Intercom
Customer MessagingIntercom is a customer messaging platform that combines live chat, chatbots, help desks, and product tours into a unified system for communicating with users inside web applications. If you've ever seen that little chat bubble in the bottom-right corner of a SaaS app, there's a good chance it's powered by Intercom. For custom web application development, Intercom is one of the most commonly requested integrations. It drops in with a simple JavaScript snippet, but the real power comes from the API, sending custom user attributes and events from your app to Intercom lets you trigger targeted messages, automate onboarding sequences, and route support conversations based on what the user is actually doing in the application. I've built integrations that sync subscription status, feature usage data, and custom properties so that Intercom's messaging and automation knows exactly who each user is.
From Zero to Standard
Intercom was founded in 2011 by four co-founders, Eoghan McCabe, Des Traynor, Ciaran Lee, and David Barrett, in Dublin, Ireland. McCabe and Traynor had previously worked together at a software company called Contrast and were frustrated by how impersonal digital business had become. Their insight was that the internet had made it easy to reach millions of people but had actually made it harder to have real conversations with them. They built Intercom as a way to bring personal, contextual communication back to online business. The founding team moved to San Francisco to go through Y Combinator, then raised venture funding and grew rapidly. Intercom reached a $1.275 billion valuation by 2018, making it one of Ireland's most valuable tech startups. The company has remained a major player in the customer messaging space, competing with Zendesk, Drift, and others.
The Technical Edge
Des Traynor, one of Intercom's co-founders, built an enormous personal following through his blog and speaking appearances on product strategy. His essays on product management, particularly his framework about "jobs to be done", became required reading in many tech companies and MBA programs. But the more surprising Intercom fact is about their content operation: Intercom's blog and book publishing arm (they've published multiple physical books on product management, customer support, and sales) has been cited as one of the most successful content marketing operations in B2B SaaS history. The company published "Intercom on Product Management," "Intercom on Customer Engagement," and several other titles that were distributed for free and collectively downloaded millions of times, establishing the company as a thought leader well before they became a billion-dollar company.
Visit: intercom.com