Des Traynor de Intercom

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¿Quiere saber más sobre qué hace del Intercom un producto icónico? Léalo todo en este post.

Jeroen: Hi Des, it’s great to have you on Founder Coffee.

Des: Hey! It’s so cool to be here, thank you.

Jeroen: En primer lugar, felicidades de nuevo por su reciente ronda de 125 millones.

Des: Thank you very much. It’s always weird to take congratulations specifically for raising money. At the end of the day, it’s actually a financial event. But I think it’s always indicative of some progress the company’s making. So I guess I’ll take the congratulations.

Jeroen: Well, you’re officially like a unicorn now. So you must celebrate this milestone or is this something that you don’t do at Intercom?

Des: I think we get much more excited to celebrate things like any sort of significant progress the product might make. Like for instance, a certain customer engagement or growth metric. The evaluation of the company is a proxy for a lot of other things. The thing that we really get excited about, is the product. You’ll see a lot more enthusiasm this year when we release some great features or when a product release hits some sort of usage that we’re really happy about.

I think that’s the stuff that we’ve always focused on. We know that the evaluations and all that, it all is the trailing indicator of like greater work that’s happening.

Jeroen: Tiene sentido. ¿Cuánto tiempo hace que existe el Intercom?

Des: We incorporated in August 2011. So we’ll be 7 years old in August.

Jeroen: Siete años. Para los que se perdieron todo vuestro trabajo en los últimos 7 años, ¿a qué os dedicáis exactamente?

Des: We help businesses talk to customers and customers talk to businesses. We’re like a customer messaging platform. If you’re an internet business with a lot of customers that you’d like to speak with or want to make it easier for them to contact you, Intercom is the tool. You’ve probably already used it somewhere.

Jeroen: En realidad, utilizamos Intercom en Salesflare para gestionarlo todo, desde la incorporación de nuestros clientes con correos electrónicos automatizados hasta el seguimiento con mensajes de chat automatizados. Toda la bandeja de entrada tiene conversaciones asignadas al equipo.

In fact, we’re also using the help pages. We’re using the whole product, from the beginning to the end.

Des: That’s awesome. So you literally use everything we make.

Jeroen: All the products, yes. Maybe not all to their fullest extent though. I’m sure I am missing some things.

Des: We need to do better there. We want to make it easier for people to get as much value as possible — as quickly as possible.

Jeroen: Tu producto es muy sencillo cuando empiezas a usarlo, pero tiene mucha profundidad. ¿Cómo lo gestionáis?

Des: It’s a real tricky one for us because as you grow your product, it becomes more powerful. But I’ve come to the conclusion that another word for powerful is, complex.

We can’t hit you with all the power upfront. If the first step in your Intercom onboarding is, create a messaging campaign for longitudinal communications with your entire user base, it will genuinely confuse you. You’ll never get past that step.

Así que intentamos mantener una especie de flujo. Los primeros pasos deben ser sencillos y demostrar pronto el valor del producto. Sabemos que para aprovechar todo el potencial, hay que adoptar el producto y sacarle más partido. Hay que dedicarle más tiempo.

When you’re generally designing an onboarding program, you should try to find things that are basically quick. By quick, I really mean in software there’s two things that take time.

There’s what I call the ‘task time’. Let’s say if it’s an email client. Then the task time is when you’re actually writing the email. You’re thinking about what you want to say and who needs to hear it.

Then, there’s ‘tool time’. Tool time is when you’re clicking ‘compose’ and you’re entering your recipients and stuff like that.

Hay dos maneras diferentes de pensar en ello. Creo que algo puede ser fácil de hacer, pero aún así puede llevar mucho, mucho tiempo completarlo.

Lets say for example, writing an article on Medium. It’s a very easy thing to do, but if Medium’s first step is to write an article right away, you might spend the next six hours stuck on that step. Right?

Sí.

Des: And it’s nothing to do with the UI (user interface). I think when you’re trying to design the onboarding, you have to look for things that are both quick to do, but also don’t have a significant amount of task time either.

