00:00 Intercom founders grew their user base through personal outreach, creating helpful content, and planting many seeds through discussions on design, product, and strategy.
- The speaker's PhD research found that traditional methods of marking programming assignments in universities encourage template-based learning, which can lead to students not understanding the code they write.
- Started a design agency with a friend, created a tool called Exceptional Ruby on Rails, and eventually pivoted to focus on improving communication with users due to frustration with slow internet infrastructure.
- In 2011, the founders of Exceptional created a chat feature for their product which led to the development of active user metrics and behavioral marketing automation, eventually leading to the creation of a backend to give to other customers.
- The founders of Intercom used their previous contacts and personal outreach to onboard customers one by one.
- Intercom's content strategy was to focus on creating good content that helped their target users with their problems, rather than just writing about their product all the time.
- To attract attention and grow user base, planting many seeds through discussing design, product, strategy, and timeless content is key, as demonstrated by the speaker's successful blog.