Most founders who love building products under-invest in the market they're building for - and even a great product in a great market can still fail. Product/market fit, Paul Adams argues, is missing a third piece: the story that tells the market why to choose you over everyone else.
Drawing on Intercom's nine-year journey, he lays out a system of product, market and story - the what, the who and the why - all fed by customer feedback. He breaks down the eleven things every team should be able to articulate in a single sentence, and shows how to keep the feedback engine honest, because bad-quality inputs in mean bad decisions out.
Auto-generated transcript - may contain errors. Tap a timestamp to jump the video.
Hello again, everyone. Brian Corcoran here at TuringFest HQ, and welcome to week four of our epic online event. A quick recap on what we saw last week in case you missed it. We'd Andy Jarvis from Eximo marketing talking us through the science of persuasion.
So that's a must watch for anyone who's in a customer facing role. Former Google, Microsoft product manager, Itzmar Gillad gave us a really, really in-depth presentation on his own product development framework, which he calls just and he thinks is a better alternative to roadmaps.
And then we had free agent co founder, Ron Lavery gave us a really thoughtful, pretty deep dive into building effective and happy teams with a focus on the tricky concept of autonomy. Speaking of free agents, they're a longtime supporter of TuringFest and of the entire Scottish tech ecosystem.
They're hiring for some product roles right now. So if that's what you're looking for, you can check them out on the event app in our expo. We also had a really, really interesting chat, myself and Debbie Shreedhar, Professor Debbie Shreedhar at the University of Edinburgh, she is one of the world's leading experts on global health.
And if you don't follow her already on Twitter, I strongly recommend that she's been a paragon of sensible and informed communication through this whole COVID situation with a really interesting and eye opening conversation about where we are, how we got here, where we're going next.
So that's, that's well worth well worth looking at all of the above keynotes and interviews. So everything that we've had so far, at the conference is available on the event platform. So that's exclusively available to delegates. So check it out at your leisure.
And then on to on to today. So this afternoon, we have three excellent keynotes lined up. The at the end of the day, we'll have email marketing expert Val Geisler, talking us through how to retain your customers and avoid churn. A pretty essential skill to master for any business, particularly in subscription.
In the middle, we've check Warner, who's the co founder of Ada Ventures, a very noteworthy addition to the venture landscape in the UK in the last two years. Checks also spoken at the conference two years ago, you may have seen her before. She's talking about the importance of building moats, defensible moats in your in your products and your business from a strategic perspective.
But to kick us off, we have someone that I've been after to speak at drink fest for ages, his his colleague Des Trainor was on our stage in twenty eighteen gave one of the one of my favorite talks that we've had actually at the conference.
And intercom remains to my mind, one of Europe's very best, very best startups, whether they're still a European startup or not, is open to debate. We maybe talk to Paul about that afterwards. But Paul Adams is coming up next. He's their senior vice president of product.
Super interesting guy, loads of well developed thoughts around the world of product and and around company building as well. So he's going to be talking about some of the systems that intercom use and that have served them to get to where they are today.
So without further ado, let's go and hear from Paul Adams from intercom. Hey, everyone. My name is Paul Adams. I work at Intercom. Delighted to be here to talk to you today, take some questions afterwards. I'm gonna talk about something that I've been calling product market story fit.
And so I'm sure you're familiar with the idea of product market fit. I'm gonna make it a little bit more complicated for you unfortunately. But hopefully today you'll learn a whole bunch of things that might help you scale or grow depending on what you're trying to do right now.
So I just want to start by showing you the intercom journey because it's useful context for what I'm going share later. Intercom is nine years old. We've grown in every dimension imaginable from four founders to over six hundred employees, from no customers to thirty thousand, from no revenue at all to over one hundred and fifty million, and then from no funding to over two forty five million.
So it's been an epic journey as I'm sure many of you can attest to who are out there trying to do the same thing And we've made a million mistakes along the way, learned hard, adapted, changed. And so what I'm gonna do is talk to you about how we've set up the company to successfully succeed year after year as we went through different stages of growth.
