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Growth at Intercom
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Ben McRedmond Director of Growth
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Stephen O’Brien Engineering Manager, Growth
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Intercom is a single communications platform for your entire company to talk to its customers
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> 6000 paying customers.
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5x revenue growth in 2014.
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On track for 4x this year.
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120 employees +90 in last 18 months.
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Growth hacking is bullshit.
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Tactics without strategy.
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Success is supported by bad science.
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A growth hacker is someone who’s true north is growth.
- Sean Ellis
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A startup is a company designed to grow fast.
- Paul Graham
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Engineering…
… grow the company
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Engineering…
… grow the company
… applies science to build products…
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Marketing…
… grow the company
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Marketing…
… grow the company
… communicates the value of a product, service or brand …
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Growth hacking…
… grow the company
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Growth hacking…
… grow the company
?
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Growth hacking only defines an outcome.
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Marketing, engineering, design, sales all have a framing of the problem.
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Their framing of the problem is their tool for solving the problem.
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PMs, designers, and engineers supporting and shaping go-to-market strategy.
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Distinct function, reports to CEO.
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We’re building the software storefront and sales people for Intercom.
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10 people currently, growing to 22 people by EOY.
Big investment for Intercom.
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What do we actually do?
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Always evaluate:
What do successful vs. unsuccessful accounts look like?
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e.g. Users added after 7 days
# accounts
# users
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Big success for us with making easier to get data into Intercom.
+30% in signups MtM, continued forever since.
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Balance between upfront work and richness of experience.
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Analyze conversations for common problems.
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Solve in a rich, scalable way through software vs. growing COGs.
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People needed help with basic orientation in UI.
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It's much easier to just explain your mechanisms, so that's why we all do it!
- Ryan Singer, Basecamp
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Users who went through a tutorial, 3x as activated.
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Pricing on Purpose by Ronald J. Baker
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Lots and lots and lots of iterations needed.
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7 new models tried in 2014.
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Only change for new customers.
For existing: grandfather and don’t announce.
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Tiny number of people will be mad. It’ll be fine.
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Tactics are useless in isolation.
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You need a strategy and an org to support these tactics.
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1. We are entrepreneurial and business minded product people.
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(e.g. we have 4 former founders working as engineers / PMs.)
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2. We are design led at macro and metric led at micro.
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3. Quality is paramount.
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Build a strategy for sustainable and systematic growth.
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It’s not too soon.