Eoghan McCabe

Born and raised in Ireland, Eoghan McCabe built his first website on America Online (AOL) in 1996 and launched his first internet business in 2000, an internet portal for his hometown of just 10,000 people! He expanded his ambitions beyond that while he studied Computer Science at Trinity College, Dublin during which he studied every page of 37signals’ pivotal book on software, dreaming about starting his own business just like their Basecamp.

Fresh out of college in 2006, Eoghan started his own software development company, creatively named Eoghan McCabe Ltd. The company’s first software product was a website monitoring and analytics product called FoldSpy, a JavaScript app that helped website owners collect user metrics to help them better place ads on their pages. It was a major success and measured one billion screens within its first three months. Foldspy was acquired in 2007.

That same year, Eoghan met Paul Campbell and David Rice, who joined Eoghan McCabe Limited, which later became Contrast. Des Traynor joined them later, followed by David Barrett and Ciaran Lee, who would all go on to start Intercom with Eoghan.

At Contrast, Eoghan and his team designed and developed products for startups like Smartling and larger companies like Wells Fargo. They also experimented with their own products, one of which was Qwitter, an app that would notify Twitter users of users who had quit following them. This caused much controversy in the early days of the Twitter platform.

After Contrast, Eoghan co-founded Exceptional, a SaaS company that created developer tools for easily identifying and tracking bugs in web apps. The success of Exceptional led to the sale of the company and its eventual acquisition by Rackspace.