Episode 71
· 45:56
Here. Time for another episode of the show. Hope you're doing well wherever you're at. Maybe you're listening to this while you're doing the dishes. That's where I listen to a lot of podcasts, doing dishes, sweeping the floor, shoveling snow here in Canada.
Speaker 1:We just got a bunch of snow last night, and, I need to go home right now and shovel the walks. Who did I talk to this week? Des Trainer from Intercom. I've been wanting to talk to Des forever. Was finally able to get him on the line, and we had a great chat, about jobs to be done.
Speaker 1:If you're a jobs to be done fan, we got into questions like, why do customers hire a product in the first place? And Des just tells it like it is. He's a great guest. You're really gonna like this episode. What else is new?
Speaker 1:Productpeople.club. I invited some new members in this past week. So if you're on the waiting list, you should see an email coming to you soon asking if you want to apply. And if you're not on the waiting list, go to productpeople.club and get on there. Also, you may have heard I'm planning to do a new show in 2015 called Build and Launch.
Speaker 1:Check that out at buildandlaunch.net. Alright. Let's get into the interview with Des Trainer. Hey, it's Justin here and I'm with Des Trainer from Intercom. How's it going Des?
Speaker 2:It's going great, thanks Justin. Yourself?
Speaker 1:I'm doing well. Now we we were joking before that it looks like we're both broadcasting from prison. Mhmm. I might be in prison, but where are you in San Francisco right now? Where are you right now?
Speaker 2:Yep. I am in San Francisco where they are struggling to deal with the first rainfall of the year, I guess. Yeah. I'm I'm based kinda half in Dublin and half in San Francisco. Right now you've got me in San Francisco which is what makes time zones work for events such as this.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's perfect. And has it always been that way? Have you always has Intercom always been in both places?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So we're headquartered in San Francisco and we're like a Delaware incorporated company. So we've been here since the start.
Speaker 1:Okay. And just for people who don't know, how do you describe Intercom? What is Intercom?
Speaker 2:So Intercom is the best way to see what your users are doing in your product and then to talk to them based on what they are are or aren't doing. So what we kinda regard Intercom as communications platform for web businesses and Internet businesses of all sorts to talk to their customers.
Speaker 1:Gotcha. And you you recently quoted Jeff Bezos. And Jeff has this saying where he says, focus on the things that don't change. In your opinion, how does Intercom kind of match up with that? What's the thing you're focusing on that hasn't changed?
Speaker 2:That's a good question. I guess for as long as there has been businesses and customers, businesses have needed to talk to customers. That much will never ever change, much as the promise of the web era of zero touch sales is, to some degree, lived out. It's certainly true that great businesses know and talk to their customers. And if you think of modern day definitions of loyalty and churn and retention and all these issues, they all kind of have their roots in the fact that we did two significant shifts in how business is done in the past decade and a half.
Speaker 2:We moved from people who know their customers to people who call their customers a hit or a page view. And we also moved to business models such as software as a service where your entire commercial engine depends on recurring revenue. Which means that for businesses such as, say, RS and Intercom or, say, any typical SaaS company, you're actually relying your entire business relies on the fact that your entire user base isn't going to cancel that one. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Which is kinda scary in comparison with a lot of businesses where, like, you know, know, you might have a lot of revenue for selling cars. You know, January is a busy month, and the revenue pull in could last you many, many times. Like most SaaS businesses are based upon an assumption that everyone's not gonna quit that much. Because if they do, the entire business is broken. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So we've done two things interesting in the last decade and a half as like with the advent of the internet and online businesses. We moved to, like, zero or very low touch sort of customer relationships. And we've also depended more upon customer loyalty than we ever have in any point in history ever. The two of them added together is not really a great thing because we're not treating our customers particularly well. In fact, we we measure them we measure their contacts in things like, you know, the cost of goods and services required to serve a customer.
Speaker 2:And we see it all as a cost center, whereas in reality, it's what we actually depend on for them to stay loyal, to keep using it. So what we depend on that hasn't changed is the value of customer loyalty built upon a good relationship between a business and a customer. That hasn't changed, its importance hasn't changed and the success winner proved that the need is still there.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And in early SaaS days, there was definitely this idea that you would have very low touch sales. And in fact, the dream for a lot of people was that they would never have to talk to the customer.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so do you think maybe in the beginning that was true? Or has it always been true that you have to have a lot of connection with your customers?
Speaker 2:I think there's a couple of things at play. Like I think not talking to your customers was always a pretty pathological thing to do because you would have like, it doesn't like, I don't I don't believe that you could, like, you know, create a successful business having never spoken to a customer or having never understood. And even if you are doing the whole self design scratch your own itch, you know, you know exactly what you're doing. Who gives a shit what the customer say? Like, you know, customer feedback is still the oxygen of how much product decisions are built because otherwise, how do you know how do you even know if you're right?
Speaker 2:You know? So I think it was always kind of a myth that that you could get away with it. But I I also think that in the earlier days, there wasn't as much opportunity. Like, if you wanted to use a CRM, there was probably, like, two of them online. You know?
