The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 34 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Adams: Intercom mandated all product designers ship code or leave the company
“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.”
Adams: Companies must part ways with a third of staff for AI
“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.”
Adams: Traditional seat-based SaaS and CRUD GUIs make no sense post-AI
“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 …”
Lemkin: SaaS giants like Zendesk and Intercom offer shitty phone support
“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?”
Lemkin: AI support, sales, and marketing functions are converging into one agent
“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…”
Adams: In AI products, building UI is easy while infrastructure is hard
“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.”
Adams: AI Product Marketing Must Focus on Infrastructure, Not Features
“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…”
Adams: Intercom abandoned its long-standing SaaS product principles for AI
“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.”
Adams: Intercom's AI agent Fin is cannibalizing its legacy software usage
“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.”
Adams: Employees needing constant convincing during AI pivots become liabilities
“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.”
Lemkin: SaaS vendors promise AI can cut 30% to 50% of staff
“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.”
Lemkin: SaaStr's custom agent outperforms Intercom Fin and website chatbots
“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.”
Adams: Non-Technical Buyers Cannot Accurately Evaluate AI Products
“Customers don't know how to evaluate AI products. They don't know how to run good evaluations.”
Adams: AI Deals No Longer Have a Single Functional Buyer
“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…”
Adams: Pre-AI SaaS companies must overhaul every aspect of their business
“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…”
Adams: Intercom's AI product Fin is close to $100M ARR
“You will grow to like a hundred million in AR or very quickly. Finn's on that path, very close to it.”
Lemkin: Sierra and Intercom's Finn Scaled to $100M in Revenue
“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.”
Incumbent SaaS Giants Are Adopting AI Rapidly, Avoiding Dinosaur Fate
“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…”
Adams: True AI companies must build model, AI, and app layers
“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.”
Adams: Intercom's Fin resolves over 1M queries weekly across 6,000+ customers
“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…”
Lemkin: Intercom's Fin AI Agent Crossed $50M in Revenue
“Intercom said Finn as a standalone product has already crossed fifty million.”
Lemkin: Customer Support SaaS Platforms Are Converging on Per-Resolution Pricing
“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.”
Lemkin: SaaS companies aim to automate at least 50% of customer interactions
“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…”
Peacock: In-App Engagement Yields 3x to 4x the Rate of Email
“And from engaging with their customers actually in product, in the application, they see three to four times the engagement rate of email.”
Peacock: Engaging Website Prospects Drives 82% Higher Average Conversion
“They see 82% on average higher conversion when they engage with prospects on their website.”
Dorfman details the exact tech stack behind Anthropic's sales operations
“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…”
Adams: Intercom bet the company on AI two weeks after ChatGPT launched
“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.”
Adams: Intercom experienced five quarters of declining revenue growth before ChatGPT
“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.”
Personio to Roll Out Intercom's Fin AI Agent for Customer Support
“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.”
Amble: Intercom charges for AI agent Fin based on resolution
“Intercom has its chat
Support, or sorry, it's a support agent that is called Fin. It's actually charging based on resolution.”
Peacock: Why Intercom's Original Contact-Based Pricing Eventually Broke Down
“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…”
Peacock: Intercom's Aggregate Revenue Once Masked an Underperforming Product Segment
“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…”