What we shipped: 2015 year in review

2015 was a heck of a year for us. We raised a Series C, doubled the team, and moved into a bigger SF office. More importantly, we shipped 100+ features, improvements, and a brand new product.

So, if you haven’t yet read every one of our product changes from last year (shame on you), here’s what Intercom got in 2015.

Intercom got :emoji:

While born in 1998, this past year was huge for emojis. Case in point, you could use them to order a :pizza:. Emoji have fast become a standard way to express yourself in conversations and are used by pretty much everyone. Besides being a fun and efficient way to communicate, emojis in Intercom represent another step forward in making conversations between you and your customers more friendly and personal. We believe they will continue to be an important mode of communication in 2016 and forecast the world to be at “peak emoji” in late 2017.

Intercom got on your website

This year Acquire, our live chat product that helps you turn website visitors into customers, grew up. It started as an idea, was released in beta, and is now our fourth fully fledged product. Acquire allowed us to extend Intercom’s reach outside the walls of your product and bring personal conversations to website visitors too. Today more than 3,000 businesses use Acquire including Expensify, Iron.io, Vend, and many more.

Intercom got on Android

It is no secret mobile is quickly becoming the dominant way people experience the web, and a whole lot of those people use Android. So we were excited when our iOS SDK was joined by our new Android SDK. Now Intercom can help the rest of the mobile world have more personal and friendly conversations with their customers.

Intercom got real-time

Yes there was a time before real-time in Intercom, but those dark days are over. This year we saw the introduction of green dots (online presence), dot dot dots (live typing indicators), company presence, read receipts and many other features that made conversations feel more human and alive. Now businesses and users can communicate via Intercom at the speed of real life.

Intercom got rules

We’ve been growing and so have our customers. Growth is great but it also introduces new challenges. Workflows break, customers need features that didn’t exist and as a result it forces our products to mature. For example, it turns out larger companies need permission settings to control who can see customer billing information :). So a big focus this year was introducing features that allow larger teams to work together more efficiently in the inbox. Two important features we released were the introduction of teams and assignment rules. Now the right conversations get to the right group of people automatically.

Intercom got “or” filtering

The people have spoken and they wanted more ways to filter the user list in Intercom. The days of just “and” filtering ended with the introduction of “or”. The people rejoiced.

Intercom got a whole new composer

This year we completely revamped our composer, which made creating the perfect message even easier.

Intercom got more targeted

But it gets better. Our customers wanted the ability to schedule messages to be delivered on a certain day at a specific time. Enter delivery windows, which make that possible. Now you can schedule your newsletter to be sent first thing Monday morning and not have to worry about the time zone or be in early to press the button.

Intercom got measurable

And even more better, we introduced message goals! Whether it’s getting people to log in, try a new feature, or upgrade to your pro plan, you can use any event or attribute as a goal for your email or in-app message. Now you can see the true impact of every message you send.

Intercom got organized

At Intercom we are super users of our product, which is nice because we usually break things before our customers. On the marketing team we send a lot of messages. Searching through that long list of messages was no easy task. To solve this problem we now have folders to make organizing and finding messages a breeze. This feature greatly reduced scrolling and was a huge win for our tired index fingers.

Intercom got tons of APIs, integrations and a new developer hub

Plain and simple, we want Intercom to be at the center of a community building amazing products together. This year we made progress towards opening and extending the Intercom platform. We improved and released new API’s (Bulk API, Conversations API, added support for OAuth), webhooks (events), integrations (Github, Marketo, Mailchimp, Facebook) and grew our client libraries (Java, Ruby, Go, Node and PHP). We also launched our new Developer Hub which makes it easier than ever for developers to extend, make integrations and build products on the Intercom platform.

What will Intercom get in 2016?

Lots. We have so much in store and will continue to keep you posted throughout the year. :)

Want to build and ship with us in 2016? We’re hiring! Check out our careers page to learn more.