Mapping Workplace Collaboration Startups

Choosing the right early core customer

Since only 3% of American workers in 2017 worked from home, there’s a huge, aspirational gap between today and the future of work.

The success of companies like Slack, Zoom, and Atlassian in challenging the dominance of Microsoft and Google’s productivity suites accounts for part of this interest, but the rise of remote and distributed teams is the most important secular shift driving the trend.

Developers in particular are also the bleeding edge of any company — people with a natural proclivity toward working as efficiently as possible, with little patience for subpar performance.

I’ve identified eight categories here: Messaging, Voice & Video, Calendar & Meetings, Documentation, Project Management, Design, Search & Context, and Low Code/No Code & Internal Tools. Companies across these categories share a melange of the same core customers: knowledge workers, remote and distributed teams, product development teams, and white ... See more

Zapier published a report on remote work which found that 74% of American knowledge workers would quit their jobs to work remotely.