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doesn't mean like you know it does not mean that they're like they're not going to go on to be hundred billion dollar companies forever more.
if you think about the funnel top of the funnel sales where salesforce is strong the middle of the funnel is hubspot end of the funnel is say zendesk and they each like so zendesk were like support and they're running back up the funnel much like salesforce are running down the funnel yeah what are trying to branch out and uh and we're sitting here kind of like part of us is going haha we were right all along but then the other part of us is like oh all these people are now trying to move into o
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
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
Stop at the very second you bump into like a market leader, I would say, stop. So, if the next step in the user's workflow is charge a credit card, don't go and build Stripe. Let Stripe be Stripe. Integrate with Stripe.
communicating workplace in the workplace. That's a big problem and it happens all the damn time and that's why it's Slack, a $5 company.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Lord knows we have dozens of copycats.
Intercom powers like 500 million conversations a month.
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?
We've had to correct this ... we let these people iterate independently.
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.
We always believe in a single platform for all conversations.
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.
In Intercom, we say we always design for both sides of the conversation.
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.
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.
that's why I believe that we'll we will have a successful outcome.
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.
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.
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.
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?
build what you sell and sell what you build.
Intercom's product team is maybe 150 people at the moment.
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.
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.
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.
I've actually never seen a company with like worse data
It always looks exponential in history. But it feels like a fucking grind at the time.
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.
looks beautiful, right? Hottest company in the valley, Intercom didn't even do it, you know?
And intercom is a sort of, our mission, for example, is like to make internet business personal
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.
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.
we keep a trusted testers group who are people who get a discount of intercom ... that's about 2,000 people
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
growth is a product your acquisition your onboarding is a product just like your product is and it deserves as much love and attention
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
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
we always iterate on a winning thing and we always kill a thing that's not working out
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
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
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
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
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
we boasted about things like having no API today we boast about things like having an API
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
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
you actually have to talk to people
when you get that beautiful sync between like problem statement and like customer solution you have a really really high converting web page
this is what led to us splitting intercom into four
in intercom we have over 9,000 customers 66 million funding
there will come a Tipping Point like the pressure to monetize will provoke things and it will create this big whole opening called we're like Twitter but with like less odds or whatever or with less uh privacy concerns
if you take something like Twitter the more users on Twitter the more users on Twitter so if everyone's using Twitter everyone else will start using Twitter that's a positive samide Network effect and then the more people on Twitter the more advertisers on Twitter so that's a cross-side positive the more advertisers in Twitter the less advertisers in Twitter if everyone's there the part's over the cpms get to get ridiculous and it's just no longer any fun and then lastly the more advertisers the
LinkedIn did this really well they moved well they didn't move but they offered an alternative to these heavyweight endorsements where you have to write a testimonial as to why somebody is great and I said why don't you just click this button and it's going endorse this person for five skills doesn't matter if they have them
people like LinkedIn are really really good at this uh you know basically no matter what I do in LinkedIn the chances there all my contacts get told about it
this campaign I'm a Mac I'm a PC this this did it really really well because they presented like uh you know they presented the PC as being Aller uh as being like old outdated crop slow riddled with malware all the stuff that was pushing people away from the PC they presented the Mac as being young and hip and cool and beautiful and all this sort of stuff and then they did other things they told you things like guess what Microsoft Office Works in the Mac so that that's their attacking the habit
is there a large cost for say using more than one driving or more than one of the transport ation apps no there's not uh for either side driver or passenger can both use Uber lift whatever no problem
we still do this in intercom today sign up for your product every week
intercom we want to make internet business personal
doesn't mean like you know it does not mean that they're like they're not going to go on to be hundred billion dollar companies forever more.
I'm not saying that they're wrong because I'm sure that they're building a network. It's just it's not as well defined.
LinkedIn has actually opened up a market for it's like LinkedIn but for people you've worked with, which is actually what they used to be, right?
it's rendered the value of your LinkedIn social network to be like less than what it once was.
I'm pretty sure somewhere that is a team in LinkedIn celebrating every new feature they've made that helps you automatically connect to hundreds and thousands of your friends and and endorse them all for WordPress while you're doing it.
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
we sell to internet businesses
We did a series B last year of 23 million.