Speaker 2:Yeah. And if you wanted to track time online, there was probably, like, three choices. So so customers, like, were making a choice between, like, desktop software and the web, or they're making a choice between upfront expense and SaaS, and they were willing to trade a lot in terms of how they're treated or handled by a business because they weren't spoiled for choice. Today, the opposite is true. There are literally thousands and thousands of SaaS businesses, many, many tens of thousands, I would guess.
Speaker 2:And there are also, like, you know, no matter how even if you are a time tracking tool for left handed dentists in Oslo, I guarantee if someone's looking at your money and going, shit, they're doing well. We should build a time tracking tool for left handed dentists in Oslo too. So like it's definitely a thing that a that competition has, you know, has booked. And the other thing that's sort of changed in my opinion is like like I really believe that like customer service and customer relationships are is kind like the new competitive edge. Everyone is getting to like everyone has you know, SaaS businesses.
Speaker 2:Everyone's using the same frameworks. We're all using the same fucking jQuery effects to fade and shadow. And we're all we're all reading the same Dribbble sites and copying the same whatever font is new. Oh, you use your photo. We use Open Sans.
Speaker 2:And we're all copying the same gradients and shadows and dropdowns and all that sort of shit. And like so I think the competitive edge of design like, and this is a good thing. I'm not being cynical here. Like, it's become the case that most software that's being produced today is reasonably is like well, it's infinitely better than it was five to ten years ago. And the our customers' ability to consume and value that design hasn't really changed.
Speaker 2:So we're getting to the point where possibly design is getting it's getting to a good enough point where, like, there's always gonna be room for innovation. You'll see tools like, I think, Wired, like, chat app that, like, launched yesterday. Like, it's like they obviously went deep on design. And, like, there'll always be room for innovation there. But I think when, you know, when you move beyond the sort of echelons of, like, extremely deep wealth of considerate design to, like, to like, a dude needs to track time for his, you know, for his freelancing business, I think, you know, what we're actually comparing at that point is, like, one text input versus another, and one button versus another.
Speaker 2:And actually, I don't think the competitive edge is going to be on who's got the better bevel. I actually think it'll move move to things like who has better relationship with their with their customers, who understands the customers better, who's making sure that their customers themselves are getting as much value out of the product as possible.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. And we're gonna get into jobs to be done in a while. And if you haven't heard of jobs to be done, a gross simplification is asking the question, what things are your customers hiring your product to do? And sometimes those are subversive.
Speaker 1:You don't understand them or see them right away. But early on, I heard a great talk by Adi Pinar where he said, what a lot of folks in SaaS don't realize is that people are actually hiring you for the support. So early on, if you want project management software, buy Microsoft Project. But getting customer support from Microsoft was a pain in the ass. I think a lot of people don't realize maybe what made Basecamp great, for example, was that you could email them, because you expected it, right?
Speaker 1:You were paying monthly. You could email them and you could get an email back within at least an hour. That was a huge thing. So there does seem to be a job to be done, especially with customer support I think, especially with SaaS businesses.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, it's like your point is solid. And like, Adi's point is solid as well. I think like if you ask what is base camp, for example, it's really tempting to pick on base camp. That's I guess the most well known example here.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But we can pick on it. Now it's the gorilla in
Speaker 2:the room. Yeah. Well, fair enough. But I mean like like there's a lot of like there's a lot of cleverness to Basecamp. But one thing is for sure, they're not the only guys who have a private forum that you can post on and other people can post on too.
Speaker 2:Right? Yeah. That that's a given thing. You'll find that anywhere. But you you know, and similarly, do not see any people upload files to or check off tasks to be complete on.
Speaker 2:Like if you're incredibly like logically minded, you will then do things like create Arrival Basecamp and scratch your head wondering why are people flocking to Mine. But there's a whole, like, you know, there's a whole jigsaw of pieces that make base camp. And support is one significant piece that people often overlook. It's also like, you know, I think being able to reply to people within an hour or within fifteen minutes, or I think they recently boasted within one minute Mhmm. Like, is is like it's definitely part of the package, you know?
Speaker 2:Yeah. And it you know, there's not there's no doubt, like like, if eighty says people hire you for support, that's definitely true. They also hire you for education and guidance and, know, hold my hand, teach me how to run a project. What's a good kickoff message to write? And Basecamp does all those things.
Speaker 2:And I think, like, these are the areas like, Kathy Sierra made this point a while ago that if you wanna have the actual best project management tool out there, that's a pretty big fucking ask. You know, there's a lot of them out there. There is a lot. You're talking Trello, Asana, Basecamp, and, like, 500 other ones, and, like, whatever's in this year's YC class. And, like, I guarantee you, there's some pretty hot shit coming out.
