- The co-founder originally started a PhD in computer science to measure programming skills but got bored due to uncomfortable findings about universities' grading methods.
- The co-founder started writing a blog about design and usability and met his future co-founder at a coffee morning in Dublin.
- They started an agency called Contrast and developed a side project called Exceptional, an error handler for developers.
- They faced communication challenges with users and developed features like chat, active user lists, and behavioral marketing automation.
- They sold Exceptional and used the backend to build Intercom, but had to start from scratch to gain new users.
- They used content marketing to attract users, writing blog posts about various topics and occasionally mentioning Intercom.
- The co-founder felt confident writing authoritative posts based on their experiences with Intercom and Exceptional.
- The co-founder had a background in computer science and moved into design, while the CEO and other engineers had various roles in the company. The co-founder's role has shifted throughout the process.

- The speaker discusses how their role at Intercom has shifted over time based on the company's needs.
- They initially focused on company vision and strategy, product development, and customer support.
- As the company grew, they took on additional roles in areas such as people ops, recruiting, and marketing.
- They found marketing to be challenging because there are no set rules or best practices.
- They learned by observing and absorbing information from other companies and making mistakes.
- The speaker emphasizes the importance of understanding how customers buy a product rather than just selling the product.
- They explain that different customers have different needs and reasons for purchasing, so it's important to be able to appeal to all of them.
- The speaker also discusses the marketing strategies used by Intercom to target different types of customers.

- The speaker discusses the content marketing strategy of Intercom, a company he works for.
- They aim to catch readers at a specific point in their journey and guide them towards choosing Intercom.
- They track repeat readers and popular articles, but admit they need to improve in tracking throughout the customer journey.
- The speaker emphasizes the importance of doing unattributable marketing to grow awareness before focusing on attributable marketing.
- They discuss the need to identify and solve customer problems and the importance of finding synonyms to describe those problems.
- The speaker explains how their product and marketing efforts are aligned, with both representing the core ideas of their company.
- They mention the importance of maintaining brand resonance and relevance.
- The speaker discusses how they decide which products to release based on their mission of making internet business personal.
- They emphasize the need for all aspects of the company, including product, marketing, and brand, to be in sync to avoid negative outcomes.

- Hiring the wrong people can lead to bad outcomes and a lack of alignment within the company.
- New hire onboarding is often neglected during fast growth periods, leading to a lack of understanding and alignment within the company.
- Maintaining alignment within a growing company is challenging, especially when there are multiple offices and time zones to coordinate.
- Hiring senior leaders in areas where the company lacks expertise can be difficult and time-consuming.
- The book "Managing Humans" by Rounds is recommended for first-time managers to understand the complexities of managing beyond technical skills.
- Startups should focus on developing a strong vision for their product and company.

- The speaker emphasizes the importance of having a strong sense of purpose for a company.
- They suggest that many people start with small ideas without considering the bigger picture or the unique problem they are solving.
- Solving a small and rare problem is not ideal for a successful product.
- It is important to match the product with a big or frequent problem in order to have success and scalability.
- Charging a lot of money for a product requires it to be self-serve and frictionless for users.
- Selling into a growing market can be beneficial, but the size and frequency of the problem still matter.
- Intercom's top growth initiatives for the next two years include being more direct about the ROI of their product and connecting their content phenomena with their software.

- The challenge for brands is being known and loved but not seen as a viable option for purchasing software or incubators.
- Being too demure or standoffish can deter potential customers from choosing a brand.
- It is important to find a balance between being too specific and too abstract in branding.
- Intercom focuses on being an intercom and making internet business personal.
- The brand needs to create an audience interested in internet businesses and their problems.
- Specificity in messaging and tailoring the onboarding process is crucial for converting customers.
- Unbundling the pitch into specific ways the product is bought has been effective for Intercom.

