What's up everyone?

This is Cortland from NDHackers.com and you are listening to the IndieHackers podcast.

On this show, I talked to the founders of profitable internet businesses and I try to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes.

How did they get to where they are today?

How do they make decisions both at their companies and in their personal lives? And what makes their businesses tick?

Today I am talking to Des trainer, one of the co-founders of Enacom and its chief strategy officer.

I'm a big fan of yours, Des. I've watched more than a few of the talks that you've given and read

a lot of your articles as well. So I'm really excited to have you on the show. Thank you so much for joining. Thank you so much for having me, Coral, and I'm a huge fan of any hackers. It's really cool to hear that. So Entercom is a suite of messaging first products that pretty much any internet business can use to accelerate growth by directly talking with their customers. Is that an accurate way to describe it?

That's very accurate, yeah.

How did you get started working on Intercom?

It's funny.

The reason we got started was because of a pain we had with our previous product.

Intercom wasn't actually the original plan.

It sprang out of solving a personal pain that we had with a previous software as a service business.

So way back in 2010, starting in 2008, I guess, we had a Ruby on Rails error tracker tool called Exceptional.

And with exceptional, we had thousands of paying customers all over the world, very, very few in Ireland where we were based.

And we had no easy way to talk to them whatsoever.

We would frequently, it was my job to get an export of all the active users that we had and import that into campaign monitor and send out an email like, hey, how's it going?

Here's some features we're working on.

What would you like to see from us next? And then we'd get all these replies into my Gmail, which I'd then have to forward around to various people. Like, there was only a small team. There was four or five of us. And I'd be forwarding these things around saying, should we work on this, should we work on that? But it was like, it was a really, really messy workflow. In fact, everything about running a SaaS business back then was quite messy. There was no stripe.

There was no mixed panels. on that. But it was a really, really messy workflow. In fact, everything about running a

SaaS business back then was quite messy. There was no stripe. There was no mixed panel. There

...