Intercom

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• neutral assessment Unattributed

  I mean, you'd be pretty pissed off if you're Intercom, wouldn't you? Sorry.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  Because look, we put some money in Intercom recently. Intercom achieved that valuation. It could have happened for Intercom had they sold in 2018, 19 in the SaaS boom.

• neutral assessment Des Traynor

  Uh, in intercom when we launched, we built this map feature. Uh, it's just one of the small things intercom can do. Uh, it shows you all your users around the world, right? And we thought this was a map. So, we were like, hey, that's cool. And then we wondered why it wasn't popular. And we saw well people roll this little map out when they want to impress people at a trade show or people tweet the map when they want to show people check out how many customers we have or people use it when they'r

• neutral fact_claim Des Traynor

  we sell to internet businesses

• neutral fact_claim Des Traynor

  We did a series B last year of 23 million.

• neutral fact_claim Des Traynor

  we still do this in intercom today sign up for your product every week

• neutral fact_claim Des Traynor

  intercom we want to make internet business personal

• neutral fact_claim Des Traynor

  we keep a trusted testers group who are people who get a discount of intercom ... that's about 2,000 people

• bullish endorsement Des Traynor

  don't ever compete on resources sort of thing if grow have a good idea that's a massive lever on your business if that can't happen you're not being smart

• bullish endorsement Des Traynor

  growth is a product your acquisition your onboarding is a product just like your product is and it deserves as much love and attention

• bullish endorsement Des Traynor

  when you have like someone who literally owns those screens they get to like run like longer term things and see which they like and they build up this whole Corpus of knowledge

• mixed prediction Des Traynor

  I think I would have red we did the growth team sooner ... start of year two ... when we knew we had a product and we knew we had an abandon issue

• neutral assessment Des Traynor

  we always iterate on a winning thing and we always kill a thing that's not working out

• neutral fact_claim Des Traynor

  when we looked at like you know how intergram was going to get adopted Lar companies C and talk wasn't a job there's no like Chief C and talk officer in a company so we were like all right well you know what how does this play out so we're like well what are you actually doing and they're like well in our case we're using intercom to reach out to people to help them get on board and they're like oh so and what's your job and they like well I'm a growth marketer or whatever oh okay right got it s

• neutral fact_claim Des Traynor

  we built intercom to help us see and talk to our users and that was literally our statement of the problem as a small little side project app right and we built intercom as a spin out of this right

• bullish endorsement Des Traynor

  we also launch this new product acquire and what acquir is it takes this messy code snippet all the way back to this and the great thing about this is there's no code here at all so we don't need engineers at all

• bullish assessment Des Traynor

  this is just consistent reconsideration of the fundamentals of what it means to get started with intercom and I you know I've given you some quantifiable data there that shows you exactly the raw impact this has on business it is significant and not to be ignored

• bullish fact_claim Des Traynor

  uh here our conversion rate was 30% here we added CSV and then our conversion 40 45% so that's you know depending on how you want to hear your data that's a 50% Improvement in conversion rate right

• neutral fact_claim Des Traynor

  we boasted about things like having no API today we boast about things like having an API

• bullish fact_claim Des Traynor

  we made the steps more obvious we tried to simplify the bit we came to the conclusion that it got more complicated the more stuff we showed so we said let's just have a switcher and that gave us a little kick and all these things gave us a little kick in conversion

• bullish fact_claim Des Traynor

  we have an entire team called customer acquisition it's like a product manager three Engineers an engineering lead two designers and their only concern in this world is onboarding and it works

• neutral assessment Des Traynor

  you actually have to talk to people

• bullish assessment Des Traynor

  when you get that beautiful sync between like problem statement and like customer solution you have a really really high converting web page

• neutral assessment Des Traynor

  this is what led to us splitting intercom into four

• neutral fact_claim Des Traynor

  in intercom we have over 9,000 customers 66 million funding

• neutral fact_claim Des Traynor

  I've actually never seen a company with like worse data

• bullish assessment Des Traynor

  It always looks exponential in history. But it feels like a fucking grind at the time.

• bullish fact_claim Des Traynor

  Because like, at Intercom, we, you know, and a lot of companies, does this goal of like net negative churn, that is, on a normal moment, if you didn't grow at all, your company would still get bigger, because your existing customers should expand, outpacing who quits.

• neutral fact_claim Des Traynor

  looks beautiful, right? Hottest company in the valley, Intercom didn't even do it, you know?

• neutral fact_claim Des Traynor

  And intercom is a sort of, our mission, for example, is like to make internet business personal

• bullish assessment Des Traynor

  So there's this new generation of companies, of which I would submit Intercom, would be a part. Slack would be there. Stripe would be there. Atlassian are there. People who build a product, and the product is the core of the offering, and everything else follows the product.

• neutral fact_claim Des Traynor

  It's hard for us to roll out stuff to test the waters, when you have 100,000 people logging into intercom every day, and like, hey, we just thought it'd be funny to move the inbox. They don't like that, it turns out. Change a version is a real thing.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  At Intercom, every single team has a stated list of values. And then every time you go in to interview a candidate, you're told you're testing for a think big, start small.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  I was reminded of this this morning when a certain CTO of Basecamp was critiquing our revenue saying that we're not quite profitable yet. Because we're trending towards profitability, but not yet profitable.

