Des Traynor di Intercom

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Volete saperne di più su ciò che rende l'Intercom un prodotto iconico? Leggete tutto in questo 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: Innanzitutto, congratulazioni per il vostro recente round di 125 milioni.

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: Ha senso. Da quanto tempo è in circolazione l'Intercom?

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

Jeroen: Sette anni. Per chi si fosse perso tutto il vostro lavoro negli ultimi 7 anni, di cosa vi occupate esattamente?

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: In realtà, utilizziamo Intercom a Salesflare per gestire tutto, dall'onboarding dei nostri clienti con e-mail automatizzate ai follow-up con messaggi di chat automatizzati. L'intera casella di posta ha conversazioni assegnate al team.

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: Il vostro prodotto è super semplice quando si inizia a usarlo, ma ha comunque una grande profondità. Come riuscite a gestire questo aspetto?

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.

Cerchiamo quindi di mantenere una sorta di flusso. I primi passi devono essere semplici e dimostrare subito il valore del prodotto. Sappiamo che per sfruttare appieno il potenziale, è necessario abbracciare il prodotto e ottenere di più da esso. Bisogna dedicargli più tempo.

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.

Ci sono due modi diversi di pensarla. Penso che una cosa possa essere facile da fare, ma possa comunque richiedere molto, molto tempo per essere completata.

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?

Jeroen: Sì.

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.

Per quanto riguarda i clienti dell'Intercom, abbiamo scoperto dai nostri primi clienti che la stessa persona che si occupa di marketing in un'azienda può anche occuparsi dell'assistenza. Potrebbe anche essere l'amministratore delegato e il product manager allo stesso tempo.

Di conseguenza, la vendita di questa soluzione semplice che fa tutto ha avuto molto senso.

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.

Quando ci siamo resi conto di questa situazione, abbiamo deciso di suddividere il prodotto in pezzi, in modo da poter adattare ogni soluzione all'esatto destinatario.

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: Credo che abbia fatto molte cose. La cosa più importante è stata la chiarezza nel marketing e nel posizionamento del prodotto.

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.”

Il problema era che avevamo migliaia di utenti e migliaia di clienti paganti. Erano geograficamente in tutto il mondo e ci pagavano importi diversi. Alcuni di loro erano in prova, altri pagavano, altri ancora avevano abbandonato.

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.

Abbiamo iniziato a costruire questo strumento con il semplice obiettivo di vedere, parlare e ascoltare i clienti. Era l'unica cosa che interessava loro. Questo è ciò che è diventato Intercom, che è diventato molto popolare.

L'idea iniziale, si potrebbe dire, era tutto questo. Si trattava di un CRM affidabile e datato che includeva strumenti di messaggistica e una casella di posta condivisa.

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.”

Allo stesso modo, ci siamo resi conto che le persone cercheranno di vendere attraverso l'Intercom, di programmare riunioni o di porre domande specifiche ai clienti. Dovevamo quindi renderlo più facile da fare. Per questo motivo abbiamo lanciato cose come l'integrazione con il chiamante di Google, l'Operator Bot e altre ancora.

Des: Abbiamo iniziato con questa grande idea. Poi abbiamo dovuto aggiungere specificità a determinati flussi di lavoro per renderla più potente e più veloce da adottare.

Jeroen: Qual è il tuo background esattamente? Qual è la storia prima dell'Intercom e come ci siete arrivati?

Des: Beh, inizialmente ho studiato informatica. Poi ho iniziato un dottorato di ricerca per capire perché siamo così incapaci di insegnare alle persone a programmare. Ho abbandonato il dottorato per diventare user experience designer. Ho fatto due anni di user experience design prima di incontrare Eoghan, che è il CEO di Intercom.

Poi abbiamo avviato una società di consulenza insieme, dove progettavamo e costruivamo applicazioni web per i clienti. Nell'ambito di questa attività, avevamo un progetto secondario chiamato Exceptional, uno strumento di tracciamento degli errori per gli sviluppatori 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: Lei ha un background piuttosto ampio. Sei passato dall'informatica all'usabilità, dall'approccio all'istruzione in un certo modo al lavoro di consulente e al lancio di prodotti, per poi abbandonare tutto per concentrarti su uno di essi.

