Intercom is a fast-growing SaaS startup that provides customer communication software for doing live chat, in-app customer messages, email triggers, helpdesk support, and knowledge base content. Their CEO recently published an interesting blog post titled Vanity metrics, the future, and 100,000 thank yous with a number of interesting metrics.
Here are a few notes on the blog post and Intercom:
- Started in 2011 (source)
- Took four months to raise $500k (source)
- Raised $1M angel round in 2012 (source)
- Raised $6M Series A in June 2013 (source)
- Raised $23M Series B 30 months after starting the business (source)
- 7,000 paying customers after four years (source)
- 50% of the 280 employees are in product and engineering as of last year (source)
- Raised $35M Series C four years to the day they started the company (source)
- Raised $50M Series C-1 in mid 2016 for a total of $116M (source)
- Took two years to hit $1M in annual recurring revenue
- 300+ employees today
- 100,000 monthly active users
- 400,000,000 customer conversations per month
- Educate, the knowledge base product, is at $1.5M ARR
- 17,000 companies that are paying customers
- Grew from $1-50M in ARR in three years ($2,941 average revenue per year per customer)
- Revenue run rate at end of year:
- 2013 – $1M
- 2014 – $7M
- 2015 – $22M
- 2016 – $50M
- 2016 operating margin of -36%
Impressive metrics all around and easily one of the fastest growing SaaS companies in the world. Congrats to Intercom on reimagining customer communication for the modern business and building an incredible company.
David Cummings on Startups 