Intercom, Inc.

MARCH 16, 2022

To achieve our mission of making internet business personal and scaling to support larger and larger customers, we have been continually, thoughtfully, and carefully investing in our people, systems, and processes to maintain Intercom’s high standards of availability. Here’s how we do it. Availability is embedded our culture.

Software Review 118

Software Review Technical Review Management Systems Review 118

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 26, 2018

by Rich Archbold, Senior Director of Engineering at Intercom. In this battle, I’ve found a secret weapon hidden within one of our core engineering strategies, an idea called Run Less Software. When I say “execute”, I don’t simply mean the engineering challenges of building something. The same is true in software.

Software Review 224

Software Review Outsourcing Services Software Outsourced Development 224

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 19, 2018

In engineering, you want to move fast, ship often and solve real customer problems. It means reducing choices amongst engineering teams and standardizing technology, so our team can spend as much time as possible delivering value to customers. Rich: Today I’m the Senior Director for Foundations Engineering at Intercom.

Outsourcing Services 192

Outsourcing Services Part-Time VPE Software AWS 192

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 30, 2024

Previously, Amit led marketing efforts at startups like Tact AI (1st AI Assistant for Sales backed by AWS, Microsoft, and Salesforce), HP Inc (next-gen computing) and Spire AI (Human Capital SaaS). In a prior life, Amit also led product and UX teams at Yahoo and Oracle.

AWS 79

AWS AI Advertising Finance 79

Intercom, Inc.

MAY 19, 2021

We hoped this would build confidence within the team and provide evidence to our stakeholders for further investment. The positive impact we had on engineering was readily apparent, which led to more investment in the core technologies area. It also led to a queue of engineers wanting to join the team. Scaling to Rails.

Scale 216

Scale Technical Review Technology Scaling 216

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 22, 2021

As it turns out, he’s also quite the writer – since the last time we spoke , he has published not one but two books on engineering. After writing An Elegant Puzzle about the challenges of engineering management in high-growth organizations, his focus shifted to a career path that’s much less understood – the technical leadership track.

Technical Review 274

Technical Review Leadership VP of Engineering CTO Coach 274

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 8, 2022

Does it cost so, so much to host a few million lines of code on AWS? The renewals, upsells, and pre-paid contracts just are cash engines if you are growing fast enough. Don’t wait to invest in customer success and account management. So is SaaS cursed? You can’t run your core team on $6m in cash per year?

Scale 286

Scale SaaS Banking AWS 286

SaaStr

AUGUST 7, 2021

Some investors bet on the best engineering teams. I thought it might be helpful to assemble a checklist of 22 reasons I almost immediately pass on investing in start-ups that are still interesting. This one you can’t really control, but I only want to invest in founders that can build a management team. This is just me.

Sales Recruiting 339

Sales Recruiting Scale AWS Investment 339

CloudGeometry

MARCH 14, 2022

If there’s one thing we’ve learned as we build full-stack SaaS across industries and user cases, it’s this: SaaS is a 3-sided balancing act: feature agility; compliance readiness; and return on infrastructure investment. Engineers may have a hard time unlearning long-held beliefs of attaining perfection in the application.

DevOps as a Service 130

DevOps as a Service Well Architected Framework SaaS AWS 130

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 12, 2019

I’m talking about product-led growth as an investment strategy, but really my background is 10 years of operating experience in the product-led growth world. Now I’m investing in that. I say investment strategy, but really it’s like how do you build a company that’s focused on product-led growth?

Investment 101

Investment Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Software Review 101

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 19, 2022

This is the fifth post in a content series exploring Intercom’s investment in supporting large businesses. Intercom services and data are hosted in Amazon Web Services (AWS) facilities in the USA (us-east-1), Dublin, Ireland (eu-west-1), and Sydney, Australia. . Explore other articles in the series. Something we’re missing?

compliance 138

compliance Data Software Review Scale 138

Clouded Judgement

MARCH 31, 2023

The majority of COGS (revenue less COGS = gross profit) fall in hosting costs (ie AWS), and some customer support. Or hire less engineers but write more code with tools like GitHub Copilot. Or hire less data engineers but write more SQL queries. What do I mean by this? The list goes on.

Cloud 130

Cloud Sales Hiring AI Headcount 130

CloudGeometry

MARCH 3, 2022

Feature value: a function of time investment of users and customers The set of problems that your SaaS solves won’t survive long in the digital age if all it does is cut prices. Proven best practices that help both finance & engineering teams Of course, not all customers want to pay for all the features.

