Eoghan, Des, David, and Ciaran started Intercom in 2011 to help businesses engage with their customers online.
Since its inception in their local coffee shop, they have grown to over $50m in ARR.
Fast:
How?
This posts explainsâŚ
I stole the idea for #saasmarketer.
There are a number of daily email players out there that have been doing this for years, I simply emulated what they are doing whilst adding a unique spin.
I subscribe to all their emails and take inspiration from their headlines, website copy and commercial strategy.
I even stole our tagline: âGreat artists stealâ from Pablo Picasso:
Pure, cold-blooded theft.
Or is it?
Are any ideas truly original or just authentic thoughts influenced by a myriad of sources?
I think itâs the latter, so letâs replace the word âstealâ with âtake inspiration fromâ.
Which is why I love how Intercom takes inspiration from others for their content strategy.
With relentless growth targets and a relatively low ACV, Intercom couldnât rely on their sales team to drive early growth. They needed to make content work.
And make content work they did:
Aside from all the standard stuff (being controversial, smooth content upgrades, post specific retargeting), Intercom adopted one strategy which is best described as âtaking inspiration from whatâs workingâ.
Alaister Low wrote a piece that received great distribution through Hacker News:
And here is one of Intercomâs most shared pieces with an almost identical headline:
After reviewing, you can see that Intercomâs piece is 100% original and even adds more to the topic than Alaisterâs post.
We have stumbled upon an incredibly intelligent content strategy.
I estimate that all in, Intercom would have invested between $1-3k on the creation of that post⌠why risk that capital if youâre not confident the topic will resonate?
Just as Pablo said⌠Intercom didnât copy, they stole.
And everyone won.
What did we learn?
When building your content strategy, find what works and take inspiration.