- The speaker discusses the success of Intercom in finding the right people and improving conversion rates through experimentation.
- They mention the lack of focus on audio in software design and the tension between customization and maintaining the identity of Intercom.
- The speaker considers their role at Intercom and the possibility of returning to product development.
- They mention two problems they think about: the lack of technology in soccer and the need for simplification in areas like pensions and insurance.
- The speaker reflects on their favorite creation, a 7-minute talk on product strategy that gained popularity and helped establish their profile as a public speaker.

The co-founder of Intercom started as a PhD student in computer science but became disenchanted with university grading methods. They started an agency called Contrast and developed a side project called Exceptional. They sold Exceptional and used the backend to build Intercom. The co-founder's role at Intercom has shifted over time, taking on additional responsibilities as the company grew. They emphasize the importance of understanding how customers buy a product and discuss the marketing strategies used by Intercom. Maintaining alignment within a growing company is challenging, and hiring the right people is crucial. Startups should focus on developing a strong vision and solving a big or frequent problem. Intercom's top growth initiatives include focusing on ROI and connecting their content with their software. The brand needs to create an audience interested in internet businesses and tailor the onboarding process for customers. Intercom has been successful in finding the right people and improving conversion rates through experimentation. The speaker reflects on their role at Intercom and their favorite creation, a talk on product strategy.

Des Traynor - https://twitter.com/destraynor - is the cofounder of Intercom - https://www.intercom.com/

Here's his talk Product Strategy Means Saying No - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AM6QQlgLSQ - and the blog post - https://blog.intercom.com/product-strategy-means-saying-no/

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.

My PhD was an attempt to see if we could automatically measure how good a programmer is, basically.

So I put them through a variety of simulated code and asked them to say what the output would be.

And, and you know, we had some really interesting findings from that research, but I got bored.

1 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 can program because they can't tell me what this code outputs.

People don't want to hear that, obviously.

Just because they figured out how to take exams well?

So typically the way, and this is true worldwide, I think, the way universities would mark a piece of code as they say, all right, we'll give them 3 points if they have a for loop and 2 points if they have an if statement.

So the phenomena is that template-based marking encourages template-based learning.

So people 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 something, study on new students.

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 he was organizing this coffee morning in Dublin City for all the people who worked on the internet, which is a small group and this is like 2006.

And, and I went along and, and actually a funny story is I met Owen for the first time there, who I went on to start Intercom with.

I also met my wife for the first time at that same meeting.

So I actually went and took a different job with a consultancy and then for 1 year, me and Owen kind of kept in touch.

And then 1 day he emailed me and said, Hey, I'm starting my own thing.

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 alert developers and notify them, hey this piece went wrong and here's who was affected.

And then 1 day we were getting really frustrated trying to communicate with our users because we had thousands and thousands of people using the product.

But The product was frequently performed slowly or fall over.

And the state of the internet back in 2010 wasn't good.

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.

Resurrect your email after 2 hours of going through it, trying to fix shit up.

And all of that, we had to do every single time we wanted to say anything to our customers.

So 1 day, we had this little message pop up in the bottom right hand corner of the product saying, hey, we're sorry we were down yesterday.

And people are like, oh, and we saw a lot of engagement on the blog post.

And then we sort of started to riff from there.

We're 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 in, you know, we started adding these little bits and pieces of features.

And 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.

All of this in 2017 is taken for granted, but this did not exist in 2011.

And then it was like, what if we could send a message to some people, but not all people?

What if we could send it at a specific time?

Today we call that behavioral marketing automation, but back then we were just like, this just seems like it makes sense.

So I remember distinctly reading 1 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.

Obviously we had been thinking that a lot, but the feedback we were getting from people really just pushed us and pushed us.

Eventually we sold Exceptional and it went on to become a part of Rackspace.

Then we had this little thing for talking to users.

We had a new problem now, we had no users.

So we had to go and build the back end so that we could give it to other people so that we would have our own customers so that we would know.

going to steal all the users from Exceptional and move over, because this was maybe the most asked question for you.

