Big announcements: 1,000,000 end-users, Public Beta, awesome advisors, $1M raised

Our goal with Intercom is to provide a product for every single web business to help them proactively build and manage relationships with their customers. We’ll help these businesses use great, personal, personalized customer service to turn their users into loyal, happy customers.

1,000,000 end-users tracked

Our journey towards meeting and exceeding this goal has only started. But already our Private Beta is helping 1,500 product managers and sales and support staff, in 500 growing web businesses, track and engage with over 1,000,000 users. And people love it.

“Intercom has fundamentally changed the way we communicate with our users.” — Jonathan Hoyt, GitHub

Opening the floodgates

The intense demand we’ve faced for access to our Beta led us to invite about ten times the number of people we had planned to! So we’re leaving behind our not-that-private Private Beta and launching our Public Beta today. Everyone can now get started with Intercom and watch us prepare Version 1 for launch this summer.

Seeking professional help

Our experience starting and growing (and then selling) Exceptional taught us a lot about the SaaS world. To help us in every other web business vertical, we’ve started bringing some amazing advisors on-board:

Biz Stone (Obvious),
Jonathan Siegel (RightVentures),
Scott Rutherford (UserVoice), and
Paul Adams (Facebook).

Funding the first step in a long adventure

We’re committed to building a Massively Viable Product (MVP?) that’s fun and rewarding for its users, and powerful and flexible enough so that every web business out there can easily and effectively stitch it into the way they like to work. This will take time and many smart minds. So we’ve raised $1M from strategic angel investors with a wealth of operational experience in web business:

Jonathan Siegel,
Eamon Leonard,
David Coallier,
Stuart Coulson,
Conor Stanley,
David Hauser,
Biz Stone,
Caelen King,
Jonathan Strauss,
Dan Martell,
Bill McCabe,
Andy McLoughlin,
Roham Gharegozlou, and
Paddy Holohan.

And from technology funds with a track record in backing successful teams:

500 Startups (investors in Simple, Rapportive, Slideshare, and Taskrabbit) and
Digital Garage (investors in Twitter and Path).

On behalf of Des, Ciaran, David, Ben and myself, I’d like to sincerely thank you for your support so far.

Paul Campbell says:

Go team.

Alex says:

congrats guys, fantastic achievement

Bill Horsman says:

Can’t wait to see what Intercom does next. Good job guys.

Jonathan Hoyt says:

Love what you guys are doing, it has made such a difference on http://speakerdeck.com and http://get.gaug.es, making it easier for our users to start a conversation, but better yet encouraging us to start the conversation with them.