Des Traynor van Intercom

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

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

Jeroen: Ten eerste, nogmaals gefeliciteerd met jullie recente ronde van 125 miljoen.

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: Dat klinkt logisch. Hoe lang is Intercom er al?

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

Jeroen: Zeven jaar. Voor degenen die al jullie werk in de afgelopen 7 jaar gemist hebben, wat doen jullie precies?

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: Eigenlijk gebruiken we Intercom bij Salesflare om alles te beheren, van het onboarden van onze klanten met geautomatiseerde e-mails tot follow-ups met geautomatiseerde chatberichten. De hele inbox heeft conversaties toegewezen aan het 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: Jullie product is super simpel als je het voor het eerst gebruikt, maar het heeft toch veel diepgang. Hoe ga je daarmee om?

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.

We proberen hier dus een soort flow in te houden. De eerste paar stappen moeten eenvoudig zijn en ze moeten de waarde van het product in een vroeg stadium aantonen. We weten dat om het volledige potentieel te realiseren, je het product echt moet omarmen en er meer uit moet halen. Je moet er meer tijd aan besteden.

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.

Je kunt er op twee verschillende manieren over denken. Ik denk dat iets makkelijk te doen kan zijn, maar toch heel lang kan duren.

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: Yep.

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.

Aan de klantgerichte kant van Intercom, ontdekten we van onze eerste klanten dat dezelfde persoon die marketing doet bij een bedrijf ook de support kon doen. Ze kunnen ook tegelijkertijd de CEO en de productmanager zijn.

Als gevolg daarvan was het verkopen van deze ene eenvoudige oplossing die alles doet eigenlijk heel zinvol.

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.

Toen we ons realiseerden dat dit gebeurde, besloten we het product in stukken op te splitsen, zodat we elke oplossing precies konden afstemmen op de doelgroep.

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: Ik denk dat het voor veel dingen heeft gezorgd. Ons duidelijkheid geven in marketing en de productpositionering zijn natuurlijk de grootste geweest.

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.”

Dat probleem was dat we duizenden gebruikers en ook duizenden betalende klanten hadden. Ze waren geografisch verspreid over de hele wereld en betaalden ons allerlei verschillende bedragen. Sommigen waren op proef, sommigen betaalden, sommigen waren gestopt.

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.

We begonnen deze tool te bouwen met een eenvoudig doel: klanten zien, met hen praten en naar hen luisteren. Dat was het enige waar ze echt om gaven. Dat werd Intercom en het werd toen erg populair.

Je zou kunnen zeggen dat het oorspronkelijke idee misschien wel alles was. Het was een betrouwbaar en gedateerd CRM met messagingtools en een gedeelde inbox.

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.”

Op dezelfde manier realiseerden we ons dat mensen gaan proberen te verkopen via Intercom, vergaderingen in te plannen of klanten specifieke vragen te stellen. Dus we moesten het gewoon makkelijk maken om dat te doen. Dus lanceerden we dingen zoals onze Google beller integratie, de Operator Bot en anderen.

Des: We begonnen met dit grote idee. Vervolgens moesten we specifieke werkstromen specificeren om het krachtiger en sneller toepasbaar te maken.

Jeroen: Wat is je achtergrond precies? Wat is het verhaal van voor Intercom en hoe ben je daar gekomen?

Des: Ik heb oorspronkelijk computerwetenschappen gestudeerd. Toen ben ik aan een doctoraat begonnen om te leren waarom we zo slecht zijn in mensen leren programmeren. Ik stopte met dat doctoraat om user experience designer te worden. Ik heb twee jaar user experience design gedaan voordat ik Eoghan ontmoette, die de CEO is van Intercom.

Uiteindelijk begonnen we samen een adviesbureau waar we webapps ontwierpen en bouwden voor klanten. Als onderdeel daarvan hadden we een nevenproject genaamd Exceptional, wat een foutopsporingstool was voor Ruby on Rails-ontwikkelaars.

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: Je hebt een behoorlijk brede achtergrond. Van informatica naar usability, op een bepaalde manier naar onderwijs kijken, consultant worden en producten lanceren, en dan alles laten vallen om je op één ding te richten.

