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SaaS
20 posts about SaaS. Every summary links to the original.
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Tomasz Tunguz on Venture Capital - The Intercom Blog
Tomasz Tunguz, a partner at Redpoint Ventures, discusses the key metrics he looks for in potential investments, including sustainable competitive differentiators and revenue benchmarks. He identifies three types of sustainable competitive advantage: a founder’s market discovery, difficult-to-replicate technology, or a new distribution mechanism. For Series A investments, he typically partners with companies at $50,000-100,000 MRR, but also invests in pre-revenue ideas, noting that 27% of Series A rounds had no revenue. He looks for short sale cycles under 45 days and negative net churn as signs of product-market fit, and advises founders to always have a plan to reach profitability on current cash. Investors view businesses as collections of risk, and founders should address how they will mitigate major risks in their pitch.
How ProfitBooks used Intercom to increase renewal rates by 40% - The Intercom Blog
ProfitBooks, an Indian cloud accounting startup, faced a fragmented toolchain as it rapidly grew to over 1,000 customers. They previously used separate solutions for customer support (Zendesk), email marketing (Mailchimp), feature tracking (Asana), and a self-built CRM, resulting in low customer engagement. After adopting Intercom as a unified platform for support, email marketing, and sales, their customer message volume increased 15 times, revealing previously hidden user feedback. Intercom’s automated messaging and user segmentation enabled targeted emails, boosting open rates from 7% to 45% and driving measurable business impact. By sending a payment reminder one day before account expiration, ProfitBooks achieved a 40% increase in renewal rates, and a follow-up promo converted 18% of churned trial users.
How to launch with a validated idea - The Intercom Blog
The post describes a three-step process for launching a validated idea, called the three I’s—Ideas, Input, and Iteration—mirroring the lean startup approach. The author explains how his team validated their idea by drafting mockups, creating a sign-up page, and running AdWords, and they got lucky when blogs shared their landing page, giving them a base of potential users for product preview sessions. They then launched a minimum viable product (MVP) and used Intercom to send surveys and automated in-app messages, creating a continuous feedback loop. To iterate, they formed a CoPilots program of users highly likely to purchase who provided weekly feedback via Google+ Hangouts in exchange for free use. The entire team was involved in reviewing interviews, and the cycle is presented as an ongoing process for SaaS startups.
What an Emerging Design Pattern Tells Us About Disruption
The post identifies an emerging design pattern where smaller companies build ‘best of breed’ products targeting sophisticated users from higher up the market, described as disruption from above. These products, Superhuman and Linear, focus on a specific niche and deliver deep, opinionated design that larger incumbents cannot match. A key example is the Cmd-K keyboard shortcut pattern used by several apps, enabling fast, learnable power-user navigation for tasks like inbox triage. The post argues this approach is economically viable because even a small percentage of a massive market can sustain a significant SaaS business, as shown by 20,000 users at $30 per month yielding over $7 million in annual recurring revenue. Drawing a historical parallel to the Canon Cat, which sold only 20,000 units, it concludes that low barriers to entry allow innovative design to succeed where earlier hardware failed.
Bridget Harris on bootstrapping your startup - The Intercom Blog
Bridget Harris bootstrapped YouCanBook.me, a SaaS scheduling tool, to their $1 million in annual recurring revenue and profitability without taking any venture capital funding. The company, now serving more than 10,000 customers including Atlassian and Shopify, emerged from a freemium scheduling tool called When is Good after businesses showed willingness to pay. Harris argues that VC interests often prioritize rapid growth and timely exits, which can conflict with a founder’s long-term vision, but bootstrapping still requires exposure to external ideas. She draws on her past as a busker to explain the need for adaptability and risk tolerance in bootstrapping, and she has banned internal email at her remote company to encourage productivity and collaboration. The key to bootstrapping, according to Harris, is finding problems that can be solved incrementally through agile and lean principles, enabling sustainable growth without external funding.
One Size Onboarding Does Not Fit All
Differentiating user onboarding is essential because a one-size-fits-all approach fails to address varying learning styles and paces. Drawing from educational principles, the post advocates scaffolding through self-serve resources like documentation, videos, and blog posts to support different learning preferences. Live conversations via a support tool enable real-time clarification and uncover unanticipated questions, while personal demos and webinars provide one-on-one or group tutoring for deeper engagement. Data-driven messaging schedules, triggered by user events and attributes, ensure customers receive pertinent guidance just in time without being overwhelmed. This strategic variety helps users extract value efficiently, reducing churn and support load, and ultimately converting them into satisfied, paying customers.