Well Architected Framework 130

Well Architected Framework VPCs (Virtual Private Cloud) SaaS Cloud 130

Baremetrics

DECEMBER 7, 2023

Cost of Revenue Examples Hosting AWS / Google Cloud / Azure Payroll – Customer Support Service Delivery Costs Twilio, Sendgrid Merchant Fees Stripe, Braintree You should also include software that helps your support team, such as Help Scout, or your Devops, such as CircleCI. Finally, add the software account.

Merchant Services 90

Merchant Services Startup DevOps as a Service SaaS 90

Buffer Resources

AUGUST 16, 2023

Our hosting costs include service providers like AWS, Cloudflare, MongoDb, Twitter, etc. Looking ahead at our future investments When we look ahead to future years, we anticipate that employee expenses will continue to make up the majority of our Operating Costs. We also plan to continue to invest in paid marketing.

Merchant Services 75

Merchant Services Payment Services Payment Features Payments 75

CloudGeometry

SEPTEMBER 7, 2021

It goes beyond just engineering culture and draining the backlog using harmonious collaboration. Those awesome new tricks that seem to show up out of nowhere within cloud-first applications like Google Workplace, Slack, Facebook, Twitter, Stripe, the iPhone, and Amazon (both eCommerce and AWS)?

DevOps as a Service 130

DevOps as a Service Software Development AWS Cloud 130

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 2, 2021

For the very first time, we’re releasing Engineer Chats , an internal podcast here at Intercom about all things engineering. Previously hosted by Jamie Osler , a Senior Product Engineer at Intercom for over seven years, it’s now up to Principal Systems Engineer Brian Scanlan to pick up the baton and keep the chats going.

Engineering 178

Engineering Technical Review Systems Review Underperforming Technical Team 178

Audacix

JULY 28, 2022

There are the most obvious and often quoted reasons for investing in robust application security standards and processes: It helps to protect your business. A cloud server, like an AWS EC2 instance, is still a server. The only difference is that it is sitting in AWS' datacentres, rather than in your office. Great question.

Cybersecurity 52

Cybersecurity Underperforming Technical Team AWS Scale 52

SaaStr

OCTOBER 31, 2019

It was around that time about 12 years ago that Jeff Bezos launched AWS, and some of you may remember that, when he did this, Wall Street analysts were looking at him and saying, “Why would you take what’s already a very unprofitable business and drive it further into the red by investing in this AWS initiative?”

Cloud 101

Cloud Scale AWS Machine Learning 101

SaaStr

APRIL 26, 2024

Historically, Cloud platforms like AWS and Azure help with the sporadic needs of renting a GPU for a few hours for training vs. long-term use, which would cost thousands of dollars. If someone doesn’t want to switch from AWS because AWS has partnerships with OpenAI, they have tradeoffs.

AI Search 235

AI Search AI Artificial Intelligence Scale 235

Neil Patel

APRIL 8, 2021

This means it’s vitally crucial for businesses to understand what they’re investing in and how they can make the most of cloud computing. For businesses running e-commerce sites, this means they don’t have to worry about the highly technical aspects of running a web application and they don’t have to invest in expensive infrastructure.

Outsourcing Services 119

Outsourcing Services Cloud Outsourced Development Azure 119

Intercom, Inc.

JANUARY 12, 2022

. “[Our research] opened up new markets for this product without them having to go through the other kinds of experimentation they were originally planning” After doing a bunch of analysis and digging into it, they realized the videos were too slow in certain countries because of where their data centers or AWS environments were located.

Data 151

Data Airlines AWS Underperforming Technical Team 151

Frontegg

OCTOBER 14, 2020

Before AWS, engineering teams had to scale their own infrastructure. We were the first to recognize Frontegg and the fundamental gap in the SaaS market, the startup had identified, as well as the first to invest in the company” says Noga Kap , Managing Partner at i3 Equity Partners. “We About Frontegg.

DevOps as a Service 52

DevOps as a Service K8S orchestration (Kubernetes) Innovation New CTO 52

ProfitWell

MAY 12, 2020

This option will require significantly more time investment from an IT department than either of the other two options will. Google App Engine — Google's cloud platform allows developers to use all the most common development tools in the cloud. AWS — Amazon Web Services is perhaps the most used of the cloud infrastructure options.

Cloud 59

Cloud Azure SaaS Underperforming Technical Team 59

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 1, 2020

Eoghan would do visual design; Ciaran, David, and then later on, Darragh, would start to engineer it. And that was probably one of the things you invested your time in earliest. And everyone, in most product-led start-ups, everyone is basically the product team, or the R&D team – designers, engineers, PMs, et cetera.

