SaaStr 058: Intercom's Eoghan McCabe on Why There Are No Rules For Building a SaaS Company, How To Turn Every Challenge Into An Opportunity & Why You Will Never Have As Much Empathy For Others As You Do For Yourself

Eoghan McCabe is CEO and co-founder of Intercom. The customer communications platform that has taken the saas world by storm in the last few years with 116m in VC funding from truly some of the world’s best including Bessemer, Social Capital and Index Ventures. He previously founded Contrast, an award-winning software design consultancy, and co-founded Exceptional, a developer tool startup acquired in 2011 and now a part of Rackspace.

In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

• How did Intercom break out in the early days with seemingly lots of competition and an install before you buy process?
• In terms of category creation, in the early days how did Eoghan convince people of a product that had previously never existed? At what stage did Eoghan and Des stop selling the product themselves? When is the right time to hire your VP of Sales?
• How did Eoghan establish a pricing mechanism for Intercom? Why is Eoghan such an advocate for value based pricing?
• Why it is so important for founders and sales teams to have empathy for the customer? How can you practice empathy? How can you cheat empathy?
• How does Eoghan manage a distributed workforce so well? What does he do to create links and culture between both the Dublin and SF office?

60 Second SaaStr

1. Biggest advice to SaaS founders?
2. Fave SaaS reading material?
3. Most proud moment of Intercom’s journey?

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Jason Lemkin

Harry Stebbings

SaaStr

Eoghan McCabe