Speaker unverified: belief

Transcript context

…'s worked from a point of view of, I dunno actually know how many people are in the program right now, but I could say that what has worked is… It landed the message of, “We stand behind the product.” Being able to say, here is the reason why you can bank on us. I think that's a strong message. I mean obviously being able to point to real customers or real results and you can say, “Hey, go talk to Natalie at Nuuly,” or whatever company you want. Go talk to that person and ask them, that's their name, that's their job title. They work there, they're saying this. With 6,000 customers, it gets more believable as the numbers kind of tick up. So I guess either you can make crazy guarantee claims, you can just point to a lot of successful customers. For us, it might be different depending on your domain, but for us it's not like we can show you—we can show you, hey, here's a beautiful backend product, here's fancy reporting and all that, but that doesn't speak to—courting someone's buying, when they're buying AI off you is to some degree a replacement of work that they have to do. And the two things they care about are how much work are you going to do for me and how well are you going to do that work? And you basically need to product-market both of those things. And it's very easy to say, we're going to do all the work and we're doing really well. So you have to actually really help them understand how to appraise this scenario. Sometimes we put time into actually helping people identify when they're being lied to in a sense. We will say, like, “Hey, try this type of question” or “Ask them about this help.” You almost teach 'em to be much more conscientious buyers. Yeah, I can see that. What are your other pet peeves when it comes to product marketing? Actually, do you want another pint? Yeah, sure, sure, sure. See again this one, did I not let it settle for long enough? And then you have the small head? Is this settling? comes to product marketing? Actually, do you want another pint? Yeah, sure, sure, sure. See again this one, did I not let it settle for long enough? And then you have the small head? Is this settling? I think the thing that still kills me, and it's still very common, is marketers that love marketing. So rather than actually saying anything useful or specific, you'll get, like, “Forget everything about email.” You're like, okay, what am I buying? Or, like, “transformation reinvented.” And you're like, “Cool, sounds like I'm going to reinvent some transformers.” But what's actually happening here? I think there is a general still type of thing where my screensaver on my laptop is literally a typewriter where someone said, what are you actually trying to say? And I keep that there as a reminder of just nine times out of 10, the best marketing comes from just writing the thing you want to say. Because I do know how docs—do you ever get into a Google document? “Our goal is that by reading this document, the reader will know the following.” And I'm like, cool, can we just say that and say that? Why are there 2000 more words here? So I think, I guess speaking in a way that sounds great to marketers is probably the thing that kills me most because they don't market, especially in the AI era, they don't really necessarily understand the depth of what's actually happening with the AI or whatever. There's a funny stat that Ogilvy used to quote, which would say something like, of all the winners of the Cannes awards every year something like two thirds of them would lose their contract that year because the thing they won the award for, it was not actually effective in market at all. And I think there's such a repetitive pattern there where a lot of people will look at say a Stripe or a Linear and they'll be like, “All right, we should just do that.” And I think the thing that people don't get is everything means something. And this is where Eoghan, our CEO, is so differentiate. It's just like every single decision we pick here—what photo, what icon, what typeface, whatever—it all sends a message. Are we conventional or not? Are we futuristic or not? And I think whenever I see folks just copy paste somebody else's branding—and even in the sort of, oh, we will change our homework along the way—I think what they're really doing is saying, “We don't really understand what we're doing here.” That's why a classic of this is whenever an incubator spits a new batch of startups and they all basically have right-hand side screenshot, left-hand side, three bullets, sign up button, whatever—you're kind of like, okay, cool, but have you actually thought about what you're trying to say to the world? ly have right-hand side screenshot, left-hand side, three bullets, sign up button, whatever—you're kind of like, okay, cool, but have you actually thought about what you're trying to say to the world? There's also a thing for startups where they probably shouldn't look at what established companies are doing because—like, Stripe for so long, we clung to making sure that we had code in the homepage and people are like, if you want to accept credit card payments for your website, we are the place to come. And at a certain point, most of the relevant people who come to your page actually know that you could do that, you can experiment a little bit more. And you know, Salesforce doesn't have to hit CRM so hard on the homepage. After 20 years, they've earned the right to talk about Einstein a bit. Oftentimes a startup has a great idea for a great product and they pitch it, and then six months later they work on some new feature and in their heads, the new feature is the big thing that they're so impressed with, not realizing that 99.9999 of the world have not even heard about the original thing yet. But there they go destroying their original pitch by being like, “And now we've got blah, blah.” I'm like, dude, no one's even heard of the original thing yet. And here you're pitching some nuanced take on some extra feature. Speaking of David Ogilvy, you've read On Advertising, I assume. It was just, like, that's such a beautiful book where all the marketing copy in it is so good. The Rolls-Royce side of,” The only sound you'll hear at 60 miles an hour is the ticking of the clock.” But somehow that should be mandatory reading for all product marketers. Absolutely. What kind of person succeeds in product at Intercom? When we set up Intercom originally we were building one thing. Once we forked out to building many different areas—like sales, marketing, and support—I think we gave a lot of freedom to product leaders and sort of said, “Hey, you owned a sales product, you're marketing product.” And I think the folks who succeed there are like, they have to have decent taste, and I don't mean that in some lofty abstract way, but I mean they have to use good software, identify good software, ultimately know how to pick one out of the bunch in a sense, right? A very common interview question I ask people is what apps are on your phone? What's your favorite app? And you might have thought someone's like, “Oh, I never really thought about that.” And I'm like, oh, so what's your favorite song? I am sure you care about some things. Certainly if you're interviewing musicians, they should have a favorite song.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.