{"id":16048,"date":"2018-07-10T13:58:57","date_gmt":"2018-07-10T12:58:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/intercom.com\/blog\/?p=16048"},"modified":"2020-07-30T12:55:35","modified_gmt":"2020-07-30T11:55:35","slug":"how-intercom-helped-a-bootstrapped-saas-business-punch-above-its-weight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/how-intercom-helped-a-bootstrapped-saas-business-punch-above-its-weight\/","title":{"rendered":"How Intercom helped a bootstrapped SaaS business punch above its weight"},"content":{"rendered":"

In order to make bootstrapping work, you need to be scrappy, ruthlessly prioritizing your actions and avoiding non-essential expenses. Having one tool that helps you do all your most important work \u2013 sales, marketing and<\/em> support \u2013 makes life so much easier.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve been pretty vocal about our love for Intercom<\/a> as we\u2019ve grown Ad Reform<\/a> and Userfeed<\/a>, our profitable, bootstrapped SaaS businesses over the last year. We run both entire businesses through the platform.<\/p>\n

However, when I talk to other entrepreneurs or startup folks, most of them ask:<\/p>\n

\u201cIsn\u2019t Intercom just a chat app? Aren\u2019t there lots of those out there?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I\u2019ve been asked this so often that I figured I\u2019d share exactly how we use Intercom, the benefits it provides our business and more importantly, the benefits it provides our customers. I\u2019ll break it down into standard use cases, and some of our more unique use cases that Intercom enables.<\/p>\n

Standard use cases<\/h2>\n

Support<\/h3>\n

Support is one of the most common use cases people think of when using Intercom. By giving your users the ability to chat directly with your team, not only does it give your team the ability to solve support issues faster<\/a>, but it allows your users to engage with your company in a much more human way.<\/p>\n

Nobody wants to go write up an email or fill out a form for support anymore. We\u2019re in the age of messaging, so it\u2019s important to connect with users in their preferred channels. Conversations like these just don\u2019t happen when a user fills out a form.<\/p>\n

\"intercom<\/p>\n

When a customer has an issue I want to do three things:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Chat with them quickly to understand the problem.<\/li>\n
  2. Replicate the issue.<\/li>\n
  3. Track the issue so we can address it quickly and share updates with the customer as we go.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    I can chat with the user immediately in Intercom, replicate the issue by watching the last Fullstory<\/a> user recording (via Fullstory\u2019s Intercom integration<\/a>), and track the issue in our \u201cBugs ? feed\u201d via Userfeed<\/a> (which will associate the user with this issue and link the conversation in Intercom so whoever is fixing the issue has context).<\/p>\n

    \"fullstory_userfeed_intercom\"<\/p>\n

    In addition to talking to customers directly, you can empower them to find answers themselves using Intercom\u2019s knowledge base<\/a>.<\/p>\n

    \"knowledge<\/p>\n

    We\u2019ve built out Ad Reform’s knowledge base<\/a> to allow users to search on their own and make it easy for our team to send help articles directly within the Intercom Messenger.<\/p>\n

    \"knowledge<\/p>\n

    Sales<\/h3>\n

    Making it simple for website visitors to engage with you at the beginning of the sales process is key to conversion rates. You did all this work and spent all this money to drive someone to your website. Don\u2019t blow it by making it hard for them to engage with you.<\/p>\n

    We have Intercom\u2019s Messenger<\/a> on our website, enabling visitors to ask us questions, provide us their email for content or trials and schedule demos at a time that works best for them (via Calendly<\/a>). We also use Intercom\u2019s Operator<\/a> (their messenger bot) to automate lead flows for situations when we\u2019re not around our computer (e.g. when we\u2019re sleeping ?).<\/p>\n

    \"intercom<\/p>\n

    Intercom is continuing to expand what it can do for the sales use cases and I’m excited to see what’s next here.<\/p>\n

    Marketing<\/h3>\n

    The value Intercom brings to your marketing team<\/a> is the ability to segment users on tons of attributes, send targeted in-app or email messages to those segments and market to both leads and<\/em> users.<\/p>\n

    With Intercom, you can capture valuable data about your users and how they\u2019re using your product. This enables you to create segments of users based on things like location, revenue, industry or certain behaviors within the product. Once you have some segments set up, you can email users with more targeted, relevant content that they might be interested in (like an update to a feature they requested), or that could help them achieve better results within your product.<\/p>\n

    \"user<\/p>\n

    Most companies spend all their marketing efforts on leads and trying to generate more leads. Marketing shouldn\u2019t stop after you bring on a customer. Losing customers is so painful to a bootstrapped SaaS business, so keeping (and upgrading) current customers is hugely important to growth. Marketing to current customers enables you to improve in these two areas, and Intercom enables you to reach out to the right people, at the right time, within the right channels (email\/in-app).<\/p>\n

    \"in-app-message\"<\/p>\n

    Onboarding<\/h3>\n

    When we started our business, I was reaching out to leads manually upon signup and during our 7-day trial period. Our whole sales team used to do this at my previous company as well, all manually. To improve upon this, we implemented Intercom, which has a pretty awesome startup plan<\/a> for just $49\/m. We built out a fairly simple onboarding flow which includes:<\/p>\n