Des Traynor: Startups must test core differentiators before building standard infrastructure
Des Traynor · Des Traynor: How I Founded Intercom; Product Marketing Tips; Feature Creep | 20VC #907 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Jul 18, 2022 · at 7:43
Des Traynor, co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Intercom, shares product development advice for early-stage founders tackling complex product categories.
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“My advice in those cases is work on your differentiators first. So in the case of say an email client, oh, we have a new take on email. I would say, right here, here's what I believe. I believe you're a competent engineer. I believe you can work out SMTP and IMAP and spam filtering and all that. Like, let's just push all that aside. I don't want to see a single engineer working on that. Show me the thing you're going to build. That's actually new to market. Even if the email stuff doesn't work, right? I don't care. I'm sure you'll solve the rich text editor problem, but I need to see the difference early. Don't tell me after two years time, we finally caught up with Gmail. And now with three months of runway left, we're going to add in the thing that makes us different. It's a waste of time. You have to actually like acid test the differentiators first”
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