want to hear, well, green buttons work better than red, Craig. Did you know what you? But like, 400 chains of blue. Yeah, yeah. I think the stuff that we found useful has been unbundling our pitch into the specific ways in which it's bought. That's been huge. And you can actually see like, if you look at say, I think Stripes on page does that pretty well these days.

Like they can sell you marketplace or they can sell you Sigma or Radar or connector. Similarly, we're like, you know, are you in the sales and marketing side of the org or in support marketing work? And if you're in sales and marketing, we'll get you with a pitch that works for that. And if you're in support, we'll talk to you about like why you should love your users and how we'll increase your MPS and all that. and making those sort of switches rather than trying to sell this holistic mishmash that it's kind of you end up in just like one size fits none phenomenon right like um so i think getting more specific and getting us a website that enables to be more specific about our value propositions uh for different people was probably like the biggest useful thing

the second biggest use thing with down i think was like tailoring and iterating the hell out of our actual onboarding for the use cases you're buying so like uh all customers you know like All paths don't necessarily have to go the same direction for somebody to become a customer here. For some people, they might want to install JavaScript. Other people might want to just import their customers and start from there. We've had great success kind of finding the right ways in which the right types of people can get onboarded to be successful with Intercom. We've had, I'd say we probably, over the years of experimentation, we've probably doubled or trebled our actual conversion, right? True things like that.

Wow. How many times have you iterated on the sounds? Not enough. Okay. Yeah, not enough. Honestly, it's, it was something I was thinking about recently. We've been talking about the Messenger a bit lately. And yeah, it's weird how, like, audio doesn't get discussed in, in a software enough because it's not part of the wireframes, if you know what I mean? It doesn't, you know, like you don't have the sound producer in the room with the designer.

Yeah, just an icon for a sound. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Precisely. So, no, you're totally correct. It's something that's on my mind. There's a general sort of tension between, like, how.

how identifiable we want intercom to be versus how customizable it is. And that's another spectrum. You have to work out with your users. People often want to customize the intercom launcher. And we generally support them in doing that. But then they want to customize the messenger. We sort of support them to do that.

But then they want to customize specific bits so that it's barely intercom anymore. And at some point you're kind of like, whoa, I didn't realize I care about this, but we actually do have some beliefs about how this should perform. Well, it might make it terrible. Yeah, there are plenty of sites where you're like, where the hell is that sound coming from?

Yeah. Totally. Why are there bells ringing right now? Tell them why is there a video auto playing and all that sort of shit, right? Yeah. Yeah, that's the worst. So I'm curious about you in the future. What's coming next for you as your role at Intercom changes?

I would guess, you know, we're at a scale now where in general, as startups grow, you move from like Swiss Army knives to scalples, right? So I was historically like a Swiss Army knife, one particularly pointy blade for product. Um, but that was useful because I meant I could go and bounce around and take, take on different portfolios of things and generally bring them up to some level and then learn enough and then we could bring in somebody who actually knows what is doing and that person would inherit. You haven't burned the house down. Yeah.

Yeah. And maybe I've got the bait, maybe I've put out the immediate fires. And I've sort of set the stage for like someone to come in and do some real work. And, uh, but I think we're at a scale now where, um, and maybe I'm necessarily optimistic, but I think we have like, you know, good people. leading all the functions. So I think there might now be a time for me to maybe retreat to an area of actual ability, which maybe looks like me going back to the product order. But we'll see. I mean, Intercom has never failed to surprise me with the areas, the ways in which you can, you know,

produce new problems for me, let's say. Yeah. So then what if you weren't working on intercom, what would you work on? I did answer this once before and you referred to it earlier. there are here's two problems i think about a lot uh one of them is uh simple it's soccer is without the biggest sport on the planet um sorry super bowl fans uh it's huge uh and it is literally the sport technology is left behind and i think there's a lot of reasons for that a lot of them are kind of societal or a lot of them cultural. You know, nerds and sports tend to go together. America and soccer tend not to go together as an example.

Sorry about the recent World Cup. Sorry everyone. So, but there's a huge opportunity there. Yeah. Piracy in soccer is, I would say, at like the levels pre iTunes, if you remember in the music industry, right? Like there are like, there is an equivalent of Kazaz, there are many of them. And no one's doing anything to solve it.

solving it would be a very complex piece of work because a lot of it isn't programming. A lot of it would be actual code, but there'll be a lot of deals and a lot of business after doing partnerships and all sorts of shit, right? And it's not a guarantee that like ESPN won't get their shit together or something like that right. But like I can imagine like a Spotify for soccer, right, as in hey, I want to watch that game that happened last night. I should be able to watch it. I'll pay. But it's not even possible. For me to watch a game that happened yesterday, it's just not possible. Like literally not possible today. So that's how backwards it is. And I think that needs to get fixed. So I think someone should fix that. I think the opportunity is big. The market's huge. So that's one. Another one is I think no one has really taken a harsh look at like, let's just say pensions and retirement funds and stuff like that. Like is in,

