Building The Right Product & Pricing with Des Traynor @ Intercom.com - Escape Velocity Show #32

About this video

Dan Martell interviews Intercom co-founder Des Traynor about how Intercom grew out of Exceptional, a Ruby on Rails error tracker built by their consultancy Contrast. Traynor says they had many users but rarely talked to them, and tooling to identify and message paying customers was so poor that they built a small in-product prompt asking what to work on next — the response revealed the bigger opportunity: helping internet businesses talk to their customers. After selling Exceptional, they pursued that mission. Traynor explains that jobs-to-be-done research in 2013 showed three distinct paths into Intercom — support, marketing, and sales — with different buyers, goals, and cost centres, forcing them to break up the product and pricing instead of offering one price for all. He states a core pricing lesson: you can have simple pricing or effective pricing, but not both, especially when customers do not know their own user counts. On product management, he separates roles — product managers own the problem, designers own the solution, engineers own implementation and inform cost — calling design without engineering input shopping without a price tag. Intercom prioritises with RICE (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort), distinguishes exploratory innovation, where failure must be allowed, from straightforward problem-solving, and tries not to react to competitors unless customers and prospects are actually asking for what competitors offer.

Key takeaways

• Talk to customers directly: Intercom itself originated when its founders found they could not easily identify or message Exceptional’s paying users.
• Use jobs-to-be-done research to uncover distinct buyers and jobs; support, marketing, and sales buyers evaluate and pay differently.
• Accept the trade-off Traynor states: simple pricing and effective pricing are rarely the same thing in complex B2B software.
• Run product as a trio — PM owns the problem, design owns the solution, engineering owns delivery and reveals the cost of choices.
• Prioritise with RICE and do not chase competitor features until your own customers or prospects bring them up in real buying conversations.

Episode details: published July 16, 2020 · 54:38 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are Dan Martell’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

← Previous: Growth Hacking - How To Become a World-Class Growth Hacker · Next: How To Create a Business That Gives Back To The World →

All Dan Martell videos · Dan Martell profile · Dan Martell (official site)