So I'm going to give you some key takeaways, I think there's five in here, but the talk really is one you'll want to print out and use with your team. I'm going to talk a lot about systems and the systems that we use to decide what we build and how we take things to market.
And so you might wanna actually sit down with a printed version of what your teammates, talk to them about it, go through things, and see how you feel about where you are. So this is the basic overall system. So at the top we have our mission which is the reason that we exist other than to make money.
And so I hope that any of you listening out there have a mission and don't just exist to make money. You have a vision for the future, so that's the future you want to see created, it's things you believe about the future. This is the future that will only be created because of the things that you're gonna build and bring to the world.
And then of course you've got your strategy which is how you will win. And below that I've got a big giant box which is a system for finding and maintaining strategic success. And so that is actually what I'm gonna talk about today. So there's two parts to this.
One is just the overall system itself, and then I'm gonna dive deeper into a specific part of the system around customer feedback. So part one, the overall system. I'm sure that many of you are familiar with this product market fit. As I said earlier, the right product for the right market.
That's the kind of basic definition that most people would agree to some version of. And when we think about it, we think about the market and the product, think about the market as your potential customers, and then we think about the product, of course, as the product for them, your product for them.
And when I talk to a lot of entrepreneurs and founders and people kind of early in the journey of building a company, often they're kind of product y people. They're like me and many of the Intercom founders when we started out, very producty, love products, love building products, love the craft and the art and the science of making software.
And we think a lot about this. We bias heavily towards this side of the thing. And unfortunately for many, don't think enough about the other side which is the potential market for your product. And of course you can have good or great or poor markets and good or great or poor products.
And so when you don't think about these enough, don't think about the relationships between them. So you can actually have a great market but a poor product, and you may in fact succeed. We could have a poor market and a great product and you're unlikely to succeed.
And so the relationship between these things matters a lot. If you have a great market, a huge market, and I'll show you some details of what that means in a second, a really, really healthy market, if you have a great market, you'll probably succeed even with a poor product.
If have a great product in a great market, you're set up for breakout success. I'm sure if any of us can attest to there are very successful products that aren't the best products you've used, and yet they have huge success. One of the reasons is because those companies were very, very good at picking a great market.
You could have a good product you might do well sorry, you could have a good market and you might do well if you've got a great product or a good product, but you're going to start to struggle a bit if you have a poor product in a good market.
And of course, lastly, if you have a poor market, you're screwed. There isn't really much you can do. And a lot of companies end up in this situation almost unknowingly at times, and throughout my career before Intercom, I ended up in this situation personally quite a lot trying to build products, and we thought they were good products or great products even, and unfortunately either we were wrong or the market was really poor and it just wasn't a good market for them.
Frankly, you could debate whether this thing is even true. If the market is so poor, there's no really such thing as a good product there. It's a little bit of delusion. So these relationships are really, really important. So that's the first takeaway. If you love building products, make sure you're paying just as much attention to the market.
So let's dig into that market side. So the market is is who. Who are your target customers? Who are you targeting? Who are these companies or people? You know, you're if you're b to c, it's it's obviously just people. You might call them users instead of customers.
But if you're B2B, you got to think about the companies themselves. Are they successful companies? Are they likely to be around for a long time? If they're not, then you've got a challenge on your hands. Then you have the second part of the market which is the problem.
It's these potential customers' problems. These problems seem to be very well understood, but what's really critical is that the problems that these people have are important to them. Again, this is kind of a classic trap people fall into, that they can observe problems through user research and so on, but actually in reality people don't really care that much about those problems.
They're kind like low energy problems, low priority problems rather than high priority problems, problems people really want to see a better solution for. Another component here is whether you believe your company, your team, with your unique talents and abilities can uniquely solve this problem or these problems.
It's important that you believe that you can be set up to succeed here. And the third thing and the final thing about the market is the health of that market. So how healthy is it? How many of these customers are they? How big are these companies if you're a B2B company?
