3 ms·

incredible transparency, thank you for sharing! paying $70 for intercom but $20 for mailchimp. interruption marketing vs permission marketing. when i first lan

by swyx 4y ago

incredible transparency, thank you for sharing! paying $70 for intercom but $20 for mailchimp. interruption marketing vs permission marketing. when i first land on your page the fake intercom chat is the first thing to put me off, i gotta ask if you think its actually worth it? last question on the content productivity. 3-5 articles per week is very good. what kind of traffic does that get you, and have you considered “slow down to get 10x results” type experiments?

can16358p 4y ago
Yup. That Intercom overlay is always more of an annoyance than a feature. Intercom is immediately -1 for me as a potential customer.
- joshmlewis 4y ago
  What? That's insane. It's literally an almost immediate portal to talking to an actual human on the other side. All companies may not care about response times but a lot of startups make it a goal to relentlessly cut down on response time to where it's mere minutes.
  - swyx 4y ago
    except that it inconveniences the 99.5% (real number from previous company) of users who dont interact with it, and those that do often get stonewalled into the “it looks like nobody is there right now, please leave your email and we’ll get back to you” flow. we all understand the premise but this form factor has in practice failed to deliver. instead if people want instant response they tend to join the public slack or discord. you know, the apps actually built for community chat.
    - robertlagrant 4y ago
      It works well for switched on companies. I've spoken to very small SAAS company CEOs before via it, which is effective. Maybe something to discard over time.
  - newaccount74 4y ago
    It's the equivalent of walking in the store and having a sales person show up and ask what you are looking for. Some people like it, some people hate it. I'm in the latter camp.
  - can16358p 4y ago
    Hating an utter annoyance that expands over whatever I'm trying to do in a cheap and cheesy way that literally everyone I know hates too is "insane"? Well okay then.
- blntechie 4y ago
  One of the first ublock origin rules i setup is to block intercom chat overlays.
- cultofmetatron 4y ago
  you're probably not the intended audience then. we have a help chat on our page as well. I didn't like it either but we've turned a few tire kickers into buyers pretty quick with it. Helps that we are small and one of my cofounders is ready to jump on it as opposed to a minimum wage employee.
  - everybodyknows 4y ago
    Surely there are config options to make it not so freakin' intrusive for the reader?
    - cultofmetatron 4y ago
      just checked and we use hubspot. you actively have to click the chat icon to get the message to pop up
tomschwiha 4y ago
Looking at their blog it seems more like 1 article per week? Imo from a content perspective if you have high quality content ready you should publish 10 articles per week - as long as your crawl budget is fine (which most of the time it is) - the more the better.
- swyx 4y ago
  they said in the article it was 3-5, i assume that is aspirational and/or varying and/or has external content included is 10 articles a week actually desirable? do we care about quantity of output or quality (measured by traffic, conversions, or vague “brand reputation”)? sometimes going away for a month and writing one good skyscraper article (seo lingo) is worth 100 tiny little forgettable things
  - charcircuit 4y ago
    He already qualified the articles as being high quality.
    - tianzhou 4y ago
      (Author here) We publish on both English and Chinese channels. Some articles are only relevant to one Channel. For the general ones, usually, we can’t just write in 1 language and translate it to another. The blog you see only shows English ones, but it also has Chinese ones such as https://www.bytebase.com/zh/blog/database-review-2021-bytebase-chinese https://www.bytebase.com/zh/blog/database-review-2021-byteba... We don’t list them on the blog front page because most Chinese audiences consume the content on WeChat.
      - tomschwiha 4y ago
        Thanks for clearing that up :) Is China a big market for you?
        tianzhou 4y ago
tianzhou 4y ago
(Author here) We have done several iterations to make it less annoying, well... As a developer myself, I am not a fan of the popover either. While wearing the marketing hat, I would say intercom is useful to some extent. We probably won't have those customer conversations if we don't have that small bubble. We are building a dev tool for database development workflow, which is not a big market. We are also based in Shanghai, thus unlike valley-based shops, we don't have many viable ways to engage (like private introduction, offline meetup). Internally, we also struggle between the experience and the leads, and as this topic is raised up here again, it will surely bring up another round of team debate this week.
nps1 4y ago
Actually it depends on the Product you are selling. The more confusing the Product portfolio, the more the consumer needs a chat feature. Also, a product which is of ancillary type needs persuasion to be sold to consumer where it needs chat feature the most. If most consumer lands in the page and know what he/she needs, there is obviously no need for such feature.