Try Before You Buy: How Sales Can Maximize the Free Product Trial
SaaS free trials are easy to start but low switching costs mean prospects can leave quickly, so maximizing trial success is critical; typical opt-in conversions are around 25% and opt-out around 60%. Intercom focuses on three pillars: understanding the prospect’s use case quickly, driving frequent and smart usage, and reducing in-trial friction through friendly support and onboarding. Sales reps engage trialists via live chat or in-app messages to learn their reasons and set expectations for the next two weeks, using internal notes to loop in support. Messages should be meaningful and triggered by prospect behavior to avoid fatigue, with in-app messaging preferred over email to keep users engaged in the product. Fast, collaborative communication between sales and support reduces time wasted on support requests and helps convert trials at higher rates, setting up customers for long-term success.
The pains of growing a platform - The Intercom Blog
Many SaaS companies aspire to become platforms, but building a true platform is far more complex than offering APIs and integrations. Intercom, despite having over 250 third-party integrations and nearly 40% of customers using its APIs, acknowledges that this alone does not constitute a platform. The post identifies three common mistakes: trying to become a platform too early, expecting others to build integrations, and focusing on adoption metrics instead of developer success. Intercom emphasizes that platforms are governed ecosystems requiring extensibility and distribution, and that companies should start by building for their own customers before third parties. Building a lasting platform takes years of deliberate planning and long-term investment, as demonstrated by Salesforce’s gradual evolution from a point solution to a platform.
Learn How To Nurture New Signups Beyond The Free Trial
The SaaS law of averages suggests 40-60% of free trial signups use the product once and never return, often due to lack of perceived value or mismatched expectations. The Nurture Starter Kit is a guide for designing messaging campaigns to convert these signups into paying customers through improved communication. It advocates behavior-based triggered messages over timed drips, tailored to each customer’s definition of success, and includes half a dozen example messages. The kit also provides advice on measuring campaign effectiveness through actions that lead to conversions, not just macro-level rates. The goal is to make becoming a paying customer the obvious choice, avoiding radio silence followed by a last-minute expiration email.
Track These 5 Customer Support Metrics to Boost Efficiency
The post presents five customer support metrics the author found useful while scaling Intercom’s team to over 15,000 customers. It warns against using data as a crystal ball and advises keeping metrics in perspective. Total conversations reveal support trends but can mislead if used alone. Conversations per teammate per day is central to hiring planning, with Intercom adjusting its target from 35 to 30 as the team grew. Response time should be examined via median and 90th percentile, not just average, and grouped by hour and day to detect understaffed periods. Customer satisfaction is measured through lightweight surveys like a simple Good/OK/Bad link or a Net Promoter Score to anticipate churn.
Our new book: Intercom on Customer Support - The Intercom Blog
Intercom published its third book, Intercom on Customer Support, sharing principles used while scaling to over 8,000 customers across 85 countries. The book examines customer support from three angles: starting and scaling a team, planning the quality of support, and ensuring support has positive relationships with other teams. It argues that quality customer support is a competitive advantage, not a cost, aligning with Forrester’s “age of the customer” concept from 2011. Two key macro trends—all businesses becoming internet businesses and the shift to recurring revenue—place the future lifetime revenue of the customer at the center of every support discussion. As boundaries between sales and support dissolve, the book addresses challenges like supporting free users, scaling the team, and controlling costs, while remaining tool- and tactic-agnostic.
Effective messages have real goals - The Intercom Blog
Defining a clear goal before sending a customer message is essential for effectiveness and guides message structure. Real goals should focus on eliciting user behavior change such as more frequent product usage, updating billing details, or trying a new feature, not on intermediate metrics like open or click-through rates. Intercom’s Message Goals feature lets you see message impact and measure success against your objective. Onboarding messages should ask users their own goals, new feature messages should explain user benefits to increase adoption or usage frequency, and announcements must ensure recipients understand implications and any required action. Newsletters can stay top of mind, reward paying customer loyalty, or re-engage lapsed users, while surveys should gather quality data to drive business decisions rather than maximizing quantity.
Using case studies to tell your story for you - The Intercom Blog
Case studies help B2B SaaS companies persuade the majority of potential customers who are not technology enthusiasts and are averse to revolutionary change by de-risking the purchase decision. Effective case studies follow a proven story formula with a relatable protagonist from an aspirational company, strong tension depicting pre-product challenges, and a resolution showing how the product replaced the old workflow. Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm prescribes that the only suitable reference for an early majority customer is another early majority member, so you should profile non-innovator customers. Customer interviews should spend most time on tension and resolution, using questions about how they started using the product, what tools they used before, and what jobs the product solves, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Well-crafted case studies can be repurposed across sales, demand generation, events, and communications, and the process deepens the marketer’s empathy for customers.
How to show customers the value of free - The Intercom Blog
SaaS has completely transformed business software purchasing, moving from sales-led demos to self-served free trials where users explore independently. Many trial users fail to experience the full product value, ending the period with objections like “too expensive” or “haven’t had time,” which actually indicate a gap between perceived and actual value. The core problem is not the price but that users receive only partial benefit while being charged for the complete offering. Customer success teams must actively bridge this gap by understanding each user’s unique success definition, auditing feature usage to highlight valuable actions, and tracking engagement to predict and intervene in failing trials. When done correctly, users reach their milestones, leading to successful conversions and feedback like “exactly what I need” instead of price complaints.