Speaker 2:But if you wanna ask, how do I make people really, really great at managing projects? Well, actually, the answers are come to you a lot quicker, and it turns out you don't need to be literally hiring Apple esque designers to spend, you know, decades working on push buttons and stuff to to get there. It is actually the gap or like the room for improvement there is way more significant. So I think it is true that people hire your product not just for what what like, you know, what they experience URL by URL as they click around, but also for the entire picture. It's like, it's things like it's the blog, it's the help, it's the docs, it's the live chat, it's the fact that the CEO replies on Twitter.
Speaker 2:All those things, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I've actually been thinking about I think people have different core motivators in terms of why they hire a product. And this is still pretty raw in my head, but one thing I've been realizing lately is that, so for example, for myself, I think relationships are a pretty big motivator. And when I kind of look back over a lot of my product purchases, or even the brands that I get really passionate about, a lot of it has to do with me having a relationship with somebody there. The founder or the CEO, or maybe even just feeling like I have a relationship with them.
Speaker 1:Reading their blog posts and things like that. And it's interesting. I would hire a project where I know the CEO over maybe something that is perfectly designed. Do you think that kind of plays into it too sometimes? There's different kind of motivations behind how different people buy?
Speaker 2:Yes. So there definitely is. Think like there's there's like emotional motivators, there's like functional motivators, there's like you know, personal motivators. There's all these different things that influence it. When you say you buy something because of who's involved in it, it's actually what you're what you're doing here is is applying like, you know, a simple principle.
Speaker 2:And that principle in my head is like that quality is fractal. Right? Yeah. So like so like I'll give you an example of quality is fractal. I can see some soft mats behind you that are there to absorb sound so that the recording of this podcast is good.
Speaker 2:Right? Fact that I can see those mats, I can infer a lot more things about the type of podcast you run just from seeing a mat. Right? Yeah. Because you guys should care about putting mats in the room, you care about the site, you care about the introduction, you care about the advertisers and the sort of how you shut them out in the middle of the podcast, And you care about the listeners, and you'll never sell the mailing list and all because you actually give a shit.
Speaker 2:Right? And I really believe that like, Nathan Barrows made this point ages ago in a blog post that's long since disappeared. But like he said, the quality is fractal. You can literally judge, and by fractal, mean it displays a quality of self similarity. Any single piece of it is like all of it.
Speaker 2:So if you're making a decision that you wanna use a product because you know the CEO to be good, it's just basically if you know the CEO is not a dickhead and he's not gonna stand for bullshit, and he's not gonna, like, you know, do anything sly or mischievous. He's not gonna sell your data. He's not gonna whatever do anything that you don't want him to do. You also know a sign in the room when he's not gonna be happy. He's not gonna hire bad people.
Speaker 2:He's not know, who are likely to put bugs in their product. Like you're making a massive judgment, but like it's it's a massively intuitive judgment based on a very good principle that quality is fractal.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes people say, you know, blogging, especially as a marketing tactic, is kinda hazy. Do you how do you how do you guys kind of evaluate the the success of the blog? Can you see it in your funnel in terms of, you know, directly attributable to some sign ups and things like that?
Speaker 2:We can, but that's not the only way we measure it. But yes, to answer your question, yes. We absolutely can. It definitely contributes. But we also know that like, you know, there's a few things that say, one is like people buy when they're ready to buy, not when you're ready to sell.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. So a lot of marketing, especially for a tool like Intercom, or like I'd say, lot of SaaS tools, honestly, if they're honest with themselves, you're you're not so mission critical such that people will drop everything and pick up your tool and mail their whole team and say, hey, guys. Change of plan. We're now going to use this new project manager tool, book tracker, the time tracker, whatever. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So, like, what you know, and, like, that's just a given. Like, as in, like, when I finish up this podcast right now, I'm gonna go back to my desktop, and there'll probably be some advert somewhere, but I'm just not in a buying position right now. I have shit to do. You know? So, like whereas if I read a great article and something sticks in my head and I think, jeez, those guys at, like, mention.net are really smart.
Speaker 2:Or those guys at Workable are you know, they seem like they seem like they know how to recruit. And when next time I have a problem, which is when I'm ready to buy, that that they will have top of mind with me. So so, like, that's like that's a hard sort of argument to to quantify. Right? Like, it's hard to say, like, you know, what percentage of my insured we adopt or, like, how, you know, for what percentage of these consumers did they originally hear us through a blog?
Speaker 2:Doesn't really matter. Like, just the you know, there's a lot of things you'll you have to do in running a business or in, like, you know, running a blog or any of those things that you know they're the right thing to do and you can go and chase numbers to try and back it up. But if you fundamentally know it's the right thing to do, you know, you shouldn't let a lack of numbers like, absence of evidence is not as evidence of absence. Just because you can't be you don't have the numbers to hand. It doesn't mean it's therefore not your next best important thing to do.
Speaker 2:Like if you're that metric oriented, fair enough, but like you're probably not writing a good blog in the first place in that case.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I I did a I did a post because now I'm working for sprint.ly And I was thinking, man, how did I even sign up for Sprintly? And in my head, I thought, well I probably thought about it and then signed up that day. But then I can look at the data that Sprintly has on me.
