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Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B

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Re: Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B

#141

Post by DoingSomeThings »

aurareturn wrote: post #128
DoingSomeThings wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Paying Fin $250k flat does nothing since it isn't going to actually know how to solve problems. The real challenge is the knowledge and context engineering and Fin doesn't help there" You misunderstand the model. Fin does not have flat fee. They charge exclusively for resolutions. That's the entire value prop. Correct that knowledge and context engineering are the key. Fin DOES help here. They have an entire backend…

The bulk of the work is context engineering which is done outside of Fin. Once you do the context engineering, it's very easy to duplicate Fin's features. Seriously. Just try it. You don't need a fancy editor for "if this then do this". A simple text document is all you need. And if you do need a fancy editor, it's extremely easy to build it in 2026. Maybe 1-2 days. I'm not a SaaS believer anymore.

Maybe you've done this yourself. I'm honestly jealous if solving customer support was as easy as your describe.

In my case, I've spent the past 12 months running implementations at multiple companies. I've engaged directly with smart engineering teams to assist. It was not that easy.

What you outlined might work for a simple ecom business. It probably does 95% of the job for a simple case where you're delivering information. But it will fail the second it needs to take action or deliver personalized information based on client's account data.

That leads to the exact issue people here complain about... an LLM that doesn't actually answer the question, can't solve the problem, and is worse than talking to a human

Re: Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B

#142

Post by nailer »

davidu wrote: post #15

Massive congrats to Eoghan McCabe, what an amazing story arc. We love when a CEO comes back and gets the business back in fighting shape and then delivers an incredible win. CONGRATS CONGRATS CONGRATS. I freakin' love it.

End of an era. I met Eoghan (and Des) at JSConf back around 2011. Twilio (represented at JSConf by Carter Rebasa) and Stripe (Alex Sexton) were also getting started around that time.

It was a super hopeful time: JQuery meant programming for the web was less painful, sockets and HTML5 SSE meant realtime was just starting.

Intercom and Olark were one of the first two "install this tag" based customer support apps. They made websites a way to talk to companies rather than just read see and buy.

I can't believe the exit took so long, especially in a field so crowded. But it looks like it was well worth it.

Everything around you was made by someone just like you.

Re: Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B

#143

Post by vanuatu »

aurareturn wrote: post #128
DoingSomeThings wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Paying Fin $250k flat does nothing since it isn't going to actually know how to solve problems. The real challenge is the knowledge and context engineering and Fin doesn't help there" You misunderstand the model. Fin does not have flat fee. They charge exclusively for resolutions. That's the entire value prop. Correct that knowledge and context engineering are the key. Fin DOES help here. They have an entire backend…

The bulk of the work is context engineering which is done outside of Fin. Once you do the context engineering, it's very easy to duplicate Fin's features. Seriously. Just try it. You don't need a fancy editor for "if this then do this". A simple text document is all you need. And if you do need a fancy editor, it's extremely easy to build it in 2026. Maybe 1-2 days. I'm not a SaaS believer anymore.

the bulk of the context engineering for users of these ai support platforms is done in the platform

and the amount of context needed to automate f500 is non trivial, plus you usually cant use reasoning because latency would blow up and you get escalated on

if this was so easy as you claim theres many millions for you to be made selling it to enterprises, but you wont

Re: Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B

#144

Post by aurareturn »

DoingSomeThings wrote: post #141
aurareturn wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bulk of the work is context engineering which is done outside of Fin. Once you do the context engineering, it's very easy to duplicate Fin's features. Seriously. Just try it. You don't need a fancy editor for "if this then do this". A simple text document is all you need. And if you do need a fancy editor, it's extremely easy to build it in 2026. Maybe 1-2 days. I'm not a SaaS believer anymore.

