Why is everybody trying to automate my meetings & SaaS Market Trends
Quick career update - I have joined a new org. A bit busy with the onboarding so there will be no detailed post this month.
These were tough times to find a new role in B2B SaaS with high customer churn and low investor sentiment everywhere. In the period of 1-2 months some of the roles I was interviewing for got axed while I was interviewing. Luckily, it turned out well in the end and I am excited to dive deep into the PLG world. More updates in my future posts.
Also, why are there so many players in Conversational Intelligence?
Gong.io, Chorus.ai (ZoomInfo), SalesLoft, CallRail, Revenue.io, Jiminny, Invoca, Allego, Tethr, Observe.ai, CallMiner, Avoma, Mindtickle, Salesken, Aispeech, TelRobot, Emotibot, Fireflies, Tactiq & others.
These are basically AI meeting assistants to automate transcriptions, call summaries, sales processes like CRM updates, etc. This space is overdue for consolidation, now that the big daddy Microsoft has included ChatGPT in MS Office.
Personally, I like that I don’t have to take any notes in work meetings now and can quickly see the summary of any call once it ends. Extrapolating this, I would like to see an AI assistant that summarises action items from a meeting happening next week and informs me today so I don’t have to attend it. 😄 Or, to consider a more dystopian future, an AI tells us what to do as we start our workday, and by the end of the day, we get remuneration for tasks completed. We knowledge workers might have created something which turns us into factory workers again.
There is a lot to catch up on in the world of products & marketing. A few weeks ago, Okta, the identity company, came out with its report on the growth of apps used by businesses in 2022. They looked at the user logins of their clients in various apps. Here are some interesting findings:
Most Used App Categories - Categories like Travel, Sales & Marketing, Design Software, Content Collaboration, HR Tech, and Developer Tools have been key areas of user growth in 2022. The lull of the pandemic has worked as a booster for Travel apps and it is by far the fastest-growing category.
B2B Apps - Figma takes the top rank in the 50 most popular apps. Along with others like Miro, 1Password, and Hubspot, it has seen a major uptake in both unique users & paid customers.
Heavy Hitters - In terms of no. of customers - Microsoft, Google, AWS, Salesforce & Zoom make up the top 5.
Individual User Tools - In the past 2-3 years, we have seen the rise of shadow IT where users start using SaaS tools in their daily work and make it go viral in their teams. Apps like Grammarly, Notion, and Gitlab find mentions among the Top 10 Fastest Growing Apps.
Office Productivity - Google Workspace beat Microsoft Office in terms of growth % but in terms of no. of customers, Microsoft still reigns supreme.
Developer Tools - Atlassian suite with Jira, Confluence, Trello & Bitbucket is at the top in terms of no. of customers. Marketing to developers is getting more and more exciting. Be prepared to see a lot more mentions of DevRel or Developer Relations in job postings.
Indian SaaS - Postman, an API-testing platform, is the top most used developer-focussed platform in the world. It has come a long way from its humble beginnings in Indiranagar, Bengaluru. Another Indian startup that finds mention is BrowserStack, a multi-device testing platform. With one of the largest pools of developers, India is going to be the target market as well as the birthplace of many more such tools.
What I’ve been reading these days:
Article: A designer’s perspective on how Kickstarter took a beating and stood up in Covid times
Article: Hootsuite’s pivot from Sales-led to Product-led
Book: The Art of Statistics - Learning from Data by David Spiegelhalter
That’s it for this month. See you soon!