11 min read

How Inside Intercom Has Grown to $300M in Revenue

A coffee shop's warmth sparked a $300M idea—what if online businesses felt more human?
How Inside Intercom Has Grown to $300M in Revenue

The story of Intercom began more than a decade ago at a small Dublin coffee shop. 

Four friends (co-founders of Intercom)—Ciaran Lee, David Barrett, Des Traynor, and Eoghan McCabe—were hanging out and drinking lattes. They noticed how the owner of the coffee shop was “growing his business conversation by conversation, relationship by relationship, growing loyalty, encouraging repeat customers, creating super-fans.” The owner was building a thriving business simply with the power of human connection!

At the time, they were building Exceptional, an error-tracking app. Although they had thousands of customers, they had barely met 30 of them. They didn’t have a close relationship with their customers in the way the coffee shop owner did. And it got them thinking whether it was feasible to replicate such a connection with customers of online businesses.

The start of Intercom

Intercom was thus born out of a desire to move from the impersonal, transactional form of doing business to establishing a deeper sense of connection. 

The friends created an admin tool in Exceptional—a floating logo at the bottom of the screen that interacted with customers through speech bubbles whenever they used the tool. Customers became more interested in the messaging feature of Exceptional than the tool itself. 

That’s how the first version of Intercom was built and released in private beta in July 2010.

Intercom: a customer communications platform

After Intercom was launched in August 2011, customers began using the “Business Messenger'' feature by inserting a Javascript code into their websites. Here’s their pitch deck from 2011, where they nail the crux of the matter: customers want more than spammy messages, canned responses, or tickets. 

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As of 2024, Intercom has grown to $343 M in revenue and is growing at 25% Y/Y as a CRM with messaging and support features. It helps companies communicate with their customers with targeted content, conversational support, and behavior-driven messages. 

The company has raised a total of $240.8 M in funding over seven rounds. It was last valued at $1.3B, pegging its present-day valuation/revenue multiple at about 4.3x, officially making it a “unicorn” startup. Intercom was one of the fastest companies to raise $1M ARR within 5 years, second only to Slack.

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Let’s explore the strategies Intercom used to grow to a thumping success.

Very Early Growth Strategies

To drive very early growth, Intercom adopted three step-by-step strategies:

  1. Personalized Email Campaigns
  2. Blogging and webinars after launch
  3. Boosting adoption with founder-led outbound sales

Personalized Email Campaigns

Des Traynor, co-founder and chief strategy officer at Intercom employed the labor-intensive but immensely effective strategy of sending personalized emails by hand to former customers of Exceptional, who were mainly SMBs. The idea was to drive very early growth by tapping into their personal network and pitching their unique story to people.

Here’s a snapshot of how Traynor sent 100+ emails per day:

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The rationale behind sending emails by hand instead of automating the process was that it helped avoid the problems associated with outbound email campaigns, like getting the email addresses wrong or sending the same email to someone’s personal and professional email addresses.

Webinars and Blogging

Another tactic that Intercom used to great effect was conducting webinars to help onboard groups of users. Again, they didn’t want to automate the process and lose all nuance. 

In January 2012, a beta version of Intercom was released. Rather than establish various subscription tiers, it was initially available at a flat rate of $50, which pulled in both users and venture capitalists. The founders then began to conduct one live webinar every Wednesday evening to groups of 9-90 members.

Blogging was a key tactic that helped Intercom drive users to its product. Des Traynor wrote 93 of the first 100 blog posts published on Intercom’s website to evangelize their vision. In fact, Intercom is known for its content more than its product! 

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This blend of hands-on outreach strategy and inbound marketing via blogging helped the founders build stronger relationships with customers and get real-time insights on what customers were saying about the product.  

Founder-led Outbound Sales

Once Intercom found a group of early users, it now had to convert them into paying customers. Instead of pursuing a self-service or sales-driven strategy to get users to upgrade to better functionality, the founders chose to contact leads themselves (or with the help of an early sales team), help them take a trial of the product, and encourage them to sign up for the paid plan. 