Onboarding customers for long-term success [Complete Guide]
Customer onboarding should be a continuous process guiding users toward long-term success, not just a first-time introduction. The C.A.R.E. framework structures this across Convert, Activate, Retain, and Expand stages, each with tailored messages and channels. Planning involves defining a retention-focused goal, understanding customer needs, segmenting users, and mapping the journey. The convert stage uses welcome emails and first-use tours to guide users to their aha moment, while the activate stage fosters habit formation. Common mistakes include designing by committee, relying solely on time-based messages, and focusing only on the first visit.
6 Examples of How to Say No to Customers the Right Way
The post presents six techniques for customer support representatives to refuse customer requests while preserving a positive relationship. The first technique explains the rationale behind the refusal as a deliberate product or policy decision, rather than a mistake, reducing frustration by providing context. Reps should maintain their usual personal tone instead of becoming robotic, and involve the customer by asking open-ended questions like ‘What do you think would be a fair solution?’ to create collaboration. Another technique suggests focusing on the customer’s job to be done rather than the rejected feature, which can reveal workarounds and provide context for the product team. The post also acknowledges that offboarding a customer whose needs do not align with product design is sometimes necessary, and that reps should balance empathy with confidence in product direction by reminding customers of new features.
Prioritizing product announcements in a SaaS world - The Intercom Blog
SaaS companies ship continuously, creating endless marketing opportunities, but announcing everything leads to audience fatigue. Intercom experienced over 12X growth in new signups since investing in marketing in 2014, with product announcements as a primary contributor. They shipped over 100 features in a year and needed a framework to prioritize announcements. Their framework uses two axes: value (existing versus new customers) and innovation (catch-up versus new solution), yielding four priority levels: P1 for big announcements attracting new customers, P2 for features valuable to existing customers, P3 for gap-filling features, and P2 also covers features that unblock sales. Each priority maps to specific tactics: changes page entries accessible inside the app, targeted in-app messages based on usage, email for inactive users, video for demonstration, landing pages, and press coverage only for major announcements.
Start Good Trouble: Mastering SaaS metrics with Equals' Bobby Pinero - The Intercom Blog
Equals co-founder and CEO Bobby Pinero joined the Start Good Trouble webinar to discuss how SaaS metrics unlock business potential and tell a compelling story. He argued that spreadsheets remain central despite the explosion of new BI tools, because everything eventually ends up back in a spreadsheet connected to live data. Drawing on seven years as Intercom’s senior director of finance, where he scaled ARR from under $1 million to over $150 million, Pinero highlighted the complexity of early-stage metrics like CAC, LTV, and retention. Equals recently published The Guide to SaaS Metrics to help leaders understand, optimize, and report on key drivers, and Pinero emphasized the need to tailor metrics to the business model and start with the story. He also recommended writing consistently and authentically to clarify ideas and connect with audiences, and noted that horizontal products require narrowing down use cases to scale effectively.
This is getting real: Welcome to the AI revolution - The Intercom Blog
The talk traces the tech industry’s journey from the late stages of SaaS in 2019, through pandemic virtual offices and NFTs, to the 2022 downturn and ChatGPT’s launch in November 2022. 2023 was a year of prototypes and ‘thin wrappers’ on ChatGPT, but also real learning about building with LLMs, including non-deterministic approaches. The author argues the AI transformation is now real, moving beyond superficial features to fundamentally rethinking products, exemplified by the shift from ‘Software as a Service’ to ‘Service as Software.’ The future of customer service includes proactive, personalized bots, video and voice bots, and the ability to analyze all conversations to deeply understand customers. The author cites Bloom’s 2 sigma effect as an example of AI’s potential in education and urges optimism, noting that learners will inherit the earth.
All that glitters is not gold: Angel investor Christoph Janz on finding the right opportunities in AI - The Intercom Blog
Angel investor Christoph Janz of Point Nine Capital, an early backer of Zendesk and Clio, shares his mental map for generative AI investment opportunities, describing ChatGPT’s launch as a wake-up call that surprised even AI experts. He argues that incumbents like Microsoft dominate horizontal categories such as spreadsheets through bundling and zero pricing, requiring startups to deliver a 10x better and cheaper product to win. Janz recommends targeting vertical markets like dentistry, where direct customer acquisition via industry channels reduces competition, and new categories for previously unsolvable problems, avoiding broad horizontal markets. He notes that relying on GPT-4 may force startups to accept lower gross margins or negative margins temporarily while betting on future cost reductions. For vertical SaaS, he believes persistent 30-50% year-over-year growth over 15 years can yield sizeable businesses due to direct customer access and less competition from large players.
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