It kind of rules out things like designing an onboarding campaign. It might be as simple as, ‘let’s configure the first message you say to people on your website’. It’s a single message, it should be two sentences or less. That’s something that people can do quick enough and it’ll probably start showing value within the same day or within the same hour if you have a busy website.

That’s kind of what we try to force people to do. As a result, it creates this impression of us being really simple to use.

Simple is good, but we don’t want to be just that. Simple is good at one end of the market. But at some point, people don’t want simplicity. They want power; in fact, they need it. It’s rare that you can see simplicity and power in the same product. Usually when that is the case, something else is being hidden somewhere else.

Jeroen: Exactly, that’s what I was aiming at. It seems like you not only make the time to help a user complete a task, but also focus on unbundling the power of Intercom product by product. It’s like focusing on one thing first and then moving ahead. Is that something you consciously put in your strategy?

Des: It was a conscious thing. I guess when we first launched Intercom, it was just one thing. I think it made sense when our customers were typically very small start-ups. The trace, that’s interesting is that in various small startups, everyone is doing everything. If you’re selling a project management tool, your developer might also be your product manager and might also be your graphic designer or even the CEO. They could all be the same person.

En cuanto a la atención al cliente de Intercom, nuestros primeros clientes nos dijeron que la misma persona que se ocupa del marketing en una empresa puede encargarse también del soporte. También puede ser el director general y el jefe de producto al mismo tiempo.

Por eso, vender esta solución sencilla que lo hace todo tenía mucho sentido.

Now, however, as companies grow up, what happens is that the initial founding team grows into a set of teams. You might have a marketing team, a support team, a sales team and a product team. It’s now that they all start looking for their own tools.

Cuando nos dimos cuenta de que esto ocurría, decidimos dividir el producto en piezas para poder adaptar cada solución al destinatario exacto.

What was interesting about that was that it worked in both ways. It increased our conversion rate because now if you’re the head of customer support for a start-up and you discover our support tool, we’re not trying to sell you our marketing software. We’re just talking to you about support.

When you go to sign up, we just ask you to sign up for customer support. We’re not going to tell you, “For your first step, let’s create a visitor auto message on your marketing side.” We’re not saying that, because that’s not relevant to support.

Breaking the product up a bit, lets us tailor what it is that we need to do for each of our target buyers. Right from their onboarding to all the engagement and retention emails they’ll receive, we stick to the specific use case only. Which means that we can sell support to support people and sell marketing to marketers, without confusing either person. You know what I mean?

Jeroen: Yeah, I know what you mean. I guess it must be good on all fronts. It must be good on the ads you run and must definitely be good on the onboarding side. It’s also kind of a land and expand strategy. You land in one department and expand to the whole company. Is that what this strategy is doing for you?

Des: Creo que ha hecho muchas cosas. Lo más importante, por supuesto, ha sido darnos claridad en el marketing y el posicionamiento del producto.

It is also true that sometimes users sign up for the ‘onboard and engage’ part of Intercom, then go on to explore the other things they might see. Their ‘well, this looks cool’, gives us an opportunity to offer them an upgrade and purchase another solution if they need it.

It does make the ‘land and expand’ easier, because we have a specific offering for each person. Obviously, it means that they start adopting more of the software and then move on to making rational purchase considerations.

Des: The old world had this problem. People felt that if they were from customer support, they couldn’t adopt Intercom without talking to the marketers, because there’s bits of marketing in there. Whereas when we isolated those concerns, apparently it made those conversations, I think, a lot easier.

Jeroen: When you started off with Intercom, which product did you actually start off with? Because I suppose you didn’t start off with the whole thing in mind.

Des: We kind of did, but I guess we have to take a step back and say, “We built Intercom to solve a problem that we had with our previous internet business.”

El problema era que teníamos miles de usuarios y también miles de clientes de pago. Estaban geográficamente por todo el mundo, pagándonos todo tipo de cantidades diferentes. Algunos de ellos estaban a prueba, algunos de ellos estaban pagando, algunos de ellos habían dejado de fumar.

