How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO)

You don't have a choice. AI's gonna disrupt in the most aggressive, violent ways. If you're not in it, you're about to get kicked out of all of it.

You have very successfully shifted late-stage SaaS business to an AI-first, agent-based business.

Fin is our AI agent. We'll pass 100,000,000 ARR with Fin in less than three quarters.

Let's talk about how you made this actually happen.

We were about to hit, like, $0 net new ARR, which means we would have been in negative growth territory.

So ChatGPT launches. Was it just like, "This is it. We gotta go all in on this thing"?

I said, "We need to become a wartime company. If we don't fight for this, we are dead." I jumped hard on AI, but I also restarted the culture. I rewrote the values designed to be a sharp knife to cut out the parts of the company that I just knew wouldn't be effective.

If you're trying to make the shift and it's just not moving, you may need to go hardcore founder mode.

The way that greatness is created is that you find a CEO who's willing to make brave, hard decisions and own the results.

What percentage of the employees kinda turned over during this period?

Ultimately, like, 40%.

You said there was a, a soft coup. Is there more you could share about that? Today, my guest is Eoghan McCabe. This is the first in a series of conversations that I'm having with founders who have successfully transformed their established SaaS or marketplace businesses into an AI-first company that is growing like crazy and overtaking their decade-plus old business. So many companies and product teams and founders are trying to navigate this very tricky time where every industry is being disrupted by AI, and my goal here is to help you essentially disrupt yourself before somebody else does. The story of Intercom's transformation into Fin is incredible. Their traditional business was valued at billions of dollars, was making hundreds of millions of dollars in ARR, but growth started to plateau, and was even about to go negative. Six weeks after GPT-3.5 came out, they had a working prototype of what is now Fin, and Eoghan and the team decided to go all in on AI. Today, Fin is growing like crazy, already at eight digits in ARR, and Intercom is on track to be growing faster than every public software company by next year. In our conversation, Eoghan gets very real and honest about what it takes to win right now, what he had to do to turn the ship around at Intercom in spite of a lot of pushback and even a soft coup attempt, what he believes people still don't understand about what is happening in software and AI, and so much more. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also, if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of a bunch of incredible products, including Lovable, Replit, Bolt, n8n, Linear, Superhuman, Descript, Whisperflow, Gamma, Perplexity, Warp, Granola, Magic Patterns, Raycast, ChatBRD, and Mobben. Check it out at leonnysnewsletter.com and click Bundle. With that, I bring you Eoghan McCabe. This episode is brought to you by Great Question, the all-in-one UX research platform loved by teams at Brex, Canva, Intuit, and more. One of the most common things I hear from PMs and founders that I talk to is, "I know I should be speaking to customers more, but I just don't have the time or the tools." That's exactly the gap Great Question fills. Great Question makes it easy for anyone on your team, not just researchers, to recruit participants, run interviews, send surveys, test prototypes, and then share it all with powerful video clips. It's everything you need to put your customers at the center of your product decisions. With a prompt as simple as, "Why did users choose us over competitors?" Great Question not only reveals what your customers have already shared, but it also makes it incredibly easy to ask them in the moment for fresh insights from the right segment. Picture this, your roadmap's clear, your teams aligned, you're shipping with confidence, and you're building exactly what your customers need. Head to greatquestion.com/lenny to get started. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're building a SaaS app, at some point, your customers will start asking for enterprise features like SAML authentication and SCIM provisioning. That's where WorkOS comes in, making it fast and painless to add enterprise features to your app. Their APIs are easy to understand so that you can ship quickly and get back to building other features. Today, hundreds of companies are already powered by WorkOS, including ones you probably know, like Vercel, Webflow, and Loom. WorkOS also recently acquired Warrant, the fine-grained authorization service. Warrant's product is based on a groundbreaking authorization system called Zanzibar, which was originally designed for Google to power Google Docs and YouTube. This enables fast authorization checks at enormous scale while maintaining a flexible model that can be adapted to even the most complex use cases. If you're currently looking to build role-based access control or other enterprise features like single sign-on, SCIM, or user management, you should consider WorkOS. It's a drop-in replacement for Auth0 and supports up to one million monthly active users for free. Check it out at workos.com to learn more. That's workos.com. Eoghan, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.