Yeah, so the folks who acquired Exceptional, they were actually kind enough to use Intercom to push 1 last message out to sort of say, hey, we're the new owners.

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.

And I think it was like July 1, 2011, we got to the top of Hacker News for like Intercom, like a cool new product or whatever.

And the engagement on that thread, I still read it out then.

That was the first 1 where I was like, I knew that other people had this problem.

And was that the HN, was that your first push for signups?

So we had a reasonable contact list from people who had used our previous products, people who we knew from conferences, or people who had read our old blog.

So we had an audience of sorts, and my job in the early days was literally mailing people every day, like, here's what intercom could look like inside your product.

1 by 1, like literally 1 by 1 we were onboarding people.

If they said yes, they'd jump on a Skype call with our CTO Kieron.

Like 1 by 1 we were winning customers And then once we felt we had a relatively smooth signup flow, we were 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 consultancy, content was the way we would try and get attention so we could attract clients.

And then later on it grow a user base for exceptional.

But what Intercom was very, it was, you know, we knew we were good at it.

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, 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, you know, a 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.

I think I wrote 93 of the first 100 posts.

And it was all like, here's how you grow a 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, we'd write a post around it, and every now and then we'd be like, oh, here's something else we added to Intercom.

Yeah, because 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.

A lot of people's attempt at content marketing is, I want to enter a 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.

You know, 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 and help them as much as you can.

And then every now and then, hopefully you're, if you're ideally aligned, your product also solves 1 of their problems for intercom.

It's usually like, you want to grow your web app or you want to grow your user base.

But we'll, but we know to get your attention, we have to plant many seeds.

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.

And, And that's how we, we have like, you know, very, very big readership of our blog today.

And it's 1 of our, you know, it is our dominant traffic source, but 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 the reason I would say I felt confident to do it is because I was never trying to say, here's a scale of $100 million error or company or whatever.

We were always talking about, all of our experiences were based on the 2 products we had run, intercom and exceptional.

And it was like the lessons that we had learned.

So I, I was always careful to kind of qualify like, Hey, like we're at 6,000 active users, we were at 0 4 months ago.

I can talk to you about the 0 to 6,000 thing.

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.

At that time, did you consider yourself a strategist?

No, no, I consider myself like a startup person, if you know what I mean.

No, no, So I was a computer science undergrad.

In fact, all of the founders studied computer science, but our CEO and I moved into design as our career.

I was a UX designer, usability testing, interaction design, that sort of stuff.

And then we had 2 other engineers, a person who built the front end of Intercom, like the little messenger piece.

And then our CTO basically owned the rest.

Because I was curious about what your role has been throughout the process.

And we talked before you were on camera, it's already shifting again.

I do go to wherever the biggest problem that I think I can help with is.

I want Intercom to be a world class company and wherever I see areas where I think I can help level up, I'll jump in.

In the very early days I had sort of 3 jobs, work with Owen on company vision strategy, that sort of stuff.

I worked with Ciarán and David on what they're actually building day to day, and then basically talked to users and trying to help people find out about Intercom.

So that was blogging, I used to do webinars at like, you know, 7pm in the evening in Dublin for people over 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 more senior product folk.

And then, and then at some point, maybe around 25 people, I was like, all right, product looks like it's in a good place.

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 1 or 2 people.

I worked with Jeff, who's the 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, Bits of recruiting were the next thing.

And then about 2 years ago it was marketing.

So we've kind of got to a point where we think Intercom is definitely, the product's definitely going to the right place.

We'd love to kind of refine our ideas about 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 we've been working on for 2 years.

And as you said, there'll be future problems I'm sure.

But it's so cool because so rarely founders shift roles in entirely separate categories.

It's very common when you start a company to start doing everything and then focus, but to shift roles between groups is different.

And I do agree, it's not the default thing.

