Eoghan McCabe

@eoghanmccabe · CEO at Intercom

@otobrglez Hey. ✋ It's hard. There are many things we do. One is that we ship features and products to customers very, very early. So we frequently find that the simpler solutions are all we need and don't have to go much further at that time so solve the majority of a problem for the majority of our customers.

Lauren Cullen

@laurencullen · HRBP, Twitter

Hey Eoghan. What is the best thing about working at Interom?

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@eoghanmccabe · CEO at Intercom

@laurencullen It's a company where we've been able to stick to our principles and values, doing things our way, rather than copying anyone else, and have that strategy actually be successful and result in incredible growth. It's more fun to be original and to be yourself, and usually a more successful approach in the long term.

CardiffRead BookClub

@cardiffread

@eoghanmccabe best answer yet. +1

Wade

@wade · Cofounder, Resource

What's the most difficult aspect of hiring in a company growing as quickly as intercom? How do you find people quickly that share Intercom's values?

@eoghanmccabe · CEO at Intercom

@wade Hey. 👋 Good question! It's all really fucking hard. 😬 The most difficult aspect is keeping your bar high. You have new people hiring new people hiring new people! It's so easy for the company at large to lose sense of what you value, what type of people made you successful in the first place. We put a lot of effort into writing out and communicating our values. We're about to publish a book internally on our values.

Russ Frushtick

@russfrushtick

@eoghanmccabe what was the biggest communication fail you guys saw before you started Intercom and how has it been remedied?

@eoghanmccabe · CEO at Intercom

@russfrushtick Hi. ✋ Generally internet companies sending their customers to support forms where they would have to categorize their enquiry ("sales", "support", etc.), pick a priority, if not first have to dig thru an FAQ, and generally jump thru hoops to get help. It was and is the most impersonal and disrespectful thing you could do to your customers. Imagine someone in a coffee shop saying "wait, is this a sales or support enquiry" when you tried to talk to them.

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Lachlan Campbell

@lachlanjc · Code, apps, design, high school.

@eoghanmccabe Hey, Eoghan! A few questions: What was getting Intercom started like? What were the first pieces you built? Now that the company has grown so much, what do you do/like doing on a daily basis?

@eoghanmccabe · CEO at Intercom

@lachlanjc Hi! 👋 "What was getting Intercom started like?" Scary, lonely, grueling. But it would have been harder without having so many solid, trusted co-founderes. Intercom has four founders: me, Des Traynor, Ciaran Lee, David Barrett. We had worked for about four years together before starting Intercom. Good co-founders are so, so important. "What were the first pieces you built?" We built the in-app stuff first! We built something like it into our last product (Exceptional) and decided to try productize it. It was just a simple, chat-style pop-up that could hold arbitrary content. There was no such thing as "in-app messaging" back then. We landed on that term because we couldn't think of anything sexier. And it just stuck. "Now that the company has grown so much, what do you do/like doing on a daily basis?" Meetings! I have a lot more meetings. And emails. My life is meetings and emails. 😅 What I like doing is dreaming about the future, spending time with my co-founders and the leadership team here, planning increasingly ambitious goals…

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Lachlan Campbell

@lachlanjc · Code, apps, design, high school.

@eoghanmccabe Really interesting — thanks!

Romy Misra

@romy_misra

@eoghanmccabe Hi Eoghan! Thanks for doing this! You guys started with a big mission - in cases like this how do you identify an MVP? It's obviously valuable as the fully integrated solution and there are so many different companies for various components. Would love to hear more about the thought process there on how to approach a big problem of this sort.

@eoghanmccabe · CEO at Intercom

@romymisra Hey. ✋ I'm not much of a lean startup person. I and we build primarily by touch and feel, by intuition. We just built the smallest, simplest thing we thought would be awesome, shared it with the world, and took it from there.

Emily Hodgins

@ems_hodge · Community and Marketing, Product Hunt

Hi Eoghan, what piece of advice would you give yourself aged 16,18,25 - would you do anything differently?

@eoghanmccabe · CEO at Intercom

@ems_hodge Hi. ✋ I'd say this: "Hey! Eoghan! This is you. But from the future. I know this is weird. Shut up for a second. Listen… You're fucking awesome. Be you more. Focus on what you're passionate about. Be real and real people will want to be around you and work with and for you. Work hard and enjoy every day. Success and great things will follow." I basically did this, but I could have done thing a lot earlier in life.

Will Martin

@willpmartin · founder liveduel

Hey Eoghan, how early into Intercom did you decide to head for SF and setup shop there? What is the breakdown of your Dublin and SF offices look like? What lessons have you learned along the way with having a US and EU office

@eoghanmccabe · CEO at Intercom

@willpmartin Hi. ✋ "How early into Intercom did you decide to head for SF and setup shop there?" I came here about 6 months before we incorporated in Aug, 2011, knowing we wanted to try do Intercom the valley way, building a bigger, VC backed company. "What is the breakdown of your Dublin and SF offices look like?" I think it's about 50/50 today. We have about 170 people in total. HQ in SF. All business functions here. 100% of our product development in Ireland. "What lessons have you learned along the way with having a US and EU office." All video conferencing technology needs a lot of innovation!

Yusuf Parak

@yusufpq

Hey Eoghan! Thanks for doing this AMA! I have a few questions, hope you don't mind? 1. What do you believe to be true that very few people agree with you on? 2. What are some of the challenges you're dealing with at Intercom and how are you going about solving them? 3. Would you ever consider making your product free to kids < 18, as a way to promote building/hacking things? Think that a lot more startups can add value in this area.

@eoghanmccabe · CEO at Intercom

@yusufpq Hi. ✋ Re your first question, the whole Intercom idea (one platform for everyone in a company to communicate with their customers) has been strongly contested as a smart thing to try build and sell. I've had a lot of people tell me it was dumb.