Dan Martell - Building The Right Product & Pricing with Des Traynor @ Intercom.com

00:00:00.000 You can easily blame your company for a lot as well,

00:00:02.920 but oftentimes it's just you just did not want to get off off the couch

00:00:06.200 or you just like beers too much.

00:00:08.400 Admission sequence start.

00:00:10.400 Three, two, one.

00:00:21.400 Des Treanor, thanks for coming on.

00:00:23.400 Thank you for having me, Dan.

00:00:24.180 Dude, the man, the myth, the legend.

00:00:26.960 Intercom, people have never heard.

00:00:28.480 Yeah.

00:00:28.720 Founder, product, so now you're Chief Solution Officer?

00:00:32.140 Strategy Officer, yeah.

00:00:32.980 Strategy Officer.

00:00:34.720 You pretty much ran product for a long time, probably still do.

00:00:38.720 How did you get into this?

00:00:39.700 Because I mean, I was an early angel investor.

00:00:42.620 I met Owen at a conference.

00:00:44.260 He showed me this early thing.

00:00:45.740 I was like, I get it, because we had built a bunch of stuff

00:00:48.180 ourselves.

00:00:50.380 How did you and Owen meet?

00:00:52.580 Like, what's the origin story?

00:00:53.840 Even before Intercom, because that's the part.

00:00:55.780 Because I know you guys ran a development agency or a product

00:00:58.240 Design and development, yeah, that's right.

00:00:59.620 Handbrake, is that?

00:01:00.380 Contrast, contrast.

00:01:01.360 OK, contrast, but did you guys build the?

00:01:03.220 Exceptional, yeah.

00:01:04.000 Exceptional, yes.

00:01:04.620 Yeah, that's right.

00:01:05.200 OK, your competitor might have been Handbrake.

00:01:06.700 Airbrake, yeah.

00:01:07.180 Airbrake, OK, cool.

00:01:08.240 So you guys have been building SaaS products back in the day.

00:01:10.760 How long do you guys do Exceptional for?

00:01:12.600 Probably about two and a half years.

00:01:13.800 That's it?

00:01:14.380 Yeah.

00:01:14.880 Wow.

00:01:15.380 Maybe three tops this month, yeah.

00:01:17.020 Yeah?

00:01:17.600 Yeah, like, I mean, I can maybe, if I start where I met OWN,

00:01:22.000 maybe I can.

00:01:22.500 Bring the mic closer.

00:01:23.540 Sure.

00:01:24.040 Yeah.

00:01:26.260 I met Owen, I think, in 2006.

00:01:28.460 It was in March.

00:01:29.540 At the time, I was trying to do a PhD in university.

00:01:32.480 But the Irish tech scene, as it were,

00:01:34.580 were like 25 people or something like that.

00:01:36.900 It was very small.

00:01:38.980 And Owen, on his blog, had announced

00:01:41.420 he was organizing this coffee meetup.

00:01:43.740 So I took a Tuesday morning off,

00:01:45.220 and I was like, all right, let's go in

00:01:46.140 and meet these internet people.

00:01:48.260 And I met Owen that day, and we talked about a lot of stuff.

00:01:50.720 I had hacked away on a couple of startups.

00:01:52.420 He had hacked away on a couple of startups.

00:01:53.560 We were comparing sort of failure notes and success notes.

00:01:56.260 And we kind of realized we were definitely on the same page about a lot of things.

00:02:00.000 Coincidentally, at the same coffee shop meetup, I actually met the woman who had gone to become my wife, which is funny.

00:02:05.800 No way.

00:02:06.400 Two important people in one meetup.

00:02:07.880 Yeah, exactly.

00:02:08.500 Get out of your houses.

00:02:09.760 Yeah, exactly.

00:02:10.680 A high ROI day, I suppose, right?

00:02:13.920 And I actually didn't work with Owen initially.

00:02:15.580 I took a job with a design consultancy, kind of learned the tricks of the trade of consultancy.

00:02:20.040 And then Owen announced he wanted to start his own consultancy called Contrast.

00:02:23.820 And he asked me would I sort of join with him.

00:02:26.000 So I did.

00:02:26.820 And for a year, we worked on exceptional,

00:02:30.320 this Ruby on Rails error tracker.

00:02:31.740 And we were also, our bread and butter

00:02:33.640 was designing products for other people.

00:02:35.700 At the time, it was a nice imbalancing currency

00:02:38.260 where we could work at a really great rate

00:02:40.720 charging euros for a Silicon Valley firm spending dollars.

00:02:43.980 And everyone was thrilled with the outcome.

00:02:46.040 Wow.

00:02:46.720 Because the euro was weak, the dollar was strong.

00:02:49.200 So we were charging a small dollar price,

00:02:51.560 cheaper than anyone in the Bay Area,

00:02:52.880 and earning an insane sort of rate per day here.

00:02:57.000 And the other nice thing about it was we had this,

00:02:58.920 and it kind of influenced how Intercom ended up,

00:03:01.160 we had this nice harmony where we would work effectively

00:03:04.400 through the night, and our clients would come to work

00:03:07.580 and be like, holy shit, you guys are awesome.

00:03:09.780 You've got all this stuff done already.

00:03:10.480 And they'd give us all the feedback.

00:03:11.740 They'd go home, they'd come back,

00:03:12.800 and all the feedback would be implemented.

00:03:14.580 Oh, you weren't working through the night, were you?

00:03:16.060 No, no, no.

00:03:16.400 No, you were just getting up in the morning and working.

00:03:17.880 We were doing our day shift, you know?

00:03:18.680 Yeah.

00:03:19.580 But it's just like, so for the firms,

00:03:22.120 like Smartling was one, a few others like sort of Bay Area

00:03:25.880 startups that kind of went on to succeed.

00:03:27.880 A lot of the time, it was like they were developing it,

00:03:29.760 and we were producing the designs.

00:03:30.960 So like literally, they had this incredible,

00:03:32.780 it was like they had a 24-hour dev shop, if you know what I mean.

00:03:35.040 Designs, implementation, design.

00:03:36.620 Yeah, exactly.

00:03:37.460 And it was so fast.

00:03:38.320 And that kind of became useful when we started Intercom,

00:03:41.240 because Intercom had the same dynamic.

00:03:42.460 Owners in San Francisco, we were all back in Dublin.

00:03:44.780 So we'd work, he'd feedback, we'd work, he'd give feedback,

00:03:47.380 and we could get through a lot of stuff in a week.

00:03:49.880 But anyway, we had this side product, Exceptional,

00:03:53.760 this Ruby on Rails error tracker.

00:03:55.000 And with Exceptional, we had loads and loads of users.

00:03:57.520 But we never really talked to any of them.

00:03:59.660 There was a street in San Francisco

00:04:01.060 where we had more customers than we did in all of Ireland.

00:04:02.960 That's how divorced we were from customers.

00:04:05.340 And in 2008, 2009, there was no good tooling for B2B companies.

00:04:09.700 And you remember this, right?

00:04:11.340 As in the way, even like, how did you charge money?

00:04:13.960 Oh, we had a PayPal subscription log.

00:04:15.760 It was all this junk, right?

00:04:17.480 So if you wanted to talk to your active paying customers

00:04:19.900 of your product, you'd have to get an export of an XML feed

00:04:22.840 out of PayPal, and you'd then sync that against your own

00:04:25.020 product's database to see who would log in and stuff.

00:04:27.380 You'd throw all that into a MailChimp, send out a mail,

00:04:29.840 being like, hey, what should we work on next?

00:04:31.300 You get 300 emails back.

00:04:32.380 It was a mess.

00:04:33.020 And as a result, no one did it.

00:04:34.860 So one day, we decided to work on this.

00:04:36.780 And the Exceptional logo was this little star that

00:04:39.140 floated in the bottom right-hand corner.

00:04:40.780 And one day, a little speech bubble came out of it saying,

00:04:42.220 hey, we're the team behind Exceptional.

00:04:43.320 What should we work on next?

00:04:44.660 And so many people were just like, what is this thing?

00:04:47.600 I want this thing.

00:04:48.800 Are you serious?

00:04:49.720 I didn't know that.

00:04:50.760 It came from building the tool for Exceptional

00:04:53.600 just to talk to them.

00:04:54.660 Just to talk to our customers.

00:04:55.760 And then they were like, that.

00:04:57.720 Yeah.

00:04:58.260 Talk to your customers is the most important thing a business

00:05:00.340 does.

00:05:00.840 And for SaaS businesses, for so long, it was impossible.

00:05:04.640 And then we realized really quickly,

00:05:07.040 we thought it might have been just because we were in Ireland.

00:05:09.320 And maybe in the Silicon Valley, you bump into your users

00:05:11.780 in the streets or something.

00:05:13.700 But it turns out that wasn't true.

00:05:15.080 Everyone had this problem.

00:05:15.840 Universal problem.

00:05:16.440 Everyone had this problem.

00:05:17.460 And it was a big problem, right?

00:05:18.700 It was in the opportunity to solve it was huge.

00:05:20.300 It was so much clearly bigger

00:05:21.280 than Ruby on Rails exception handling.

00:05:23.820 So we sold off exceptional

00:05:25.420 and went on to become a part of Rackspace.

00:05:27.220 Next thing we had this like lump of JavaScript

00:05:28.860 and we're like, right, what do we do with this?

00:05:31.480 So we better quickly establish a company around it.

00:05:33.460 And we had some money from the proceeds of the sale

00:05:35.000 and we just went all in on this idea of like,

00:05:37.520 let's help internet businesses talk to their customers.

00:05:39.480 And we said at the time,

00:05:40.400 our mission was to make internet business personal

00:05:42.180 because we were working out of this coffee shop at the time,

00:05:44.440 3FE, you probably ran past it a few times.

00:05:46.780 And 3FE, like the guy who hosted us there,

00:05:50.920 Colin Harmon, his name is,

00:05:52.160 he used to serve us every day,

00:05:53.140 but we got to observe a single one person

00:05:55.840 build a coffee shop brand

00:05:57.300 simply off talking to customers.