How much money do they have? Is it lucrative? These are all the things that kind of make up the health of a market. And so when you think about this box overall, you're kind of thinking that you need lots of potential customers with problems that they care a lot about and that they're willing to spend money to see solved.
So that's the market side. Then you have the product side, which of course is the what. If the market is the who, the product is the what. So what is your product? What solution do you have for this problem or these problems that these potential customers have and how are you specifically gonna solve their problems?
And then lastly on the product side is product quality, which I'll get into in a little more detail. How good is your product? Is it a high quality product? Is it something that these customers look at and think that is the solution for me?
The thing that drives this system is customer feedback. So taking market feedback, feed it from the market, inputting it into the product that you build, deciding what to build, how you're gonna build it, taking that thing back out to the market, learning if it works, learning what people say and do and if they use it or buy it or don't and talking to them and observing them and feeding that back in.
This is a kind of everlasting cycle. This system in this state is never standing still. It's always evolving. So the market is always evolving. You get new companies coming into the market, they all launch different features, the market changes, how much energy people have around things might change over time.
And of course you're trying to update your product, improve your product, so this thing is in constant motion. The third thing though, and bit I'm gonna add to product market fit is that you could have a great market and you could have a great product and you still may not succeed.
You still not be a successful business and that's because you might be missing one thing. That thing is the story. The story that you tell to the market. Your position in the market and the reason to choose you and your product. So the story is the why. Why are you better?
You could have a great product in a great market, but there could be other great products in this great market. And if there's many great products in a great market, that's often the case. Great markets tend to attract a lot of great competition and great products, then you need to be differentiated.
There needs be a reason why someone would choose you over everyone else. The second thing is the value, the kind of value equation. So are you good value for money? Have you correctly figured out how much customers are willing to pay? Are you too expensive?
If you're too expensive, then some other good products or great products, or they could even just be on the good spectrum might beat you because there's just a better value for money equation there. And then lastly, there's demand. So can you create and generate lots of demand for your product?
A great product, of course, is kind of pointless if no one's ever heard about it. And so when you go out to the market and try and tell people about it, these big problems, high energy problems that they have, and your solution you think is really well set up for them, they need to care and listen.
And so you've got to be able to generate demand. So this is the kind of basic system, but I'm going add one more thing. And that one more thing is the financial plan. So this is obviously the business goals that you have. Everything in this system should sit inside the financial plan and all of these things should be working in harmony and in unison in order to hit that financial plan.
Another thing to think about in this system is org design. So typically, product engineering team own the product box here, the marketing team own the story box, and the sales team own the market box. And one thing that we've learned over the years is that these boxes left to their own devices tend to operate independently because it's much harder to collaborate than to not sometimes.
And we've made a huge effort at Intercom to try and make these three functions work together so that we are building and selling and marketing the same thing. That may sound really obvious that you would build, market, and sell the same thing, but in fact it's not.
It's very common for those things to be out of sync. So for example, the sales team selling something that's not built yet and has no plan to be built, or a marketing team telling a story about something that doesn't quite yet exist. And so it's really important that these three things work in unison and that they're based on the financial plan and customer feedback.
The key insight here is that you need all eleven things in this system which might sound like a lot and it might sound a bit daunting. Hence I was telling you to you might wanna print this out at some stage in the future and actually sit down with your team and go through each of these eleven things individually and say, do we have a very clear and easy articulation of who the target customer is, what their problems are?
And if you can't easily articulate in one sentence or two sentences the answer to each of these eleven things, then you've got work to do, which is the second takeaway here. If you can't easily explain each one of these eleven things, you have work to do.
Okay, so that's part one. That's that overall system of product market story fit. Part two is the customer system. So when we think about this system, I'm gonna simplify it a little here and say that the market is the who, the product is the what, and the story is the why.
And again, you need all three of these things. Customer feedback, like I said earlier, is the lifeblood of this system. And so when you dive deeper into customer feedback you can see how that's the thing that's required to power success in each of these boxes.