there's a company in New York called Lemonade that took a really, really nice approach to insurance for property. It's a bot basically. You talk to it and you can get you can literally insure your house in New York in like five minutes just true, you know, chat bot basically. I think that's an example of. like tackling a real what what has historically a lot of paperwork and a lot of fucking around and turning into a relatively simple flow and making it work i think that model and i'm not saying chatbots aren't the thing here so much as drastic simplification as the thing and what the q and a may be like charming as a way to do it or like at least unique from a brand perspective but i think there's a lot of areas like that you know where uh car insurance is another obvious iteration but like anything to do like a mortgage application like you know like i think there's a lot of areas that are rich for like drastic simplification that

people turn a little bit away from because of what paul graeme would call like the schlep work side of like you know it's it's easier to build a recipe up frankly done it is to go and talk to banks about saying i want to reduce mortgage creation to like tree taps you know um but i i you know i i i think they're like obvious areas what i would have to offer up front is like i don't feel a drastic passion in any of those myself but there's something i could get excited about about when I say I don't feel a drastic passion, what I really mean is like, remember I talked earlier about like having a strong vision for the space and all that.

Like I can jump to like a chat bot for like, you know, for mortgage applications. But I actually need to take a step back and be like, what do I actually believe here? And it's that it's that I believe I guess maybe like the finance should be liberated of the bureaucracy that's being inherent in the industry for so long. You know,

but like I need to go and draw that whole landscape and then be like, am I excited to put another decade in my life onto something like this? Yeah. Because like intercoms, you know, or the intercom story has taken a quarter. my life so far and I've enjoyed it but like you know if I was to if I was ever to do something else I you know I now know how many how high a filter I have to apply in order to say yes right but it's a huge problem I mean I suppose many of these are rare in your lifetime but they're

gigantic big hue yeah big rare that's that's a great point it's a great application of that yeah yeah and I think the the incentives also aren't aligned right like the companies are incentivized to make it complicated because they exist on fees I think that's why vanguard was such a right. Exactly. Yeah. Ready? Index fund.

Yep. You're done. Yeah. You're totally correct. Yeah. So like I think yeah, there's a, there's a simplification model there and the efficiencies you get by not having to go through all the bureaucracy. You could share that saving with the user in a sense.

Yeah. I think there, there is an opportunity there. I'm very confident of that. Like, but yeah, there's like there's a bit of a bit of calculus you'd have to do to work out. Like, where are you going to make your money and what's the best way to do it, et cetera. I think that's a whole category of startups. that are just now in the past couple years being attacked. Because in the past, I was like, I'm going to just make developer tools and stuff.

Yeah, if it's just me and my editor, it's a lot easier. What is interesting is the people are probably best positioned to do it, don't necessarily have the programming skills. So like there's, I could imagine a world where like some universities says, hey, we're going to have our MBAs meet our engineers and we're going to throw a lot of problems near and we're going to see what the fuck happens. And I could see that working. I wouldn't realize. I think the last question I have for you is, you've written all this content over the years.

You've done podcast, intercoms, like all over the place. What's the favorite, your favorite thing that you've ever made? Like me, I mean, like,

so obviously I'm supposed to say intercom. I can hear my fucking comms team in the year already. Not just the product. It's like, it can be a blog post, a podcast. Yeah. I'm going to assume you like intercom.

Yeah, for sure. Okay. So let's just take that off the table. I guess, um, for me personally, isn't the thing that will be a Des trainer

production of sorts. I didn't know it at the time, but I gave a seven minute talk in Boston, maybe five years ago, six years ago, called product strategy, mean saying no. And it has kind of been like, I'd say probably like, it's definitely the most popular talk I've ever given because it's seven minutes. And I think it was funny. It was done in the style where like the slide, I had no control over the slides and they changed every 15 seconds. That was one of those. So yeah. And so it kind of forces you to be a little bit dynamic and entertaining. But it came out pretty well. It was shit in rehearsal. I was convinced it's going to be terrible.

But it came out pretty well when I actually performed it for real. And I think it kind of, it, you know, it raised my profile substantially as a sort of public speaker. And I kind of sowed the seeds of a lot of future things. Like I got to speak at like, you know, 8,000 person events and stuff since then. But I think that was probably, that's probably the one that I look back and sort of chuckle about because, it wasn't like I had I intended that to happen but um but kind of forced into a corner like I've always been um my my my makeup is that I might I'm better under time pressure than I am under like like longitudinal sort of abstract projects whatever and that was one of those shit I have to do this thing in the next seven minutes you know it's like let's just get going turned it on and I kind of backed

into a corner that was what I produced and I I look back at that now and I kind of I find memories of it that's cool yeah we'll link up to it then in the podcast transcript. There's a supporting blog post as well. But yeah,

it was definitely some of the some of the more fun stuff I did. Awesome, man. Well, thanks for coming in. Thank you so much,

great. Great viewer. All right. Thanks for listening. So as always, the video and transcript are at blog. dot ycombinator.com.

And if you have a second, please subscribe and review the show. All right. See you next week.