00:05:59.480 He took feedback, he'd try out new recipes,

00:06:01.900 he'd like new beans, new flavors,

00:06:03.500 he'd know everyone's names, know their orders.

00:06:05.500 And we're like, why can't we have that tangible

00:06:07.600 sort of relationship with customers?

00:06:10.020 And that became what we started to bake

00:06:11.680 into intercom we started like here's the customers you haven't spoken to in a while here's where they

00:06:15.400 are around the world here's the state of this customer here's dan dan has like three projects

00:06:19.740 and two files and no friends or whatever you know and all of that became really really rich

00:06:23.500 uh because it gave you all the reasons why you're like oh now i know what i should say to certain

00:06:26.720 people at the time like we didn't it wasn't like today you call all this oh behavioral marketing

00:06:31.740 automation and all you have all the new buzzwords that they're like forrester would invent for the

00:06:35.680 terms yeah in the late years it would follow put you in a quadrant yeah exactly but at the time it

00:06:39.920 just felt like our job was, make it really easy

00:06:42.680 to have good conversations with good people and give people

00:06:45.240 everyone, exactly, give them all the relevant information

00:06:47.540 so they can talk about the right stuff.

00:06:49.420 And that was like the thread we've

00:06:50.800 been pulling for like eight years now.

00:06:52.440 Now, one thing I've seen you does over,

00:06:54.720 I mean, I think it was 2009, I went bachelor party for Ethan

00:07:00.020 and Owen was there.

00:07:00.980 And there was a conversation around, like, what are we?

00:07:04.700 Because there's like this support tool.

00:07:06.300 There's this marketing automation tool.

00:07:08.400 And even, I mean, arguably a lot of people said online,

00:07:10.900 like the pricing was a little hard to understand for a while.

00:07:14.560 How did you guys, because it's also fascinating, though,

00:07:17.580 to watch staying true to that, being OK that it's not perfect.

00:07:21.900 And I've seen you talk a lot about how

00:07:23.460 to prioritize product roadmap, et cetera.

00:07:27.060 How did you guys move through that

00:07:29.340 and think about it back then?

00:07:31.020 Because I feel like there's a lot of founders out there

00:07:32.640 today that have these products that have distinct use cases,

00:07:36.000 and they don't want to give anyone up,

00:07:37.680 because they're, but what if that's the thing,

00:07:39.660 the vein or the thread we pull on that makes it a thing?

00:07:42.480 How did you, what was the mindset back then?

00:07:44.740 I think it was quite small company back then.

00:07:47.240 Like we were like maybe at the time,

00:07:49.100 like if you're on 2008, 9, 10,

00:07:50.660 we were like four people, maybe 10 by the end of 2011, 2012.

00:07:55.020 And we, you know, none of us,

00:07:57.820 in good ways and bad ways,

00:07:58.720 none of us had ever worked in large companies.

00:08:00.000 So we also were kind of lacking any sort of awareness

00:08:02.440 of how bigger companies might have worked.

00:08:03.960 So we genuinely thought like we could build a product

00:08:07.080 that would just be like all conversations

00:08:09.540 between businesses and their customers.

00:08:11.880 And so as a result, the idea of like having a product

00:08:15.220 for sales or for marketing or for support,

00:08:17.720 it never, like that wasn't the language we specifically had.

00:08:21.220 It was only really in like 2013,

00:08:22.740 we did this jobs to be done research

00:08:24.580 with this firm in Detroit.

00:08:26.360 And they introduced us to our customers effectively,

00:08:28.800 it's the best way I could describe it.

00:08:29.680 There's something ironic about this,

00:08:30.620 given the tool we had built.

00:08:31.880 But like what they did is like these two hour long deep dives

00:08:34.160 of like, you know, literally walk me through

00:08:36.160 exactly what was going on in your mind

00:08:37.640 when you signed up for Intercom?

00:08:38.580 What were you trying to solve?

00:08:39.740 They did the interviews?

00:08:40.760 Yeah.

00:08:41.100 Is this with Bob?

00:08:42.000 This is Bob Mess, definitely word.

00:08:43.540 Yeah, that's right.

00:08:44.720 And it was then like that we realized,

00:08:47.600 you know, two things came out.

00:08:48.640 One was like,

00:08:49.600 there were three very different paths

00:08:50.860 into Intercom,

00:08:51.680 support, marketing, and sales.

00:08:53.600 So sales being like,

00:08:54.620 I want to talk to people on my website.

00:08:55.840 Support being support in the app

00:08:57.360 where we kind of started.

00:08:58.580 And marketing being like,

00:08:59.620 I want to like drip out to people

00:09:01.080 because they've slipped away

00:09:02.360 or, you know, they're on trial.

00:09:03.780 I want to let them know

00:09:04.340 about the new stuff or whatever.

00:09:06.200 And we realized, oh, so it turns out we have three different buyers.

00:09:09.580 And then the other piece that we unearthed it from that was like,

00:09:11.760 also, as companies get big, these are three different buyers.

00:09:15.600 And they actually don't necessarily compare notes and they don't all agree

00:09:18.820 and we have to use the same tool.

00:09:20.700 They actually all would like use loads of different tools

00:09:22.640 to support people go off to like the Zendesk or whatever of the world.

00:09:25.280 And the salespeople go off to like, you know, Salesforce and things like that.

00:09:28.420 And marketing is obviously like this smashed up hybrid of a dozen tools, right?

00:09:32.640 Yeah.

00:09:32.840 And we realized, OK, so it turns out

00:09:35.880 we have different buyers of our product,

00:09:37.580 and we're trying to sell them.

00:09:39.980 The perception from our customers, which used to frustrate us,

00:09:42.100 was I'd love to use Intercom, but my support team really

00:09:46.280 liked Zendesk.

00:09:47.360 Yeah.

00:09:48.060 And we were like, why is that a problem?

00:09:49.700 Yeah.

00:09:50.200 Well, because I have to switch over entirely.

00:09:51.520 And we're like, oh, that's what you'd think.

00:09:54.380 And when we weren't helping the situation,

00:09:56.100 our website made that exact pitch.

00:09:57.900 Yeah.

00:09:58.680 So we realized, OK, well, let's break the product up

00:10:01.320 make it clear you can buy us for each of these things in isolation.

00:10:03.960 But then to make that work, we have to then change our pricing.

00:10:05.960 So it wasn't just one price fits all, because one price never fit all.

00:10:08.360 No.

00:10:09.000 So now we have to charge different prices for different jobs.

00:10:11.000 And now that created a whole new problem, which was like, hey, it feels like you're

00:10:14.280 charging me.

00:10:14.760 It feels like I'm going to be punished by using this product in multiple places.

00:10:17.560 And we're like, but it's multiple cost centers.

00:10:19.560 Like, you know, it's multiple buyers.

00:10:20.600 And so like, yeah, and it's difficult as companies scale, because even within marketing,

00:10:25.880 it's not like there's a, in a larger company, it's not like there's a marketing head.

00:10:28.920 there's actually like the head of demand gen and the head of product marketing and the head of like

00:10:31.880 sales operations and all these different people have like have fingers in the pie if you like

00:10:35.480 yeah and one of you know and any one of them might want to buy intercom or all of them or none of them

00:10:40.840 and one of them might be might have to veto power to block so you have all of these new dynamics

00:10:44.360 that we had to learn uh as we were kind of rolling out our packaging which was to basically say

00:10:48.680 we want people to be able to buy the pieces of intercom they want and we don't want them to have

00:10:53.320 to adopt all of the cost or all of the product yeah but if they decide to start using something

00:10:57.320 later, we should profit off that, too.

00:10:59.120 Yeah, make it easy.

00:11:00.460 And to balance that whole transition,

00:11:03.380 well, it was just proved to be very hard.

00:11:05.000 And that's where a lot of the sort of confusion

00:11:07.040 around the pricing came from.

00:11:08.040 Yeah.

00:11:08.540 And I mean, how many times would you

00:11:10.460 say you guys have iterated around packaging and pricing

00:11:13.840 since 2014?

00:11:15.500 And so you're saying you guys went for four years of just saying,

00:11:18.040 this is the problem we want to solve in the world.

00:11:20.120 And it was four years in-ish that you said, hey,

00:11:22.700 let's figure out what are the jobs that need to be done

00:11:25.520 from our customers' point of view.

00:11:26.720 Three to four years, yeah.

00:11:27.900 And I think, and yeah, the light bulb moment

00:11:32.160 was basically there's different types of customers here

00:11:34.440 with different goals in a sense.

00:11:36.860 Like sales and marketing, they only care about upside

00:11:38.860 and whereas support costs, people generally tend

00:11:41.880 to want to minimize costs.

00:11:43.260 And so their goals for the product are different as well.

00:11:46.860 So we have to, and that clarity also let us start

00:11:48.980 making product development choices in different directions.

00:11:51.520 That's where I want to go next because to me,

00:11:53.080 This is a, you know, it's hard when you have three distinct kind of products.

00:11:57.920 But on the pricing and packaging, because I know a lot of people use you guys as the, they're like, this is how Intercom does it, so we're going to do it that way, right?

00:12:04.540 Where you had like the meter slide and like this gives you some, but I mean, what were some of the mistakes and some assumptions you made in the pricing that you later changed?

00:12:13.100 So like probably the biggest assumption, and I guess you could actually, we should have been smarter about it, but we assumed people would know roughly how many users they have.

00:12:23.080 and they don't and we assumed people would have some sense of how many abandoned users

00:12:27.980 they have and they don't and we i guess we um and like we should have known this because we

00:12:32.140 ourselves didn't know this information until we built intercom you know uh but as a result like

00:12:37.020 dissolve and like so that was one that was probably the biggest assumption so like without

00:12:40.620 that the first wave of our first significant wave of pricing feedback was some version of i don't

00:12:45.180 know what an active user is yep and we're like okay uh and then other uh a lot other tools charge

00:12:51.360 just charge for all users.

00:12:52.980 And some people, they just have a public-facing tool

00:12:55.980 that doesn't technically have a logged-in user.