We had no good way to understand what our user base was at any given point of time. Now, you have to bear in mind, when we started in 2011, Stripe wasn’t a thing. So everyone used PayPal for recurring subscriptions, as a way to manage their customer accounts.

There obviously was no tool like Intercom. It wasn’t possible to do things like, show me all the users who haven’t created a lead or who haven’t opened a project yet. The idea that you could, sort of, interrogate your user base based on what activities they have or haven’t taken was just not popular.

Mixed File didn’t have it, Kissmetrics didn’t have it. None of the tools of that era had it at all. So we started building a tool that would let us see and talk to specific customers with our user base.

One day, that might be something like, let’s talk to all our paying customers. Another day, it might be, let’s talk to people who haven’t yet used a certain feature.

Empezamos a construir esta herramienta con el simple objetivo de ver, hablar y escuchar a los clientes. Eso era lo único que realmente les importaba. En eso se convirtió Intercom y entonces se hizo muy popular.

Podría decirse que la idea inicial era todo eso. Era un CRM fiable que incluía herramientas de mensajería y una bandeja de entrada compartida.

What happened as we grew up, was that we got more focused. We realized, “Oh, shit. If there’s going to be 25 people on a support team, managing thousands of customer conversations, we better design a UI that makes that possible.”

Del mismo modo, nos dimos cuenta de que la gente va a intentar vender a través de Intercom, programar reuniones a través de él o hacer preguntas específicas a los clientes. Así que teníamos que facilitar esa tarea. Así que lanzamos cosas como nuestra integración con Google Caller, el Operator Bot y otras.

Des: Empezamos con esta gran idea. Luego tuvimos que añadir especificidad a flujos de trabajo concretos para hacerla más potente y rápida de adoptar.

Jeroen: ¿Cuál es exactamente su trayectoria? ¿Cuál es la historia antes de Intercom y cómo llegaste allí?

Des: Bueno, originalmente estudié informática. Luego empecé un doctorado para saber por qué se nos da tan mal enseñar a programar a la gente. Dejé el doctorado para convertirme en diseñador de experiencia de usuario. Hice dos años de diseño de experiencia de usuario antes de conocer a Eoghan, que es el CEO de Intercom.

Luego acabamos montando una consultoría juntos, en la que diseñábamos y creábamos aplicaciones web para clientes. Para ello, teníamos un proyecto paralelo llamado Exceptional, una herramienta de seguimiento de errores para desarrolladores de Ruby on Rails.

That was the tool, if you recall a couple of minutes ago, when I was saying, “We had this product that had thousands of users, we had no easy way to communicate with them.” It was within Exceptional that we first felt this pain of managing a user base and speaking to a specific customer segment. That was what ultimately led to the birth of intercom.

Jeroen: Tienes una trayectoria bastante amplia. Desde la informática hasta la usabilidad, pasando por la educación, la consultoría y el lanzamiento de productos, hasta que lo dejas todo para centrarte en uno.

Des: Yeah, that’s about right.

Jeroen: Su sede está en Dublín, ¿verdad?

Des: That’s right, yeah.

Jeroen: ¿Qué parte del Intercom sigue hoy en Dublín?

Des: I think that we’re maybe 220 people or something in Dublin today. We’re 470 worldwide, so there is still a very substantial part of the team here. We have five offices basically and our intention is to grow all of them. I don’t anticipate anything changing in terms of Dublin’s presence for the next few years.

Jeroen: It’s about half your entire team right now. Is it going to stay that way or are you growing the team?

Des: We’ll see. It depends on a lot of things actually. What I would say, is almost all of our R&D, for the last four or five years, has been based in Dublin. Over the last year, we opened an R&D office in San Francisco and then one in London. We’ll see what are the needs of the businesses there and decide what teams really need to grow and which ones will remain the same. That will actually dictate how the future headcount gets distributed.

