Des Traynor: How I Founded Intercom; Product Marketing Tips; Feature Creep | 20VC #907

Three, two, one, zero. You have now arrived at your destination.

Des, this is such a joy to do. As you know, I've been a long-term admirer, fan, so thank you so much for joining me today.

Thank you for having me yet again.

Not at all. I do want to start though with a little bit of context. We see Intercom in all of its glory today. What was that founding aha moment for you and the team with Intercom?

I think we had a few different ideas. So we, we were originally a consultancy building software for other people. There was a few ideas on the go. Ones that, like, you know, at times looked hilariously bad. Like, we had an idea for, like, a white boarding product, and, uh, and that, like, you know, ultimately looked like not a good idea contrasted with Intercom. But then something like Miro comes out, like, years later, and you're like, "Maybe it wasn't such a bad idea." Um, however, with Intercom, uh, we ha- we're building an actual way to communicate with our customers from a previous product, uh, and we wanted to communicate inside the product. And the real sort of spark was, like, when we realized how much more effective that was and how more, how r- people were just quite excited about that. I remember Owen, at the time our, our, uh, former CEO, current chairperson, saying to Ciaran, like, that this could actually be a huge idea by itself, this little talk to customers in your product type thing. And, um, and when I heard that, my response whenever I think, "Ooh, could this be an idea?" I just immediately go into, like, "L- l- let's, like, what's the actual strongest, like, iron man case we can push to support this? Or a steel man case." So I was like, right, what are the trends, uh, whether it's messaging or whether it's, like, uh, the rise of web software, whether it's the rise of SaaS and the, the need for relationships. I started to look at, right, okay, this fits, it supports so many current sort of tectonic shifts, and then obviously the, the real click was once we actually offered it to other people and we saw them use it, and we saw them, like, rip it out of our hands, and be like, "Oh my god, I love this thing. How did, you know, how, how did my life exist without it?" type thing. That was when it was like, right, clearly we're onto something. And that was the decision then to, like, close the consultancy, let's get going, and let's go all in on this.

Uh, so I, I want to touch on something you said there first, which is kind of the idea selection process for you. I'm so... And VCs always say, "Oh, it's all about the people, it's all about the people." I don't care if I hate your idea if I believe in you so much. I've invested many times, and actually, it was Elizabeth Yin on Twitter who said the other day, "No, no, no, like, actually the quality of the idea really matters, and you have to be excited about it." Which camp are you in? Are you in, like, the, "Fuck it, great founders find the market and find the product over time," or do you have to like what they're doing when you invest?