00:12:58.220 I know that was a big, like, I want to use Intercom,

00:13:00.180 but if I run it through their numbers,

00:13:01.640 it's crazy expensive because they're

00:13:04.120 tracking individual sessions.

00:13:05.580 Yeah, no, we don't charge for a visitor,

00:13:07.020 but you are, right?

00:13:07.860 That's what people will have.

00:13:08.860 I get 200,000 hits a day.

00:13:10.120 Are you going to charge 200,000 things?

00:13:11.420 We're like, no, only conversations that get started.

00:13:13.240 And they're like, OK.

00:13:14.940 So you have a lot of this, but there's also

00:13:17.520 some things people don't really know

00:13:20.700 how to put a price on.

00:13:21.460 So people want to store hundreds and thousands

00:13:26.000 of leads in Intercom who don't use their product.

00:13:29.000 And they want to reach out to them and mail them.

00:13:32.500 But they don't value them the same way they value active users.

00:13:35.140 I think for a good reason, because they're not as valuable.

00:13:38.140 But for us to make this work now,

00:13:41.360 we need to create a new type of user, which would be a dead user.

00:13:44.120 So if you could imagine this, you'd have active users.

00:13:46.600 Yeah.

00:13:47.100 And there's a fundamental axiom here,

00:13:50.500 is you can have simple pricing

00:13:52.400 or you can have effective pricing,

00:13:53.980 but you can't have both.

00:13:54.980 And I really think,

00:13:55.820 I think in trivial product domains,

00:13:58.120 yes, you can, like a to-do list,

00:13:59.320 you could charge per item

00:14:00.060 or something like that for sure.

00:14:01.320 But once you get into the big murky world

00:14:03.460 of B2B SaaS software,

00:14:04.940 what you have is within one platform,

00:14:07.300 you have multiple buyers,

00:14:09.320 multiple paths to purchase,

00:14:11.400 and multiple different ways

00:14:12.600 to evaluate ultimately the same thing.

00:14:14.780 So a support tool would really value

00:14:17.700 having a full customer record

00:14:18.820 because it helps them deep dive.

00:14:20.500 A sales tool doesn't really care about the customers.

00:14:22.600 It cares about the leads and the prospects.

00:14:24.340 The fact that you're building and stockpiling

00:14:25.720 all these authentic customer records, they're like,

00:14:28.300 whatever, that's not our problem.

00:14:29.260 My problem is to get people in the door.

00:14:32.440 So you can imagine the dynamics at play.

00:14:34.440 And as a result, yes, we've iterated in pricing a lot.

00:14:36.980 And we'll do it again.

00:14:38.300 And what is your current pricing access?

00:14:40.360 What are the things that?

00:14:41.640 We charge by seats, which is how many people

00:14:44.280 do you want to talk to customers.

00:14:45.640 Generally speaking, that works because people roughly know how

00:14:48.380 they know how many they're going to hire.

00:14:49.880 They can answer that question.

00:14:51.120 Yes, they can.

00:14:51.920 And then we charge by like.

00:14:52.860 If they don't, they have bigger problems.

00:14:54.340 Yeah, yeah, for sure.

00:14:55.160 You don't know how many people you have on your team.

00:14:56.900 And then for some of the tools, we

00:14:58.320 also charge based on how much conversations you want to start

00:15:00.940 as well, because seats wouldn't work if it was just

00:15:03.380 a marketing product, because you have one person sending 9

00:15:05.260 million emails.

00:15:07.280 It's not 9 million active users, but it's not one seat either.

00:15:10.940 So we use each of them depending.

00:15:12.920 And then we have add-ons as well.

00:15:14.160 So we have a product tours add-on, an answer bot add-on,

00:15:16.900 custom bots add-on, so where you can build your own chat bots

00:15:19.260 and stuff like that.

00:15:19.760 And each of those are incremental figures as well.

00:15:22.440 And then so let's talk more about product and decisions.

00:15:27.080 There's so many places, because you write so much.

00:15:28.980 You're prolific on the blog.

00:15:30.080 And you guys have done an amazing job just the e-books

00:15:32.980 and just sharing as much as you can with the market

00:15:35.640 and other SaaS founders.

00:15:37.140 How do you think of managing product?

00:15:39.840 Like for a founder that is product, as a product founder,

00:15:43.600 how should they think about product and engineering

00:15:46.040 and what the role of product is versus building it

00:15:49.080 How do you explain that?

00:15:51.440 I think the biggest mistake people make is they,

00:15:56.640 and often I think Intercom might have accidentally caused this,

00:16:00.400 product is not more important than engineering.

00:16:03.680 They're equally important.

00:16:05.440 And product managers could get, like they've read that Ben Horowitz post,

00:16:08.880 and I think they're the mini CEO, like they get this kind of God complex.

00:16:11.800 It's terrible.

00:16:13.700 A product manager literally without a good engineering team

00:16:16.620 can produce a load of whiteboard sketches and notes,

00:16:19.620 and that doesn't sell very well.

00:16:21.360 No impact on customers.

00:16:21.700 Exactly.

00:16:23.880 And so I think that when I think about it ultimately,

00:16:26.360 I guess the product manager's job

00:16:28.260 is to understand the problem.

00:16:30.480 That's it.

00:16:31.420 The designer's job is to come up with the solution,

00:16:33.760 and the engineer's job is to render the intended solution

00:16:36.700 in a way that customers can experience it.

00:16:39.240 And the way we work at Intercom,

00:16:40.940 and we've been like this for six or seven years,

00:16:42.840 there's a lot of stuff we've changed,

00:16:43.880 but this is not one.

00:16:46.620 And we obsess about our product managers being able to articulate exactly the problem they're trying to solve.

00:16:51.720 Because, you know, Einstein, I think he used to say,

00:16:53.860 a problem I'd explain is a problem half solved or whatever.

00:16:57.660 So once we have a really good articulation of the problem,

00:17:00.720 the design becomes self-evident at times.

00:17:02.960 But sometimes it does need some creativity, like for redesigning our messenger.

00:17:06.220 It's like, all right, well, there's a lot of options here.

00:17:09.340 And once we have a decent design, we then partner with the engineering.

00:17:15.460 The reason we partner with engineering is because engineering are like,

00:17:18.340 if you just let product managers and designers work independently,

00:17:21.300 I call that like shopping without a price tag, right?

00:17:23.940 You don't actually know the cost of the decision.

00:17:25.940 And we've seen this happen.

00:17:26.720 We've had some of the most highest ranked designers in the community

00:17:31.380 have worked on parts of Intercom.

00:17:32.960 And we've seen some produced things like motion blur as an effect

00:17:36.820 by which the messenger should render itself.

00:17:39.420 And it looks phenomenal.

00:17:41.680 And then you sit down with an engineer and they're like,

00:17:43.040 that's cool, man.

00:17:43.780 I think it's cool too.

00:17:44.800 So January 2020 is when we're going to see this.

00:17:48.040 And I'm like, that's 14 months away.

00:17:49.840 And we're like, yeah, yeah.

00:17:52.300 If you take the motion blur out of it,

00:17:53.600 I can have it done in two weeks.

00:17:54.800 And you're like, oh.

00:17:56.140 And that's maybe an over-exaggerated example.

00:17:59.000 But it's shopping without the price tag.

00:18:00.260 Yeah, you're shopping without the price tag.

00:18:02.000 So engineering has to inform the solution.

00:18:04.560 And at what stage of product development or design

00:18:07.600 does engineering, are they part of the discussion?

00:18:10.360 I think it depends on where the area of the product you're working on.

00:18:13.600 Yeah, some stuff is like, if we're adding extra tabs to our Salesforce integration,

00:18:18.600 there's going to be drop-downs.

00:18:19.980 You don't need an engineer to say that's pretty straightforward.

00:18:22.060 It's more like when we're trying to do new shit.

00:18:23.540 So our product or his product, this is a visual walk-through guide with video

00:18:27.400 that will walk you around a product.

00:18:29.360 Engineers were core to that because they're like,

00:18:32.200 here's what's possible, here's what's cheap,

00:18:34.780 here's what's expensive but potentially worth it.

00:18:37.280 Here's the Lego pieces.

00:18:38.500 Let's assemble, and you have a price in each of these things.

00:18:40.900 So if you want video, here's what it costs.

00:18:42.360 If you want shadows and shades and animation

00:18:44.740 and you want things to be able to scroll up and down,

00:18:46.840 here's the costs.

00:18:47.620 And we can then make an informed decision

00:18:49.420 about the market impact relative to the cost.

00:18:52.000 So anyway, just to zoom back out,

00:18:54.140 so product managers own the problem.

00:18:56.800 They know what we're trying to do.

00:18:58.220 Designers own a solution.

00:18:59.160 They know how we're trying to do it.

00:19:00.140 And engineers own literally everything else,

00:19:01.960 which is getting the thing happening

00:19:03.080 and also informing it.

00:19:05.640 If something goes into deadlock

00:19:07.560 where we've been working on it for nine months,

00:19:09.400 you can effectively hold all people accountable.

00:19:12.360 It's either we're either solving the wrong problem

00:19:14.000 or the solution is either bad or too expensive

00:19:16.380 or the engineers aren't, well, for whatever reason,

00:19:18.240 aren't progressing.

00:19:19.200 But I don't think it's useful.

00:19:21.840 We kind of observe blameless postmortems.

00:19:24.100 I kind of look at the unit of three and sort of say,

00:19:26.440 between the three of you, this has not moved.

00:19:29.240 And it's very rare this would happen.

00:19:30.480 But I think it's worth clarifying that.

00:19:33.180 I hate to see anyone kind of in blind fate execute something.

00:19:38.540 So like an engineer who will take a design

00:19:40.820 and kind of just close their eyes and bang it out.

00:19:42.440 Not challenge it.

00:19:43.100 Yeah, not challenge it, not say how expensive it is.