So when I dig into it, I'm gonna show you a different diagram, different system. This is one system that we obsess about a lot at Intercom and we've talked a lot to other companies externally about and it makes sense to them oftentimes. This is a different system.
I'm gonna merge the two in a second. So this is the customer feedback system. So the first thing, very obviously, is that we have inputs. So when we think about how we prioritize what to work on, should we work on a new feature, should we improve an existing feature, should we build a new product, there's lots and lots of things.
We could work on speed and latency, we could fix bugs. There's so much stuff we could prioritize what to work on. And like everyone out there, we've limited time, limited resources, and need to be very careful about what we decide to do. And so we've got inputs to help us do that, things like customer feedback.
The second part of this system of course is outputs. We take all these inputs, we build a roadmap, and then we build product and build software and write code against it. And then we ship, and maybe we ship to beta, and then we could ship into the full market, and that's the output, the kind of quality and quantity in which we ship products to our customers.
So what we ship, how fast, and to a high standard. And the third thing here in the system is outcomes. What was the customer and business impact of what we ship? And so right now in our industry there's a lot of focus on outcomes which is really fantastic, but I'd argue that all three of these actually matter equally.
The outcomes, the business impact or the customer impact of what you ship needs to become an input. So because we ship early, we try things with customers, we don't always get it right, we make mistakes, we have to learn, adapt, evolve, The outcomes of our work, the outcomes of the outputs become an input.
And so all three of these things, in my opinion, matter equally. You got to have all three set up and set up well in order to be able to fuel this like build market sales system, this product market story system. So, to try and map these two things together, you can take the inputs, so that's the inputs from this system, and put them here on our overall system.
So you can see the customer feedback coming from the market. What is the market saying? What are our customers saying? Are they saying that these things are solving our problems or otherwise, do we get it right, do we get it wrong, where do we get it right, where do we get it wrong, what needs to change, etcetera, etcetera.
So all those customer feedback becomes the inputs and those inputs obviously then go into the product, the what, what are we gonna build. And then we take that and we work with the marketing teams, the product engineering team and marketing team are working together and we've outputs, collective outputs.
So that is we've built this product, we think we know why it's better, why you should choose this solution over other things in the market, and then we take that to the market. Then that gives us our outcomes. We can map those outcomes against customer feedback.
So the customer feedback will tell us if they're good or bad outcomes and things like product usage and adoption and adoption of new features and all sorts of stuff. And we can map it against the financial plan and say, was this a successful business outcome?
So the outcome is twofold. Was it a successful business outcome? Was it a successful customer outcome? And then they become inputs again. You can kind of see this whole system circles around and with careful attention you can really start to tune it and predict or become much more predictable what will actually be successful when you take it to the market.
So as a well known system designer once said, in all of these systems there's a simple rule which is **** in equals **** out. So when you think about these inputs and think of it as customer feedback, if it's not well structured, if it's not a high quality input, then you're just feeding something to the system that's gonna lead you astray.
So it's critical that you think about the quality of these inputs. That's what I'm focus on next, the last thing for today. These inputs, what are the inputs, how do we think about them, and how do we prioritize between them? So we have set up a system at Intercom where we have four key inputs.
And you can take some of these, some might be useful to you, some might be less useful. You could certainly build your own system, like the things I'm showing you today are just the things that have worked for us over the last nine years.
It's the kind of system that we've adapted and evolved and built over that time based on things we got wrong and learned and so on. So in our system, in our input system, we have four. We've product health, vision and strategy, product gaps, and commercial success.
And the fifth one of course is the outcomes. You can kinda see it off to the screen there. The outcomes then feed back into the inputs as well. So, me show you each one of these four very briefly. So, health is made up of two things: operational health and everyday health.
Operational health is, as you might imagine, is the product working? Is it up? Is there downtime? If the product isn't available, then nothing else really matters. And so in this list, it's actually ordered at the top on purpose to signal to all of us internally to remind us because we couldn't get excited about the strategy stuff, to remind us that if the product health isn't high then nothing else matters.
