How Intercom got its users

Find the surface your customer puts in front of their own visitors, not the dashboard they log into. Intercom's is the Messenger launcher: one JS snippet setting window.intercomSettings with an app_id, and a bubble sits bottom right on every page of every customer site. Ship that surface first, even if yours is a status page, a booking form or a checkout step. Everything else in your product is invisible to non-users.

done whenOpen your own product in a private window as a visitor who will never sign up. Count the surfaces carrying your name. If the answer is zero, you have a dashboard, not a viral artifact.

Put your name inside the artifact, in the customer's voice. The Messenger says 'We run on Intercom' at the bottom of the open panel, never on the closed bubble: nothing shows until a visitor clicks, then one small line that reads like the customer's choice rather than an ad you placed on their site. Make it a link. Write the sentence the way your customer would say it, and keep it to one line.

done whenRead your attribution line out loud as if your customer wrote it. If it sounds like an ad you placed on their site, rewrite it. Check it appears only after the visitor opens the widget.

Add the second artifact: hosted content that search engines index. An Intercom Help Center sits on an intercom.help URL by default, and customers who want their own domain point a CNAME at custom.intercom.help, yet the 'Powered by Intercom' link stays in the article footer. Ship docs, a changelog or a status page that you host, default it on, and keep the footer link when they map their domain.

done whenRun a site: search on the domain you host customer pages on and count what is indexed. Then map a test custom domain and confirm your footer link is still there.

Cover every escaping surface with a single switch, then gate it. The 'Intercom Attribution Message' toggle sits in Settings > Workspace > General and turns branding off on the Messenger, outbound emails and the Help Center at once, with no per channel opt out. That toggle only appears on the higher plans. Entry tiers carry your name on all three surfaces, and removing it becomes a reason to pay.

done whenList every surface your name escapes on. Count how many a single toggle covers, and check that toggle is missing from the tier most of your accounts sit on.

Get the artifact onto sites that have not launched yet. Intercom's Early Stage program hands a near free year to teams under a funding ceiling and a headcount cap, and only to companies that are not customers yet. They install the Messenger at a tier where the attribution toggle does not exist. Copy that: give the smallest teams in your niche the paid product, minus the switch that hides you.

done whenTake your last ten free or discounted accounts. Count how many have the artifact live on a public URL, not a staging link. That ratio is your real distribution, not the signup count.