00:19:44.900 Or not even, like, the inverse of that's also true,

00:19:47.320 being like, hey, I see what you've designed,

00:19:48.920 but did you know that for an extra, if you give me one more

00:19:50.620 week, I can do this extra thing, which is way cooler?

00:19:53.060 And you're like, oh.

00:19:53.960 Add some value there.

00:19:55.200 Absolutely.

00:19:55.700 So you want that conversation to be happening.

00:19:58.260 So that's the kind of the trifecta that we see.

00:20:00.320 And then the external sources that inform all, usually

00:20:03.140 inform the PM, will be like user research, product analytics,

00:20:06.380 anything that's like data or like qualitative feedback

00:20:08.360 related, you need all that flowing to the PM.

00:20:10.320 Yeah. And that's, and you talk about this with the, do you guys still use RiceScore for?

00:20:14.580 Yes, that's right. Yeah, yeah.

00:20:15.660 So do you want to pack that for people that are not familiar?

00:20:17.380 Sure. So when we try to prioritize any piece of work, we started this primarily working on our growth team,

00:20:26.520 but it became kind of like popular across all of Intercom.

00:20:29.660 We came up with this framework to try and ask which of these bets should we take?

00:20:33.540 Which most growth work is bets. And it was like reach, impact, confidence, and effort.

00:20:40.320 So reach would be like, how many people will this affect?

00:20:43.260 Because ICE has been around, I feel like,

00:20:45.000 for a while, the impact company.

00:20:46.680 I think it came from the Navy SEALs.

00:20:47.980 Probably, yeah.

00:20:48.600 Yeah, it's like an army reference.

00:20:49.940 But then adding the reach just crystallizes it for the product.

00:20:53.380 Exactly.

00:20:54.000 So then impact is like, how will this possibly affect

00:20:57.300 the business?

00:20:57.720 Confidence is how likely is it that we can do this?

00:20:59.760 And then effort is obviously, how much cost is it to do?

00:21:03.120 And it's a really simple way to kind of get down to like,

00:21:07.380 It's another type of putting a price tag on things.

00:21:10.700 It's basically the way I think about Intercom's product teams,

00:21:14.880 there's two types of work we do.

00:21:16.820 We never really formally say this,

00:21:18.260 but there's work we do where it's pure innovation

00:21:20.480 and exploration.

00:21:21.280 We're trying to find a new solution to a new thing.

00:21:23.160 R&D, going where the puck's going.

00:21:24.680 True R&D, exactly.

00:21:26.220 And then there's what I just call problem solving, which

00:21:28.040 is just people who use our Marketo integration

00:21:32.880 need to be able to throttle the API limits.

00:21:34.980 So you're like, you know, enough customer support requests.

00:21:37.760 Exactly.

00:21:38.240 You hear it enough.

00:21:38.840 And like my expectation for the latter

00:21:41.580 is that it will get solved in one go

00:21:44.740 with no significant iterations and no significant misses.

00:21:47.500 Because we have everything we need to know.

00:21:48.860 It's a closed world.

00:21:49.720 So low probability of it not being done.

00:21:52.880 Yes, exactly.

00:21:53.660 And it's rare as a result.

00:21:55.240 It's rare that these things are supremely high impact

00:21:57.140 because we would have done it a long time ago.

00:21:58.660 Like, you know, there's not that much low hanging fruit

00:22:00.540 hanging around.

00:22:01.140 Yeah.

00:22:01.740 And then the other type of work is it's really important

00:22:04.160 and you distinguish them because the exploration work,

00:22:07.040 you need to be willing to fail.

00:22:08.300 And you need to be OK with the idea

00:22:09.480 that a team might disappear for six weeks

00:22:10.980 and come back with something that isn't shippable.

00:22:13.380 Because you're actually exploring.

00:22:15.200 And if you're not willing to fail,

00:22:16.680 then if your error bars aren't high enough,

00:22:18.780 then your error bar is probably a great outcome

00:22:21.280 or a bad outcome or whatever.

00:22:22.500 They're also like your success bars as well.

00:22:24.460 So if there's no chance of this thing going wrong,

00:22:26.540 there's no chance of going particularly right.

00:22:27.920 You're not trying, going right.

00:22:28.660 You're having those big wins.

00:22:29.500 Precisely.

00:22:30.000 So I think you need all of these different lenses

00:22:32.760 when you're putting together a roadmap and then it's a case of like how much innovation can we

00:22:39.260 afford versus how much like blocking and tackling. And what percent split would you say maybe it was

00:22:43.980 different back in the day? Where does that land today? Is it 30-70? Is it 50-50? Yeah, it's a good

00:22:51.720 question. So again, we have to remind, we break it down per team as well. Into those three core

00:22:57.080 areas? Yeah. So your product team essentially is support marketing. Yeah, exactly. So in our

00:23:02.400 customer support world, we know that world pretty well.

00:23:04.980 And there are still things that like Desk.com or Service

00:23:08.520 Cloud or Zendesk can do that we can't do.

00:23:10.680 That you may not do for a while.

00:23:11.940 We may not do, but there wouldn't be a big bet,

00:23:16.060 like as in we should add a ticketing capability.

00:23:18.540 Like a new paradigm change.

00:23:19.920 Yeah, exactly.

00:23:20.460 Because that's what you guys, I mean,

00:23:21.580 this is the thing with innovation,

00:23:22.620 is what you brought to the market, and you kind of want to.

00:23:27.180 That's what I find about all these software companies

00:23:29.940 is they have a different perspective on the problem.

00:23:33.320 And that's hard to figure out.

00:23:34.980 But that's where the big opportunity is.

00:23:36.820 They're the big bets.

00:23:37.600 Not a me too, not a feature comparison checklist.

00:23:39.720 And sometimes you need to add in a couple of regular features,

00:23:42.960 like classically.

00:23:43.860 So something we added recently, like a new,

00:23:48.360 your support team can't download all your users.

00:23:51.640 Seems sensible, but it never occurred to us

00:23:53.760 that that was necessary.

00:23:54.700 But when that came up, I was like,

00:23:56.120 I can totally see why we need to do that.

00:23:57.920 my expectation is we'll ship that in a couple of weeks

00:24:00.020 and it won't be a big fanfare,

00:24:01.620 but it'll definitely succeed, right?

00:24:03.280 And so when we look at, say, an incumbent competitor

00:24:05.240 and we were looking at trying to help people

00:24:07.120 switch from them to us,

00:24:08.640 occasionally there's just things we need to do.

00:24:10.340 So in the support scape,

00:24:11.240 if you want to move from Zendesk to us,

00:24:13.400 we probably need to add a couple of things

00:24:14.820 to help your workflows map perfectly.

00:24:17.540 But they're not big bets.

00:24:18.740 Whereas, say, in a product area space,

00:24:20.940 it's not rife with competition,

00:24:23.440 nor is it a well-trodden path,

00:24:25.860 nor is it mature.

00:24:26.700 So the areas of innovation are still quite wide there, like there's a lot more we could

00:24:31.540 do.

00:24:32.540 And I would say our customers don't have expectations of, well, of course they should

00:24:37.780 be able to X, Y, Z, because they're also joining us on this journey of, let's see what happens

00:24:42.160 at the end of all this.

00:24:43.940 So you don't have any sort of incumbent expectations, so you have freedom to innovate.

00:24:48.100 Whereas in other areas, you're like, oh my God, you call yourself a help desk, but you

00:24:50.700 can't merge tags or whatever, you're like, okay, I guess we should have the merge tags

00:24:54.520 functionality, that type of thing.

00:24:56.600 So I'd say the cocktail of innovation

00:24:59.180 versus the blocking and tackling or whatever

00:25:01.300 kind of changes for each product,

00:25:02.660 depending on where they are and what they've recently launched.

00:25:05.020 OK.

00:25:05.560 So it could be 50-50, it could be 70-30.

00:25:07.700 Obviously, in the early days, it was like 90% innovation,

00:25:09.740 10% yes, people need to be able to sign in or whatever.

00:25:12.300 And then over time, I think I'd say we've probably

00:25:14.980 crossed the halfway mark, where maybe it's like 70%

00:25:17.040 is things our sales team need to close deals,

00:25:19.640 things our product team need to finish off features we recently

00:25:23.340 launched, things our customers are screaming for,

00:25:25.580 things that are prohibiting people from switching to us.

00:25:29.060 And then 30%, go do some cool stuff.

00:25:31.980 And do you separate the teams that do that?

00:25:35.740 Or do you allow them to round rob in?

00:25:37.340 Yeah, I think you rely on the product manager or the group

00:25:40.760 manager for each area.

00:25:42.340 And you don't give them that direction.

00:25:44.180 You tell them, be a good product manager.

00:25:46.320 Yeah, and that's just part of it.

00:25:47.700 Yeah, and I think it's really dangerous.

00:25:49.860 I've seen friends, actually, I was arguing with a friend

00:25:51.900 recently who creates a special labs team.

00:25:55.080 Labs, yeah.

00:25:55.580 And basically what happens is they're

00:25:57.000 the ones who get to do all the cool work,

00:25:58.460 while the rest of you can build this create, retrieve, update,

00:26:00.960 delete database junk, right?

00:26:02.200 Yeah, some crap.

00:26:02.840 And everyone hates that team.

00:26:04.160 And that team, the other problem is not only

00:26:06.640 is it demoralizing for the vast majority of your workforce

00:26:08.900 who aren't now labs and aren't doing anything interesting

00:26:12.220 by that measure, this labs team has no touch

00:26:15.240 with reality whatsoever.

00:26:16.320 They're like, we're just going to throw shit out the door,

00:26:18.040 and it doesn't actually matter if anyone ever uses it.

00:26:20.200 Because you have to have everyone

00:26:21.480 on the same commercial page.

00:26:22.520 There has to be accountability, and there has to be results.

00:26:24.520 And I think, yeah, carving off labs.

00:26:27.220 And you say the same thing with a larger company

00:26:28.600 is having a chief innovation officer or whatever.

00:26:30.160 It's like, isn't that everyone's job?

00:26:31.700 Yeah, to be innovative, to solve problems.

00:26:34.620 You mentioned competition.