So that's top. Everyday health is bugs, bugs that come in, software tends to break over time, and again we ship fast, we get some things wrong, we need to fix them afterwards and so on. So health is the first thing. The second area is vision and strategy, and these are kind of broken out.
And at the very, very start of the talk I showed you an overall diagram that showed the vision is the future you want to create, the future that you believe should be created. This is your differentiation, this points to differentiation. And your strategy is how you're gonna win.
How are you uniquely gonna beat the other companies in the market? And so your vision and strategy of course are a huge input. A third one is product gaps. And we've broken down our product gaps into four. This of course is again thinking about the competitive landscape and where we wanna be as a product and where we wanna evolve and improve and so on.
No product is ever done. Back to the idea that product and markets always evolve, it's a constantly evolving system, so no product is ever done. And so, you're going to always have gaps, always, always, always have gaps. So, you've got to get comfortable with that idea and make sure you're prioritizing the ones that are most important to your customers.
So for us, we have existing customers and the product gaps that they see and feel, the things we haven't solved for them yet, prospective customers, new customers that are interested in trying Intercom and the things that they care about and don't have yet.
Churn, people quit, why did they quit, what were the gaps? And then iteration, which is this outcomes to inputs line is our iteration. Make sure that we iterate when we ship, we don't ship and forget. Then lastly, have commercial success. So like I said earlier, have a financial plan, we have revenue goals.
We also have strategic customers, customers that are kind of flagship for us or important in ways that point to our future. Maybe there are customers that are leaning in really heavily into our vision and strategy and so they're more important for us to get right and really understand more deeply.
And then we've got the competitive landscape. We've many great competitors building lots of stuff too and so we wanna make sure that they are not opening too many gaps or too much differentiation that makes it hard for us to compete. So there's all four, product health, vision and strategy, product gaps, and commercial success.
So there's a lot of inputs again going back into this system. So there's two things to kind of take away here. One is have a system for each input to ensure it is of high quality. So individually, each one of these individual things, make sure you have a system or sorry, a system for ensuring it's high quality.
Second thing is prioritizing. Make sure it's high quality. So for existing customers, we're getting so much customer feedback. It's all flying in. The existing customer feedback, we don't know how to prioritize it. Make sure you have a system for collecting it, tagging it, aggregating it, synthesizing it because then you've gotta trade that off against the rest of this list.
So make sure you have a system, a high quality system for getting each one of these things right. That's the first thing. Then the second thing is make sure you have a system for balancing them together, which is as much art as science frankly, but rather than randomly have this list all fly in and you don't really know how to trade off one versus the other, make sure that when all the stuff comes in, it comes into something you've designed to take it, aggregate it, think about it, synthesize it, etcetera.
It just makes life a lot easier. So have a system for each one individually and then a system for collective whole and being able to prioritize and trade them off. So that's it, this is the full thing. Like I said, you might wanna print this out and kinda noodle on it for a while.
We have our market, our product, our story, all three working together. Then we have our inputs, outputs, outcome system. Customer feedback fuels the whole thing. Your financial plan of course is your business goals. And then within inputs, remember that bad quality in equals bad quality out.
And that's the one area that we obsess about quite a lot in this system, the product and engineering team, and we've got our four inputs there. That is it for me. Thank you so much. Thanks to join Fest for having me. It's probably not in Edinburgh right now, but my bedroom here will do.
You can reach out to me on Twitter there, we've got questions there too. So thanks a lot. Great stuff from Paul. And we're gonna go and have a chat with him in a second. Before we do, just like to highlight everybody, we have a whole bunch of sponsors supporting us through Turing Fest twenty twenty.
And to be honest, without them, none of this would be happening. So if you get a chance, they're on the they're on the event platform in the expo and in the featured partner section, drop in whether it's now or later today or another day drop in and say hello and give them give them a bit of support because they've been supporting the conference and on the Scottish tech ecosystem.
