*You’ve spent time, money, and leveraged the help of many developers to build a new software product for a set of end-users; congrats! *
Your users love using your product, but in today’s world, they want to be able to work collaboratively with other people in real-time to have the benefit of multiple opinions, live feedback and guidance, brainstorming, and improving efficiency/productivity.
Do you hire more developers on the product team to build these social features from the ground up?
Do you rely on the users of your app to use existing social channels (Slack, Teams, etc.) to communicate and work with their team members?
These are real problems that real companies face that we will discuss in more depth below.
More generally, building a product (software) is no easy task. It takes several skilled developers (employees & money), many months of development (time), and extensive feedback cycles. And today it is paramount for these products to be collaborative. But in looking into the possibilities for making your product collaborative you face two distinct problems:
Building these tools from the ground up means you need to hire more engineers and spend more money, or you can reallocate your existing product team to this effort. This takes their focus away from cultivating the core product experience and the evolving needs of the users!
Expecting your users to use their existing communication channels means they will have to leave your app. It may take them time to return and refocus on the task at hand, known as context switching (more on that below). This substantially decreases user engagement and may at some point cause your users to search for alternative products that do have social features baked in… Which brings us to:
Cord
Cord’s simple API enables you to add Slack-like collaboration features like chat, presence, audio and video chat, screen recordings, co-browsing, and more directly to your product without having to build it yourself. This gives time back to your developers to focus on the core experience and feel of your product. Why waste time trying to perfect social tools that many companies have already mastered!?
Screenshot showing Cord’s integration with Typeform (Image Credits: Cord)
Context switching is an enormous problem for the global workforce. When we switch from one task or app to another, our brains may still be focusing on the previous task, resulting in attention residue and a cost that comes in the form of impaired focus. Benjamin Spall puts it nicely in tangible dollar terms in a post:
Context switching makes us less effective as workers, increases the number of mistakes we make, and, researchers have estimated, costs the global economy upwards of $450 billion annually.
There is a tangible monetary cost on the lack of productivity that context switching causes. Not only do we have a limitless number of methods through which to communicate with one another (Skype, Teams, Symphony, Slack, Google, Zoom, the list goes on…) but it feels like every day there is a new app promising to make you more productive, manage your workflows better, etc. The business productivity software space is certainly oversaturated. The last 12 months have seen countless names fundraise such as Miro, Loom, ClickUp, Lucid, Ment.io, but the notifications seem to never end! It begs the question, at what point does more optionality and apps actually hurt?
For Cord and for other companies I will look at down the line, I also want to spend time looking at potential risks. To do this, let’s look at one of Cord’s most prestigious customers as a case study, Typeform, a platform for surveys and forms.
Typeform uses Cord to enable its users to work together on creating, populating, and filling out surveys. Typeform users are likely employees of an organization, and this organization subscribes to some type of SMB / enterprise-grade business communication tool such as Slack, Skype, etc. It’s hard to imagine users get more value from Cord’s social tools built directly into Typeform compared to those they already have at their disposal with associated entitlements, integrations, and more. Typeform’s multiplayer experience may make it an easier product to use relative to competitors, but especially as business communication tools continue to improve, Cord’s collab tools may not be ~mission-critical~. Now that’s something to consider.
Cord is a really interesting API-based product that is getting funding from the same investors behind Notion, Slack, Figma, Canva, and Stripe. It will be interesting to see if development teams value pre-built collaborative tools or will prefer to build them on their own.
Hope you guys enjoyed this one. I want to end each Next Round post with a bit about what I’m up to recently.
This week I am taking vacation for my birthday to see some family in Miami and celebrate with some friends. Have been helping my grandmother reset all of her passwords for Facebook, Instacart, Bridge Online, and more. We need some funding in that space…
Lots of food and drinks to consume as I reflect on what it means to be 24.
Best,
GW
This time, last year celebrating the bday (a nice gin in hand :) )