Jeroen: ¿Qué es exactamente lo que haces en Intercom? Recuerdo que la última vez que hablamos, te dedicabas al marketing y volvías un poco al lado del producto. ¿Sigue siendo ese el plan?

Des: Sí, exactamente.

Jeroen: Empezando a terminar en marketing y volviendo de lleno al producto. Cuáles son los motivos?

Des: I think it’s because we have brought on more senior talent to the marketing team. Two years ago, we welcomed LB, who is our VP of sales for instance. She has transformed a lot of how we think about going to the market.

Then recently, about an year ago, we brought on Karen Peacock, who’s the COO. She again, I say, comes with a wealth of experience that we just never had.

As we’ve gotten more senior talent on how we sell and market Intercom, my role there had reduced to giving people contacts, letting people know why things are the way they are and what stuff should change. It was more about being able to provide them with valuable information.

Ultimately, I think I started off on the product side of Intercom. I think that’s probably still where most of my best abilities lie. I think it makes sense for me to rejoin the product team, given the amount of software we intend to ship in the coming years.

Jeroen: Lo que más te apasiona es el producto. ¿Verdad?

Des: Sí, por supuesto.

Jeroen: ¿Cuáles son sus planes a alto nivel para los próximos años? ¿Qué puede decirnos al respecto?

Des: I’d say we want Intercom to power conversations between every internet business and customer. Every type of internet business means that we have to think about the different verticals that we need to trade in. Everything from iPhone apps to games, e-commerce — you name it. B2B subscriptions, software subscription businesses, etcetera.

Every conversation means, today we do sales, marketing and support conversations, but they’re obviously not the only conversations that people have.

We’re looking at different people from across the world. It means things like localization. We need to make sure that we work in all languages for all the people, in all possible ways. The best way to predict how Intercom will behave is if something can help make business — people conversations easier in some way, we’ll need to do that at some point.

Obviamente, tenemos un orden específico, una ética y una filosofía definidas de por qué hacemos las cosas como las hacemos. Pero creo que nuestro plan es bastante simple más allá de eso.

Así que, básicamente, con el dinero que recaude, podrá ampliar geografías, ampliar los casos de uso de los productos y los sectores a los que puede atender.

We touched on a few bits and pieces about what else we’re planning to do, in our funding blog post.

Jeroen: Si no recuerdo mal, son cosas más técnicas. Como construir muros alrededor de la IA, etcétera.

Des: Yep, there’s a lot on that side for sure.

Jeroen: Entonces, ¿vas a dirigir estas cosas ahora, durante los próximos años?

Des: Yeah, that is the plan. As I said, we raised a lot of money to build a lot of product and obviously it won’t be just me leading it. There’s a whole heap of people in Intercom. Paul Adams, Ann Montgomery, Lewis Bennett, Darragh Curran, there’s a lot of us who are responsible for significant portions of the company’s future, as it relates to R&D. That’s basically what we’ve been working on. For the longest time.

Jeroen: ¿Cómo es un día normal para usted? Aparte de esto, claro.

Des: In practice, I guess I start slightly late because I’m in Dublin and I want to overlap with San Francisco. I start at around 10:30–11:00 in the morning so that I can finish by 7:30–8:00 in the evening.

First half of the day is usually one-to-ones with anyone who I report to or anyone that I’m working with. Then, it’s email. Just dealing with anything that came up overnight or any sort of long-standing projects.

From there, I usually take two to three hours each day, if possible, to work on any personal tasks that I have. As in personal for Intercom. If there’s something I’m working on — be it a new angle for a product or a new idea for a feature, a new talk or a new narrative around why we’re building something the way we’re building it.

Intento hacerlo antes de que San Francisco se despierte, lo que suele ocurrir entre las 15:00 y las 15:30, hora local.

From that point onwards, it’s usually syncing with my counterparts on the go-to market side of the business. Whether that’s our VP of Sales, our COO, Head of Marketing, etc. It’s connecting with all them, to make sure that we’re all on the same page.

Once a week, I’d have a pretty in-depth chat with our CEO Eoghan, where I go through everything that’s at the top of my mind and vice versa. We see if there’s any way we can help each other or any contacts that we need to share.