Okay, so we're going to bring we're going to go over to Paul, who's in his house, I guess in Dublin, and we're gonna have a bit more of a chat with him. Paul, I I I guess that is your house. Right? It is. Yeah.
This is our well, what's now my study used to be our spare bedroom or as or as my kids say, granny and grandad's bedroom, but no longer. They got the boost. Needs must in times of COVID. I'm I'm glad you have a spare room.
So the so so much to to dive into there in the talk. But something that you you mentioned right at the start, which I've I I think about a lot. I've I've lived through to to my chagrin is about the biases in founding teams and the product bias versus market bias.
But, you know, generally, they're the they're the two. Intercom was clearly a very product biased team at the beginning and and had been through previous product. Which of the two is less bad? Like, obviously, a balanced team is great, but if which is easier to learn and how was the intercom journey on that front?
Yeah. Yeah. It's a tricky question to answer because I don't think it's that simple. So is shaped I guess by their journey and their career and I worked on many a failed project in my life at big companies. I was at Google for a while and worked in a few things there that didn't pan out in the market.
Only when I joined Intercom I think that I truly as a product person appreciate that this is a much richer system than just what I thought we should go out and do. I think from the very early days, Owen and Des, two of our co founders were very attuned to the market which I think is partly why Intercom took off in the early days.
They're very tuned to the type of opportunity that existed out there. I think it's fine for a product team to learn about the market but that will only take you so far. In the early days we had first no marketing team and then we kind of started one and a great guy called Matt Hodges joined and I learned a lot from Matt about marketing.
He was a great marketer who really understands product and so he had a good relationship there. And over time then the marketing was growing and growing and now of course it has all sorts of specializations within it. So product marketing and demand generation and product education and all sorts of different things.
So it's definitely learnable in the early days if you're a very small company but you do have to go and learn it. And then over time if you grow and scale I'd encourage you to hire in people who know what they're doing more than you.
Yeah. You I I remember the early days. I I was a pretty early customer of Intercom back in two thousand twelve, I think, and loved it. And one of the things that that really stood out was the amount of work and effort that Intercom put into, I suppose, educating educating their customers, educating the market.
A lot of it was about around product management and stuff like that. There's a question around that that's come in from one of our audience, Ross Hancock, who refers to a podcast episode from of on the Intercom podcast in August and talking about product marketing manager.
And he his question is about how that the model of product market management fits alongside product management. How do you how do you separate those out at Intercom? Yeah. They're they're very distinct roles and people set them up differently in different companies. So in some companies, product marketing, so PMM, product marketing manager, are part the product org and they partner with the product manager.
That's not how we set it up at Intercom. The PMM role is in a marketing org. And for each kind of significant part of the product where we have a product manager, there'll be a product marketing manager. So it's a kind of buddy system if you like.
And they'll obviously work really closely together in the best versions of that relationship. They have a blurry line between what they do or don't do. But typically the product marketing manager's role is twofold. One is to understand the market better than the PM can.
For any PM out there, you'll know that lifetime is short and you don't ever have many opportunities to go and do things. There's a lot on your plate. And so they can understand the market much better than you could. Things like competitive analysis, what's happening in the market, trends, things like that.
And then they'll help market the product. So they'll help tell that story and they'll have a specialism in storytelling, positioning, even things like pricing and packaging, like all of that fits under the PMM's kind of specialty. And so certainly founders can do this and certainly some PMs who've kind of read a lot can do it and you can try it and learn by your mistakes like we did a lot of the time in the early days.
But again, at some level of scale you're gonna need someone who's actually studied this and has certified education through college or life in it because you'll just see results much faster. Yeah. I remember you you hired in John I can't remember John Cerner, but he was an editor in the Irish Times.
Yeah. John Collins. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That that seemed like a that was an eye opening moment. But it I mean, like, he's been doing great work, and I have a couple of intercom books on my shelf actually at home, which I imagine is his his product.