Speaker 1:And the first time they saw me was I visited their website probably six months before that. And that kind of unlocked all these things that had happened. Like before that I'd seen Joe Stump in an interview. And then some things happened. I learned about Kanban.
Speaker 1:Then all these kind of, I call them touch points. There's probably seven touch points before I finally signed up for an account. And then there was another thirty to sixty days or something between when I signed up for an account and I started paying. So it really is a process, isn't it? It's not People think What did you say?
Speaker 1:People buy when they're ready.
Speaker 2:Yeah. People buy when they're ready to buy. And I think, like, that's where, like, a lot of people who do, like, you know, fucking, like, day one automated marketing where they're like, hey. I noticed this. I need to you need to go do this.
Speaker 2:It's, you know, to some degree, like, you know, they're missing out on critical data. And I specifically cite day one there because, like, you know, it's it's the classic naive mindset is like is, you know, Justin signed up for Spritly. And on day one, he had not added his whole team yet. So let's go do that. And it's like, well, not only had he not done that, he hadn't created a project or or or, like, created any task or anything.
Speaker 2:He's clearly just pricking around. So let's let's let's not go heavy on the marketing stuff just yet. Yeah. And, like, another exam another example of of you of of, like, that is, like, I don't know. You know, you work at Spinlacea, but we have better data on this.
Speaker 2:But I would bet that a lot of people sign up, look around, do nothing, and then forty five days later, come back with seven developers and a GitHub schedule and all this sort of shit. Like, yeah. Because, like, they're looking around, uh-huh. Yep. This is good.
Speaker 2:Alright. We'll do this for the next project or whatever. Because, like, you know, no tool is that important that it's, like, drop everything. We need to totally change how we're managing this project and move it all over. You know?
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's usually like, you know, the the process of gradual adoption is is like a is when you have to sort of study and learn. And just for us, we're like, there's a mirroring principle to that when it comes to churn, which is if you're gonna lose a customer, what you don't see is like busy busy busy busy busy busy gone. Yeah. That's just not not that the case.
Speaker 2:What it is like is like, you know, creating one project a month, two projects a month, three projects a month, three, two, hasn't created a project in ninety five days, hasn't created a project in a hundred twenty and like what you're not seeing here is all the event data in someone else's fucking app where they're going in the process of moving the whole thing over. But what you will see is like that then like four months down the line, they're like, you know what? We should we we're done with using Sprinkly. We should cancel that account now or whatever, you know, product. Of course, they cancel that account now, and then you hit them with the whole, oh, we're so sorry to see you go.
Speaker 2:Whereas, like, honestly, if this was like a coffee shop or a bar or whatever, you'd be like, you'd hey. I haven't seen you here in like two weeks. What's going on? Like, oh, well, you know, there's this other place down the road that's bit closer to work, you're like, oh, fuck. Well, I'm in the process of losing this guy.
Speaker 2:I can still do something about this. Yeah. You know? So like I think, like, you know, two points I'm making here is that, like, you shouldn't expect immediate adoption for a product because they'll buy when they're ready to buy. And certainly, unlike similarly, don't expect that quitting looks as obvious as one day zero activity and cancellation happen at the same time.
Speaker 2:What actually happens is activity degrades over a period of time, and then many months later when somebody in Sprinkly goes to check their credit card, they're like, oh shit, we're still paying for that thing, we need to cancel it.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it's funny at that point they're like they get the email going, oh, we're so sorry you left, but like left, but like the time they actually quit was like six months ago, you know?
Speaker 1:Yeah. You're way too late.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They're they're way moved on. So like at best you can hope that they might remember why they quit. But even that isn't great, like you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You know, one of the things I like about Slack is I'm a member of a bunch of different Slack rooms. Know, so I've got the one for work and then I've got this other one and this other one and this other one. And what's interesting to me is I just love observing the way people buy and the way people make decisions. It's fascinating to see people discuss which product should we buy.
Speaker 1:And when you're looking at these things, you can see there's all sorts of factors that come into a decision. There's some products, like if you were selling me an e book, I can just take out my company credit card and buy it. Don't need to talk to anybody else. Or maybe I do, depending on what it is. But if you're selling me intercom, I've got to talk to some other people about that.
Speaker 1:There's a bunch of other people that are in that discussion. And so often our onboarding is just based on, you might even say like, it's so self centered in some ways because you say like, hey welcome. And then you say, okay invite some team members. But why not provide me with something that says, you know, you're probably gonna have an uphill battle selling this to your team. Let's help you through that and talking about it.
Speaker 1:Like maybe we can get all of you guys on the phone or maybe here's a guide that's really helped some other bosses. It it's hard to do that stuff, isn't it?
Speaker 2:Here's here's a video here's a video you should all watch together. Or like, I think it's really like it's the forgotten job of every single SaaS product. It's like, okay, you've sold me. Now, your first job is help me sell them.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And like, don't know why everyone is so blinded to it, but like, it's a it's a real thing. Because like, believe it or not, like, if I sign up for your product, the $29, like, I could eat that. But, like, spending my own social currency within a company, that's a big ask. I think people kind of forget that because they they designed for, like, this, like, one to one relationship, but we need to sell Justin. Justin's on board.
