Introduction

In the past year Zoom has experienced absolutely explosive growth, despite the fact that it was seemingly redundant with other better known solutions, such as Skype, Google Meet, Discord, or Microsoft Teams. Why? While I can’t claim to know for certain, I believe there is a metric which can give us some insight into this explosive growth.

Setting the stage

It is March of 2020*, and due to COVID-19 it is now quite clear that almost all of your in person interactions now need to be conducted online. The people you need to reach are on a wide variety of software platforms, and you haven’t had time to arrange for a more typical online conferencing solution. You need to setup a web conference, and you need to do so with a minimum of fuss so you can keep working without interruption.

* _{The pandemic hit different parts of the world at different times. This is about when it properly became a problem in the United States.}

Enter Zoom

You spend what little time you have talking with other people about how they’ve solved this problem. Someone tells you about Zoom, you decide to give it a shot. You visit the site, and after logging in with Google or Facebook you’re presented with a form to setup your first meeting. Ah, this will work great, you need a solution now, and here it is on your screen. You fill out the form, and send out your invites to the meeting you just scheduled.

Meeting time

You’re used to having to fight computers to get them to do anything useful. Doubly so when you need to fight computers on behalf of all 20+ people you just invited to that meeting. You brace for impact, and expect to lose the first half of your meeting to a sudden need for technical support. The meeting time arrives… and things are fine. Everyone is in your meeting on time, and your meeting can continue without issue. A few people comment on how weird it is to be conducting this meeting on the computer, but things more or less continue as normal.

What happened?

You’re the inquisitive type, and you’re not content to just be pleasantly surprised. You want to know why that went off without a hitch. After the meeting you approach a few attendees that you quite frankly expected to have more problems, and ask them how their experience was with Zoom. They tell you that it was fine, they clicked the link you sent them, were immediately prompted to download the software, and after waiting a couple seconds, the software launched, with a button on screen to join the meeting. They clicked it, and then they started talking with you. No account creation, no lengthy install times, and no navigating complex menus to find where you need to put in a code. It was just ready to go.

Zero to Hero Time: The secret to Zoom’s success

How long it takes for a user with

• No prior knowledge or experience with the software
• No existing installation of the software

To accomplish

• Finding the software to install (N/A for web apps)
• Installing it (N/A for web apps)
• Setting up any necessary online accounts or profiles
• Navigating the menus to find what they want to do (Including tutorials)
• Waiting for the software to start doing it

One thing I’d like to get out of the way right now: this metric will not be useful to everyone. If you expect your users to be reasonably committed or simply have no viable alternative to using your software, then you might not care about this metric. However, if your target is as broad as “the general public” then this metric could be make or break for you.

Machines exist to serve people, and most people consider computers to be a nuisance, quite frankly. Anything they have to do to make the computer happy, which isn’t directly serving their desires, is wasted time. They might prefer to spend that time with competing software, or in some cases just not using software at all.

How can we cut back on this time?

You’ll need to look at your specific case to understand where most time is being spent on the path from Zero to Hero, however here are some broadly applicable suggestions.

• Do you really need to require your user to setup an account? Does that account need to have as much information as you’re requesting?
• Could the user setup an account later when they might be more compelled to continue engaging with your services?
• Can you piggyback off an account they might already have, such as Google or Facebook?
• Can your menus be optimized for speedy navigation?
• Can you use the surrounding context to avoid asking questions? Could you redesign your approach to make the surrounding context more informative?
• Those dependencies you’re asking users to install, do you really need them? Maybe it’d be pretty easy to inline your limited usage of them.
• Does your application take ages to install? It’s widely believed that 80% of your execution time is spent in 20% of the code. Can you prioritize installing that 20% first, and setup the other 80% while the user is using the software?

What’s a Zero?

You get to define some aspects of this, but generally speaking a Zero should represent a potential user. Someone you could imagine yourself giving a sales pitch to. If the overwhelming majority of potential users possess a given trait, you can assign that trait to your hypothetical Zero user. For example, almost everyone has a web browser installed, so it’s reasonable to say “has access to a web browser” is part of Zero.

What’s a Hero?

You also get to define some aspects of this, but generally speaking a Hero should represent a current user. Someone who is competently using the software for its intended purpose. It’s important to note that a Hero doesn’t need to be an expert with your software, they just need to be someone who feels like they’re getting value out of using your software.

Can you tell me about success stories from focusing on this metric?

Not yet. This blog post is the first time I’ve shared this idea with the world. I’d love to hear your feedback on this at kieseljake+zerotohero@gmail.com. Tell me what worked for you, and what didn’t work.