Yeah, and the blog as well, the bloggers and podcasts as well, john's team. Yeah, no, that's, there's so much there's so much in there for for people to learn about about product building in general about intercom, particularly. But you talked about earlier about markets, pick picking markets and picking the right market, etc.
And how do you how do you think about validating a market for early stage companies? Because it's one of those questions? You know, it's a tricky one, because you could pick the right market but the wrong time. You know, the time question in fundraising decks is always pretty arbitrary.
How do you think about that? Yeah, it's a tricky one to navigate honestly. Like I said earlier, I think in earlier parts of my career I was a little bit delusional or maybe not a little bit, maybe very delusional. I thought that if we built a great product, if we listened to our customers and really deeply understood those customers' problems and infer what they need from that and built a great product for them, a great solution, that that would be enough.
Only later did I realize that that's not enough and the size of the market, the quality of the market is of paramount importance. Unless you're happy building a fairly niche product for a fairly small audience which is what some people do and they're very happy doing that.
But if you want kind of the other thing, the kind of breakout success, fast growing, scaled up company, obviously the health of the market is really important. I guess with Intercom, the categories we play in are huge. So what is customer it's all customer communications and kind of focus on customer support for support teams and then customer engagement, so anyone who's involved in engaging customers and so on.
And so those markets are huge. They're absolutely enormous and there's many, many billions of dollars to play for there. And so some kind of markets just at least from my point of view are just kind of stand out obvious. If you look at it today for example, you could look at things that are going on in society that will kind of shift the market.
Online conferences or virtual events is clearly a market that is growing and exploding and building software for that is a huge opportunity. Video communications, so these are all things that have kind of been triggered by the pandemic that will probably sustain. And not sure what other kind of practical advice I'd give that isn't really going to sound trite.
Read a lot, which may kind of sound like the most obvious advice in the world, but we read a lot. We read a lot of what's going on in technology, a lot of newsletters, even things like futurists and what they're kind of projecting will happen in the world over the next one, two, three, four, five years and kind of take all these signals to help us determine which parts of the market will be more lucrative than others or where the bigger opportunities lie.
And like I said at the start, our customers are obviously the kind of base foundational primary way we try to evaluate how big an opportunity is. One last thing I'll say on this is that, so again something I learned at Intercom was to always look for the amount of energy someone has, a customer has when you're talking to them about a problem.
Or if you're a B2C like any kind of consumer out there, look for the energy they have in talking about something because I didn't really focus on that a lot in the early days and as a result I got a lot of strong signal about problems people didn't really care about.
I thought it was a big deal but they didn't really have much energy around it. And I might talk to like twenty customers and all twenty want a thing or need a thing or see a problem, but they don't actually care that much.
And so these I think can all be like proxies for the potential size of markets. Yeah. Yeah. It's the the what's that? The anadine, the painkiller versus I forgot the forgotten the phrase. It vitamins versus pain cutters? Is that yeah, that's a bit of a versus pain.
Exactly. Yeah. On the customer feedback thing, I mean, it's basically the the fuel for the entire machine that you mapped out in your presentation. What do you think about the best ways to get that customer feedback? Is it a passive process? Is it something that you need to go hunting for combining the two?
How does that map out? Yeah. For us, it's very active. So it's not I mean there are passive ways in which we collect information but it's very active. So always at Intercom we have obsessed about talking to customers and talking to them directly.
So we do do things like surveys now and again but but for the most part this is actually getting in front of customers and actually talking to them. Sometimes of course that's through Intercom. We obviously use our own product to do this. But oftentimes it's on video calls, even going to people's offices in the time when you could do that.
But a lot of video calls, screen sharing, having our customers show us the product, show us them using our product, all the ways in which it doesn't work, showing us the ecosystem in which Intercom exists for them. No product exists in isolation. So how do we connect to other services, other tools?
What's good about them? What's not so good about them? So it's all very active, very direct. And then increasingly as we built up our sales team, our customer support team has always been a huge source of insight for us. So for example, our customer support team we see as a very strategic team at Intercom.
