Page 11 - Intercom On Marketing

Marketing in year one
By Des Traynor, Co-founder
The most important tasks for any early stage startup are to write code and talk to users. When we started Intercom the latter was my job. About 50% of my time was spent communicating with potential users, whether that was asking them to try Intercom over email, meeting them at conferences, responding to them in blog comments or talking to them on Hacker News.
Looking back, I didn’t see these activities as marketing with a capital M, but they absolutely were. They allowed us to reach an entirely new audience who would never have heard of Intercom had I not talked to them. If you were to look at the first 100 paying customers for Intercom, I’d bet most came from one of these channels.
Probably the most common question I get about this phase is some version of “Where did you find the time?”, and the answer I give is always the same: the same place we found the time for writing code, designing our product, raising capital, etc. You have the time; you’ve just decided that these tasks are lower priority. I didn’t.
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