Speaker 2:Great. Hey, why did you want your team? And you're like, because that's a much harder thing to do. Know? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like pricking around at your own desktop is actually pretty easy, and setting up a fake project and adding some fake tasks and, you know, making a fake commit and writing a fake commit message, all very, easy things to do. Costs you absolutely nothing. Free trial, here's my personal credit card. No problem. Going to, like, your boss or going to the rest of your team or ordering your entire team to do something, It's much more of a commitment.
Speaker 2:And I think it's never acknowledged that that's a bigger commitment, Don. Here's my credit card number. I'm gonna cancel this in twenty nine and a half days.
Speaker 1:And and so what are some of the ways at Intercom that you're helping to overcome that friction?
Speaker 2:You used to have to install a snippet with Intercom. We now have, like, loads of different ways you can import your users. You can connect to Stripe, and we'll pull in your users from Stripe. You can connect to Mailchimp, NextPanel, Campaign Monitor, whatever. We also have an API.
Speaker 2:You can dump one in from there, or you can install the snippet in the footer. Right? And each of those work for different use cases for different types of people. So that said, your question is, like, you know, how have we addressed this? Well, one one thing I've learned is that, like, here's the, like, dopey the silly way to approach the task.
Speaker 2:The stupid thing to do is look and say successful customers all have added at least three teammates. So let us force every new customer to add three teammates, and that will actually get you some success. So it's not 100% stupid. In fact, it's not stupid. It gets you some success.
Speaker 2:It's an incremental win in the greater scheme of things. But it's ignoring the job and ignoring the sort of causation, and it's focusing purely on the correlation. So it's like, we just need to get everything to this state. So you'll get a lot a lot of like test at test.com invites and stuff like that because people just need to get this fucking box ticked so they can move on. Yeah.
Speaker 2:A better way to think about it is when does it make sense for them to invite their team? So is it that they wanna share this view with a teammate, or is it that they wanna assign this conversation to a teammate who's yet to sign up? Or is it that they you wanna forward a teammate a report? Or is it that you wanna make sure that the daily mail gets sent to the teammate? They're all things that, like, people actually want to do.
Speaker 2:Because no one actually wants to add their teammates. That's like a hardware sort of, like, your metrics oriented problem with Spritly, for example. Right? That's your problem that you need me to have three and a half teammates before I'm considered successfully onboarded. My problem is I'm looking at this kick ass report, I need my company to see it.
Speaker 2:You know? And, like, you you need to align these touch points sort of, like, you know, sort of when I I do something as a byproduct of achieving something, not as a byproduct of completing your your predisposed notions. Yeah. I know you you had Samuel Hillock on board before, and he was he made a sent a similar point, like, which is, like, onboarding is about the customer's definition of success, not your definition of metrics of a successful customer. You know?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Unlike Jason Fried at a point a talk in Chicago, he said something quite interesting, which is like, it's even worth considering the notion of these concepts like teammates or like people. Like, teammates is something that Basecamp thinks it needs, but like, why why do you even need an account at Basecamp to be able to use Basecamp? It's worth questioning that because you can do the whole thing by email. Why can't you complete tasks by email?
Speaker 2:Why can't you just write back completed or whatever? Like these are all real things. And next year you realize, shit. We've been chasing teammates all along where it's actually not teammates we want. Teammates is actually a dumb proxy for viable engagement with more people other than yourself.
Speaker 2:Maybe that's what we should be talking about, you know. Yeah. So like there's there's like lots of ways to come at this, but I I think I think like I I divide the world in kind of like onboarding one point o, which is like, you know, tool tip. It's like, check out this button. Check out that button.
Speaker 2:If you click this, it drops down. And then onboarding two point o was like the LinkedIn fused, like, you know, your profile 65% tweets. Now it can be 70% complete. That's onboarding two point o. I think three point o is gonna take us back again and say, alright, let's talk about customers and their success, and let's make sure customers achieve their success through doing things that they need to do.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. And even
Speaker 2:That makes sense?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly. And the the the way The reason I love thinking about this, and it is hard because it's easy to When you have a product, you're always just thinking about, like your head's down, you're thinking about how do we get this thing to work? Like how do we get more users? How do we get more money?
Speaker 1:And what I like about all this talk about jobs to be done and onboarding and all these things, is it's kind of forcing us outside of ourselves and forcing us to be more and more other centered. So more and more focused on other people and saying, hold on, let's really examine what does this person actually want? What does this person actually need? What does this person actually hiring your product to do? As opposed to what you would like it to be.
Speaker 1:And you only need to sit in an office for a while and just observe people. And pretty soon, you'll see the head of engineering poke his head out of his cubicle and go, hey Justin, what's this thing you just invited me to? And then you realize these little things you put in your app, invite a team member, they've got huge consequences. Now the head of engineering is saying, well what is this stupid thing you just invited me to? Like I don't wanna look at this.
