{"id":14085,"date":"2017-12-12T18:08:51","date_gmt":"2017-12-12T18:08:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.intercom.com\/?p=14085"},"modified":"2020-07-30T12:57:06","modified_gmt":"2020-07-30T11:57:06","slug":"how-intercom-got-our-first-customers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/how-intercom-got-our-first-customers\/","title":{"rendered":"How Intercom got our first customers"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are two harsh truths for startups. 1: Until you have users, you don\u2019t have a product. 2: Until they\u2019re paying you, you don\u2019t have a business.<\/p>\n

So where do users come from? That is literally the number one question I get on every podcast, every fireside chat, every Q&A, live blog, AMA, you name it. Like all such questions, the real asks are behind the scenes. \u201cHow can I get mine?\u201d \u201cWill your method work for me?\u201d<\/p>\n

So I thought I\u2019d answer it properly and consistently for once. TL;DR: I emailed people and asked them to try our product. End of Post.<\/p>\n

In 2011 we were just four folks with a lump of code and a shared idea. Collectively we called the whole thing Intercom. The idea was to make internet business personal. Where did that come from you ask?<\/p>\n

A quick bit of background\u2026<\/h2>\n

We hated the siloed mess of tools that were out there \u2013 we had run our previous company using them. There was one tool when you wanted to message your customers. There was a different tool when your customers wanted to message you. There was a different one again if you wanted to ask a question. And a different one if you wanted to send a product update. There was a tool for seeing how many people were doing things on your site. Or in your product. But there was literally no tool to show you who was doing what.<\/p>\n

Yes, you could have your engineers spend their hours writing heaps of middleware to connect your Google Analytics to your janky PayPal dashboard (there was no Stripe back then), to your newsletter software, through to your helpdesk software<\/a>. But most businesses wisely believe their engineers should be building their product, not messing around daisy-chaining incomplete APIs together.<\/p>\n

Intercom could do things like \u201cPut a message live for all your users to see\u201d
\n<\/p>\n

Intercom’s early auto message workflow. Here’s how it looks today.<\/a> <\/em><\/center>And you could handle those replies in Intercom too…<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Intercom’s early support inbox. Here it is today.<\/a> <\/em><\/center>And amazingly you could see who is using your product right now.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Intercom’s early user list. Here’s how it looks today.<\/a> <\/em><\/center>So we had created Intercom and from the first moment we used it ourselves, there was wide-eyed agreement that this was definitely something that everyone needed. It quickly became my job to tell them.<\/p>\n

Intercom customer acquisition strategy<\/a> 0.01 beta<\/h2>\n

With the benefit of hindsight (and having spent 2+ years on Intercom\u2019s marketing team), it\u2019s easy to retrofit logic here and say that I had a strategy<\/a> and that it was my plan to:<\/p>\n

a) Acquire customers through content marketing.
\nb) Send direct outbound email to customers.
\nc) Create brand awareness through off-site content campaigns.<\/p>\n

But honestly at the time it was a lot simpler. It was basically \u201cDo things that make people find out about Intercom\u201d. Our previous businesses had helped us grow a network of people who would listen to us, so they were the first people we reached out to.<\/p>\n

So all day every day I\u2019d email people to tell them about Intercom, show them what Intercom might look like for them, and hear their feedback. I did this 100% by hand and if I was to do it all again today I\u2019d still do it by hand. Honestly.<\/p>\n

This is what it looked like.<\/p>\n

\"Early<\/p>\n

But Des, you could have used \u201cAutoMail\u201d or \u201cProspectDawg\u201d or \u201cOutboundMaster2017 (Enterprise Edition 7)\u201d. First of all they were all still in alpha back then, but secondly and more importantly, it\u2019s not the right time to do this.<\/p>\n

The reasons I think doing it by hand was the right call include:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The approximately 100 or so emails I sent every day built on the previous day\u2019s learnings. When you\u2019ve read the 40 replies and understood common confusions, you can address them in the following day\u2019s new set of emails.<\/li>\n
  2. Every email was pretty much unique, which meant that the automatable boilerplate was minimal.<\/li>\n
  3. Doing it by hand helped me avoid all the tell-tale signs of a bad outbound campaign. I wasn\u2019t guessing email addresses. I wasn\u2019t sending the same email to someone\u2019s personal and professional address. I\u2019d include every contact in a company on the same mail rather than send them three identical emails.<\/li>\n
  4. I was creating custom screenshots of example use cases for their exact businesses, and speaking their exact languages. I was showing them something they definitely wanted.<\/li>\n
  5. (Warning: fluffy point ahead.) There is just something primal about trying to sell your software directly to people and listening to what they say. When your runway is measured in weeks and you\u2019re spending your own savings, every rejection is like a dagger to the soul, and every positive reply warms your heart. I think those emotions are good to taste, and I honestly worry about early stage founders who see themselves as above this type of graft, or think that they should API their way out of it.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    All automation loses nuance and nuance is literally all you have in the early days, so embrace it. You could call this a \u201cNail it before you scale it\u201d strategy, but then we wouldn\u2019t be friends because I can\u2019t stand things like that.<\/p>\n

    \u201cThere will be webinars\u201d<\/h2>\n

    We opened up Intercom to the public on January 27th, 2011 and with the floodgates open I decided to switch to blogging and presenting webinars to help onboard groups of users at a time. Again, there were ways to automate this and avoid the hard work, at a cost of the nuance. So every week I did one live webinar on Wednesday nights to groups ranging from 9 to 90 depending on how successful the week had been. My goal was to get 100% of the attendees using the product and some weeks we got damn close.<\/p>\n

    Perhaps the biggest high\/low from this period was when I got a mail from some startups folks in India wondering if I could send them a recording of the video (as the timezones didn\u2019t overlap) and I was tempted to do just that. But that\u2019s not how you win customers. So one morning I got up at 4am and drove to work to give a webinar to nine folks in India thinking if I could just get one of their companies to sign up it\u2019d be worth it.<\/p>\n

    \n

    I’m up at 6am to run a seminar for good folks in Australia, New Zealand, India, Singapore and more. Starting now: https:\/\/t.co\/GAVLVk7z<\/a><\/p>\n

    \u2014 Des Traynor (@destraynor) August 2, 2012<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n