00:26:36.520 I think it's interesting to see a lot of new players

00:26:40.820 in your space.

00:26:41.620 You guys have obviously created a category,

00:26:43.420 and they're coming in from different angles.

00:26:45.020 How do you prioritize product roadmap to compete?

00:26:52.600 And have you been blindsided?

00:26:54.140 How do you think of that, of like, shit, all of a sudden,

00:26:56.960 now we're losing deals because of this company.

00:27:00.140 And I'm assuming your product roadmap has a 12-month maybe

00:27:04.960 outlook, and then you've got to reshift it.

00:27:07.220 How do you guys think of prioritizing product roadmap,

00:27:10.100 responding to the market, all this stuff?

00:27:13.200 Yeah, so I think we, for the longest time,

00:27:19.280 it was just intercom out there.

00:27:21.680 And then I think like, I felt like in the space like six months, pretty much half a dozen like

00:27:26.400 pixel for pixel copycats sprang up, right? And I think like they all had different angles and

00:27:32.000 they all had different challenges themselves. Like I think building the piece of intercom you can see

00:27:36.020 is quite easy. And then the piece you can't see, which is the scalability, the send 10 million

00:27:40.720 emails in a minute, the like, you know, handle like hundreds of thousands of concurrent live

00:27:44.180 chats or whatever, that stuff's actually harder to scale, right? So I think a lot of the like

00:27:49.160 the direct copycats they tend to stay bottom of the market doing the tiny sort of things

00:27:53.120 and then every now and then you get one larger one who actually like you know does kind of move

00:27:56.820 gets funding yeah all that sort of stuff exactly i think like for us i'd say the areas where we

00:28:02.460 were probably most uh like blindsided was um areas where we saw the areas where we thought like

00:28:09.500 we were we were listening to our customers and they were giving us feedback when we're working

00:28:13.820 away like maybe this isn't important and you're like yeah and like you know like and then something

00:28:18.900 new would come up like so a classic won't be like say uh chatbots or mobile or something like that

00:28:22.840 right and we're like oh well people never really talked about mobile before where's this coming

00:28:26.540 from and we're like oh and it's kind of like you're in this ocean and you look over and you're like

00:28:29.380 oh there's another ocean around the corner we didn't realize and somebody else had been growing

00:28:32.340 over there so you kind of have to like work out like if you know is this a fight worth having is

00:28:37.000 this an opportunity worth winning i think like the one piece of guidance i was given by a good

00:28:41.100 friend uh when all this started happening was basically most of the time the reason competitors

00:28:47.480 hurt you is because of what they make you do to yourself.

00:28:51.300 Wow.

00:28:52.040 And I think that was really good advice that we were.

00:28:54.900 That's really good advice.

00:28:55.740 Like, we heeded as best as we could.

00:28:58.040 And it's one of those things that even though you know it's true,

00:28:59.740 it still doesn't hit home enough, right?

00:29:01.740 Yeah, because you still, your natural reaction

00:29:04.340 is to immediately react.

00:29:05.220 To do something.

00:29:05.820 And you're saying, trust it to do nothing.

00:29:08.260 And they were saying, like, you know, just be chill here.

00:29:11.280 Look at your own revenue figures.

00:29:12.680 Look at your own customer growth.

00:29:14.740 Have confidence in that, right?

00:29:16.380 Yeah.

00:29:16.580 And I think that was good advice.

00:29:18.400 So as a result, probably the way in which that best informed us

00:29:21.400 was like, we wait now, and we have for the last few years,

00:29:25.200 we only really respond to stuff that our customers

00:29:27.340 or our prospects say to us.

00:29:28.980 Now, there's a good side and a bad side to that.

00:29:31.300 The good side is we are kind of well-checked by reality.

00:29:34.920 So you might see someone announce,

00:29:36.340 we've got some AI-powered flip-flop pixel tracking,

00:29:39.400 audience building, lead generating, augmenting, blah, blah, blah.

00:29:43.180 And you can immediately be like,

00:29:44.460 quick, get the lab team together.

00:29:46.240 We're going to build the AI paired flip-flop talking,

00:29:48.240 whatever.

00:29:49.240 And I think so not doing that is alone a great strategy.

00:29:54.240 Just don't like react to dumb shit.

00:29:56.740 But then react to when your customers are actually

00:29:59.440 bringing you up on sales calls or feature requesting.

00:30:02.240 Then you're like, all right, turns out

00:30:03.440 we are reaching the same customers.

00:30:04.840 And this thing is resonating.

00:30:06.040 And we don't have it.

00:30:06.940 And now you have a decision on the table.

00:30:08.440 You're like, do we want to build it?

00:30:11.340 Yeah, exactly.

00:30:12.440 And then there are multiple different sort

00:30:15.040 of playbooks from there. One is like, let's directly, like, let's directly build the thing

00:30:20.480 that everyone's asking for. Another one is like, let's take a step back and work out what are they

00:30:23.600 really asking for? Yeah. What's our, what's our take on that? And sometimes they're correct in

00:30:28.120 various degrees. Like when someone says they want a Salesforce integration, what they don't want to

00:30:32.280 hear is, no, you don't. What you really want to do is have a better way. And they're like, no, no,

00:30:35.160 no. I literally want a Salesforce integration. Yes, exactly. I'm telling you the thing I want,

00:30:39.660 you know as in like uh you know i actually want a nine millimeter drill and a nine millimeter hole

00:30:45.200 and i'm very i've thought about this you know like yeah that's sometimes customers are actually

00:30:48.760 asking you asking you for the thing that they literally want and will pay for and any conversation

00:30:52.820 beyond that is out of scope wasted yeah so sometimes you just need to go like okay you asked for this

00:30:56.400 here it is other times it's actually like oh i see what you what you like about that here's our

00:31:01.260 take on it and uh so an example would be like when chatbots took off there was like loads of

00:31:05.820 different ways to handle like guessing what people are trying to say but our approach was to launch

00:31:11.300 answer bot which we launched launched last october and uh answer bot basically it renders it takes

00:31:17.080 text input from users and renders intent like the intent being like you know you know customers

00:31:21.560 asking to change credit card or whatever and based on that intent you're then you can then

00:31:25.080 trigger whatever you want to happen which is like launch the credit card swap form or like you know

00:31:28.620 give this auto reply share this doc point them to this page of your documentation whatever but um

00:31:33.540 But I think the more naive approach that we could have

00:31:38.540 taken would have been-

00:31:39.540 Copy a feature.

00:31:40.540 Copy a feature, or when you launch the messenger,

00:31:42.540 here's 10 things you're allowed to click.

00:31:44.040 Which one do you want to click?

00:31:45.040 And number one is the credit card thing.

00:31:46.540 And that might work, and it might be a very direct-

00:31:48.540 So it's interesting.

00:31:49.540 What you did there is you said, look,

00:31:51.540 this is the competitor set, air quotes,

00:31:54.540 that are solving this problem, and they have their approach.

00:31:58.540 Because you could almost fast forward and say,

00:32:00.540 where are they going to run into issues?

00:32:02.540 let's just go there, solve the problem this way.

00:32:05.580 Yes, it doesn't have campaign management

00:32:07.400 and all this crazy stuff, but it also

00:32:08.760 doesn't have complexity, because that's

00:32:10.740 the only thing they do.

00:32:12.000 And in our product, we do several things.

00:32:14.960 And long term, they'll probably end up here.

00:32:17.300 But that's a bet you guys made.

00:32:18.440 Oh, yeah.

00:32:19.160 That's fascinating.

00:32:20.040 And there's a conference that you have to have

00:32:22.380 about your own future, in a sense, to understand.

00:32:24.720 Yeah, totally.

00:32:25.140 Like, whenever I see the super small startups come along

00:32:28.500 and they can claim that they can do intercom cheaper

00:32:30.360 or faster or with less buttons or whatever,

00:32:32.540 I'm like, you're all going to get here, you know, there's like, it's a nice idea that you could have like a, you know, a help desk that only has a reply button and beautiful design and simple things.

00:32:43.140 And it works phenomenally fast. Of course it does. But then at some stage, someone's going to be like, hey, I'd really, really love if I could handle more than one conversation or merge a user or whatever.

00:32:51.360 And next thing you've got options and preferences and settings and you kind of get all that.

00:32:55.400 So, like, I think it's easy to get attracted or drawn or have your head turned by, like, the younger, simpler version of your own software and be like, man, they're doing it right.

00:33:06.120 But you kind of know that they're going to, like, you weren't irrational when you added this power to your own software.

00:33:12.400 You were doing what the market wanted.

00:33:14.260 And if they do what the market wanted, they're going to end up here too.

00:33:17.040 Exactly.

00:33:17.480 We'll all get there in the end, you know.

00:33:18.640 So like, and as a younger Des, if I was sitting here like five, six years ago, I would have

00:33:24.140 been like, ah, look at these clunkers like Zendesk and HubSpot and Salesforce and all

00:33:28.080 that.

00:33:29.080 Oh, everybody talks shit about Salesforce.

00:33:30.080 Yeah, yeah.

00:33:31.080 But like-

00:33:32.080 They're solving big problems at scale.

00:33:33.080 And you know, like, let he who is without a $120 billion company cast their first

00:33:36.140 own, you know?

00:33:37.140 Yeah.

00:33:38.140 Like, it's the same as like people used to like joke about Microsoft Word.

00:33:40.140 I'm like, Word, I think is the second or first most commercially successful software product

00:33:44.260 of all time.

00:33:45.260 There's a reason.

00:33:46.260 really definitely going to claim you're going to outperform that, or are you just like talking

00:33:49.320 shit? And I think, yeah, so the power is essential. Now, there's an interesting thing I've been

00:33:54.940 talking to folks internally about, which is there is a relationship between, I think,

00:33:59.640 there's definitely a relationship between software power and market size. If you can do everything,

00:34:03.760 you're in theory available to everyone. We'll do every type of document you want,

00:34:07.720 like legal forms, whatever. So Microsoft Word, there's not a thing you can't do in Word.

