eoghan

Intercom

https://www.intercom.io/

Remote in US: Support Engineer: https://www.intercom.io/home/jobs/support

San Francisco: Head of Product Marketing: https://www.intercom.io/home/jobs/marketing

Dublin: Infrastructure Engineer: Mail macey@intercom.io in confidence

Dublin: Excellent Ruby Engineers: Mail macey@intercom.io in confidence

Intercom (https://www.intercom.io/) is hiring in San Francisco and Dublin. We're building a product for web businesses. It's all about bringing them closer to their customers, giving them awesome new ways to see them and talk to them. People love it (https://twitter.com/intercom/favorites).

San Francisco, H-1Bs offered:

* Head of Marketing

* Head of Business Development

* Head of Product Design (UX)

* Senior Visual Designer

Dublin:

* Senior Front-end Developer

* Senior Ruby Developers

We offer zero bullshit perks. Our focus is on producing the best work of our lives. We're turning down acquisition offers. We intend on building something meaningful and being around for a very long time.

Talk to me in confidence: eoghan AT intercom DOT io

AFAIK they asked for $2B and Mark talked them down to $1B with the majority in stock.

You can only follow "the right people", but they'll still talk about things you're uninterested in. In addition, you'll also have people following you who have different interests, who will start irrelevant conversations with you.

Why does Hacker News exist? And other special interest web forums, Facebook groups, mailing lists? Who do interest groups hold meetups? People with shared interests get MASSIVE value from highly focused gatherings and conversations. And Twitter right now is anything but focused.

The reason I think App.net is going to grow is NOT because it doesn't have ads or that the "users are not the product", etc. It's because the community it hosts will be so tightly grouped around a similar, passionate interest: tech startups. Requiring payment, being called "App.net" (they'll be tempted to change this), and being distributed via word of mouth amongst the segregated tech startup community, will prevent so many different types of people from using it. This is all a great thing and I bet there will be opportunities for other "Twitter for ________" ventures. Charging for a service like this that caters to a much smaller market makes it sustainable.

Congrats to Dalton and all involved. This is one of the most interesting and courageous internet projects in recent time.

The email they sent was unfortunate. It's from no-reply@dropboxmail.com. I presumed it was a phishing attempt.

Google Hangouts is a surprisingly, truly amazing product, marred by its relationship with Google+.

Totally. This is a great deal for everyone.

The founders (probably) achieve some liquidity, the company gets to expand up and out in the market, with the guidance of some of the most experienced investors in the business, the customers get see more resources put towards what is now a very large product, and the investors get to ride the wave that I think will see GitHub reach a few billion dollars valuation.

This is fantastic. I love the status indicators. I would go one step further and show little, live thumbnails of each person on your contact list—sure, you might get caught picking your nose, but that could happen when working with people in real life, and I see these tools as trying to make remote working as real as possible. Live thumbnails would be a very natural way to check if someone is at their computer, on the phone, too busy or stressed looking to disrupt.

Nice post. Thanks for mentioning Intercom (https://www.intercom.io/). I don't think people generally find the social profile stuff creepy, but I'll admit that knowing who they are on Vimeo, etc. is not very useful. We just link-up whatever profiles we have but don't give them much priority in the product.

Here you go:

http://docs.intercom.io/privacy.html

Congrats Kirsty. Very cool news. :-)

The stock answer to this is that "actual personalization" doesn't scale. But I think that's BS. It comes from people who think of web business customers as datapoints—heartless automatons traversing A/B test optimized sign-up funnels.

Today's and tomorrow's high-margin businesses do and will invest in real humans. It's truly mind-blowing that Apple can find and very comfortably pay nice, smart, real people who can understand the problems of any customer who walks in off the street and fix them, one by one. But they do.

I think that the future of support / customer service / customer development / marketing involves more humans and less automation. I'm part of the Intercom team and we've designed the first version of our product to fill the gap between now and that future—we have a great amount of automation and a great amount of one-to-one communication features, integrated tightly together. By design, we don't allow our customers to send automated messages that can't be responded to because we know that the real value happens when real people get involved.

