What you’ll learn:
- How tech is adapting to an attention-scarce world
- Practical ways to buy better SaaS products that you actually need
- The South African market is on-pace with the pack
- Insights from HBR, AirBnB, Slack and others
It’s 2015 and Tom makes a counterintuitive observation.
“The world’s largest taxi firm, Uber, owns no cars. The world’s most popular media company, Facebook, creates no content. The world’s most valuable retailer, Alibaba, carries no stock. And the world’s largest accommodation provider, Airbnb, owns no property. Something big is going on.”
Tom Goodwin for TechCrunch in 2015, later the subject of his book Digital Darwinism.
He didn’t know it yet, but he’d defined a new chapter of business: The world’s emerging powerhouses were no longer producers, but enablers. They were interfaces – digital venues for value exchange. The platform era had begun.
A decade later there’s an opposite rising tide: platformless tech with no interface of its own. That is, software which functions entirely from within existing platforms. It’s commerce in our WhatsApp chats. It’s payments from our browser extensions. It’s tech we use without even knowing it.
A New Era: Platformless Tech
Businesses spent $38 million reaching audiences via WhatsApp in 2019. In 2024 that number exceeds $3 billion. The emphasis is no longer on building new venues of value creation and luring users into them. It’s on meeting users in platforms they already inhabit and layering new value into them.
And it’s no wonder why. Our digital worlds are saturated. The average person has 80 apps on their phone and skips between 10 different tools in a typical work day. A Harvard Business Review study found that people tend to spend nearly 4 hours a week – 9% of their time – reorienting themselves after switching into a new digital environment.
So when you’re adding new tools into your team’s workflow, another new platform is seldom the path of least resistance or highest impact. In the emerging era of platformless tech, great new tools meet people where they are.
The Cost of Complacency
The consequences of ignoring this are especially pronounced when it comes to things outside of people’s core responsibilities. Your sales team may shift to a new CRM for a break-through feature. But ask your people to sign in to a new portal for a culture development initiative…
“Please create a profile and share feedback at www.YouWillProbablyNeverClickThisLink.com”. A message that nobody wants to send and nobody is glad to receive. Words that precede weeks of follow-ups to little avail. Words followed by low uptake, shallow engagement, and abandoned projects.
But there’s good news. Sharp tech-builders recognise the opportunity to address these painful points of friction by creating software that embeds itself sneakily and delightfully into people’s existing workflows. In fact, you’re probably already using products like these.
Notetakers that join your calls and send you recaps via email. Browser extensions that improve your grammar as you type. This seamlessness is available in team tech too. It even comes in local flavours.
South Africa’s Savvy SaaS Surge
Take Jem for example, which bakes HR admin for frontline workers into WhatsApp.
90% of South Africa’s deskless employees don’t have email addresses. In printing payslips, timesheets, and announcements, HR departments generate over 1 billion pieces of paper annually and have to send these back and forth all around the country.
Jem brings this process into the pervasive daily digital home that is WhatsApp. HR teams keep their payroll systems and reclaim their time. Frontline employees get their essential info where it’s most convenient and unlock new benefits in the process.
Or consider Zuzo, which brings peer-driven recognition into MS Teams & Slack.
People want to feel valued at work and companies want this for their employees too. Yet in many teams, the day-to-day appreciation that colleagues have for one another is stifled by overly-formalised recognition programs. A fleeting feeling of gratitude for a coworker seldom survives a clunky submission process that’s subject to management’s approval.
Zuzo puts recognition in the place where teams already communicate and puts meaningful rewards in the pockets of those getting praised. This human-centric, rewarding approach sees monthly engagement rates of over 70%. That’s over two thirds of employees getting involved in recognition every month.
And there’s more good news. This high-engagement and intuitive usability is something you can find in most product categories if you know what you’re looking for. These products share underlying characteristics that you can filter for when searching for a new team tool that suits your needs.
Two Things to Look for When Picking Team Tech
#1 – Good Synergy with Existing Workflows
Ideally, you shouldn’t need anyone to download a new app. If your need pertains to communication, look for something that plugs into your current communication tool. Rather than another platform, look to introduce a marginal extra activity into an already-entrenched behaviour.
The upside:
- Avoids oversaturating your employees’ digital worlds. Less is more.
- Lowers perceived barriers around “learning to use a new tool”. Familiar is friendly.
- Minimises training needs. Simple is smooth.
A rule of thumb: Does the introduction of this tool make life easier or more delightful for my employees? If not, skip.
#2 – Usage Drives More Usage
New tools encounter resistance at the best of times. A powerful antidote to this is when a product becomes incrementally more valuable the more it gets used. This is known in Silicon Valley as the Network Effect and accounts for compounding growth of companies like AirBnB. More travellers looking for beds = more incentive for new hosts to join = more choice for travellers. And so on.
Look out for products where:
- Each extra user makes it more valuable. For example, a chat tool like Slack is more and more valuable with each additional colleague that can be reached through it.
- Each extra usage makes it more valuable. For example, a loyalty card where your discount grows with each swipe. Or a project management tool which gets better at helping you prioritise the more fully it contains your to-do list.
- Each extra usage drives visibility. For example, a plugin like Zuzo where each message of public appreciation in your team chat keeps recognition top-of-mind for others.
Rule of thumb: If I can get a core group of employees to use this tool, will that likely drive wider adoption and sustained usage among my team? If not, skip.
[Bonus] #3 – Specific Pain Point, Specific Solution
We all know the allure of the product that does it all. “It has all these other cool features”. It’s a trap.
Solve your problem thoroughly, not every problem superficially.
Closing Thoughts: Find the Invisible Software
If you can deeply satisfy even one of the above criteria, then you’re on course for success. This will only become more important as people’s digital worlds become increasingly saturated.
These considerations don’t replace the fundamental considerations of suitability: purpose-fit, budget-fit, reliability, and good support. However, with the basics in place, your winning solution will be tech that’s smooth to implement and sticky once used.
Your tools can be so good that they’re taken for granted. The tech is there, you just have to choose it.