At the time, Intercom had a simple pricing system for one SaaS product. They had launched with a freemium version and paid plans that scaled up based on usage. So, Intercom attempted to create awareness through email, webinars, and blogging, reach out personally to leads, offer them a free trial of the product, and then encourage them to become paying customers.

Land and Expand 

While their initial focus was on SMBs and very early-stage companies, eventually, they moved to enterprises. To help sell to larger companies, Intercom also built a sales team that employed a land and expand strategy. A sales representative would reach out to a company and build a relationship over a period based on excellent customer experience, value creation, and trust. The sales representative would then use this goodwill to upsell to the company, which was easier than pitching to a new company because Intercom already had its foot in the door. 

Growth Strategies Employed 2014 Onwards

From 2014 onwards, Intercom employed a jobs-based marketing tactic based on the jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) framework. Basically, people buy things to get a task done. Intercom spoke to 40 different customers to understand how they used the product and what outcomes they were expecting.

Driven by Matt Hodges (VP of Commercial Product Strategy and first marketer at Intercom), Intercom changed the way they marketed their product: from the typical SaaS method of persona-based marketing to focusing on jobs-to-be-done statements. Previously, Intercom was marketed with four use cases that the product was thought to be good for. Now, they repackaged those use cases into four distinct but integrated products. This enabled them to segment their marketing and target specific audiences for the product. The strategy helped Intercom grow really fast.

Here’s a screenshot of Intercom’s home page from 2015, where they call out the five different jobs the product could be used for:

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Pricing Strategies

To boost growth, Intercom chose to have different pricing models (enterprise, transactional, and self-service) to target different market segments. It allowed them to sell to startups and SMBs on one hand and to enterprises on the other. 

Intercom’s value metric (what you charge for) is the number of people reached and the number of seats. Thus, as customers grow, Intercom’s revenues also grow. 

If they use Intercom less, they pay less—this helps reduce churn. That’s why charging based on value metrics is better than charging a flat fee based on features and functionalities.

Karen Peacock, former CEO of Intercom, says, “You always need to make sure that the price you’re charging is less than the value for the customer.” 

Content Marketing Strategies

Content has been a major driver of growth for Intercom. It has helped them create awareness, drive traffic to their website, keep leads coming to their marketing and sales funnel, and become an authority in the industry. 

Intercom’s main distribution channel that helped them grow from $1M to $50M ARR was their blog, where they published several posts per week targeting medium- and high-volume keywords to attract people looking for information on user engagement, support, pricing, and other common SaaS topics. 

In 2015, Intercom began to publish a series of books with insights and opinions from team members around subjects like jobs-to-be-done framework, customer engagement, and product management. 

Through its popular blog and books, Intercom shaped industry discourse on product management, onboarding, and startup growth—its content became a go-to resource, further extending its impact beyond its product​.

In summary, Intercom’s decade of innovation not only yielded a successful company but also transformed the playbook for customer communication in the digital age.

Other strategies that have held them in good stead are:

  1. Evergreen content
  2. Retargeting
  3. Link building with thought leadership 
  4. Mimicking successful content ideas

Evergreen content

Intercom keeps its pipeline of leads and customers full with evergreen content i.e. content that is continually relevant and remains relevant to the audience over a long period. 

Using the JTBD framework, they identified market segments they want to target, then they’ve chosen relevant medium- and high-volume keywords for these segments, and created high-quality content that matches the search intent of this market segment.

Since these content pieces remain relevant for a long time, they can gather a large number of backlinks and build an authoritative position in the industry. 

Apart from blog posts and books, Intercom also publishes webinars, guides, podcasts, and courses.

Even though customer messaging is a dry industry, Intercom has turned it on its head with its storytelling approach. Combined with their organic search strategy, Intercom has elevated itself as the final word in customer support.

Retargeting

Top-of-the-funnel content is great for driving traffic to one’s website, but it doesn’t necessarily get paying customers. 

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Intercom uses prompts like “Next Steps” at strategic points to encourage readers to share their email address, or read more relevant content, or provide contact information in exchange for a digital asset like an ebook.

There are very few direct CTAs pushing readers to try out the product because Intercom does not focus on immediate conversions. Their growth strategy is based on delivering a stellar product with flexible, usage-based pricing and high-quality, useful content.