by swyx 4y ago

can16358p 4y ago

Yup. That Intercom overlay is always more of an annoyance than a feature. Intercom is immediately -1 for me as a potential customer.

joshmlewis 4y ago
What? That's insane. It's literally an almost immediate portal to talking to an actual human on the other side. All companies may not care about response times but a lot of startups make it a goal to relentlessly cut down on response time to where it's mere minutes.
- swyx 4y ago
  except that it inconveniences the 99.5% (real number from previous company) of users who dont interact with it, and those that do often get stonewalled into the “it looks like nobody is there right now, please leave your email and we’ll get back to you” flow. we all understand the premise but this form factor has in practice failed to deliver. instead if people want instant response they tend to join the public slack or discord. you know, the apps actually built for community chat.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    It works well for switched on companies. I've spoken to very small SAAS company CEOs before via it, which is effective. Maybe something to discard over time.
- newaccount74 4y ago
  It's the equivalent of walking in the store and having a sales person show up and ask what you are looking for. Some people like it, some people hate it. I'm in the latter camp.
- can16358p 4y ago
  Hating an utter annoyance that expands over whatever I'm trying to do in a cheap and cheesy way that literally everyone I know hates too is "insane"? Well okay then.
blntechie 4y ago
One of the first ublock origin rules i setup is to block intercom chat overlays.
cultofmetatron 4y ago
you're probably not the intended audience then. we have a help chat on our page as well. I didn't like it either but we've turned a few tire kickers into buyers pretty quick with it. Helps that we are small and one of my cofounders is ready to jump on it as opposed to a minimum wage employee.
- everybodyknows 4y ago
  Surely there are config options to make it not so freakin' intrusive for the reader?
  - cultofmetatron 4y ago
    just checked and we use hubspot. you actively have to click the chat icon to get the message to pop up

tomschwiha 4y ago

Looking at their blog it seems more like 1 article per week? Imo from a content perspective if you have high quality content ready you should publish 10 articles per week - as long as your crawl budget is fine (which most of the time it is) - the more the better.

swyx 4y ago
they said in the article it was 3-5, i assume that is aspirational and/or varying and/or has external content included is 10 articles a week actually desirable? do we care about quantity of output or quality (measured by traffic, conversions, or vague “brand reputation”)? sometimes going away for a month and writing one good skyscraper article (seo lingo) is worth 100 tiny little forgettable things
- charcircuit 4y ago
  He already qualified the articles as being high quality.
  - tianzhou 4y ago
    (Author here) We publish on both English and Chinese channels. Some articles are only relevant to one Channel. For the general ones, usually, we can’t just write in 1 language and translate it to another. The blog you see only shows English ones, but it also has Chinese ones such as https://www.bytebase.com/zh/blog/database-review-2021-bytebase-chinese https://www.bytebase.com/zh/blog/database-review-2021-byteba... We don’t list them on the blog front page because most Chinese audiences consume the content on WeChat.
    - tomschwiha 4y ago
      Thanks for clearing that up :) Is China a big market for you?
      - tianzhou 4y ago

tianzhou 4y ago

(Author here) We have done several iterations to make it less annoying, well... As a developer myself, I am not a fan of the popover either. While wearing the marketing hat, I would say intercom is useful to some extent. We probably won't have those customer conversations if we don't have that small bubble. We are building a dev tool for database development workflow, which is not a big market. We are also based in Shanghai, thus unlike valley-based shops, we don't have many viable ways to engage (like private introduction, offline meetup). Internally, we also struggle between the experience and the leads, and as this topic is raised up here again, it will surely bring up another round of team debate this week.

nps1 4y ago

Actually it depends on the Product you are selling. The more confusing the Product portfolio, the more the consumer needs a chat feature. Also, a product which is of ancillary type needs persuasion to be sold to consumer where it needs chat feature the most. If most consumer lands in the page and know what he/she needs, there is obviously no need for such feature.