Maybe you've done this yourself. I'm honestly jealous if solving customer support was as easy as your describe. In my case, I've spent the past 12 months running implementations at multiple companies. I've engaged directly with smart engineering teams to assist. It was not that easy. What you outlined might work for a simple ecom business. It probably does 95% of the job for a simple case where you're delivering info…

  But it will fail the second it needs to take action or deliver personalized information based on client's account data.
And why would Fin be better here? It's very easy to give your agent context on the customer.

In 2026, every time I've tried to build a custom tool to replace a SaaS, I've succeeded. The biggest problem with SaaS is that they build a one size fits all. When you build a custom tool, you control everything from data to UI and it works for your business.

Re: Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B

#145

Post by vanuatu »

janderson215 wrote: post #99

I see a lot of negativity in regards to using AI as a customer service agent. I have only spoken with 1 and that was calling Starlink customer support. It was easily better than 95% of customer support experiences I’ve had. My guess is the bad experiences have to do with bad execution. I’m sure some companies think they can just plug in AI and their job is done. Obviously that is wrong, but done right, the experience…

+1

its surprising to HN tech crowd but a well implemented support agent gets higher reviews and successful resolutions than humans

Re: Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B

#146

Post by vanuatu »

jmuguy wrote: post #30

Intercom is definitely one of those SaaS that I figured had essentially zero value prop once businesses figured out how to train their own support agents, so congrats to them for exiting before that happens.

its very hard for most businesses, especially large ones, to build good agents (not the kind that does rag on a faq) that complete actions autonomously and cannot be jailbroken

demand for ai support vendors is going vertical this year

Re: Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B

#147

Post by carlosjobim »

vanuatu wrote: post #139
carlosjobim wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they can, then it's going to be a nightmare for companies when people manipulate the bot to give them what they want, or a refund, etc. It's practically putting these decisions in the hands of the customer, and if that's what you want to do, then why not put those functions into the customer facing UI to begin with?

the whole value prop of these companies is they can build you agents that perform actions (e.g process refunds, live troubleshooting, claims etc) without being manipulated

Why would you need an agent for that? They need to look at a database or some rules to make their decisions anyway, so why not make a normal system to let the customer self-serve?

Re: Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B

#148

Post by nailer »

phillipcarter wrote: post #102
davidu wrote: post #15

Massive congrats to Eoghan McCabe, what an amazing story arc. We love when a CEO comes back and gets the business back in fighting shape and then delivers an incredible win. CONGRATS CONGRATS CONGRATS. I freakin' love it.

[flagged]

"Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B

#149

Post by aurareturn »

runako wrote: post #100
jmuguy wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well specifically with just the AI agent/customer support product I think businesses would do well to handle this themselves rather than hoping a one size fits all solution from Intercom would serve them. Not just from a bespoke AI solution but also on cost. The other aspects of Intercom's product, the little chat bubble, CRM, can be had for much much less from dozens of competitors. I think they mostly benefit from…

The problem is that Fin prices at $0.99 per outcome. Only for companies with tremendous support volume would it even begin to make sense to build in-house. There's a wide swath of companies that do < (say) 20,000 cases monthly where the economics will never make sense. And a company finds Fin successful as it grows to 20k/mo, why would it decide to take on the headache as it grows to the 50k/mo? or whatever level whe…

  The problem is that Fin prices at $0.99 per outcome. Only for companies with tremendous support volume would it even begin to make sense to build in-house.
$0.99 could be the profit margin of small ecommerce businesses too so it might not make sense for small businesses.

Re: Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B

#150

Post by aaron425 »

vanuatu wrote: post #145
janderson215 wrote: post #99

I see a lot of negativity in regards to using AI as a customer service agent. I have only spoken with 1 and that was calling Starlink customer support. It was easily better than 95% of customer support experiences I’ve had. My guess is the bad experiences have to do with bad execution. I’m sure some companies think they can just plug in AI and their job is done. Obviously that is wrong, but done right, the experience…

+1 its surprising to HN tech crowd but a well implemented support agent gets higher reviews and successful resolutions than humans

Can you cite a source or study for your assertion?
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