Intercom Blog

Intercom have some great blogs: https://blog.intercom.com/ https://engineering.intercom.com/

Tom Tunguz: http://tomtunguz.com/ Patrick McKenzie http://www.kalzumeus.com/greatest-hits/ Intercom http://blog.intercom.io/

This hits the nail on the head. Optimization is very, very rarely completely „free“ - and usually a concious trade of some property for another trait that‘s deemed more important in a specific case. Simplicity for performance. Code size for compilation speed. Startup time for architectural complexity. UX for security. For a great product, you need to say „no“ much more often than not. Do one thing and do it well. Be Redis, not JBoss. I love how this article gets down to the essence of it: https://blog.intercom.com/product-strategy-means-saying-no/

OP here. Feature Audit is an analytics tool that gives SaaS owners a quick answer to the following question: “how many people are actually using each of our product’s features?” It's inspired by this Des Traynor post (https://blog.intercom.com/before-you-plan-your-product-roadmap/) that I've returned to many times over the years, and finally decided, "someone should build that." If you're a founder, PM, or engineer working on a SaaS product every day, I'd love to hear what do you think.

Meh. I'm cynical of the voting ring algorithm. I used to tweet when I wrote a new post on the Intercom blog but too many of my followers used to +1 the post and now it seems we're in some way blacklisted on HN. Example: http://blog.intercom.io/the-future-of-email-products/ this post when pretty much viral everywhere else, ~100K page views, submitted to HN lots of times by lots of people and I'm sure most of you guys have read it, but never gets anywhere. Curious.

Inside Intercom, hands down. https://blog.intercom.com

Intercom | Dublin, Ireland | SUPPORT ENGINEER | Full Time | ONSITE Do you have a strong need to understand how and why things work the way they do? Are you acutely aware of customer experience and upset when a company you’re dealing with lets you down? If you have some engineering or web development experience and want to be a part of creating truly exceptional customer experiences then the Customer Support team at Intercom is right for you. Intercom supports over 12k businesses ranging from bootstrapped startups to large enterprise corporations. Our Support Engineers partner with our customers to tackle the challenging technical issues they face in innovative ways. In this role, you will be directly responsible for helping people integrate Intercom into their products, diagnose and report problems they have, and serve as the bridge between our customers and our product teams. [We use Intercom to support Intercom customers](https://blog.intercom.io/intercom-customer-support/), so whether you’re just starting out in your career or want to get a deeper understanding of fundamental customer motivations and how those are applied to building an ambitious, world-class product, this role provides that great opportunity. Our way of providing support is based on the [principles of continuity and trust](https://blog.intercom.io/rebuilding-support-around-continuity-trust/) and our style of communication is personal, friendly and fun. We engage in dynamic conversations with our…

The problem w/ circles, lists and tags, is that they require the user themselves to create and maintain them. Unless your tech can read minds and prompt for new affinities discovered or changes in relationship automatically, its too much cognitive load. You should read - http://blog.intercom.io/what-we-can-learn-from-google-plus/ Curious how you solve for that. I don't think its natural for humans to say "today Bob went from acquaintance to friend" or "i'll make a circle for dirty jokes" proactively.

Their older article of matching personas with Jobs-to-Be-Done has always been a good one: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/personas-jobs-be-done/ So is Intercom's: https://blog.intercom.com/when-personas-fail-you/ It also depends where you use these. While personas are often low value in product design and UX (where JTBD can shine), in marketing and sales personas can be a big help (although even there, JTBD has strong role).

Found where I saw the cake analogy specifically: https://blog.intercom.com/start-with-a-cupcake/

On a simple level, RICE scoring can help: https://blog.intercom.com/rice-simple-prioritization-for-product-manag…

As the other response said, you're confusing revenue with earnings. Very few companies have a revenue multiple of 13x. Looking at this chart https://blog.intercom.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/4-forward-revenue… it looks like Dropbox can expect something in the 6x-10x range, valuing them at $4.5-7.5B.

If I understand it correctly: >What's the other kind of design that isn't like those eastern european apps? According to the author, the dominant Californian minimalism (Google Material Design & Apple's flatter IOS7 compared to previous versions). This eastern european style would be based on this, but add definitely non-minimalist gradients and shadows and glows and stuff... >What's dribbbbblization? Looks over function: https://blog.intercom.io/the-dribbblisation-of-design/

Recently relevant, for those who missed it: https://blog.intercom.io/the-dribbblisation-of-design/

I found this on Intercoms blog post entitled "Some Things can't be Wireframed". This picture reflects the meta design of many websites. https://blog.intercom.io/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/SquareSpace-Frame.… We've arrived with this design from years of design evolution and no one person is responsible. All products seem to ultimately converge on some optimal universal archetype. Websites, books and radio towers are no different in this sense. The same will be true of mobile Apps someday but I don't think its the case at the moment. https://blog.intercom.io/things-cant-wireframed/

Hype, as far as I can tell. (e.g. https://blog.intercom.io/why-cards-are-the-future-of-the-web/ seems just a wee bit excessive in its enthusiasm for cards.)

Thanks for the mention, guys. I recently wrote a post about our approach to building landing pages at Intercom. Thought it might be relevant :) https://blog.intercom.io/12-steps-to-creating-landing-pages-that-conve…

There will always be at least one thing that was more complex than expected. Even finishing a project looks good to employers. This post explains that even adding a word counter can be complex. http://blog.intercom.io/there-are-no-small-changes/ "Do we crop the string, or display an error message to the user? If we display an error, where does it appear? What does it say? Who is going to write the error message? How do we explain to the user why we’re limiting them to 140 characters? How will these errors look? Do we have a style defined? If not, who is designing it?"

http://blog.intercom.io/the-end-of-apps-as-we-know-them/ - This article about where mobile apps are going resonated with me. It says we're eventually moving away from a bank of homescreen icons to notification centers and all actions related to certain context are present in the notification itself (like, reply). Moreover certain products/services might not need to have their own app - piggybacking as child cards of others app notifications. Very fascinating read.

+1 Here's another post on the topic: http://blog.intercom.io/automated-emails-customer-respect/

There's sort of a naming scheme: http://blog.intercom.io/whats-in-a-name/

I hope criticizing the link itself isn't considered trolling here (I'm still new), but what I see here is an article that is 90% a quote from a different article and 10% pretty uninspiring commentary. Why link to this particular site instead of the place where the actual content is in? http://blog.intercom.io/criticism-and-two-way-streets/

So this pretty much polls Twitter, Digg, Picasa, Youtube and Flickr for the search term you enter, then updates in real time? I like the interface a lot, and it certainly seems well architected (in that I've had it open in three tabs simultaneously and not noticed any lag whatsoever). However, to use an idea from the Intercom.io blog[1], what job would I hire this app to perform? [1] http://blog.intercom.io/when-personas-fail-you/

Do you pay your hair stylist $10k+ for creating hair that will theoretically increase your bottom line? Will that hair project also require months of work? If so, your hair stylist would be very, very smart to say "No, sorry," to your request, because then there will be at least one more client of his/hers out there with a negative result. Which makes the hair stylist's portfolio success rate that much lower. And the sign of somebody who won't say "No" is the sign of somebody who's not dedicated to results. As consulting god Weinberg would put it, they'd fail the Orange Juice Test: http://blog.intercom.io/the-orange-juice-test/ If you ask me, a better metaphor would be whether a person will go out with absolutely anyone who offers them a free dinner (even if they think the potential date is dumb as a box of rocks)… And what other, later, more desirable potential dates would think of that person's choice to not exert choice.