What’s so special about Intercom?
If you’re a fan of beautiful products, or have had to think about customer engagement, and support for your business in the last five years — you’ve likely heard of Intercom. And if you haven’t heard of Intercom, you’ve probably heard the deluge of customer love that follows it around (see below!)
The big question is why? What has Intercom done that makes it so special?
Customer support and engagement was not a new concept when Intercom launched, but it is no surprise that it was done poorly for so long despite advancements in cloud technology and cloud software design. About a year ago, Intercom publicly shared a blog post sharing parts of their journey since founding the company. These included: growing from $1-$50M ARR in three years, maintaining their incredible world of mouth growth with 99% of new customer growth still being inbound, and passing 100k monthly active users. Additionally, they just announced a $125M round to grow their platform. These metrics are incredible, but I believe there is something deeper, and more special about Intercom that has made it successful today. I’d distill it to three core tenants: simplicity, transparency, and culture.
(1) SIMPLICITY — Stay true to the vision from Day 1: I still remember the first time we met Eoghan McCabe, co-founder and CEO of Intercom, in late 2013. We had been fans of the product from afar and had heard raving reviews from a vast array of companies for the last few months. Intercom’s vision was incredibly simple: make internet business personal. Eoghan asked, if software is the future of work, why is it so hard to use, and so impersonal? Intercom wanted to build a product, which when used felt like you were talking to the owner of a coffee shop in your neighborhood, a business you had known for years: simple, intuitive, warm — but also equipped with answers and results.
Why shouldn’t every customer engagement feel that way, if the software can be both powerful and elegant? This original vision was central to Intercom’s viral adoption, and despite a rise of competitors who are now picking off small verticals within customer engagement, Intercom’s strength in balancing strong customer brand with targeted actions (messages, inbox, articles), remains unchanged.
(2) TRANSPARENCY — You’ve got to get personal to build a personal product: Last year, I attended the last stop of Intercom’s 2017 World Tour in San Francisco. The tour was a series of events hosted in several cities around the world where Intercom employees would give short TED-style talks to their large community of users and fans. You’d think the talks were about how to best utilize Intercom within your company, or how using Intercom could lead to high ROI. Wrong! These talks were all about the mistakes Intercom has made — and what it learned from those mistakes. I still remember how I felt walking into the venue. It was nothing like I expected. Intercom fans stood outside the venue in long lines waiting to get checked in — they weren’t there for a meeting, or to close a sale — they had showed up on a weekday evening to gather around and listen to a company share their ups and downs over the last few years. When people line up for Apple’s WWD, it’s a summation of all that is great at the company. Products and presentations are perfected over years to project the best version of the company for a short few minutes.
But Intercom does it differently — they know that the new generation of founders and users want to talk about the hard parts of internet business — the times when they hired the wrong people, or launched a product at the wrong time. How could Intercom sell software that made business personal, without getting personal themselves? Megan Sheridan of Intercom says it best in her blog post: “History isn’t romantic. Success is never pure. This is our messy, true story.” Users showed up because they knew Intercom would give them a glimpse into what happens on the “inside.” It sounds cliché, but there was magic in the hall — no one was checking their phones, there was a fervent energy and excitement that is so deeply lacking in broader Silicon Valley today. Here’s a glimpse of that night.
3) CULTURE— Don’t forget the passion, art, and creativity: 2017 was an interesting year politically. Lots of communities banded together to fight for universal rights that were under threat. Emotions flared, several tech companies made bold statements in protest, but few, if any, took action. Intercom was, again, different. I still remember when Eoghan authored a post right after the purposed Muslim ban in late January 2017. There was no way he and the broader Intercom team would stay quiet while the very dream that brought them to the United States could be taken away from other immigrants, destined to create the next Intercom, or Facebook, or Google. He offered to help immigrants relocate to Dublin (where the engineering and product teams of Intercom were headquartered.)
The post was bold, brave, and inspiring — and when most of the highly powerful, resource rich companies in Silicon Valley touted what their PR firms told them to say — the team at Intercom took real, unscripted action. I’m sure every employee at Intercom, regardless of race and gender, felt taken care of that day, and worked a little harder, knowing that the company they dedicated a large part of their working day to, had their back. Little moments like this go a long way for culture — they contribute to it in ways that free gym membership, or extra salad toppings simply can’t.
Eoghan said it best in a blog post:
“We still feel like outsiders in Silicon Valley and the SaaS industry. We’ve stayed skeptical of the Valley playbooks, or at least never thought we could make them work for us. And in a time of excitement for things like artificial intelligence, we’ve been more interested in facilitating authentic connection (our mission being to make business personal). We’ve tried to put passion and art and love and creativity ahead of revenue and valuation and buzz and traction, discovering that the latter can often follow the former.”
I hope the broader Silicon Valley community can learn a bit from Intercom’s playbook. I’m incredibly proud to be a very small part of their journey.