00:34:12.820 And as a result, their addressable market,

00:34:15.080 they could argue, is everyone wants to agree.

00:34:18.260 Exactly, right?

00:34:19.460 And that's a huge market.

00:34:21.900 Now, the problem here is they're not necessarily

00:34:24.960 perfect for anyone, right?

00:34:27.900 So they are the sum of all features,

00:34:29.760 and they have the largest addressable market.

00:34:32.300 The question is, they have found a point

00:34:34.360 where they're comfortable saying,

00:34:35.440 we're specialized enough.

00:34:36.380 We're not like architects don't use words to draw plans.

00:34:40.280 We have drawn a line somewhere,

00:34:41.500 but it's pretty far down the line but they're also not like ia rider or bear or one of these

00:34:47.580 super slim like note-taking apps right uh and what they're basically saying is like uh we have chosen

00:34:53.320 what we consider to be like the strongest market impact where we can make the most revenue hence

00:34:57.280 them being so successful in revenue all of this comes to potentially a negative conclusion which

00:35:02.300 is that like for software to be largely commercially successful it almost by definition isn't a perfect

00:35:07.420 fit for a single person.

00:35:09.160 So if I build you the Dan Martell email client,

00:35:12.960 that's perfect for you, your font, your typography,

00:35:15.540 your reply style, everything.

00:35:16.640 Workflow automation and all that stuff, yeah.

00:35:18.560 I won't use it.

00:35:19.820 And none of my friends will, none of your friends will,

00:35:21.580 because we're not you.

00:35:22.500 So we have an addressable market of one.

00:35:24.160 Now the question is, if we start to make a few options

00:35:26.220 so that me and you can both use it,

00:35:28.400 we've made the product slightly more clunky,

00:35:30.620 but we've doubled the addressable market.

00:35:32.120 And that's the tension you have between simplicity and sleekness.

00:35:35.400 Do we have an opinion on this feature?

00:35:37.140 or are we going to make it a preference option?

00:35:39.220 Yeah, are we going to do it at all?

00:35:40.420 Yeah, totally.

00:35:41.320 And so then the correlation here is power with, I guess,

00:35:46.080 ugliness or preferences or whatever, it all kind of comes together.

00:35:50.220 So again, going back to when I look at the younger,

00:35:53.840 more slimline versions of Intercom that are in the wild,

00:35:56.080 I'm like, I hope you are successful enough to grow up

00:35:59.240 and get to where we are, which is all this extra power.

00:36:01.360 And then try to solve problems at scale.

00:36:04.100 Absolutely.

00:36:04.860 And show us how you solve those, because that's

00:36:06.620 Oh, yeah, totally. And we even see it from engineers joining Intercom. They're like,

00:36:10.040 we can't believe you deployed this across a fleet of 300 Amazon EC2 instances. And we're like,

00:36:13.680 you'll work it out. So these are just the growing pains. And at the same time, I would never

00:36:21.760 discourage the young folks from looking up the market and saying, oh, all those people are

00:36:25.820 idiots. We're going to do this so much simpler. That is the belief that actually makes you succeed

00:36:30.000 in a sense, as long as you're willing to not be dogmatic and as long as you're willing to

00:36:33.340 actually follow the voice of your customers.

00:36:35.600 And when you think of that, going down that line,

00:36:40.520 looking at how you look at the product and prioritize.

00:36:44.640 So you've got the right score, you've got reach impact.

00:36:47.400 And then you've got the different areas of the business.

00:36:50.160 And then you have this dimension, which

00:36:51.420 is solving problems in a way that can address the market

00:36:56.500 from SMB to mid-market to enterprise

00:36:59.020 in a way that's aligned with your product roadmap.

00:37:02.260 Is this the fun part for you?

00:37:04.800 Like, is this what, like, you like to think about those kind of problems?

00:37:10.860 Yeah, I think, and let me just zoom out, like, one more,

00:37:15.300 and actually say what I actually like working on

00:37:17.180 is the system that defines all of this.

00:37:21.440 Yeah, so, like, what are the inputs that cause the decisions

00:37:24.420 that make us prioritize innovation versus, you know,

00:37:27.820 blocking and tackling or whatever?

00:37:29.440 Like, it's more...

00:37:31.560 Yeah, so like, I guess any given product team is a function of inputs and outputs, right?

00:37:36.900 Like, and then outcomes.

00:37:38.060 So the inputs might be things like, hey, here's a customer voice report.

00:37:41.120 Here's where we're losing sales.

00:37:42.840 Here's what our product is lacking.

00:37:45.080 Here's known bugs.

00:37:45.900 Here's known quality issues.

00:37:46.940 Here's competitive landscape or whatever.

00:37:49.000 Make a plan for the next couple of quarters, right?

00:37:51.220 And that's the inputs.

00:37:52.040 And as long as they're all good inputs and you have a sane product manager, you should

00:37:54.540 get good outputs, which might be like, here's the tagging feature, the merge feature, the

00:37:58.200 Salesforce integration and, oh, we've done some innovation on the AI bot or whatever, right?

00:38:02.080 You're like, all right, cool.

00:38:02.960 That's your outputs.

00:38:03.920 And then fast forward a bit of time, you get your outcomes, which is, hey, churn's down,

00:38:07.700 retention's up, new deals are up, sales lost for product reasons is down, everything's

00:38:12.940 looking good.

00:38:13.380 OK, so that's a nice little system.

00:38:14.900 That's one team.

00:38:15.820 Now, we have 25 teams across foundations, infrastructure, product, et cetera.

00:38:21.220 So we obviously, I can't have that.

00:38:23.380 And each team has different inputs.

00:38:24.340 Yeah, yeah.

00:38:24.820 Each team has their own sets of inputs and their own sets of outputs, whatever.

00:38:27.100 So we zoom out and we think of it in terms of groups.

00:38:29.660 So we have a foundations group, which is all the software

00:38:31.960 that Intercom sits on top of all of our servers, et cetera.

00:38:36.340 We have sales marketing support.

00:38:37.460 We have our automation group, our platform group, et cetera.

00:38:40.220 So the first thing I get to design with Paul and Dara,

00:38:43.860 our head of product and head of engineering,

00:38:45.800 is how does that make it get made up?

00:38:47.740 And then who do each of these people listen to?

00:38:49.260 And then what do we take into this,

00:38:51.120 and what do we take out of it?

00:38:52.340 So how do sales talk to the product team?

00:38:55.240 It's the interface.

00:38:56.120 Yeah, exactly.

00:38:56.740 So you design an interface that works like that.

00:38:59.100 And then how does our product team listen to our users

00:39:01.440 versus listening to our customers?

00:39:02.780 Because our users and our customers are often different.

00:39:04.800 People like the person who's using the inbox to do support

00:39:07.280 is not the person who bought Intercom.

00:39:08.660 That's the head of support, right?

00:39:10.480 So you design a system that makes sure that all of these inputs

00:39:13.380 get to the right people in good shape, not like anecdotes

00:39:17.180 or not like random recency bias stuff.

00:39:19.400 Yeah, exactly.

00:39:20.320 So like you have to do some format that's digestible,

00:39:23.220 that's actionable, insightful.

00:39:25.100 Yeah, exactly.

00:39:26.940 And is that an iteration process?

00:39:28.340 You kind of take a stab at it.

00:39:29.780 Yeah, and it itself is a system.

00:39:31.160 It's like how does, let's say we close whatever thousands

00:39:35.000 of deals a month, we probably don't close thousands

00:39:36.980 of deals a month too.

00:39:38.600 Each one of the don't closes, when it's for a product

00:39:40.240 related reason, it throws out a reason.

00:39:41.940 How does that reason get caught and end up

00:39:43.860 in the hands of the right PM who can then

00:39:45.860 make the right decision, which is to either do it or not do it

00:39:48.000 or postpone it or whatever, right?

00:39:49.280 So that's a system as well.

00:39:50.700 Just that alone.

00:39:51.840 So you realize this is just a recursive systems

00:39:54.580 upon systems upon systems.

00:39:55.740 And if you just sort of zoom out,

00:39:57.600 what you'll just see is a load of input, process, output.

00:39:59.800 It's like a fractal.

00:40:00.600 Yeah, exactly.

00:40:01.300 And you're just working out what bits plug into what bit.

00:40:03.940 And then the people part of the puzzle

00:40:06.440 is the system in the middle.

00:40:08.660 So engineer, given a spec, will produce code.

00:40:11.320 Designer, given a problem, will produce a solution.

00:40:13.160 PM, given inputs, will produce a roadmap.

00:40:15.600 Group manager, given 7 PMs and 7 EMs, will produce this.

00:40:19.380 And you're just trying to look at the whole thing

00:40:21.460 and evaluate it.

00:40:22.300 So oftentimes, good people do bad work,

00:40:24.340 but it's because they were given bad data.

00:40:25.900 Sometimes it's because they're not as good as they thought

00:40:27.420 they were.

00:40:28.000 They weren't trained properly.

00:40:29.140 Totally.

00:40:29.400 Or sometimes work was good, but we never advertised it

00:40:31.540 or marketed it, so it didn't get used or whatever.

00:40:33.720 So you have to, even of that, I often

00:40:36.280 say you have engagement, and you have a product.

00:40:38.440 And engagement of a product produces value.

00:40:40.300 This is another system, right?

00:40:42.280 And value, when monetized, produces revenue.

00:40:44.740 So there's a few different functions there.

00:40:46.180 There's engagement, which is like, how do we get people

00:40:47.700 using our software?

00:40:48.460 There's our product itself, which is what we actually work on.

00:40:50.560 Because all we do is throw code onto servers.

00:40:52.540 Everything else that happens is business.

00:40:55.120 And then when we have value, like, hey,

00:40:56.860 people are now better in touch with their customers.

00:40:58.800 How do we monetize that?

00:40:59.580 Well, that's your pricing function, right?

00:41:01.220 That's the packaging conversation we had earlier.

00:41:03.120 And there's ways to increase revenue

00:41:04.420 without changing your product.

