User Review
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Today I’m excited to share something I’ve be working on since I joined Zoom to lead Product integrations. At our annual conference Zoomtopia, we launched Zapps — which enables 3rd party developers to create and distribute apps that enrich the Zoom experience and enhance the meeting workflow to increase productivity before, during and after a meeting.
Over 35 launch partners are building Zapps, including Asana, Atlassian, Box, Cameo, Coda, Coursera, Chorus, Docket, Dot Collector, Dropbox, Exer, Gong, Hubspot, Kahoot, Kaltura, LoomieLive, LucidSpark, Miro, Mural, PagerDuty, Pitch, Remix Labs, Rev, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Slack, Slido, Superhuman, SurveyMonkey, Thrive Global, Unsplash, Woven, Wrike, WW and Zendesk.
I wanted to take a moment and mark this occasion by sharing why I believe this is important. As avid readers know (all three of you), I’m a long time startup founder. These days consumer and SaaS startups need to ride platforms to win. And there’s some important details in how we designed Zapps that provide exactly what I’d look for in a platform as an entrepreneur.
A Flexible Canvas for the Full Meeting Workflow
Zapps are web views that run in the Zoom experience. This provides a flexible expressive canvas, with the ability to iterate faster. And we made it so they don’t just run in a Zoom Meeting or Webinar (which is in and of itself a feat), but in the Client Home. That means people can use it independently from meetings, and is critical for supporting the full meeting workflow — before, during and after.
App Store, Word of Mouth and Viral Distribution
Distribution is everything for app developers, and what makes for a great platform opportunity. We literally stuck an App Store where 300M people are paying attention each day — in Zoom meetings. Discovering Zapps can happen before, during or after a meeting. And especially during.
One of the key platform features is one click to Share a Zapp as a screen share in a meeting. This is perfect for using something like Pitch.com for a presentation. But it’s also word-of-mouth distribution where you show-and-tell.
You can also Send a Zapp. This actually sends a deep link to a page within the Zapp, so you can get your team on the same editable page in a meeting. And if they haven’t Added the Zapp yet, they do so on the fly, and then join everyone on that page. Sending works outside the meeting through chat notifications, so you can spread a Zapp across your network of contacts.
What’s Next
Our next step is to build and ship the first Zapps this year, and then open it up. Enabling developer to create new meeting experiences and enhance the meeting workflow will product apps the likes before we’ve never seen. And I believe this not just a platform opportunity, but a new model for SaaS distribution. Where apps are social objects — for discovery, adoption and engagement.
Today the world works on Zoom. And tomorrow it will be a platform that makes the world work better.
Disclaimer: opinions expressed here are my own.
(Cross-posted @ Medium | Ross Mayfield)
