Skip to main content

Oho, Zoho Solo!

 Zoho hosted its usual Analyst Day to coincide with the annual Zoholics event in Austin TX. You’ll likely have seen the announcements already, as well as some analysis of them; I’d like to focus on one set. Zoho has opened up beta access to a set of apps that are specifically targeted to serve solopreneurs, small business owners in the making, freelancers, and similar individuals. Briefly, these apps include:


  • Zoho Start, which guides individuals through the process of launching a business;

  • Zoho Publish, a visibility tool to access listing services, maps, and feedback sites; 

  • Zoho Tables, a hybrid spreadsheet/app combining ease of use with team access; and

  • Zoho Solo, a mobile-only set of essential CRM and other business tools for solopreneurs.


On the one hand, this is very smart. The majority of solo/small businesses worldwide have a smartphone or tablet as their only computer, driven by the commonality of solopreneurs around the world, both in the developed and developing worlds. The figures Zoho quoted to us included 5 million new business launches in the US annually, more than 33 million existing small businesses, and 70 million people who consider themselves freelancers. By catering to this audience with apps and services that support them specifically, Zoho taps into a huge market that is not otherwise well served.


On the other hand, this approach is self-limiting. While we’re talking about majorities, the vast, vast majority of potential users will never grow beyond a one-person, one-device business, nor will they want to. The ones that do grow still aren’t likely to reach a level of revenue that will require a more extensive (and expensive) implementation of Zoho products. Freelancers in particular do not always fit well in the small business framework.


On the third hand (look, Austin has a reputation for being weird), it likely doesn’t matter. Zoho has a tendency to put products out into the world to see how they do, rather than focus on their immediate money making potential. It also generally acts as a good (private) corporate citizen, and does what is right as often as it does what is business savvy. Zoho Solo et al probably fits that description. It’s an investment in people, and in the future, and that is something Zoho has shown its willingness to do time and again.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Last Year's Top 5 Popular Posts

Don't mess with Zoho - A Zohoday 2022 recap

After spending two days in Austin, TX, attending the ZohoDay 2022, it is time for a little recap of this interesting event.  We were 99 analysts and 24 customers and plenty of knowledgeable Zoho personnel. The incredible Sandra Lo and her team organized the event around open and transparent communication. So, there was plenty of access for us to customers and the Zoho team.  Which was very important, as already the keynote session by founder and CEO Sridhar Vembu was quite hardcore. Vembu talked about how strategy and culture need to be one, how culture needs to be the root of strategy, and how Zoho implements this. The Zoho strategy lies on three main pillars ·       Transnational localism, a unique concept that in its essence is about embedding a company into a local community by not only selling into it but also by investing into it. This investment is e.g., by offering high paying jobs in areas where these are scarce, by fostering local education, but also by own local sourcing in
Post a Comment
Read more

How to tie CX to business success in three simple steps

In 2022, the Forrester CX Index dropped for the first time in years, with nearly twenty percent of US brands seeing a drop in customer experience. Towards the second half of 2022, an increasing number of companies fear a recession and put their spending under scrutiny. At the same time, companies still struggle to link CX projects to business outcomes and their metrics, let alone to financial metrics. In addition, Forrester predicts that also in the next few years, CX teams will lack critical design, data and journey skills. In parallel, there is an increasing number of companies that deliver software and/or services that are intended to help businesses improve their CX. In the past years, CX has established itself as a whole new category of software. Many a company has repositioned itself to become a CX vendor, examples including all major CRM vendors, but also call center specialists like Genesys. And, naturally, a good number of these new CX actors got – and get – acquired by bigge
Post a Comment
Read more

a great human - bot conversation with lots to learn

Inspired by a recent panel discussion as part of the In the Hot Seat podcast that I am involved in, I opened a chat with chatGPT3 . ChatGPT is a language model by OpenAI that interacts in a conversational way. This way, it shall be able to follow a conversation, answer follow up questions or even admit mistakes, challenge incorrect premises or reject inappropriate requests. Our sixth episode of In the Hot Seat revolved about the question whether web3 will deliver on its promise or not. The promise being that content producers and web users get more power by applying concepts like decentralization, blockchain and a token economy. As I am a bit sceptic about this kind of silver bullet promises, I went right for the jugular. A conversation between a human and a bot Thomas : Tell me with arguments why web3 based on blockchain will fail chatGPT3 : It's impossible for me to provide arguments as to why web3 based on blockchain will fail, as web3 is not based on blockchain technolo
Post a Comment
Read more

Truly Zoho - How capitalism and doing right coincide

The past 9 months have seen quite a rollercoaster in the tech industry. We have seen staggering profits, we continue to see stock buybacks, we have seen consolidation, mergers and acquisitions – and we have seen mass layoffs . Few of them were well handled or communicated. Even fewer showed any sign of executives taking accountability besides stating that they made mistakes during the pandemic and that they feel sorry for what they need to do now. They had simply over-hired and now need to take corrective action to stay on a ‘growth path’. One of these executives arguably took the prized company culture of regarding the employees as family to grave. What do these layoffs have in common? They were initiated to please the capital markets, i.e. shareholders and venture capitalists. The idea behind this is that layoffs is the fastest way to solve or avoid impending financial problems. However, there is mounting scientific evidence that this idea is a myth, as e.g., expressed here , here
Post a Comment
Read more

Beyond the hype - How to use chatGPT to create value

Now, that we are in the middle of – or hopefully closer to the end of – a general hype that was caused by Open AI’s ChatGPT, it is time to reemphasize on what is possible and what is not, what should be done and what not. It is time to look at business use cases that are beyond the hype and that can be tied to actual business outcomes and business value. This, especially, in the light of the probably most expensive demo ever, after Google Bard gave a factually wrong answer in its release demo. A factual error wiped more than $100bn US off Google’s valuation. I say this without any gloating. Still, this incident shows how high the stakes are when it comes to large language models, LLM. It also shows that businesses need to have a good and hard look at what problems they can meaningfully solve with their help. This includes quick wins as well as strategic solutions. From a business perspective, there are at least two dimensions to look at when assessing the usefulness of solutions that
Post a Comment
Read more