Des: Yeah, that’s about right.

Jeroen: Lei ha sede a Dublino, giusto?

Des: That’s right, yeah.

Jeroen: Quanto dell'Intercom è ancora presente a Dublino oggi?

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: Di cosa ti occupi esattamente presso Intercom? Ricordo che l'ultima volta che ci siamo parlati, lei si occupava di marketing e si stava spostando un po' sul lato dei prodotti. È ancora questo il piano?

Des: Sì, esattamente.

Jeroen: Iniziare a finire il marketing e tornare completamente al prodotto. Quali sono le ragioni di questa scelta?

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: L'aspetto del prodotto è la sua passione. Giusto?

Des: Sì, certo.

Jeroen: Quali sono i progetti di alto livello che avete nei prossimi anni? Cosa può condividere?

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.

Ovviamente abbiamo un ordine specifico, un'etica e una filosofia definite sul perché facciamo le cose nel modo in cui le facciamo. Ma credo che il nostro piano sia piuttosto semplice.

In pratica, con i fondi raccolti è possibile espandere le aree geografiche, i casi d'uso dei prodotti e i settori a cui ci si può rivolgere.

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

Jeroen: Se ricordo bene, si tratta di cose più tecniche. Come costruire muri intorno all'IA, eccetera?

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

Jeroen: Quindi sarà lei a guidare questi progetti nei prossimi anni?

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: Come si svolge una sua giornata tipo? A parte questo, ovviamente.

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.

Cerco di farlo prima che San Francisco si svegli, di solito intorno alle 15:00-15:30, ora di Roma.

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: Molto del suo tempo è dedicato alla comunicazione e alla gestione, mentre una parte del suo tempo è ancora dedicata alla realizzazione di attività operative. O a costruire cose?

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.

Jeroen: Sì.

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: Hai parlato di blogging. So che all'inizio dedicavi molto tempo al blogging? Lo fai ancora?

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: Quindi ogni volta che partecipa a una conferenza racconta una storia diversa?

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

Jeroen: Ma se lo trasformi ogni volta in un post sul blog, immagino che tu non possa fare la stessa identica cosa più volte?

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

Jeroen: Lei ha parlato di arrivare al lavoro alle 10:30. Giusto?

Des: Sì.

Jeroen: Cosa fai prima di questo?

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: E la sera?

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.

Se dovessi alzarmi alle 4 del mattino per tenere un seminario per due clienti in India, lo farei. Si iscriverebbero e pagherebbero.

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.

Viaggiavo sempre, sia per essere a San Francisco sia per andare agli eventi e far sapere alla gente che cos'era l'Intercom e parlarne ovunque me lo permettessero. Credo che tutto questo fosse necessario. Ma allo stesso tempo, la mia salute ha probabilmente sofferto un po' in quel 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.

Siete contenti di guadagnare un milione nei prossimi sette anni o volete farlo nei primi due anni? Questi sono i compromessi che dovete fare in termini di traiettoria di crescita che volete per la vostra azienda. Questo ha implicazioni anche per quanto riguarda l'opportunità di raccogliere fondi o meno. Se sì, quanto dovreste raccogliere? Che tipo di persone assumere? Tutto questo genere di cose.

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: Solo per gli ascoltatori, quando ha fatto il cambio tra dedicare molto tempo al lavoro e poi fare un passo indietro per concentrarsi sulla salute?

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: Perché ha scelto di leggere questo libro sulle sette fonti di energia per le aziende?

Des: Perché due miei amici, di cui apprezzo molto le opinioni, mi hanno detto che si tratta di un libro piuttosto forte. Entrambi me l'hanno consigliato perché utilizza molti framework aziendali per analizzare i problemi e le dinamiche del mercato.

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

Jeroen: Bene. Infine, se dovessi ricominciare da capo con Intercom, cosa avresti fatto di diverso?

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: Bene. Spero che questo podcast possa portare un po' di questo alle persone.

Des: Speriamo di sì.

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: Abbi cura di te. Arrivederci.

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