Thoughts on Meta/Facebook sunsetting 🌆 Workplace
🍿 It was, and still probably is, the best internal communication platform out there. Once you’ve had Workplace, It makes everything else (Teams, Slack, etc.) barely usable. Turns out Facebook groups, news feed, profile, and Messenger work just fine for companies/employees willing to build community, reduce distances in the organization, and create a culture where information travels fast. It was not a product for everyone, the investment had to come from the very top (some organisation precisely don't want to build community and reduce the distances), it takes a special kind of leadership to make take that leap of faith (in your employees/culture), but I still believe it gave a competitive advantage to our customers.
🔥 It's probably one of the biggest SaaS businesses built out of London, and an entire, large, cohort of GTM and Tech people has been trained to build for and sell to the enterprise market. Monster deals & mega-global-deployments. You'll find them today at some of the best SaaS companies out there (even sometimes starting their own, like Anna at Meander or Gabriel at Paper Run), from Pigment to Deel via Lumos. A goldmine for VCs & Angels.
🌍 It became an enterprise, Fortune 500-heavy, frontline-friendly business by accident. We thought only tech companies would use Workplace, until Clay Johnson, back then CIO of Walmart, told us he wanted Workplace for 100% of their employees (1.3 million back then). When the Fortune 1 calls, you listen and behave. Then we doubled down on this blue ocean of a market (frontline workers) that is still an obsession of mine, and started selling to CHROs ( not just CIOs). PMF was found in the most unexpected market/segment.
🏭 It's hard to do B2B when you come from B2C (see Microsoft vs. Google). The best SaaS companies out there are run by dictators who talk to customers every day and turn this into a roadmap and then ARR. It's a muscle that's not easy to build coming from the B2C world. You can't do enterprise SaaS as a side gig.
🤔 At our first proper review of Workplace, we had 0 customers, just a few beta testers and "a potential" pipeline. No one was proud, but somehow Zuck got excited by this and gave us more resources to keep going. When your mission is to make the world more open and connected, you might as well go and achieve it one company/deployment at a time. Ultimately, we did not manage back then to convince the Facebook LT to invest properly in the growth of Workplace, and honestly, it's on me.
⏳It's still the "year of efficiency," and as a loyal Facebook shareholder, I'm happy to see them focus on the core initiatives. There's a massive book of business to go and get there for hungry software entrepreneurs. There are 10M paying users looking for an alternative, right now.
#thejourneyisthereward 🙏🏼👍✊🏼
PS: If you're looking for Workplace alternatives, take a look at YOOBIC (for frontline employees) and Haystack