Jeroen: Gran parte de tu tiempo lo dedicas a la comunicación y la gestión, y otra parte a hacer cosas operativas. ¿O a construir cosas?

Des: Well, let’s just call it individual contribution? I think that’s necessary. I think if your entire day is just about forwarding emails from one group to another, it’s the sign of a messy organization. It also means that you will inevitably end up not using the skills that you probably, more uniquely have. We need to carve out time to do specific things.

I would say it’s not always working on new Intercom activities. It could be something more typical like analysing performance. Talking of performance, now it’s just gathering peer feedback on certain people, working out the future or the organizational design for R&D or the product itself. It could be any of those sort of things.

That’s also a part of growing Intecom. It may be less exciting to a lot of listeners, but this too needs to be done.

Jeroen: You keep a bit of, let’s say, passion in the job, by still doing actual things.

Des: I’d say passion and relevance, if you know what I mean.

Sí.

Des: One fear I have for people who turn into long-term advisors, consultants or just bloggers, is that, I think if you’re not actually practicing the material, it’s very easy to come up with really interesting ideas that have no bearing on reality because you never tested them.

All you ever do is write pieces or give talks about them. Again, I’m very wary of not becoming that sort of person. So I think it’s actually good to be frequently involved in doing things.

Jeroen: Has mencionado los blogs. Sé que al principio le dedicabas mucho tiempo. ¿Sigue haciéndolo?

Des: No. I wish I could and I do need to get back to it. But right now, I’m averaging maybe three pieces a year. I still do a bit of conference speaking because it’s easier to do in some senses.

The nice thing about a conference is that it gives you a sense of a ticking clock. You have to go on stage on April 23rd and give this talk, and then you’re done. Whereas blog posts don’t usually have that. I still make time for it and often what happens is that whatever I present at a conference, turns into a blog post. That’s usually the way it happens.

Jeroen: ¿Así que cada vez que asiste a una conferencia cuenta una historia diferente?

Des: Yeah, it depends. Sometimes I’ll tell the same story if the crowd’s totally different.

Jeroen: Pero si cada vez lo conviertes en una entrada de blog, supongo que no puedes hacer exactamente lo mismo varias veces...

Des: Yes, that’s true and I try not being repetitive at all. It has to be about adding value.

Jeroen: Has mencionado llegar al trabajo a las 10:30. ¿Correcto?

Des: Yep.

Jeroen: ¿Qué haces antes de eso?

Des: I usually exercise if possible. I’ll go to the gym or I’ll have breakfast and go for a jog or something like that. Something to wake myself up.

Jeroen: ¿Y por las tardes?

Des: It’s basically dinner and family time.

Jeroen: Are there any other things you do to stay productive? You’ve been at Intercom for seven years and it must be sort of draining. So how do you keep up with it all?

Des: The first few years were definitely a drain. They were probably the ones where you don’t realize it at the time, but I think you sacrifice yourself more physically than you would have first realized.

The reality is, hard work is necessary to run a startup. I think a lot of people have created a movement against this idea, but I think it is important. It’s not necessary to follow the same routine once you’re past a certain stage, where you have traction, and you’re up and running. At that point you just need to start thinking about the longer term.

As in, how can I design an organization and a role where I’d be happy to spend the next 10 years of my life. I think there’s a weird thing that has gotten into the tech industry — a bad rapport for hard work.

I will readily admit I worked 8, 10 and then 12 hours a day all the time in 2011, 2012 and 2013. I think all of the founders did. That was what it took. I can’t imagine a world where we weren’t doing it.

Si tuviera que levantarme a las 4 de la mañana para hacer un seminario para dos clientes en la India, lo haría. Se apuntarían y pagarían.

The same people who say, “Surely you don’t have to work so hard”, are also the ones wanting me to appear on a podcast to share how we got our first 100 customers.

I’m like, “You have to fucking work.” There was genuinely a period, I don’t want to sound like I regret it, but there was a period where we had to work really hard. As a result of which, a lot of things fell by the wayside to make that happen.

