Product & Design
4 min read
Making things people want
In product development understanding the outcome customers want, and what they currently use to get that outcome, is essential to making a better solution.
Des Traynor
Latest posts by Des Traynor
Growth 3 min read
Using cohort analysis to improve retention
There are few issues more important than customer retention when running software-as-a-service businesses. It’s no good acquiring customers for $10,…
Product & Design 5 min read
How to make product improvements
Kaizen is the philosophy of continuous improvement. Web businesses searching for product market fit think they can follow this philosophy…
Marketing 6 min read
Startup marketing: strategies for year one
The most important tasks for any early stage startup are to write code and talk to users. When we started…
Marketing 3 min read
Understanding direct and indirect competition
Sometimes your customers really want to use your feature or product, but they also want something else that simply isn’t…
Growth 3 min read
Trajectory matters more than state
When you analyze your company it’s easy to look at everything in its current state. What’s our biggest problem today?…
Marketing 6 min read
How Intercom got our first customers
There are two harsh truths for startups. 1: Until you have users, you don’t have a product. 2: Until they’re…
Product & Design 1 min read
Ingredients to build a product first company
Sales first, marketing first, technology first. There’s lots of ways to build a company. Today we’re in an era of…
Product & Design 6 min read
Harvesting the low hanging fruit of user onboarding
Startups are knee deep in customer acquisition metrics. Click through rates, cost per click, cost per lead, conversion rate, cost…
Growth 1 min read
New book: Intercom on Starting Up
We’ve just released a new book, Intercom on Starting Up. With the insane volume of startup literature already out there…