This story is about Zoom. Yes, the video conferencing app that most companies have adopted after the Covid 19 Pandemic forced most of the world to work from home.
In Dec 2019, Zoom had around 10 million daily meeting participants. Today, the number is around 300 million. In early Jan 2020, Zoom was worth 16 Billion US Dollars. In May 2021, it is worth around 90 Billion US Dollars!
So, what happened? Most people will say that Covid 19 happened and as a video conferencing company, Zoom got lucky and made a lot of money. But is that really true? Let’s explore this.
There are a lot of companies that have traditionally been the more popular video conferencing applications. However, none of the companies or their applications have benefited as greatly as Zoom did.
Let me explain a few reasons. Firstly, Zoom was one of the first video conferencing applications in the world that was smartphone friendly. In fact, the founder of Zoom was an employee at WebEx and quit to start Zoom because at that time WebEx did not see the point in making their application Smartphone friendly. This very step of going the extra mile differentiated Zoom from other applications and it quickly gained a lot of users. Of course, soon others followed.
Zoom also focused a lot on being user-friendly. Many of the other applications required the participants to be tech-savvy but Zoom was developed keeping non-tech savvy people in mind and even people with little skills could use it easily. Again, by going the extra mile, it became a favorite among users and started dominating the competition.
When Covid 19 happened and suddenly almost everyone was ordered to work from home, Zoom was already popular among the other apps. Therefore, many organizations quickly adopted the software as its user-friendliness made it easy in shifting from physical offices to virtual interaction, especially for non-tech savvy people.
But there is one final thing that it kept doing for years that completely changed the game! Zoom kept maintaining enough resources to accommodate a huge number of users. Furthermore, it had structured itself in ways in which it could scale up extremely quickly even more if there was suddenly a huge spike in users. Other companies had simply not thought about taking this extra step and assumed that growth would happen in accordance with usual market projections.
This one step led to the exponential growth of Zoom. Because they had planned for a scenario where they could scale very fast extremely quickly, when the opportunity arose, they were READY!
A lot of other apps could not adapt quickly to the massive demand and started experiencing major issues. So, even many companies that were using these apps switched to Zoom.
Even when Zoom did experience criticism due to certain flaws, it worked to resolve them quickly
Is there any wonder then, that the company has experienced exponential growth, both in terms of users and its market value? Of course, not.
Zoom achieved massive success because it positioned itself correctly and prepared YEARS in advance.
Zoom went the extra mile in every area. When others focused on desktops, Zoom focused on being smartphone-friendly. When others did not care to make using their apps simpler, Zoom put in extra effort and became among the most user-friendly apps. When others did not anticipate and prepare for future opportunities, Zoom prepared itself quietly to handle hundreds of millions of users!
So, did Zoom get lucky? Perhaps it did.
However, good luck happens when preparation meets opportunity. If you stay ready by putting in extra effort and preparing for opportunities daily, you won’t have to get ready when the opportunity arises! ALWAYS remember that!!