2016 on Inside Intercom

Over the past year, we’re proud to have increased the frequency of publication on Inside Intercom without dropping the standard.

When people talk about scaling content production, I’m often reminded of the old saying: “Fast, cheap, and good: pick two.” Try aim for all three, and before you know it you’re writing reactionary pieces responding to the latest tech news, or writing bland “all theory, no practice” type articles with a bunch of vague truisms thrown in.

Producing high-quality, editorial content on a consistent basis isn’t easy, but we think we’ve laid the foundations this year. We’ve shipped a whole new blog design, season two of our podcast, two books, a world tour, commissioned dozens of new illustrators and started publishing five times a week.

Here’s a few highlights from the past year.

Intercom on books

Many business books give you the same old tired advice: write a business plan, study the competition, seek investors, etc. If you’ve read any of our first 3 books, you’ll know we think those vague business platitudes are best left on the shelf.

This year, we published two more books of practical advice that we believe any startup will find useful.

Intercom On Onboarding. User onboarding is a subject we’ve always been super passionate about (we built a whole product for it, after all). It’s become one of the most critical steps in building a product company today. Over 9 chapters, we shared some of the lessons we’ve learned about user onboarding, and how you can convert new signups into successful users.

Intercom On Jobs-to-be-Done. Despite the framework being almost 30 years old, we noticed little was written on applying Jobs-to-be-Done to software companies. That’s why we consolidated our best ideas into a book to help anyone understand why customers are using their product.

Inside Intercom Podcast

In June, we launched season two of our podcast, sticking to the same tried and tested formula – get great interviewees, and engage them in conversations that reveal stories our listeners are interested in. What you hopefully noticed is we really started sweating the production details. Adam’s been hard at work setting up two studios in Dublin and SF, as well as experimenting with some new forms of audio, all to give listeners high quality productions. Plenty more to come in 2017.

Here’s a few of our favorite clips from the past year.

Editorial illustrations

Our editorial sensibilities don’t end with text and audio. It includes our approach to editorial illustration. Thanks to Stewart, head honcho at the Intercom Brand Studio, we have been commissioning a diverse range of illustrators to interpret the subject of each post in their own unique ways. Packed full of metaphors to the articles beneath, we hope they provide readers with an experience that’s uniquely Intercom.

 

 

A few of our favorite posts

Our design might have changed significantly over the course of the year, but we’ve maintained a singular focus on what you’ve always come here for – everything related to startups, product management, marketing, and customer support.

Here’s a few of the team’s favorites you might enjoy:

• Your product is already obsolete
• Unicorns don’t exist. Generalists do.
• Visual support is human support
• Prioritizing product announcements in a SaaS world
• Get the most out of your research with storytelling
• How I learned to stop worrying and love the target
• Critique the system, not the logo
• A future without code
• The first rule of prioritization: No snacking

Thanks for reading Inside Intercom and enjoy the holidays.