I want to tell you a story about a company that grew five times in customers in less than a quarter, and they didn’t build anything new to do it. They turned things off.
That’s hard for product people to hear, I get it. That’s because most of us were trained to add.
A customer struggles, so we add a feature…
Sales loses a deal, so we add a feature…
A competitor ships something, so we add a feature.
Over time the product becomes a giant Frankenstein of a product; we overwhelm our customers and we wonder why people keep asking for a discount because “they don’t use (x feature)”.
A story of Intercom: two guys who wanted to build everything
Des Traynor and Eoghan McCabe were in my class. They were intense, driven, the kind of people who ask the second and third question.
They noticed that every time they built software for clients, they had to buy a pile of subscriptions: one for marketing automation, one for support, one for analytics, and so on.
So their idea was simple – “Let’s package it all together into one program that can do it all”. They called it Intercom.
Their positioning was basically that you could manage your customer from cradle to grave.
They spent around two years building Intercom. When they launched, the numbers were strong – year one, about three and a half million in sales. Year two, about five million.
On the face of it, these were good numbers, but they were expecting ten, so they asked us at Re-Wired to see if we’d do some interviews to understand why people actually bought Intercom.
The “anomaly” trap
We interviewed the first customer. When I played it back, they said, “No, that’s not our customer. That’s an anomaly.”
We did another one. “That’s not our customer either… another anomaly.”
Then a third. Same thing.
At some point I had to stop and say, “Guys, these are the people who are buying. If every customer is an anomaly, then the anomaly is your theory of who the customer is.”
I see this all the time, especially with product development teams. You build a persona, you build a roadmap for that persona, and then real people show up and buy for reasons you never designed for. Instead of being curious, the team gets defensive.
The data doesn’t fit the story, so the data must be wrong! I hear product teams cry.
But here’s the thing – people don’t buy products, they buy progress. They hire something because they’re in a struggling moment and they want to get unstuck.
The persona tells you who someone is, but it sure doesn’t tell you why they showed up on a Tuesday afternoon and pulled out a credit card. That’s what you have to go learn, and you can only learn it from the people who actually did it, especially the ones who don’t fit.
Four Jobs hiding inside one product
When we stopped debating about who the customer should be and listened to what people were saying, we found four clear patterns.
There were four different reasons people came to the website.
- The first group had traffic but people weren’t converting – they needed help turning visitors into customers.
- The second group had plenty of users, but they weren’t engaged. They needed a way to keep people coming back.
- The third group wanted to learn where their users were struggling so they’d know what to build next.
- The fourth group surprised everybody. They said, “We use it to run our customer support.” And the team said, “Wait, it wasn’t set up to do that.”
Each of those is a different Job. Each has a different struggling moment, a different definition of progress, and a different competition. The support job wasn’t competing with some idea of an all-in-one platform – ti was competing with Zendesk.
The engagement job was up against HubSpot. Each customer was comparing Intercom with the thing they’d otherwise hire for their Job, not with everything Intercom could do.
Why “it does everything” positioning creates anxiety
Here’s what was happening in the sales conversation. There was one price, and you got it all. So the team showed up and walked through every feature and every benefit – mainly because they thought they were adding value.
But what they were really doing was adding anxiety.
Think about the four forces of progress. There’s the push of the situation, the pull of the new solution, the anxiety of the new, and the habit of the present.
If I’m the person whose support queue is on fire, I’ve got a strong push. But when you show me lead capture, engagement campaigns and product research, the pull doesn’t get stronger. It gets muddier.
So now I’m thinking: “Do I have to learn all of this? Am I paying for things I won’t use? Can I just get a discount?” Every extra feature you show me is one more thing I have to figure out, and figuring things out is what I don’t have time for.
More is not more – Greg and I say, more is often friction.
Pursuing subtraction as strategy
So we tested it.
First, marketing. Instead of buying keywords for the solution, we bought keywords for the struggle. That turned out to be cheaper and it worked better, especially with startups, because a startup often doesn’t know what the solution is called – they just know what’s going wrong.
Then the product. Nobody had signed up for the whole thing because of the whole thing. Each customer had come for one Job. So instead of one product, Intercom became four.
Each one was priced against the competitor customers were comparing it with, and each one got its own onboarding so you could make progress on your Job without wading through the other three.
But notice what they didn’t do: they didn’t write a new line of core functionality. They turned off the features that weren’t relevant to the Job the customer was hiring for. In less than a quarter, they grew five times in customers and three times in revenue.
It was the exact same code, just a different context. And we know context is what creates value.
What this means for product teams
If you build products, I’d ask you to sit with a few uncomfortable questions.
When a customer doesn’t fit your picture, do you call them an anomaly, or do you get curious?
The customers you’re dismissing may be the ones telling you the truth about your product.
Do you know the distinct jobs people hire your product for? Not your segments, your Jobs. The moment of struggle, what they tried before, and what progress looks like to them.
And for each of those Jobs, what could you turn off? What could you hide, defer or remove so that the path from “I’m stuck” to “I’m making progress” gets shorter?
There was a line I heard from the team about going after the underserved. What we actually found was that once people were hiring Intercom for the right Job, they’d rather stay with it than switch to Zendesk or HubSpot.
This wasn’t because it did more, but because it did exactly what they needed, without everything else getting in the way. Sometimes the best feature you can ship is the one you take away.
This article was based on a talk presented to the Christensen Institute Innovation Summit, Why JTBD matters in the Age of AI.
Does this situation feel familiar? Feel free to get in touch with the team to understand how we can help you uncover where true demand is for your SaaS product.