Usually you find your corner and you stay in it for a very good reason.

I think 2 years ago when I was starting in marketing I felt a little intimidated because marketing itself, it's not really, there's no real marketing 101 sort of thing.

Well, it's less quantifiable than like, this code runs or this code doesn't run.

And if I sit here and name somebody who's good at marketing and you're not allowed to say Apple, like everyone's opinion is kind of different.

So, so I'm like, frankly, like marketers don't really like write many articles about how to think about things or like how you structure things or, you know, I've talked to maybe 50 different VPs of marketing at this point about how their marketing org is structured and they're all different.

Like very, like, like not just different as an, Ooh, you put 1 person up, like substantively different.

Like even like in terms of like sometimes brand design is inside, sometimes it's outside, sometimes communications reports to CEO, sometimes reports to a partner marketing, You know, all of that's different.

So I did find it quite intimidating early on.

And more so than the other areas where I felt there was a lot of literature and there's a lot of best practices out there.

And I, 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.

And we, 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 of rules that you've kind of, maybe learned just through experience over the past couple of years that you could share?

Yeah, I guess, there, there's definitely like principles I've just picked up over time.

1 is the general narrative about marketing.

People will tell, the engineers approach to marketing is like, we're going to hire a marketer and they're going to find the keywords that are CAC 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.

Someone's going to be like, sorry Des, I have 1 case.

It never happens 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, the next, I guess, the, Let me just take a look and see.

So aside from that, like the next piece I think is, understanding how people buy your product is more important than selling your product, if you know what I mean?

So 1 big eye opener for me was that like, some people come shopping for intercom, Some people come shopping for a chat widget on a website.

Some people come looking for a solution to their growth challenges.

And they're all actually looking for intercom.

And what I mean is like, there are various levels of abstraction, various ways people can buy your product.

So like, I think a lot of times companies get sucked into selling their product 1 particular way.

And maybe they, like, you know, maybe they, they pick 1 of those things and like, we are, you know, 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.

Because they talk to their friend and their friend recommends it.

And like, so you, so you have this brand 1, which is like, your friend says, install Intercom.

Then you have this, like maybe, you know, you've changed marketing leaders and they're like, Hey, we need live chat on our 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 1 of the challenges is actually, we're not converting leads in our homepage.

Now at this point, like should they install optimizely?

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 1 of the big lessons for us in intercom has been like learning to be able to like, to put our hand up in all of those different shopping journeys.

So that was like 1, whenever I speak to other people who are maybe like earlier on in the marketing career and they're looking for guidance, typically what they find is like, you know, inter Google advertising, they're bidding on their own company name.

And I'm like, that's cool, but that's actually not where, you know, That's not what people are shopping for, right?

For people in the tech industry who know they want to do an accelerator, the likelihood that they know what YC is is pretty high.

And we can convince them to do YC, possibly.

Then there are other people that have no idea what a startup is or have this vague notion.

And so what strategies do you guys use to appeal to that type of person or each of those people without alienating the others?

Yeah, so this is kind of a core of how we think about it.

So when you have somebody who, obviously, YC has a brand.

And maybe you're so dominant you don't even need to bid on that, because they're going to find you anyway.

But also, in some sense, there is no substitute.

As you take a step back, like some people just want the money, right.

And it's like, I'll take YC, I'll take Techstars, I'll take 500 startups, whatever.

And Now the question is, should you bid on 500 startups to keyword, right?

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 if you can pull that off, you now get to like compete for all the super set of the traffic, not just the YC shoppers anymore.

And then you have the people who have a startup and they don't know if they want money or not.

In which case, these people aren't googling.

They're not going, hypothetically, if I was to start a startup, would I want...

Yeah, you'd be the only person bidding on it, and that'd be you testing it.

Basically what happens is the amount, the size is getting bigger each time.

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Be Wary of Solving a Small, Rare Problem - Des Traynor of Intercom