Viajaba todo el tiempo, ya fuera para estar en San Francisco o para ir a eventos y dar a conocer a la gente lo que era Intercom y hablar de ello en cualquier sitio que me dejaran. Creo que todo eso era necesario. Pero al mismo tiempo, mi propia salud probablemente se resintió un poco durante ese periodo.

I definitely wasn’t as fit as I could’ve been. I definitely wasn’t eating as well as I could have been or whatever. I’ve certainly clawed all of that back and I feel like I’m very happy where I’m at right now.

But I think, your point about health or how do you keep up with things, I think it is important to take care of it all. Honestly, I think one can’t do it all. You have to obsess about working hard from day one of your startup.

Most startups fail because they’re trying to optimize a perfect day at work, focusing too much on the work-life balance from day one. It’s like you’re trying to solve the wrong problem first.

It’s important to have a company that needs you and then work out what you’re willing to give up for it. You need to basically learn what are all the various things that need doing, do them all, understand them all, then get them all up and running.

If you talk to folks who have had similar success as that of Intercom, I think they’ll say a similar thing. I admit and totally acknowledge that there is also a world out there where you take things a lot slower and still achieve similar outcomes. Or reach these goals over a longer period of time like five to ten years.

That’s the long, slow ramp. I think you can do that and that’s a valid approach too. It’s just I think you need to pick one of those two lanes.

¿Te conformas con ganar un millón en los próximos siete años o quieres hacerlo en los dos primeros? Este es el tipo de compensaciones que tienes que hacer para decidir qué trayectoria de crecimiento quieres para tu empresa. Esto también tiene implicaciones a la hora de decidir si debe o no recaudar fondos. En caso afirmativo, ¿cuánto debería recaudar? ¿Qué tipo de personas debe contratar? Todo ese tipo de cosas.

There’s a lot to think about in terms of the type of company you want to set up early on. My advice there, is to know that hard work is going to help you in either case. But for sure if you’re planning for things to blow-up quickly, you need to really put the arrows in. And I’m yet to see anyone who’s avoided that.

Jeroen: I think you mentioned spending 10 hours a day at work? For the trajectory you guys took, that’s not too bad. I think your trajectory was from zero to one, five, 20 and then 50 million. Right?

Des: That’s correct, yeah. I’m probably underselling it at times. Like when I say 10 hours a day, I guess what I mean is ‘in the office’ hours. I’m not counting the hours where I was at shitty airports or hotel rooms, away from my family and friends. I know I could make it sound more dramatic, if I wanted to.

Jeroen: You’re right. I would say, I think it is all about working hard for that period of time to really grow your business.

Jeroen: Sólo para los oyentes, ¿cuándo hiciste el cambio entre dedicar mucho tiempo al trabajo y luego dar un pequeño paso atrás para centrarte en tu salud?

Des: I think it’s when you realize that the raw momentum of the business is sufficient to maintain at. For instance, if we all don’t show up to work tomorrow, people are still signing up on Intercom and they’re still getting the support they need. They’re still clicking the ads we’re running and interacting with our business. .

I think that’s when you realize that you can afford to take a step back and hire senior people to handle substantial parts of the business. It’s the moment when you realize that the company is going to be around next year.

When you start off, you don’t know if you’re going to have a second month. I’m sure it was probably the same for Salesflare too. For us it was no different.

In our first year, we damn sure didn’t presume that there would be two years of Intercom. We thought that our best might be one year of Intercom. It was never this ‘guaranteed win’.

Now I think we can afford to think slightly long term. You think, “Well, I was 30 when we started Intercom.” If I’m still going to be in Intercom when I’m 45 or 50, what will really support that or will make that hard?

Then you realize that if you still have to work just as hard as you did when you were 30, when you’re 40, you start thinking, “Well Jesus. Would I really have time to have a life, to have a family?” So you start to sort of realize that if the right thing for the company is to have you, then you need to prioritize both you and the company. It doesn’t work if it doesn’t work for the both of you.

