Des Traynor talks startup strategy, product fundamentals and enterprise SaaS on 20VC

Our co-founder and chief strategy officer, Des Traynor, joins the 20VC podcast for a fascinating conversation with host Harry Stebbings.

Shares information about his entire career: the chat is full of anecdotes and lessons about Intercom's origins, the most persistent myths about startups, his approach to angel investing, the challenge SaaS product marketing, etc. more.

Watch the video above or read on to learn the key points from this informative discussion.

Origins of the intercom

"We were creating a real way to communicate with our customers from our previous product; we wanted to communicate inside the product. The real spark was like when we realized how great it was. was more effective and how people were just pretty excited about it… The real click was once we offered it to other people and we saw them using it and we saw them like snatch it out of our hands and be like oh my god I love this thing.”

Two of the Biggest Startup Myths: Being First and Being Defensible

"I think being first doesn't matter. Let's say me and you have a really great idea - let's say it involves the idea of ​​a sticky note metaphor that you can drag and drop around the place. Give it a year and everyone will have it if that makes sense. And then what's left for you? What's left for you is "Well , we got it first," and you start running ad campaigns saying, "We're the original." You're kind of screwed because nobody really cares.

"I think day one arguability is rare, but every once in a while a small business emerges with something that says 'wow if you want to copy this, you're going to spend a lot of time working on it' ."< /p> Product 101: When to start creating a second product

"Do we credibly think that the ROI of adding a new product is definitely greater than increasing maturity and maybe time to market up or whatever either what we currently have?"

The Foundations of Great Product Marketing

Startup product marketing has generally always defaulted to "Here's a big screenshot and here's a one-liner." And I think that's totally fine in a world where the screenshot is really obvious of what's going on... I think the challenge for product marketing is, first, you have to figure out what your users and buyers want to know (and it's not always the same thing), and second, what's the best way to show why you're the best at it."

Go to business

"To sell to the Enterprise, you actually have to be a good citizen of their tech stack, so you can't just say, 'Intercom is here, take out everything else!' They probably have 15 more tools than they use in working with you to talk to their customers or to manage customer conversations or just the health of their customer base You need to have a really good interoperability posture which means you need to hydrate all other sources of data that would benefit from knowing what Intercom knows and in the same way you should also suck data from them to make sure that intercom is the best Intercom it can be and in doing so you become what they call an upgrade to their tech stack."