• bullish endorsement Des Traynor

  these are the moats that like we think about a lot in Intercom and that's why you know in Intercom we have actually we've done a lot of work to build a platform that is Intercom and we're going to keep going and keep going and that and you'll see more of that in the future. We've done a lot of work to similarly to build this community like this photo is from our San Francisco world tour we had like a couple of thousand people here who came along just to see talks about like what mistakes we've m

• neutral assessment Des Traynor

  if your product works, and it's really really unique, over a long enough time, your payback will be that everyone in the industry expects to have it in their in all of your competitors and as a result your competitive differentiation your moat will be eroded.

• neutral assessment Des Traynor

  in SaaS specifically, software as a service, uh every feature is basically one that either fails as in no one uses it or it succeeds for you and then all your competitors copy it.

• neutral assessment Des Traynor

  if your product road map looks something like this where things just keep getting more and more and more messy, uh understand that you're going to have problems. You're going to like maintaining all this code is a nightmare. There'll be bugs all over the place. No one knows what it is. Your customers won't know how to use it. All of your model will break.

• neutral assessment Des Traynor

  some parts of your product are your core innovation. Uh some parts of your product are just there to round out your product and they don't need you don't need to experiment with how reset password works. Just make it work, you know. However, there are core pieces where you really want to have a sort of dominant and really intriguing position in the market.

• neutral assessment Des Traynor

  And if if we left our product teams to their own devices, uh they might go off and come up with a really creative solution to what I would call a checkbox. And uh and that's not a good use of time or money or focus or or anything.

• neutral fact_claim Des Traynor

  We never intended for like the in-app or the pop-up to define Intercom. It wasn't We didn't sit down and go, 'Oh, that'll be our signature piece.' But it is now our signature piece. That messenger is like the thing that kind of dominates when people think of Intercom.

• neutral assessment Des Traynor

  A couple of years ago we uh realized we had to support customers who wanted to send hundreds of millions of push notifications. Uh and we started doing that and everything was going great until one day the website wasn't there anymore. And we're like, "What the hell happened?" And that was a huge like product health can basically trump everything when it when it wants to.

• neutral fact_claim Des Traynor

  For a while this is how Intercom's road map looked. We had seven inputs. I think today we have five. We've merged a few.

• neutral assessment Des Traynor

  Lord knows we have dozens of copycats.

• neutral fact_claim Des Traynor

  Intercom powers like 500 million conversations a month.

• neutral assessment Des Traynor

  Intercom has kind of hit some sort of new point and obviously all eyes now are not on the valuation that we currently had or the product that we currently have. It's kind of what's the next 3 years? What's the next uh journey do we have to go on?

• bearish criticism Des Traynor

  We've had to correct this ... we let these people iterate independently.

• neutral fact_claim Des Traynor

  This has happened at times in Intercom where we where we've had to correct this but most of the time it happens is because we do we let these people iterate independently.

• bullish endorsement Des Traynor

  We always believe in a single platform for all conversations.

• bullish endorsement Des Traynor

  We always believe in the right message to the right person at the right time. That's why we don't build anything that would permit spam.

• bullish endorsement Des Traynor

  In Intercom, we say we always design for both sides of the conversation.

• neutral assessment Des Traynor

  our mission in Intercom is to make web internet business personal. Uh that's what we try to do. That's what we tried to do in 2011 and every year since.

• neutral assessment Des Traynor

  Intercom itself, we start off small solving small problems and then it turned out we were able to do it all on a common platform and that's the kind of what how we are today. We're like a suite of tools on a platform.

• bullish prediction Des Traynor

  that's why I believe that we'll we will have a successful outcome.

• neutral assessment Des Traynor

  Whenever I see a company struggling even with a great product idea, it's cuz people are running in different directions and the sum output is zero.

• neutral assessment Des Traynor

  If we didn't have principles, I would spend like with like 400 odd people, I would spend I I would say like 160 hours a week just answering these low-level questions.

• neutral assessment Des Traynor

  the only way any of you will go beyond 10 people in your company is by establishing that you need to have principles that you operate on, and those principles need to be codified for the people that you hire.

• neutral assessment Des Traynor

  every decision you're making highlights a principle that you don't have, basically. If you have to make a decision, why is it the person who came to you for that decision couldn't make it themselves?

• bullish endorsement Des Traynor

  build what you sell and sell what you build.

• neutral fact_claim Des Traynor

  Intercom's product team is maybe 150 people at the moment.

• neutral fact_claim Des Traynor

  Intercom, when we started it, was 2011. Um and we were four people. And we raised about after a year, we raised a seed of 1 on 6. And today we're 470 people.

• bullish endorsement David Friedberg

  already know about it i don't need to tell you it's the best way to get to know and talk to your customers

• bullish assessment Des Traynor

  our business is on a certain trajectory and you basically assume that that's going to continue unless you do anything inorganic to change it and then you say right that's like you know things are going well we've had a great year we're going to invest a lot more into hiring a lot more okay what do we think that's going to do

• bullish assessment Des Traynor

  intercom is like obviously scaled at this point like we have many product lines you know way over 100 million in revenue and all that one of the things we still continue to need to do is like build a new building like new lines of business into the into the sort of the platform and get them started so you know every year or two we have to kind of start a new type of startup now we have an advantage versus say like a launch incubator startup and that we've got like 30 000 customers ready to go bu

VentureSignalScore 27.2/100 for intercom, composed from 1 of 4 components (index v0 cross-signal), discounted ×0.79 for 30% signal coverage