Speaker 1:You're interrupting my day. You're filling up my inbox. And all these things actually do matter. They're not just, you know, little bits that we send out.
Speaker 2:Totally. And and, like, the the best way to think about that for me is, like, you know, if if you're all you're trying to do with these things is influence metrics that you're tracking yourself, such as, like, average teammates per person or whatever, bear in mind you're possibly not creating any value in the world. You know, you're possibly just influencing metrics. Like, you're metric hacking or growth hacking, you might say. And, like, it's you know, you're focusing on the measurement bypassing what it's actually a proxy for.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How how do you track customer success at Intercom?
Speaker 2:It's pretty base I mean, look, it's funny how like, I used to give a talk where people would ask, like, you know, talk a lot about, like, finding out what the customer needs to do. How do you do that? And I'm like, have a guess. And they're like, well, I mean, emergent metrics, you know, latent covariance theory by underlying two statistical groups and looking for an adjacent matrices. And I'm like, not quite that.
Speaker 2:No. It looks not a single word there. We have a really interesting technique here at Intercom. We ask our customers what they're trying to achieve during their trial. You know?
Speaker 2:Surprisingly how often that works.
Speaker 1:But can they articulate it? Because because sometimes when
Speaker 2:you Yeah.
Speaker 1:Sometimes you're asking people, you know, what do you wanna achieve? It's it's something that's difficult. I guess it depends on how you're doing it. If you're just doing it in a form
Speaker 2:yeah. Yeah. If you ask them I guess it disconsense how you value your customers. Right? So we don't ask every single person what are trying to do, but we do ask them when they meet certain criteria.
Speaker 2:Like, if they look like they're gonna be a useful, viable customer. And by that, I mean, like, they're not, like, a long term free user or, like, they're not, like, you know, they're not clearly, like, a student project, you know, at the University of Utah or something like that. Yeah. Like, but if they actually you know, if, like, you know, if they look like credible credible customer and you really want them to convert, great thing to do is say, hey. I mean, what is the purpose of a of a of a trial?
Speaker 2:The purpose of a trial from a from a user's point of view is I'm signing up for this, like, $99 a month Sprint new account. K? And I'm doing this trial because I'm trying to work out, is it worth $99 a month? And in my head, I have some definition of what is worth $90 a month. That definition's usually closely tied to a problem that I'm experiencing that I would definitely pay $99 a month to get rid of.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And if you ask me what that problem is, it could be something fluffy and abstract like, I wanna see if my developers can speed up. Right? I I wanna see if we can get faster at shipping. Or Yeah. I want greater clarity into my roadmap.
Speaker 2:Or I don't know what the hell anyone's working on, and and I heard you guys can fix that. Yeah. And like, you'll you'll get some version of that. And now you realize, well, if in thirty days time, he doesn't have greater clarity into what the hell everyone's working on or she doesn't have a faster development team or or he doesn't have like a good understanding of the rate of bugs that you're producing per month or whatever, then they're not gonna see this $99 a month value. So they're gonna quit.
Speaker 2:They're probably gonna quit way quicker enough for what it's worth to be able to quit like day six when when they've played around enough and haven't seen anything. You're only gonna mail them on day 31 because you're not watching what they actually do, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But so you try to find out what their definition of success is. And you're totally right. Like, you won't get a clean definition of, well, if I can have seven people on board plus I have, you know, two plus or minus three projects, like, activated. I don't know if I'm seeing increased engagement across all my you know, that's not what they'll say. They'll give you some, like, sort of short glib.
Speaker 2:You know, I hear you guys are good for changing for changing speed of our developers, or you guys, I like that road map view that you do. You know, alright. Cool. You know you know, I'm not be and what you'll see is like that, depending on how you market Sprintly and depending on on what the awareness of it is in the world, these things will start to converge on certain jobs. Right?
Speaker 2:And this is where we get our guest talk a little bit about jobs. But, you know, it won't be the case that a thousand different people have a thousand different goals. K? And if it is the case, you can use the abstract at a level and find a common similarity. For example, like, I'm sure Basecamp is used to manage weddings and home redesigns and software projects and website designs.
Speaker 2:But, like, to some degree, it's like I wanna get everyone on the same page or I wanna get everyone, like, looking at the same screens or whatever. And and it's similarly for Sprinting. Like, you know, it might be like, well, we need we've got this defunct product team that aren't doing anything good, and we wanna get them fixed till we you know, I'm trying to bring this in. But, like, you can abstract that to I wanna see an improvement. I wanna be able to measure improved performance across the software team or whatever.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So you abstract to a certain level to a job where you're comfortable. Right? Where, like, the job is definitely something you believe your product can do. And there might be more and there might in fact, there will be more than one job typically.
Speaker 2:Like, if your product isn't in any way deep, it'll it'll have it'll do more than one job for people. You might have, like, one, two, three, four, five, whatever. And you'll you'll send you can start to, like, loosely book at these people. And you can sort of say, alright. Well, you know, Jeanette from, like, you know, whatever app.com signed up, and she is in the improved performance, or she's in the road map job.