So that means hiring people to help lead functions that you’re not sure what you’re doing with. It means that you need to start getting the right people around you. Then I think you have a chance at balance. You know?

Jeroen: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. Slowly wrapping up, what’s the latest good book you’ve read and why did you choose to read it?

Des: These days, I’m reading through Blinkist a lot.

Jeroen: It’s the book summaries, right?

Des: Yeah, it’s the book summaries because I read a lot of business books. Most people I know, who read business books, usually read the first six chapters to get the main idea. The following eight chapters generally tend to be just case studies or repetition of the same points.

I think Blinkist is wonderful, because it skips through all that. It doesn’t lose the key ideas contained within a book, it just spares you of a lot of the hundreds of pages of fillers that the book industry feels the need to push for.

As a result, I haven’t actually read many sharp business books over the last while. But I’ve read dozens through Blinkist. Probably the most recent one I read is, Sources of Power.

Let me think. No, I’m totally getting the name wrong here. Let me try one quick Google search and see if I can get it. It’s a business analysis book about the sources of how businesses gain power. Yeah, it’s by a guy called Hamilton Helmer and the book is called called the 7 Powers. The foundations of business strategy.

That’s probably the last book that I read cover to cover, that was businessy and quite good. I used to read a lot of crime fiction too. But that’s mostly just stuff to do on holidays.

Jeroen: ¿Por qué decidió leer este libro sobre las siete fuentes de energía para las empresas?

Des: Porque dos de mis amigos, cuyas opiniones valoro mucho, me han dicho que es un libro muy sólido. Ambos me lo recomendaron porque utiliza muchos marcos empresariales para analizar problemas y dinámicas en el panorama del mercado.

They were right. As I read through it, I was like, “Shit. This is really good.” So that’s why I read it.

Jeroen: Genial. Por último, si tuvieras que volver a empezar con Intercom, ¿qué habrías hecho de forma diferente?

Des: If I was to start over knowing what I know now, I think there’s a lot of early mistakes that I had made that we wouldn’t have. But a lot of those mistakes tend to be tactical.

I guess, the best way I’ll explain it is, I think we were very strong on product at the very start and every other function. We made many mistakes. If there was a general point, maybe I certainly, for my own part, I could’ve learned to understand more about what goes into every other business function.

Be it sales, finance, analytics, marketing, customer support — you name it. Everything that’s not product basically, is something where I think, I at the very least, made mistakes early on.

Maybe through talking to people, through learning more about how other companies succeeded, through working with mentors, or just I don’t know, reading more books or whatever, I think I could’ve learnt a bit more early on, which would have helped us.

It could have maybe helped make the right hires early on, maybe choose the right tactics early on. The lesson I learnt is that when you’re running a business, you’re probably going to be a bit weak in some areas and you don’t necessarily need to know what you’re doing.

Don’t use the confidence of your strength in one area to assume you’re going to be really good at all the other functions. Be open to the idea that you might need to learn a lot about something before you even try it.

If you’re a product team looking to set up a marketing team or a sales team and support team, there are people out there who are quite good at this stuff. You should try and meet them, learn from them, understand what makes them tick.

Learn how to spot a good person from a bad person. Learn how to spot a good team from a bad team. Only then should you really go deep into trying to make this new initiative work. Rather than going at it from the other side and being opportunistic or assuming that there’s not a lot to it and you can work it all out yourself.

Jeroen: So you’re saying that one should be more open to talking to others and learning from them?

Des: Specifically where it relates to areas that you’re exploring for the first time.

Jeroen: Genial. Espero que este podcast pueda aportar un poco de eso a la gente.

Des: Esperemos que sí.

Jeroen: Thanks again, Des, for being on Founder Coffee. I’ll even send you over a very nice little package of Founder Coffee in the next few weeks.

Des: Oh, you’re very kind. Thank you very much.

Jeroen: Thank you for being on. I’ll see you soon.

Des: Cuídate. Adiós.

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