What if I told you there was a way to save at least 1 hour of your life everyday? Most of you would already be curious. Executives strapped for time will happily pay top $$$ to achieve this hack. A new category of enterprise products builds on this insight. Tools like Zoom and Superhuman are fast replacing Skype and Gmail in Silicon Valley. Take Superhuman - a Gmail add-on that recently raised funding at a $260M valuation. The core idea is that millions of folks spending hours replying to emails each day. A better email product would introduce bunch of shortcuts and automate a lot of stuff. A sort of Gmail on drugs. People love the product and shell out $30/month for this simple email client. And despite the price point, the company already has 15,000 paying customers and is invite only. It already has a waitlist of 150,000+ customers and is one of the most hyped products on Sand Hill Road. Here is what the email experience looks like:
(Btw, the story of how Superhuman achieved product-market fit remains one of my favorite reads on measuring customer value.)
Zoom was built on a similar insight - what if there was a video conference product that didn't actually suck? This was in an age when Skype and Hangouts had supposedly 'won' and dominated the web conferencing vertical. The company, started only in 2011, IPO'ed recently and is worth $26B already. And unlike other tech unicorns, it is actually one that is already profitable. Online universities are already using Zoom as a virtual classroom to deliver live courses to 500+ students. And as offices move increasing remote, Zoom can be the connector that holds enterprises together.
Anyways, let’s return to the point of saving time and technical debt. Most people think of documentation or testing issues in the codebase when they hear the term 'technical debt'. And yet, mostly technical debt is of a simpler kind. It is all around us. Whenever your old email client does not work, remember that this is also technical debt. You could have been using Superhuman or Gmail. Whenever you can't have a team conference call on your video conferencing software, remember that this is also technical debt. You could have used Zoom. Whenever you can't access that Excel file because the network drive is down, remember that this is also technical debt. You could have use Google Sheets or Airtable and shared files simply over the cloud. You get the picture.
Executives must not wait for a leprechaun to show up as CTO one day and erase technical debt. Most debt is of the simpler kind, one of ease and lock-in into existing processes and software. And that is where start-ups have a real advantage over incumbents. A startup will come in, cheerfully build their analytics on top of a new enterprise software put out by a startup. And it might offer them insights that are 10x better than what you spent years building.
Most large organizations already have teams devoted to refactoring the codebase. And yet hardly any has individuals looking at HackerNews, Reddit and ProductHunt at new product releases. After all, a small side project will likely become the Zoom or Salesforce of tomorrow. And simple hacks like adopting these tools company-wide early would save millions in lost productivity.