Outbound (YC W15) Helps Businesses Message Customers Over Both Email and Mobile

Intercom, true to its name, is a really nice tool for 2-way communication with your users. Here's where it shines:

1) Visibility: It acts as a CRM that auto updates - it automatically shows you what each user has done and lets you build rich profiles from their interactions with your app and your communication history.

2) Conversations: Intercom is wonderful at initiating conversations via email or in-app messages based on what your users are doing. You get a granular sense of what is going on with each user and so it's easy to talk with them about it.

3) Handholding: The lines between onboarding, product feedback and support are very fuzzy. Intercom helps you handhold your users through your product, heading off some support tickets before they happen and helping you understand at a very basic level what it takes to make an active, engaged customer.

Where Intercom is not as strong is: 1) Scaling communication for a large number of users: It's hard to have these 2-way conversations with your users as you scale up. You can do some automation with Intercom but building sophisticated business logic based on combinations of events and user attributes is difficult.

2) Mobile: They don't do native mobile push or SMS, both of which are very important touch points if your users primarily interact with your product on mobile or on the go.

3) Testing and analytics: It's very useful to have deep analytics (not just clicks and opens) and a testing infrastructure, including control groups, that allows you to try things quickly. The key thing here is that it is not enough to know how many messages you send to users and how many users took an action - you need to understand how many users took a particular action BECAUSE they got a message.