Speaker 2:So is she gonna get to see this road map? Well, what what does she need to do to see road map? Well, she needs to add at least 10 projects or 10 people or whatever. And then you can start to have that dialogue. And like, you can actually frame your, like, your messaging schedule now much more precisely using her words back at her.
Speaker 2:Things like, hey, I I bet you'd be interested in seeing this this road map overview. Reminder, here's a screenshot of it. Here's the best way to get there. Here's three things you should do. My name is Justin.
Speaker 2:Let me know if I can do anything to help you get there. Otherwise, I hope I hope to see you there. You know, I'm like, you'll be surprised how much more that effective is versus it's day 10. Now you need to blah blah blah, you know. So Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:One one I think we should get into some other examples because I love the examples. And the last ten minutes here. One job to be done that I've observed over and over and again is, and this is gonna be very specific, but you can generalize a little bit. I want to look impressive at a meeting. And so just this idea of, if you sent me an email, just said, hey, if you're ever heading to a meeting, click here, print off this report, and you'll be able to show your team your roadmap for the next three months.
Speaker 1:That right there is worth, in my mind, is worth like thousands of dollars. Because that's like my job. I wanna look good in front of my peers. So that's what I see over and over again. Am surprised more people don't capitalize on that.
Speaker 1:This idea of people wanna impress their bosses. People wanna impress their peers. They won't look good at meeting.
Speaker 2:Totally. Like, the the basically, my spoiler there is that the job of every report or dashboard is to get someone promoted, basically. That's like that's what the actual job is. And, like, you get promoted by looking like somebody who has their shit together. And a good proxy having your shit together is having all the things you need to know at your fingertips.
Speaker 2:And the and, like, what's interesting is you can, like, double click on that job and like, so let's talk specifically about this, giving someone something to take to a meeting. Well, the data needs to be up to date. Right? So you should also give them a button that pings everyone on a project and says, hey, guys. I'm going to a meeting at 03:00.
Speaker 2:Can you make sure you've got all your stuff up to date? And like and that thing, for what it's worth, should also look good on a phone. And it should be able to, like, you know, airplay and all this other sort of stuff, like, that lets you command the meeting. Right? Because like, ideally, a piece of paper is great, but like but what if you get to present?
Speaker 2:You know, that's even better. So why not have it out as a keynote slide. Right? Because like then you can just drop it in say, hey, guys, I've got something here. Why not have it as an animation so you can click through it?
Speaker 2:Like, there's all these things you start to realize when you actually know what the job is. Because when you think the job is like analytics or reports or whatever, what you do is you go and build a lot of fucking analytics and reports and shit, but you actually miss the purpose. Right? Like so, like, I think I think it's it's a real thing that, like, you know, there is functional energy in a job which tells you, like, what people actually need to achieve, such as like show, you know, hours logged per developer or whatever the hell it is. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. There's also emotional things like, you know, if it looks ugly, you're not gonna handle it. Have it look good enough such that I'm comfortable to share this in front of everyone else, Whether that's shared as a printed page, or whether that's like broadcasted, say like onto a screen. Like for example, this is a meeting room we're in here. That's a big screen on the wall.
Speaker 2:You know, would I be comfortable sharing your like the sprint lead report on that so that when I have, like, people here, like my CEO and stuff like that, do I feel like when I put this up, people go, shit. That Des guy knows what he's talking about. We should give him more responsibility. Like, these are the energies that people miss. And I think to that end, like, one one thing that Jobs really helps clarify is is like features when you label them based on like internal and you have really have to be careful about how you how you name these things when you're building parts of your product.
Speaker 2:When you name them after like internal nicknames, like, hey, this is the reports feature, this is the analytics feature, or this is like the whatever social feature, you actually forget what the hell you're trying to build. Right? It should be like, this is the get Rick promoted feature. Rick is our persona for the you know, whatever, like or it could be like it could be like the, you know, make me cool feature or, like, you know, give me confidence in my uptime feature or whatever. That's actually what you're trying to Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, whereas, you know, for some reason, we tend to categorize these things into, like, you know, discussion or report or whatever, which is a whole different thing. So, like, that's I think people miss out on those sort of energies. And there's a million and one examples of that. We talked about one on our our blog recently, the map. So, like, Intercom can create a map of all your users.
Speaker 2:And, like, people use that map like hell. We were like, what the hell are you trying to do with this map? Like and and we're like, it's not you know, we've went through all the obvious things because we were thinking if this is a map, So thinking, oh, well, it can plot all your people across a geospatial region. Like, yep. That's not useful.
Speaker 2:What we realized because, like, if you scroll down a little in that post, like, what you'll see is, the original map was kinda ugly. Right? And, like, it was ugly, but people still used it. And if you keep scrolling, you'll see is people where do people use it? Well, used it at trade shows to try and impress potential VCs, or they used it to like boast on Twitter about like things that they'd that like, you know, look how our business has grown, where they used it in like pitches to like, you know, at demo days to say, look how global our business is.