VP of Engineering 165

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Engineering 165

Intercom, Inc.

OCTOBER 1, 2020

Eoghan would do visual design; Ciaran, David, and then later on, Darragh, would start to engineer it. And that was probably one of the things you invested your time in earliest. And everyone, in most product-led start-ups, everyone is basically the product team, or the R&D team – designers, engineers, PMs, et cetera.

VP of Engineering 165

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Engineering 165

Chart Mogul

JUNE 23, 2022

This is a perfect time to invest in your user base & core product offering because playing to your strengths will pay off. You might be hard-pressed by your AWS bill but you’re not going to start replacing the engine to lighten the load mid-flight. Here are a few thoughts: 1. Dig Deep Into Your Financials.

SaaS 52

SaaS DevOps as a Service Marketplace as a Service Forecasting 52

SaaStr

JANUARY 28, 2020

Maria : Yeah, I think, coming from a marketing side and thinking about that as a marketer, marketing is all about investments. There’s none of the brands that you’ve seen get to an IPO or continue on to a Fortune 500 company that is not making some significant investments there. Aaron : And they just have to do it.

Sales Hiring 211

Sales Hiring Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Recruiting 211

OpenView Labs

MARCH 16, 2021

AWS takes this a step further by allowing a customer to commit in advance, but still pay for their usage as it happens. The best usage-based companies invest heavily in predicting customer consumption. SaaS vendors must get creative with different usage-based pricing structures to give enterprise customers greater peace of mind.

Pricing 52

Pricing Payments SaaS Payments Payment Solutions 52

SaaStr

AUGUST 8, 2023

The team is typically highly cross-functional, working together with sales, product, engineering, and marketing, and the goal is to help the other teams make better decisions through data and financial modeling. In 2014, storage had historically been Dropbox’s most significant cost driver, with hundreds of millions of dollars spent on AWS.

Scale 190

Scale Finance Outsourcing Services Sales Recruiting 190

Audacix

APRIL 2, 2022

When encrypting data at rest don't forget unstructured data stores such as AWS' S3 buckets. We've found that engineering teams often forget to encrypt and secure S3 buckets leaving their environments very vulnerable to attack. This means applying TLS 1.2

Software 52

Software DevOps as a Service Software Development Cloud 52

SaaStr

JUNE 25, 2019

Come and hear about the typical pitfalls (and how to avoid them) from Pat Poels, an executive with over seven years under his belt leading Eventbrite’s now 300+ strong engineering team that sits across North America, South America, and Europe. I started right at the end of 2011, and I started in the role of VP of engineering.

Engineering 148

Engineering Part-Time VPE Sales Hiring Scale 148

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 13, 2018

I saw we had the opportunity to do that in London and to do something that will be new for Facebook, in the same way that AWS was a new business model and product line for Amazon and a bet that paid off very well. We are going from having an enterprise business to having a mid-market business to investing in an SMB business.

Scale 151

Scale Marketplace as a Service Mobile Sales Hiring 151

Audacix

OCTOBER 24, 2019

There are the most obvious and often quoted reasons for investing in robust application security standards and processes: It helps to protect your business. All of this is then supported by engineers and civilian support to rebuild that city. How many of these three things do you offer your prospective customers? Great question.

Cloud 49

Cloud Cybersecurity Scale Transportation 49

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 9, 2021

Ten years ago, we built the initial Intercom infrastructure in AWS’ us-east-1 data center in North Virginia, USA. As a first step, we’re delighted to announce that we now offer European data hosting – allowing your most important data to remain entirely in Europe, stored in the AWS-eu-west-1 region.

Data 181

Data AWS Scale Engineering 181

SaaStr

DECEMBER 20, 2019

Befofe that Manny was a Senior Product Manager @ Amazon where he engineered the compensation system for Amazon Associates and Web-Services which accounts for 15% of Amazon’s traffic. If I were to try to sell to AT&T, who is a customer now, or to AWS, who’s a customer now, they actually walked me out the door of AWS.

Scale 145

Scale Sales Hiring Construction Education 145

Audacix

JULY 18, 2022

It is focused on making collaboration between developers and operations engineers (ops) easier, faster, and safer. Get our Ultimate Guide To Test Automation for a comparison of the most popular, modern software testing tools and test automation engines. There is no wrong answer to this riddle.

DevOps as a Service 52

DevOps as a Service Technical Review CTO Coach Underperforming Technical Team 52