Intercom approaches retargeting in a similar, value-based manner. They personalize the content they retarget potential customers with based on what they’re currently reading. 

Thought Leadership

All Intercom employees—founders, executives, marketing teams, product teams, customer support—contribute to the Intercom blog. It helps them generate insightful thought leadership pieces that generate high-quality backlinks.

Tyler Hakes, Strategy Director at Yes Optimist, says, “They’ve picked up on interesting topics or emerging ideas within the field of customer support, startup growth, and design. Then, they use their blog to advance that idea in a new direction or solidify and refine it in a way that provides perspective and insight for others in the industry.”

Mimicking successful content ideas

Intercom doesn’t always put out ground-breaking content. Often, they pick up other people’s content that’s doing really well and they put their own spin on it. 

For example, Nick Babich wrote a popular Medium post on “Using Card-Based Design to Enhance UX” in March 2016. 

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Six months later, Intercom published a post titled “Why Cards are the Future of the Web” in September 2016 that became quite popular.

Instead of spending time and energy hunting for new ideas, Intercom identifies emerging trends and takes them up early, adding their own thoughts to it. They keep an eye on topics garnering increased interest or engagement in their target communities, like HackerNews.

SEO Strategies 

Along with content marketing, Intercom employs the following SEO strategies:

  1. Dynamic keyword insertion
  2. Targeting semantic keywords for high-quality traffic
  3. Off-page strategies (leveraging Medium, attractive CTAs within blog posts)

Dynamic Keyword Insertion

Early in Intercom’s growth, the company would insert referral links like “We run on Intercom” within the chatbots of customers, which would lead people back to Intercom’s website. These links also led customers to a landing page that had been customized for the traffic from that website. This technique is called dynamic keyword insertion, which improves relevancy. 

With customers like Atlassian, Lyft Business, and Amazon, such a strategy helps Intercom grab many more eyeballs than it would have with just content marketing and product-led growth tactics.

Semantic keywords

Intercom uses semantic keywords, i.e., phrases similar to primary keywords, to rank at the top of the SERPs and to build industry authority. They chose keywords that solve a specific user issue instead of filling their blog posts with a variety of keywords. 

Leveraging Medium for new audiences

Intercom uses Medium to republish its posts and harness the audience on the platform to get new audiences. Thus, they are able to get more mileage out of a piece of content by distributing it to new readers. 

Notably, Intercom does not republish on Medium immediately after publishing on their own blog. There’s a gap of 2-11 months between the two platforms. This is done to maximize traffic to older blog posts. 

Product-led Growth

While content, SEO, and a strong sales strategy have helped Intercom grow exponentially, their product is also leveraged to create awareness, onboard users through self-signups, and then have those users upgrade after discovering the value within the product.

Some product-led strategies they’re using:

The Embedded Growth Loop

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Intercom used dynamic keyword insertion early on in their growth journey to guide visitors to their website and educate them about the product. 

Similarly, Intercom’s customers become distribution channels for them when they embed the widget in their website. While competitors, too, use this embedded growth loop strategy, Intercom’s Messenger widget is so good that it acts like a proof-of-concept when a customer lands on it. 

Upselling and Stickiness

Intercom integrates subtle upselling pathways within its product and sends in-app messages when customers are using the product. Depending on the customer’s usage and account value, they guide them to self-service funnels or lead them to an account representative.

The product is built to thrive on stickiness—the more a customer uses it, the more their account value grows, and the less likely they are to switch to a competitor. 

Product Education

Intercom has a dedicated team for product education that focuses on creating happy customers using the CARE (Convert, Activate, Retain, Expand) framework. They create product education content to complement a feature or functionality that the product team is shipping or launching, and they simultaneously work to improve how customers use Intercom. 

The goal of the product education team is to continue building a relationship with customers throughout the journey after they have been onboarded and ensure they get the most value out of the product.

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To Sum Up

Using a SaaS platform is more about the experience rather than its quality, and modern brands attempt to distinguish themselves from the competition based on user experience.

Customer support is usually considered boring and humdrum, but Intercom has successfully changed that perception. The company has implemented innovative growth strategies spanning content, SEO, and products to attract the right audiences and lead the conversation around customers.

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