00:41:05.280 You just up the price.

00:41:06.880 And there's ways to increase revenue

00:41:08.160 while changing your product, which is like,

00:41:09.400 hey, if we make this usable in more circumstances,

00:41:11.220 people will add more users or add more seats.

00:41:12.840 We inform our customer success team better.

00:41:14.280 They'll present the option.

00:41:15.940 Precisely.

00:41:16.300 So we have all of these things or systems.

00:41:18.960 And like most of the time, I'm just trying to find either areas to improve in the system

00:41:24.300 or bugs in the system.

00:41:25.320 We're like, hmm, we lost a customer X because of Y.

00:41:28.180 Why did that happen?

00:41:29.240 And how do I, how am I sure?

00:41:30.680 Yeah, dig in and work out what like should this have happened?

00:41:34.760 And often I'm just like, yeah, we lost them for all the right reasons because they actually

00:41:37.600 want something that's just not important to us.

00:41:39.000 And we're not going to do it.

00:41:39.620 Yeah.

00:41:39.860 And that's fine.

00:41:40.460 Or like, or we're not going to do it this year and they needed it this year.

00:41:42.680 And that's just, you know.

00:41:43.840 Is your biggest fear that there's teams working on things that they shouldn't be working on?

00:41:47.640 It's amongst my biggest fears.

00:41:49.860 Speed in general is something I care about a lot.

00:41:52.140 Just the actual throughput.

00:41:53.320 Just actual throughput.

00:41:55.880 Because when you're small, it feels fast.

00:41:58.440 And then I'm assuming at the scale you guys grow,

00:42:00.520 it's scary to slow down and all of a sudden you've got layers.

00:42:04.220 How do you guys keep throughput high?

00:42:07.360 So I would say the biggest bottleneck

00:42:09.160 to our throughput these days is actually our own processes.

00:42:11.860 And that's something we're evaluating right now.

00:42:14.640 Too much required documentation, essentially?

00:42:16.460 Yeah, effectively, yeah.

00:42:17.780 Like, as in all those inputs for it to get to a PM,

00:42:20.660 how much work is that?

00:42:22.020 And are each of them definitely worth it?

00:42:24.140 So an exercise I've been playing.

00:42:26.180 An ROI calculation on interface.

00:42:28.160 Yeah, and I guess the ROI of anything.

00:42:30.000 So the ROI of user research, or product analytics,

00:42:32.540 or the sales, close, lost reasons, or whatever,

00:42:37.220 the only way you can evaluate them

00:42:38.480 is have they changed decisions for the better?

00:42:41.360 100%, for the better.

00:42:42.520 Yeah, and if they have, then they're worse.

00:42:44.180 And if they're not, then maybe we're

00:42:45.280 just doing a little extra bit of work here for no reason.

00:42:47.160 Yeah, just because we think we need to be looking at this.

00:42:49.200 Exactly.

00:42:50.140 And the other area where I know with the more conventional

00:42:54.060 way of thinking about throughput is

00:42:55.500 we have a team called Accelerate Internally,

00:42:57.600 whose only job is to work on developer productivity.

00:42:59.700 They just basically try and get it.

00:43:01.040 Yeah, DevOps, essentially.

00:43:01.420 Effectively, yeah.

00:43:02.760 And they work on everything, like moving all of our IDs

00:43:04.840 to the cloud, because things render faster up there.

00:43:06.680 You name it, right?

00:43:07.280 They'll just work on all of that.

00:43:08.680 It's interesting.

00:43:09.180 There's DevOps.

00:43:09.840 There's RevOps.

00:43:10.480 There's all these ops.

00:43:11.800 And then is this like product ops?

00:43:13.680 Is this a team that you think, or maybe that's what you're leading,

00:43:16.420 is a group of people that just look at all these interfaces

00:43:19.240 and inputs and outputs and say,

00:43:22.380 let's just try to maybe crystallize the information better

00:43:25.420 or get rid of it.

00:43:26.700 Yeah, so we actually literally just started somebody two weeks ago

00:43:29.820 called, and her job title is like Global R&D Operations Manager.

00:43:34.460 And it's literally like, look at this system.

00:43:37.040 And the system is everything to do.

00:43:38.140 Like, it could be our org design.

00:43:39.280 Our org design can slow us down, right?

00:43:40.940 Yeah, totally.

00:43:41.380 Our processes can slow us down.

00:43:42.920 are like the manner in which we ship,

00:43:45.060 how quickly we can communicate with marketing

00:43:46.500 to tee up and launch.

00:43:48.000 All of these things are just systems

00:43:49.360 that can slow you down.

00:43:50.540 Like we have a lot of cogs that are,

00:43:52.380 and some of them are fast moving

00:43:53.280 and some of them are slow moving.

00:43:54.160 We have to like find.

00:43:54.520 Some of them are critical.

00:43:55.240 Yeah, exactly.

00:43:56.160 And some need to move slow.

00:43:57.580 Like we can't make changes

00:43:58.640 to our email infrastructure easily

00:43:59.780 because if it goes wrong, it's terrible.

00:44:01.540 Bad.

00:44:02.080 So like you have to kind of,

00:44:04.220 you know, we kind of look at this

00:44:05.640 and we see all these spinning cogs.

00:44:06.920 We're like, well, which ones

00:44:07.600 are moving slow unnecessarily

00:44:09.340 and which ones are spinning for no reason

00:44:10.820 because no one cares anyway.

00:44:12.200 Like, if you throw it away, the whole system keeps working.

00:44:14.200 Nobody would care.

00:44:15.540 Turn it off and it's like, nobody would scream.

00:44:17.540 Precisely.

00:44:18.040 So to your question of teams working the wrong thing,

00:44:20.200 that's what it would net out to, right?

00:44:22.460 Somebody improving a piece of the product that doesn't matter,

00:44:24.920 or somebody producing an input that has never mattered.

00:44:28.160 Or somebody like, you know.

00:44:29.080 Their job could be producing that input.

00:44:30.920 Yeah.

00:44:31.180 Nobody uses it.

00:44:32.300 And I worry less about that, because in that case,

00:44:36.100 we're the idiots, because I mean,

00:44:37.880 we've employed a good person, and they're doing good work.

00:44:39.760 We're not adding complexity to the product.

00:44:41.100 Exactly.

00:44:41.600 Yeah.

00:44:42.600 But like, yeah, you still want to, you know, for that person, it must be a pretty boring

00:44:45.940 life to like not affect the change.

00:44:46.940 Just crank a widget.

00:44:47.940 Yeah, exactly.

00:44:48.940 Produce docs that people burn or whatever.

00:44:50.940 Exactly.

00:44:51.940 Yeah.

00:44:52.940 So, yeah, that's like when I think about it in the big picture, it's that system and

00:44:56.680 it's the efficiency of that system.

00:44:58.220 And then like, then you can start to have conversations about the ROI of that system

00:45:01.620 itself.

00:45:02.620 Like, so of the tens of millions of dollars we might spend producing software every year,

00:45:06.320 what do we see back and when and how, you know, and do we think we should pour more

00:45:09.720 into this system?

00:45:10.720 Should the system be just turned faster?

00:45:12.780 Should it be slowed down?

00:45:13.780 Like, you know, they're all different sort of meta

00:45:15.320 questions you have to ask about the system then.

00:45:18.000 As a founder that has, you know, because I'm always

00:45:21.940 impressed with like Owen and yourself

00:45:23.560 that have continued to keep pace with the organization.

00:45:26.100 You know, I meet so many founders that sometimes just

00:45:28.300 don't grow with it.

00:45:29.560 Looking back, you know, the last eight years

00:45:32.900 of your personal journey, who have you

00:45:36.040 needed to become Des to continue to lead the organization?

00:45:39.880 I think the journey I had to go on, I would say like eight years ago, I probably felt

00:45:46.640 more of a need to impress and more of a need to be liked and I think that both of those

00:45:52.640 things can be weaknesses when it comes to making hard decisions and so I think the biggest

00:45:58.920 transition I had to go through was being comfortable having uncomfortable conversations and being

00:46:06.360 okay with making decisions that a lot of people think aren't okay um and that like this these

00:46:11.320 never grave circumstances but it might be like killing a project or or like you know moving a

00:46:16.180 team or telling somebody that their favorite piece of work they're not going to work on anymore

00:46:19.000 they're going to work on something else it's more important even though they don't like it as much

00:46:21.840 or and i think like the the departure i had to make was like you know i had to realize over time

00:46:29.100 i was ultimately the old des was putting like my own maybe ego or need to be liked or whatever

00:46:37.340 ahead of what i you know what was actually the right thing to do and and so in a way i thought

00:46:43.880 i was being like kind or considerate but i was actually being inconsiderate because i was

00:46:47.320 prioritizing me over them yeah you know and and i think like getting over that like which is

00:46:52.600 obviously like you know and any of the like these topics can always get uncomfortable in some sense

00:46:56.180 But I think most of the discoveries and the learning

00:46:59.780 and development that senior people in startups need to do

00:47:03.440 is generally personal.

00:47:04.520 Because what we're doing is not a natural thing.

00:47:07.460 It's only really in the last 20 years

00:47:09.640 could you be in a position where you go from a random dude

00:47:14.240 in a tiny office in Dublin to running a company

00:47:18.560 with 600 people and just valued it over whatever

00:47:21.700 and all this sort of stuff.

00:47:23.060 Like literally one of the top companies in the SaaS space.

00:47:25.680 And, like, it can happen so quickly, whereas, like, if you think of, like, if I was, like, a barista, I'd have my seventh coffee chain and maybe my 60th employee by now.

00:47:33.200 You know, it's, like, it's just a different, like, that's a much more human scale, like, you know.

00:47:38.140 It's more digestible.

00:47:38.900 So you have to kind of, like, the biggest barriers tend not to be accumulated wisdom, because you can actually hire accumulated wisdom.

00:47:46.740 You're like, all right, we need somebody who's really good at whatever, like marketing ops.

00:47:49.260 Okay, let's go.

