Intercom

“When you're hiring for a role that's new for you, find three people who are considered to be best in class in that particular role.”

“At Intercom when we started, we had a very simple pricing metric and we called it total people records, and that basically meant that we charged customers based on the number of contacts that they had in the Intercom database, which was your total people recor…”

“And from engaging with their customers actually in product, in the application, they see three to four times the engagement rate of email.”

“They see 82% on average higher conversion when they engage with prospects on their website.”

“What we realized when we did that was that we had one product that we were actually very excited about and was growing well that had much weaker revenue health metrics Then the rest of our business, and in fact, the strength of our other products was hiding th…”

“Even support companies do shitty support, and I go on, and I play, I go on to all the leaders, the, I, okay, does, do all the leaders in SaaS, do the Zendesk and the intercoms, and do they answer their phone and say, none of them do either, right?”

“The learning is that the bigger SaaS companies are pretty fast to embrace AI, so it's not like they are the dinosaurs from the on-premise world that didn't manage to move to the cloud. If you look at what Intercom, HubSpot, Notion, Zendesk, and others are doin…”

“The real number everyone's trying to get to in the industry, and you can see it on things like the homepage of Intercom, is folks are trying to automate at least half of customer interactions. That's the goal across, if you talk to folks that are in support or…”

“Everyone in post sales, Salesforce, Intercom, Zendesk, Gorgeous, on and on. They are promising you can eliminate. 30 to 50% of your humans in support with AI. They're promising it today.”

“Even in this sort of odd per resolution model in, in post sales support. I think everyone, Zendesk, intercom, customer, gorgeous, dial, even dial pad, even in other areas, I think they all converging on the same model.”

“Intercom has its chat Support, or sorry, it's a support agent that is called Fin. It's actually charging based on resolution.”

“Intercom said Finn as a standalone product has already crossed fifty million.”

“Sierra went from nothing to a hundred million in one year, Decagon, lots of others. Intercom was just here, Finn. They, their AI products at a hundred million right after the company growth.”

“And then we're going to use Fin for customer support. That's the second agent that we're going to roll out in the next few weeks.”

“We said every designer is now shipping code to production. It is now part of your job. If you don't like that, We had a great run, but we should part ways and you should go somewhere where designers don't have to ship code.”

“Customers don't know how to evaluate AI products. They don't know how to run good evaluations.”

“There isn't a single buyer anymore. So for example, with Finn, we have, yes, the customer service leader, and they're still heavily, you know, heavily influential. They have a lot of clout, but they don't make the decision. And the reason is because there's tw…”

“AI products don't look like this at all. It's actually the inverse. Building the UI is the easy part. That's the small part. The hard part is building great AI infrastructure, building products that actually truly work at scale.”

“A lot of AI products do look the same. A lot of them are now AI agents. They all kind of look like some kind of chat interface. They all do different things, but they all kind of look the same. It's hard to tell them apart. Look at five competitors. They all k…”

“Finn's growing 300% year over year.”

“If you're a truly a deep AI company, of course you have an AI layer, but you also have an app layer and a model layer.”

“So we bet the entire company on AI. We bet the entire company. It was a risky thing to do. We ripped up our strategy. We ripped up our roadmap. We made these decisions in a very small number of days. Like you're talking once, two weeks after ChatGPT.”

“We had these principles at Intercom that evolved over years and they made us really good at building SaaS product... But, these principles were designed for the SaaS era. They were designed to build a SaaS product. We had to abandon all this shit.”

“Fin is totally different to Intercom. It's a completely different product. The two of them are like, they've almost nothing in common in some ways. It's a completely different product. I'm like, yes, Fin is, Fin usage is eating Intercom usage at times.”

“Like a third of your company, you need to part ways with them. They're not fit for this new world. They don't want to build the same way you want to build. They don't like fast, crazy fast pace. They don't like chaos.”

“If you fast forward to today, Finn has over a million resolutions a week. So every single week Finn is resolving over one million customer problems. We have over 6000 Finn customers. And Finn's average resolution rate is over 65%. So the resolution rate over t…”

“We then had five quarters of declining revenue growth. So revenue is still growing, but the rate at which was growing was declining. And this was not a good period for the company. We had gone down the IPO journey.”

“If you have a SaaS company and it predates AI and it's not an AI native company, in other words, you started the company designing an organization for the AI world, you have to change Everything. Your org, your product, your roadmap, how you build, the metrics…”

“Culture runs really deep. So you have to be wary of the people you need to keep convincing because they're going to be a liability.”

“You will grow to like a hundred million in AR or very quickly. Finn's on that path, very close to it.”

“Most SaaS companies sold seats. These are seats that humans sit in. Those humans use some kind of GUI, some CRUD type tasks to achieve some outcome. None of these things make sense anymore, right? None of these things make sense. There's no seats in a post AI …”

“This is fin or whatever intercom to the millionth degree that we built because it knows every so many details in real time for a hundred people and gets them all right. It's better than any chatbot on any website.”

“We use lean data for routing. We use clay for enrichment. Salesforce is our system of record and source of truth. We use Jira for tickets intercoms fin product. We use for Custer's customer support, as well as for sales support. I joke with the ironclad team t…”

“If you talk to folks like at Finn or Intercom or Gorgias or Sierra and others, they're all saying that there's convergence that support sales and marketing are all converging because once you can AI-ify them, you don't want to have three different agents, righ…”