Top Remote Work Trends of 2024

There’s a growing market for silent 1:1 video chats.

It’s called “body doubling” and it’s essentially “focussing-as-a-service”. Subscribers can buy slots to help them get their work done–like a modern accountability buddy.

The focus-as-a-service industry started out humbly, with Chrome extensions like BlockSite (>1M users) that would let users block distracting sites while they worked.

But in a world where companies hire thousands of engineers and data scientists to maximize user attention, simply blocking sites is no longer enough.

The space is being increasingly commercialized with sites like Focusmate.com which makes money by paring up strangers to work silently on video chat. And the platform takes things seriously: “If your partner goofs off during the session, you can report it using the reporting button on the appointment card in your dashboard.”...“If you are late, your account can be banned.”

The rise of remote work has increasingly highlighted one insight: co-working spaces are more than just real estate companies. As the office gets unbundled, there’s a rise in sites like Focusmate that bring back the missing component of accountability.

In parallel, the distribution of company sizes is falling: 14 years ago, for the first time ever, single-person businesses outpaced multi-person businesses in estimated formations. As the creator economy grows, and individuals increasingly work for themselves, it has become harder for many to maintain accountability and focus and the products and services that bring that part back will likely play a key role in the future.

When Steve Jobs was designing Pixar’s new headquarters, he famously designed the layout to make employees walk long distances to the nearest bathroom in an effort to increase collaboration, serendipitous meetings, and chance encounters. An office isn’t just a place where people work in isolation at desks or meet in conference rooms—it’s also the way they bump into each other between these tasks, which can lead to idea generation.

The first generation of remote work replacements for meetings involved video conferences. Usually, that means one person looking at a gallery of faces, which is an inaccurate reflection of how meetings work and doesn't do anything to recreate other aspects of in-person work, like casual chats in the breakroom or bumping into someone on the way to another meeting. Gather.town is a video chat service that tries to build casual serendipity into the interface.

Instead of logging in to a general chat, users control an avatar that can navigate a virtual room, and when they get close to another user's avatar, a video chat begins. While some workers enjoy remote work—a commute-free workday and a pajamas-based dress code have their benefits—many have discovered that there are aspects of in-person work they miss.

With Gather Town, since users can design the virtual space themselves, they can build and adjust it as needed. Users can test out their design and rearrange it as needed, giving them the job of an architect with the iteration speed of a software engineer. The cartoonish avatars have another benefit: they help avoid the "uncanny valley" phenomenon: some designs and digital art copy life so closely that the few flaws that remain are disconcerting, often in a way that’s hard to articulate. A software interface that looks like a real-world analogue, but doesn’t quite work like it, forces the user to put more effort into processing the metaphor. By keeping some interactions lo-fi and simple, Gather Town dodges this limitation.

Gather Town is one of several companies in this category. Another, Huddle, was founded by a former Uber engineer: he argues that he's still in the same business he was in at Uber, but that "the future of transportation is no transportation."

Loom, one of the most viral B2B products we've seen, lets team members communicate through instantly shareable videos that combine screen sharing and video chat recording. Racking up over a million users from around 20,000 companies in 2019 since launching in 2015, Loom is growing very quickly for a B2B product, even compared to the celebrated Slack which took 2 years to pass one million daily active users.

Loom solves a pain that many of us have felt, but one that has been hard to pinpoint - it's the previously missing communication form that's between writing an email and getting together for a face-to-face group meeting.

Part of Loom's magic is immediate uploading of the video while the user is still recording such that it's ready for sharing the second the user finishes. This makes sharing the message as frictionless as firing off a Slack message.

As with Instagram stories and similar communication mediums, it's becoming more commonplace to briefly hop on camera and this is beginning to transition into the workplace.

Whether they are in part the cause or in part the consequence, tools like Loom, Notion, and Slack all play into the rising bigger picture trend of remote work. In fact, many of the sites that drive large amounts of traffic to Loom are centered around remote work, like Upwork.