00:47:51.120 You can, like, lean into the expertise, but, like, you yourself have to change.

00:47:55.120 Yep.

00:47:55.280 and those changes are not like you need to read a book about like this it's like you need to

00:47:59.940 actually go on an emotional journey you know mindset yeah yeah and uh and adapt to be the

00:48:04.680 person that the company needs you to be at this stage for where it's at and uh and like that like

00:48:10.380 this and what i shared earlier about like being the need to be like that that's one there's probably

00:48:13.600 been other ones but like that's probably the the standout one for me where like even today i still

00:48:18.200 feel my old habits kick in and and i kind of have to force myself into being like actually hang on

00:48:22.860 And you know the right thing to do here.

00:48:23.980 You're just uncomfortable saying it.

00:48:24.940 That's different.

00:48:25.520 And I'm like, oh, shit, yeah, OK, that is that.

00:48:27.320 So you catch yourself.

00:48:28.480 Yeah.

00:48:29.280 That's huge.

00:48:30.620 Where do people find you online, Des?

00:48:32.640 I'm basically Des trainer on most social networks,

00:48:35.640 whether it's Twitter, Gmail, or whatever.

00:48:37.100 And what do you like the most, Twitter?

00:48:39.060 I actually like Strava the most.

00:48:40.500 Cool.

00:48:41.220 Genuinely, yeah.

00:48:42.000 Like, well, Strava.

00:48:42.420 How new is this, the running journey or the fitness?

00:48:46.260 Yeah, good question.

00:48:47.700 I think two and a half years ago, maybe I, you know,

00:48:51.400 But being a founder is an unhealthy thing at times.

00:48:53.440 Oh, it's a dude.

00:48:54.500 I mean, that's my biggest thing is just

00:48:58.180 because the work I do with founders essentially

00:49:00.760 have biometrics and business metrics.

00:49:02.260 I literally have a full-time nutritionist that monitors

00:49:04.460 body fat on my clients, because I don't think

00:49:06.220 it's successful for you to go crush it in business

00:49:09.040 and then totally let.

00:49:10.160 And pay for it, yeah.

00:49:10.860 Yeah, it's just not success.

00:49:13.000 And that's why when I saw you go on this journey,

00:49:16.420 because you have such influence in the space,

00:49:18.160 it's really cool for me because I think it's

00:49:20.500 More founders need to take that priority.

00:49:22.340 I'd never thought about it as being a thing

00:49:24.040 that I should share from an influencing positive behavior

00:49:27.580 and defense program.

00:49:27.920 Oh, I think it's big.

00:49:28.740 I always felt to be kind of braggy or something,

00:49:30.340 but that's interesting.

00:49:31.540 I guess two and a half years ago, I came home from a conference.

00:49:36.620 And I just felt really groggy and shit.

00:49:38.400 And I went to a doctor.

00:49:39.200 And the doctor was like, look, there's nothing wrong with you.

00:49:41.960 At the same time, there's a lot wrong with you.

00:49:43.660 And I was like, what do you mean?

00:49:44.620 He's like, well, there's nothing wrong with you now.

00:49:46.960 There's nothing particularly worth talking about today.

00:49:49.840 He's like, but you're four and a half stone overweight.

00:49:51.820 You can't run for more than a minute.

00:49:53.780 You know, you're like, diet is terrible.

00:49:55.540 Like, you just look like your hair is like, you know, lacking in color.

00:49:58.860 I can tell that like you only, you haven't eaten a vegetable in months or whatever.

00:50:02.440 And he's like, you know, tell me about your life.

00:50:04.880 And I was like, well, you know, travel like maybe eight to 10 flights a year.

00:50:09.580 Usually Dublin to San Francisco, it's an 11-hour flight.

00:50:12.520 A lot of my food is junk.

00:50:13.740 I go to conferences where they feed you like ridiculously rich food.

00:50:17.940 I don't exercise.

00:50:19.000 I play soccer maybe once a week but even at that I probably just walk around to pitch I don't really

00:50:22.760 do much and he's like right and he's like so he's like I'm not like here to be your coach or anything

00:50:27.400 but uh what do you think about all that and I was like hmm sorry and I'd love to say like and I

00:50:31.800 walked out that door a change man but I didn't it took maybe two or three more uh it took me going

00:50:36.920 to a physio at one point and physio's just like look yeah they're straight yeah physio's just like

00:50:42.040 look you've a bit of hip pain but if you do you really want to talk about what's wrong with you

00:50:44.840 then he was just like you need to be in here like five times a week and i was like okay

00:50:48.500 and intercom i just started to take off such that i could afford to see a personal trainer a couple

00:50:52.340 times a week or whatever so i started going down that route and first in personal trainer talked

00:50:56.460 to me about was my diet so i started changing that did i kind of went on paleo for a while

00:51:01.540 that kind of caused this crash and over the course of i guess a year and a half i lost five stone

00:51:06.940 uh roughly like maybe you know and then i probably lost 10 pounds in the like proceeding

00:51:11.760 and then two or three years since.

00:51:13.700 And then about two years ago,

00:51:14.960 maybe about a year and a half ago,

00:51:15.980 I started getting into running

00:51:16.960 and I was like,

00:51:17.820 I always set myself,

00:51:18.720 today I set myself two goals every,

00:51:20.840 sorry, three goals every month,

00:51:22.340 which is a total distance,

00:51:23.300 which is usually 60, 70, 80K.

00:51:25.820 Fastest distance,

00:51:26.720 which is I usually try to break

00:51:27.660 some personal records

00:51:28.600 out of 5K, 10K, yeah.

00:51:30.080 So my big one for this year

00:51:31.400 was to do 10K in under 50 minutes,

00:51:32.960 which I did in August.

00:51:35.040 Yeah, I was really surprised.

00:51:36.800 And then my distance,

00:51:37.880 which I just broke a couple of days ago,

00:51:39.740 which was to do a half marathon.

00:51:40.860 but like i i push myself to do these things and i have to say like it like the you don't i i remember

00:51:47.520 my trainer said to me on the first day he's like welcome to the gym but by the way you don't build

00:51:51.080 muscles here you build discipline and discipline will show up in your physique he's like but that's

00:51:55.760 what you're actually here for and and i felt the same about running like like it's i i run and it's

00:52:01.380 it's 90 percent in my head uh because the body is actually able to do it now it's just a case of

00:52:06.340 what you know yeah the conversation you're gonna have oh for two hours and whatever it was one

00:52:10.140 an hour, 57 minutes of jogging around a park for a half.

00:52:14.640 You need to be pretty psychologically stable

00:52:16.920 because there are demons, and they'll find you.

00:52:18.820 Oh, they will show up.

00:52:19.860 Yeah.

00:52:20.820 But yeah, so I've taken it very seriously, and I do.

00:52:25.060 I exercise every day.

00:52:26.380 I do watch what I eat almost all the time.

00:52:27.960 I track calories, all that sort of stuff.

00:52:29.380 I started that recently.

00:52:30.840 I do think a lot of founders sacrifice things both

00:52:34.380 necessarily and unnecessarily.

00:52:35.800 Have you become better as a leader because of it?

00:52:38.820 I just think like so more energy definitely more energy and clarity yeah and strength and just

00:52:44.480 and problems I mean I've run and it's like that's when the things are running in the back and then

00:52:49.260 yeah boom totally and I take a lot of inspiration with the two guys who report to me or two people

00:52:53.240 who report to me uh they're like both like very very physically fit and always have been and

00:52:57.540 they're like they've got like six seven children between them like you know and they're not married

00:53:01.980 each of the families um but uh yeah like I've definitely like taken a lot of inspiration from

00:53:06.900 them and what they can pull off and uh i yeah i i would say to anyone who's like you know finding

00:53:15.020 themselves in an unhealthy position and they feel like their company is eating away at them and

00:53:19.120 they're making damage like doing damage to their body or their health or their psyche or their

00:53:22.500 even just their diet uh i do think it's it's firmly a problem worth solving and it's actually

00:53:27.780 a business problem worth solving is you don't realize it but you're actually why don't you

00:53:31.720 don't have time to make this a priority.

00:53:33.760 That's a business problem.

00:53:35.040 Exactly.

00:53:35.900 And also, don't BS yourself either.

00:53:38.620 You can easily blame, and I was definitely like this,

00:53:41.020 you can easily blame your company for a lot as well.

00:53:43.980 But oftentimes, you just did not want to get off

00:53:46.660 off the couch, or you just like beers too much.

00:53:49.900 You can tell yourself it's Intercom's fault,

00:53:51.760 but let's be honest here.

00:53:52.660 Those are your choices.

00:53:54.400 Our VP of Engine, VP of Product, they managed to do it,

00:53:56.840 and they've got more stress in their lives than you.

00:53:59.240 So yeah, I do think there's a bit of that.

00:54:01.600 I never want to be too preachy

00:54:02.560 about that sort of stuff

00:54:03.220 but I definitely found

00:54:04.040 like I look back

00:54:05.340 at my earlier self

00:54:06.380 with a little bit of contempt

00:54:07.460 at times for that as well

00:54:08.520 and like you can get into

00:54:09.320 forgiveness and all that

00:54:10.120 but ultimately like

00:54:10.740 I was making bad choices

00:54:12.280 and yes some of it

00:54:13.380 was a product of circumstance

00:54:14.320 and environment

00:54:14.960 but I was also making bad choices

00:54:16.840 you know

00:54:17.560 keep shining a light man

00:54:19.100 it's awesome

00:54:19.620 so Strava it is

00:54:20.560 appreciate you Des

00:54:21.320 thanks so much

00:54:22.000 take care

00:54:22.240 thanks for watching

00:54:23.060 this episode of Escape Velocity

00:54:25.400 be sure to like

00:54:26.400 and subscribe

00:54:27.020 and leave a comment

00:54:28.260 with your biggest insight

00:54:29.480 from our conversation

00:54:30.580 Be sure to check out the next episode.

Dan Martell - July 16, 2020

Building The Right Product & Pricing with Des Traynor @ Intercom.com - Escape Velocity Show #32

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