+1

Here's another post on the topic:

http://blog.intercom.io/automated-emails-customer-respect/

OK. It's sad if "that's that" and that a simple fault will be allowed to prevail and damage an otherwise great resource. If it really is the case that a couple of flags can rip the post of the home page, that's a really dumb system IMO—i.e. that many people like the post and upvote it but two people don't agree and overpower them. Doesn't make any sense to me and I'm still skeptical that this is how it works. Thanks again for helping.

I've read the same pg comment. I'm pretty sure that Des is not doing this. Thanks though.

Thanks for trying to help shed light on this.

If this is the case, it would do HN a great deal of good for this system to be made more transparent. I understand that it might not make sense to publish the exact formula or algoritm which could expose "exploits" to those wishing to game the system, but I think it would be useful to at least show how many flags and down-votes a post has received. It would, for one thing, put an end to this speculation.

If it is the case that these extraordinarily fast demotions (#2 to #88 in one step) come from "normal" flagging and down-voting, I would ask: Why the hate? :-) I can say categorically that people LOVE Des' posts—not one gets less that 50k uniques in a week or so. Including the ones that are ripped off the HN home page. If it's simply because Des posts all of his hard work here, I would then ask: Does HN not want good content? And Des simply submitting it does not ever cause it to hit the home page—it takes a lot of votes to get it there. (Which is more than can be said for YC hiring posts…)

I love(d) HN, and it's totally within the rights of YC to do what they wish with it. But situations like this are doing a lot of long-term damage to the trust one can have in it as a source of quality, relavent content.

Disclaimer: I work for Intercom.

+1 Except AFAIK Des only ever wrote 2 posts that were in any way "promotional". And even at that, they're pretty damn classy posts. E.g. this is the other one and it's been one of the most popular posts on the Intercom blog to-date: http://blog.intercom.io/automated-emails-customer-respect/ But isn't any post on a company blog a promotional post in some way? (Maybe not.) Disclaimer: I work at Intercom.

Thanks for your kind words. I don't consider myself one of these people. I love reading the content I find through HN and participating in the discussions from time to time. I really don't want to see it die due to the misplaced efforts to prevent the same.

Read my comment again.

I find this idea of trying to maintain a certain "elite" quality quite silly. This sort of growth is a natural phenomenon that happens to valuable sites like HN.

Trying to prevent growth in a certain area (i.e. the less awesome people who you like here) will prevent growth in all areas—e.g. HN buttons could also promote HN to great but new hackers. If you stop these guys from getting involved, you'll cut off the lifeblood of a community whose participants are moving very quickly past the phase where they're excited to be involved in such a community—people get successful, busy, jaded, etc. and not forever passionate enough to bother doing the things that HN needs: reading, commenting, voting. You need new guys to replace the old guys, and both can learn from each other.

If HN is locked down to a degree that its natural growth is stunted, it will die, and probably deservedly so.

It sounds like you should start your own company. I can't think of a situation where an early stage startup will want to hire someone to have a significant influence over the product strategy to the degree that it sounds like you're looking for.

Ha. Well said.

I made this page. To the design critics: I wish I could have spent more time ironing out the kinks. But I couldn't afford another day. That's why I'm hiring a full time visual designer! The next single-use, throw-away ad will be a model of true perfection. We'll likely run a private beta for it. We'll A/B test the copy, conduct extensive cross-browser, cross-device testing too.

:-P I do genuinely appreciate your feedback. But you've got to choose your battles with everything you do, always. Including with design. I'm betting / hoping that the flaws on this page won't stop it doing its job.

Fair comment. I might remove it.

This is great. Would love them in a more accessible format. 10 mins in and I still haven't been able to find anything actually written by him… :-)

So many armchair commentators… Nobody here has the data about Oink that Milk do. The data required to tell if this venture was something worth doubling-down on or moving on from.

Business is an art. And great artists know that moving forward often requires you to say "this didn't work, let's start again."

"If you want to live your life ... as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever you were and throw them away." — Steve Jobs

Stripe is going to be huge. Theirs is a MASSIVE market, waiting too long to be disrupted. Can't wait to use the service.

Stripe is going to be huge. Theirs is a MASSIVE market, waiting too long to be disrupted. Can't wait to use the service.

Dublin?