Eoghan McCabe: evaluation

Transcript context

…Before we start talking about how you actually made this transformation a success, one other piece of history is just your pricing strategy historically has been not liked by people. For example, I once had a Twitter poll or a survey on my newsletter just like what products do you pay the most for of all your SaaS products? And Intercom's by far the most. I know people constantly complain about just how unclear it was and how high it was, and now you guys are at the forefront of how to price AI products. So, we're going to get to that, but just talk about the lessons and what happened there with pricing back in the day. Yeah, so I want to just validate your survey data. Yes, people abhorred our pricing. It was a meme. There were actual funny popular viral memes on Twitter that were making fun of our pricing. Part of the problem, if not all of the problem, well, there's two problems. One was our strategy, super unfocused. As you said, we're trying to do all the things for all the people, and when you're trying to do all the things for all the people, your efforts to capture all that different types of value are going to necessitate pretty complex pricing. If you're like customer service and you're selling seats and you're doing outbound messaging and you need to charge for messages and you're doing like SD or Messenger on a website and you need to charge for leads, already that's just metrics in every direction. And then if you're trying to sell to many different sizes of customers, you need tiers and gates and it just became a behemoth. So, part of the problem was the unfocused strategy, and then the other part of the problem was an unwillingness to frankly make bold decisions, say no, pick a lane and actually take pain in the short term for the long term. We rolled out this new pricing, and this is even before the Fin pricing you're talking about. When I came back and I said, "Yes, we're going to lose a lot of revenue here." I can't remember how much we wrote down, but we actually have already given away something like $50 million in ARR. We've reduced the prices for a lot of customers just to give them way simpler pricing because surprise, surprise, when people feel like they have far simpler, more predictable, fairer pricing, they'll stick around longer and it creates so much more ease in the company and promotes a healthier relationship with the customer too. When our people saw that we were screwing customers effectively in every direction, it starts to erode the idea that we care about our customers and then they make other customer-unfriendly decisions. And so one of the values I promoted when I came back was that we would be customer-obsessed, and so we had to kill our old pricing and give away a lot of revenue. So, that was the spirit behind the changes. But we can talk about the Fin pricing if you want to also. Let's save that because that's a really important topic that I think people need to hear. Let's talk about the shift and how you made this actually happen. You make it sound like, oh, not fully, but it's oh, we have to do, it wasn't working anyway. There's no risk to go all in on this AI thing. You're making $150 million a year ARR, you're worth at least a billion dollars at that point as a business. Yeah.…

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