They tag all incoming customer feedback with a system that we designed together and we've evolved over the years. So they tag every single customer conversation and then that feedback gets routed to the product team that own that part of the product. And so it's always there, easy to look up, easy to kind of summarize and so on.
And then over the years as we built up a sales team, they've increasingly become again a really strategic partner where all customer calls they're on like discovery calls or follow-up calls, kind of quarterly business reviews, everything gets registered in Salesforce and again everything's tagged.
So it's easy for us to, like, pull that out of Salesforce, summarize it, and so on. And then we join all this together, of course, to try and create a holistic picture. In the in the intercom story, you mentioned balance a couple of times in your in your presentation, you have the product, the market, the story, has it been hard to find the balance.
And in the early days, you know, you mentioned that you started off all those product geeks, that was where you wanted to be. And when we saw some of the the the story team evolve, did the market part did the sales part come at the end or or or later on in the journey?
Or what what way and and what were the mistakes? You know, if you were if you were redoing the journey, what would you change on that? Yeah, there were mistakes, a lot of them. For us, the way it played out for us, which of course will be unique to every company, Intercom initially was self serve.
So self serve product, you sign up for yourself, kind of typical self serve SaaS product. So in those days, we invested a lot in the kind of the sign up flow and making sure that customers are at least getting to a trial without significant questions coming into our customer support team.
Again, which would have been a signal to us that something was wrong. So if everyone's getting confused on a certain part of the sign up flow, we need to go fix that or we're toast. Potential customers and prospects have a lot of options in the market these days no matter where you are.
And so it's important that they can get in and start trying the product. And then we kind of in the initial sales kind of era of Intercom, it was basically an experiment at the start and the kind of thinking at the time was, hey, the Intercom product is getting a bit more complicated and we have customers who are using Intercom now in pretty complex ways and would it help the company and the business if they had help, like real time help I.
E. A salesperson. Someone to kind of talk to them and guide them and help them along the way, very much like a consultative kind of partner. And so that's how we started the sales team and that's kind of been the spirit ever since where the sales folks we hire and the training we do and so on is very rooted in the product and in problems, problem kind of discovery and comprehension and making sure that the prospective customers the sales team are talking to, the conversations about the problems they have and how
Intercom might solve those problems. And so it started that way. It started as an experiment. It went really well and we kind of started to see that actually, yes, applying people to help the journey of exploring Intercom and learning how it can be used and can help you was really successful.
And so we just kept going and scaled it up kind of piece by piece and now we do both. Obviously, we've got a self serve business that's still going, We have a sales business still going, and both are, like, really important to the company.
Yeah. It seems like a the getting the timing right on when to build a sales team is one of the one of the trickiest questions for for a lot of start ups. Paul, we've covered a load of ground there. I think that's that's a good spot to wrap.
Thanks so much for being with us. And, you know, sorry we couldn't have you across in Edinburgh, but next time, another time. Good luck with the with the journey. It's been amazing to watch. I actually, met Des in the Dogpatch Labs offices, like at the very beginning.
Oh, yeah. So it's it's been amazing to watch Intercom grow from from afar and, seeing, you know, the way the teams evolve the products, tremendous stuff. So good luck with all of it, and we'll we'll have you and and Des and a few others.
Maybe we'll get Maria maybe back as well to, to check-in on progress, at some time in the near future. But for now, that's it. Thanks very much, Paul. Thanks, Brian. Thanks for having me. Cheers. Cheers. Alright. So we we got tons there from Paul and intercom.
You know, as you can hear, I'm a fan of intercom. I think one of one of Europe's probably one of Europe's breakout startup successes. And we've had Dez in the past, Maria Gutierrez is is with them as well. She's a former Turingfeld speaker.
So we'll we'll hear more from them to come in the future. For now, we're going take a quick break. And we're going to be back at three pm with check Warner from Ada Ventures talking about strategy for products and businesses and particularly around building defensible moats.