Speaker 2:Then when you realize, shit, this thing is not actually about cartography. Right? This has nothing to do with, like, you know, with geographical precision or or, like, any of the typical things. Like, the equatorial lines aren't relevant here. You know?
Speaker 2:Like, the fact that this this user is near the topic of of cancer is not interesting. So you forget about the map and you think, well, let's design something that is sexy and looks great to share and will make you look impressive and you will be comfortable sharing. And then let's make it really easy to share it. So let's anonymize it so that it doesn't show any business sensitive information. Let's make sure that people can, you know, can tweet it and can embed it onto their company websites and all that sort of stuff.
Speaker 2:And lo and behold, like, the uptake for our feature's been immense because, like, that's what people wanted to do with it. That's what they were doing with it. Ultimately, the realization was that we improved it along the lines that people were actually using it, not along the lines that the category was in. So to map that back to your reporting example, you might think reports mean, like, better date pickers and better, like you know, let them alternate between a three d pie chart and a two d bar two d, like, whatever, bar chart. But that's actually not it.
Speaker 2:What are people using it for? Well, if they're using it to put it into a Keynote file, let them get it as a Keynote deck. If they're using it to, like, show it to their boss, let them, like, put their company logo and let them put their profile photo beside it so that you never look at that report without remembering that it was Justin that delivered it. You know, like, there's all these different things that we when you actually realize the the true goals, like, the the improvements are much more obvious, but also, like, they tend to be met with amazing waves of a glow of gratitude from the customers.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. What just in closing here, what's kind of the next thing for Intercom? It's been really fun to watch you guys grow. I can't believe you're at 90 people actually.
Speaker 1:And clearly I need to go back and look at the product again because last time I looked around it was a little snippet you installed. But now you've got all these other ways to get yourself going. What's next for you? What do you see, are you still focused on the software kind of world, or are you focused on all sorts of businesses now?
Speaker 2:We're focused on Internet businesses. That's that's the best way to describe it. So I say Internet because I don't mean web and I don't mean mobile. Just mean Internet.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Obviously, the value Intercom provides, it's it's different. Like, if you're releasing a tool where you just wanna, like you know, if you're releasing a product that where, frankly, your attitude is, if I could sell this once, great, but I never wanna hear a single word from the customer. Mhmm. You know, you're you're not in a position to to get a lot of use out of Intercom because you actually don't care about your customers.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Most businesses, thankfully, these days care about your customers. So, like, anyone who basically does any sort of business on the Internet is is who we're designing and developing for. And in terms of what the future holds, it's gonna be like, we're gonna go deeper on all the jobs that we do for people. And the jobs that we do are pretty well outlined on the homepage, so I don't wanna actually I don't wanna talk you through our our marketing website. You know, people can go and visit it.
Speaker 2:But, like, we're you know, it's pretty it's a pretty clear outline of the use cases of Intercom. All we're gonna do is go deeper in all those. Like, deeper looks like, you know, innovation in some areas, doing things that no one's done before, like removing barriers, removing complexity, removing reasons why people can't adopt. And we'll you know, in those areas, like, it's more about resolving issues than it is about, like, necessarily about, you know, redefining people's imaginations.
Speaker 1:Sweet. Well Des, it's good to finally talk to you in person. Like I said, I've been a big fan of your work when you blog at blog.intercom.io. For everyone else out there, check out intercomintercom.io. And you can check out Des, I think you're Des Trainer on Twitter.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Des Trainer on Twitter. Beauty. Thanks again, Des.
Speaker 2:Cool. Thanks so much, Justin.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Talk to you soon.
Speaker 2:Cool. Take care. Bye.
Speaker 1:Alright. Well, thanks for listening everybody. That's my interview with Des. You can follow him online on Twitter. I think I just mentioned that in the interview, didn't I?
Speaker 1:Des Trainer. You can follow me online too at the letter m, the letter I, Justin, m I Justin. You'll see a big bearded guy there. Also, I've been sending some great updates to my newsletter list. I'm gonna be sending a financial update on how much money I made on my my sale.
Speaker 1:What do you call that? Black Friday. Black Friday, Cyber Monday sale. So if you're interested in seeing some real numbers, justinjackson.ca/newsletter We'll get you there. If you have not left a review on iTunes, if you could do that right now, that would be amazing.
Speaker 1:Here's one from Haikes from France. Justin is an awesome interviewer. He always asks specific spot on questions to his guest about the hacks they use to succeed. Keep up the good work. Go to iTunes, search for Product People, leave a four star rating, and if you leave a comment in the rating, I might read it here on the show.
Speaker 1:So if you're able to do that, that'd be sweet. Thanks again. I will talk to you in a bit. I think I'm gonna take a break over December here, but you should see new shows from me coming out on buildandlaunch.net in 02/2015. Alright.
Speaker 1:That's it for me. Thanks for listening. I will see you next time. Talk to you soon.
Listen to Product People using one of many popular podcasting apps or directories.
