Top Workplace Trends (September 2023)

In the crowded space of project management software, it's surprising to see a rapidly growing startup that has raised relatively little money and, most surprisingly, has spent practically $0 on paid marketing.

ClickUp's retention numbers are healthy too, with around 70% of the site's traffic accounted for by users logging into the tool.

The lifetime value for these tools is high given that once an influential employee or team starts using the product, the product spreads within the organization. And the more it spreads, the harder it is to switch, as employees spend time learning and much of the organization's work becomes closely tied to the software. As a result, the industry is in a race for customer acquisition. Companies like Asana, Monday, and Smartsheet spend as much as $15 for CPC search ads on phrases like "free project management software".

Competing against these companies, ClickUp has grown to over 50,000 teams purely organically. The company emphasizes that a large portion of signups are referrals.

In the first six months of 2019, ClickUp's site traffic more than doubled to 3M.

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. oVice is a game-like environment that helps remote companies emulate in-person work and casual serendipity.

Instead of logging in to a chat room, users control an avatar that can navigate a virtual room, and when they get close to another user's avatar, their voice gets louder, mimicking real life. 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 oVice, users can upload their own space design or choose from one of oVice's standard layouts. From there they 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. Users often choose cartoon avatars too which have more than one 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 analog, 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, oVice dodges this limitation.

oVice is one of several companies in this category. Among them all, oVice is one of the fastest growing: it just surpassed Gather Town in online search and discussion. 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."

​​The way we work is changing, and companies that provide services to the rising class of gig workers, freelancers, and remote employees play a key role in this shift.

Time tracking apps Clockify and TSheets are part of a wave of business tools designed to support the growing number of people who work remotely, as well as companies who rely on outsourced or freelance labor. The apps' users differ geographically — Clockify is more popular in Asia, South America, and Europe, while TSheets dominates in North America, Australia, and South Africa — but both have very high retention and continued use, each with over 80% of their traffic coming direct, rather than from other sources like search, social, or ads.

As more and better tools become available, they'll be part of a trend that has far-reaching implications on the economy and — as geographic proximity between workers and companies becomes less important — where we live.