As the novel coronavirus spreads around the world, many companies are asking their staff to work from home. The boom in working remotely may prove temporary — even if the trend behind it is not — but having more staff operating away from traditional offices is having an impact on the tools that many companies use to coordinate and communicate while apart.
Switching to a remote-work setup isn’t easy. Smartsheet’s Mark Mader told TechCrunch that the “challenge of remote work isn’t just about physical location,” continuing to say that it is “also about the need for people to feel connected and stay informed.” That means intelligent tooling, and smart workplaces norms and practices. (Mader also stressed low-code and no-code tooling as a possible way to empower remote workers).
The remote-work boom was recently highlighted in Zoom’s earnings report. Its results bested expectations, and in its earnings call, the company said that it was seeing rising demand for its product in the wake of COVID-19, even if most of that rising usage was for its free service. Zoom CEO Eric Yuan said that in light of the spread of the coronavirus, many companies had quickly come to understand the need for a tool like Zoom. The CEO added that he expects more companies to deploy remote work tooling like his video service in the future.
Zoom’s CFO Kelly Steckelberg added that while her company has seen an “uptick in usage,” it is mostly “on the free side.” Conversions to paid products, if they occur, are something we’ll learn about it in three months.
But Zoom is just one company among many that builds tools or provides services that can facilitate remote work. TechCrunch wanted to know if other, smaller companies are seeing similar usage gains, and, perhaps, revenue gains as well. During our coverage of the Zoom earnings cycle, TechCrunch asked startups building remote work friendly tooling to write in with what they were seeing in their analytics. Was usage rising? If so, where? A good number of companies, startups and the more mature alike wrote in.
All that in hand, let’s begin. This post collects and examines their reactions and notes. A thanks to HiveIO, Friday, FreeConferenceCall, Brandlive, Kentik, Bluescape, LogMeIn, and others for sharing data.
(Before we dive in, it is worth noting that companies we talked to were universally calm and polite about their business results; no one was beating their chest in a manner that we found off-putting. As we seek to understand the market as it is we must proceed with respect, but continue all the same. The companies listed in this piece did so with general good grace.)
Consumer uptick
According to HiveIO, a company that lets users access their computers virtually on a subscription plan, there is an “initial uptick of opportunities coming in.”
That’s a somewhat modest bit of data, but worth sharing as it indicates that not only products like Slack may see a possible boost in demand as remote work goes through a period of outsized popularity.
Friday, a SaaS product that claims to provide “easiest way to see what’s going on at work,” told TechCrunch that it is seeing “4x as many signups as before (this week vs last week).” Given that the service is designed to let teams collaborate and stay in touch, that sort of gain is notable. Friday went on to tell TechCrunch that municipalities in California are signing up. COVID-19 is currently spreading in California, with some cities declaring a state of emergency.
Turning to Brandlive, which told TechCrunch it builds “video communication software that’s used to host virtual events and large meetings,” says that it is has “seen a surge of interest given current travel restrictions.” Brandlive is a SaaS business based in Portland, OR, that has raised over $5 million to date.
According to Kentik’s Avi Freedman, “video conferencing and messaging across the internet have increased, particularly during normal 9-5 work hours, in correlation with coronavirus news.” Freedman added that this data point may “confirm the reports” that “more individuals in North America and Asia are working from home given companies’ precautionary measures.” Finally, the company shared that “since the start of the coronavirus, Kentik has seen roughly a 200% increase in video conferencing traffic during working hours in these regions.” That’s a lot!
Let’s add Bluescape to the mix. Based in San Carlos, according to Crunchbase, the company’s SaaS product is designed to help teams collaborate. Its bumpf says that its “secure virtual workspaces [can] unify your content and conversations in a shared, persistent space that can be accessed from any device or location.” After highlighting potential demand gains for certain services in light of COVID-19, the firm told TechCrunch that is itself seeing a “300% increase in customer demand.”
Tacking on another data point, Consolto told TechCrunch that since “the beginning of the Coronavirus” the company has seen demand for its video chat plugin grow by about 15%.
Finally, LogMeIn, the well-known remote desktop access company (sold to private equity for $4.3 billion just a few months ago), told TechCrunch that since “the beginning of February, LogMeIn has seen a spike in daily usage of GoToMeeting of nearly 20% worldwide, and in affected regions in China and Singapore, the company is seeing spikes in usage of 100 percent.”
I wanted to close on LogMeIn’s usage data as it’s a good preamble for our final set of figures.
FreeConferenceCall, country by country
TechCrunch got on the phone last night with FreeConferenceCall’s Bill Swain, the company’s VP of Marketing, to talk usage data. According to Swain, the company’s January to February usage gains have been huge in select countries. Here’s what the company shared with TechCrunch (month-over-month usage gains from January 2020 to February 2020):
- United States and United Kingdom: +6%
- India: Around +10%
- France and South Korea: +20%
- Italy: +170%
- China: +524%
- Hong Kong: +1576%
- Vietnam: +3836%
There’s a general trend towards countries more impacted seeing the most usage gains, which gut checks. For FreeConferenceCall, revenue follows usage (as with many software-powered companies). In some markets, the firm generates revenue from per-minute usage fees, along with other methods of driving income from its userbase like donations. It will be interesting to see what business impact the usage boom drives for the firm.
A new normal?
In time, things will return to a more normal state. The question on the mind of everyone building and financing startups constructing remote work tooling is what happens then? Does the demand boom dissipate? Or will we see a decline but at a new, higher usage plateau? If so, a host of software companies could see permanent gains as workers and companies alike shift towards a more remote friendly future.
As I write this from my own remote setup, I am certainly biased. There are huge advantages to both office work (internal relationship building, the anti-loneliness impacts, and more) and remote work (productivity gains for ICs, focus gains for everyone, etc.). I wonder if instead of seeing companies land on either extreme of the remote work dichotomy, we instead find a happy medium where offices are used by staffers as needed, with periods of remote work in between.
Whatever happens in a few months, it’s all systems go for companies helping other companies work remotely. More data when we have it.