Des: Yeah, that’s about right.

Jeroen: Je bent gevestigd in Dublin, toch?

Des: That’s right, yeah.

Jeroen: Hoeveel van Intercom is er vandaag de dag nog in Dublin?

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: Wat doe je precies bij Intercom? Ik herinner me de laatste keer dat we elkaar spraken, dat je bezig was met marketing en een beetje terugging naar de productkant. Is dat nog steeds het plan?

Des: Ja, precies.

Jeroen: Ik begin af te bouwen in marketing en ga volledig terug naar product. Wat zijn de redenen daarvoor?

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: De productkant is meer jouw passie. Toch?

Des: Ja, zeker weten.

Jeroen: Wat zijn jullie plannen voor de komende jaren? Wat kun je daar over vertellen?

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.

We hebben natuurlijk een specifieke volgorde, een gedefinieerde ethos en filosofie over waarom we de dingen doen zoals we ze doen. Maar ik denk dat ons plan verder vrij eenvoudig is.

Dus met het geld dat je inzamelt, kun je geografische gebieden uitbreiden, productgebruiksgevallen uitbreiden en de sectoren waarin je kunt opereren uitbreiden.

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

Jeroen: Als ik het me goed herinner, zijn dat meer technische dingen. Zoals muren bouwen rond AI, etcetera?

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

Jeroen: Dus jij gaat deze dingen nu leiden, de komende jaren?

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: Hoe ziet een typische dag er voor jou uit? Afgezien van dit, natuurlijk.

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.

Ik probeer dat te doen voordat San Francisco wakker wordt, wat meestal rond 15.00-15.30 uur onze tijd is.

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: Veel van je tijd gaat op aan communicatie en management, en een deel van je tijd gaat op aan operationele dingen doen. Of dingen bouwen?

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: Ja.

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: Je had het over bloggen. Ik weet dat je in het begin veel tijd besteedde aan bloggen? Doe je dat nog steeds?

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: Dus elke keer als je op een conferentie bent, vertel je een ander verhaal?

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

Jeroen: Maar als je er elke keer een blogpost van maakt, kun je zeker niet een paar keer precies hetzelfde doen?

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

Jeroen: Je zei dat je om 10:30 op je werk moest zijn. Klopt dat?

Des: Ja.

Jeroen: Wat doe je daarvoor?

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: En 's avonds?

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.

Als ik om 4.00 uur 's ochtends moest opstaan om een seminar te geven voor twee klanten in India, dan zou ik het doen. Ze zouden zich inschrijven en betalen.

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.

Ik reisde de hele tijd, ofwel om in San Francisco te zijn of om naar evenementen te gaan en mensen te laten weten wat Intercom was en erover te praten waar ze me maar lieten. Ik denk dat dat allemaal nodig was. Maar tegelijkertijd leed mijn eigen gezondheid er waarschijnlijk een beetje onder in die periode.

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.

Wil je de komende zeven jaar een miljoen verdienen of wil je dat in de eerste twee jaar? Dit zijn het soort afwegingen die je moet maken in termen van het soort groeitraject dat je voor je bedrijf wilt. Dat heeft ook gevolgen voor de vraag of je geld moet ophalen of niet? Zo ja, hoeveel? Wat voor mensen moet je aannemen? Dat soort dingen.

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: Even voor de luisteraars, wanneer heb je de switch gemaakt tussen veel tijd in je werk steken en dan een stapje terug doen om je op je gezondheid te richten?

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: Waarom heb je ervoor gekozen om dit boek over de zeven krachtbronnen voor bedrijven te lezen?

Des: Omdat twee van mijn vrienden, wier mening ik erg waardeer, allebei zeiden dat het een vrij sterk boek was. Ze hebben het me allebei aangeraden omdat het veel zakelijke raamwerken gebruikt voor het analyseren van problemen en dynamiek in het marktlandschap.

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

Jeroen: Gaaf. Tot slot, als je opnieuw zou moeten beginnen met Intercom, wat zou je dan anders hebben gedaan?

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: Gaaf. Ik hoop dat deze podcast een beetje van dat kan overbrengen op mensen.

Des: Hopelijk wel.

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: Hou je goed. Tot ziens.

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