In this conversation with Drew Moffitt from Kumospace, we learn about they are powering virtual offices, workspaces and events. We discuss the future of work and what a move towards working in the metaverse might look like.
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Episode Transcript
Matthew Todd
My name is Matthew Todd, and welcome to Inside the scale up. This is the podcast for founders, executives in tech, looking to make an impact and learn from their peers in the tech business, we lift the lid on tech businesses, interview leaders and following their journey from startup to scale up and beyond covering everything from developing product market fit, funding and fundraising models to value proposition structure and growth marketing.
We learned from that journey so that you can understand how they really work, the failures, the success the lessons along the way, so that you can take their learnings and apply them within your own startup or scale up and join the ever growing list of high growth UK SAS businesses. Hey, welcome back to the podcast pleased today to be joined by Drew Moffitt from Kumospace. Great to have you here.
Drew Moffitt
I’m excited to chat with you. Thank you for having me on the show.
Matthew Todd
No worries, I’m looking forward to hearing more about Kumospace exactly what that is, what your involvement is, and how that came about. But obviously, you’re pretty experienced in the startup world as well and I wonder if you could just kick things off by giving people a little bit more background about yourself about your experience?
Drew Moffitt
Yeah. So I’ve been in the startup space for 10 plus years, I have helped builds now the seventh company. Initially, I had co founded two companies that had a mass exit. They spent three years building for corporate backed ventures for CEOs of public companies. Now most recently, I’m a very early employee at Kumospace. We’re now into almost two and a half years of operating the business. Yeah, we’ve raised over $24 million.
Matthew Todd
Nice, no, some impressive experience and history. I look forward to kind of digging into more of the details of that. But just to get us started, what is Kumospace?
Drew Moffitt
Yeah, so Kumospace is building software that replicates all the benefits of a physical office in a virtual environment. So that ability to have kind of presents more seamless, synchronous communication, knowing more about like, which team members are maybe in deep work or available to talk to you. Really just iterating faster, and being able to think about like a problem. That might be a blocker, and often you resort to doing like asynchronous communication of sending an email or Slack message. There’s just a lot of context, and it can lead to a lot of delays.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, so is this something designed to replace those tools or in part or in whole or something else to kind of sit on top?
Drew Moffitt
Yeah, so it’s definitely a strong replacement for zoom. We’re building a lot more functionality around the chat, use cases for that asynchronous communication. So ultimately, that could be used in a lot larger degree than maybe a full using Microsoft Teams, or Slack. It’s replicating that physical activity of saying, hey, Matthew is available right now, let me just walk over his desktop, tap him on the shoulder and like resolve this matter.
Whereas often in the remote world, what happens is you send a Slack message, and you’re like, is that really a green dot? That they’re available right now? Or are they like maybe walking their dog or like, you know, making lunch? Or what are they doing? Then you’re, you know, maybe you guys communicate, but it can’t be resolved in text based communication.
So then it’s let’s go find a time on mutual calendars and a day or two or three, whereas that could have maybe most of the communication when people use Kuhmo space, they find that they go from having 30 minute meetings, to having five to 10 minute meetings, and they tend to resolve things a lot faster.
Matthew Todd
I see that makes sense. So trying to replicate a lot of what you would see in you know, physical in person office environments, to the virtual world for remotes hybrid teams, then. When you joined Kumospace, and where was the business, the company at that time.
Drew Moffitt
It was about 45 days old. So the beta product launched in April started August of 2020 and I got involved in the middle of September. What they have found was a chat product or video chat product that works a lot better with groups. They were trying to figure out what the right market was, this was obviously 2020, the world was kind of locked down. So a lot of initial use cases centered around more group activities, like all hands, meetings, things of that nature, early on.
Matthew Todd
Given your experience before Kumospace and what was it that drew you to that product, that company to start with?
Drew Moffitt
Yeah, that’s a good question. So I have done a number of different businesses on different continents. The thing that just caught my attention right out of the gate, was the founding team seems really good. You have a software engineer, as the co founder and CEO, and the co founder and president is a serial entrepreneur and venture capitalist. So it just felt like a really good founding team. In the secondary piece of it was, they just made lack of a better expression. It was pretty feature like early on it was it was just almost like a widget and people were going using it. It just felt like there was something interesting there. But it wasn’t, we weren’t quite sure like what that thing was yet.
Matthew Todd
I see. So there were constant promising product signs, albeit on a pretty small feature sets are just starting to figure out exactly what that you know, where the product was, what the market might be for something as well.
Drew Moffitt
Yeah, that’s correct and a lot of that journey in the first year was focused on figuring out like, what is that market? So there’s a lot of users who wanted to, you know, as I said, they use the product in this like virtual events use case. Then that ultimately evolved as people started getting together physically, again, that evolved into this use case of remote teams wanting an always on like virtual environment where they could build that team crop camaraderie. That’s how we have been building that use case for the last about year now.
Matthew Todd
In those early days, was it pretty easy to find customers interested in? In trying that out? How did you approach that?
Drew Moffitt
You know, going back to my background, when I was building, the corporate back ventures, the basically the job I would have, I’d get parachuted into some part of the world, and be given a very simple mandate, like, build me, a developer ecosystem around the car, and I went to Detroit. I hadn’t worked in automotive before. But the thing that that you take away from that is, you develop the skill set of just let’s just try a lot of things. Then you get a good sense, like a gut sense of what indicators of success look like. So I applied that same thought process to Kumospace. That’s really when myself and the founders connected.
Initially, it was okay, let’s try to market to VCs, VCs, their portfolios are probably small, it’s a pandemic, they’re probably going to largely remain remote companies, they may have been started in a remote environment, if they were pretty new, in that moment, a lot of cold outreach to them. Turns out VCs are kind of busy, and didn’t want to distribute our products for us, and various other tactics similarly, so. But ultimately, we had this kind of converging forces from a lot of trial and error and we were able to realize that there was short form video content that was also paired with this growing common use of the word zoom fatigue and you have TikTok on the rise, where a lot of those creators didn’t quite know how valuable those views could be and the engagement issues are really high.
So I was able to test and then ultimately build an influencer and scale and influencer activity that just generated millions of impressions on the internet at a very low costs and that led to people and we still have like a lot of brand awareness because of that fact. So it was a really large tactic that carried us through a lot of 2021. Subsequently, we’ve been developing more additional tactics as well.
Matthew Todd
For that short form, video content for anyone else out there who may be starting to experiment that with that as well. What were some of the things that you found worked in terms of, you know, type of content or how you you went about structuring?
Drew Moffitt
Yeah, so my advice on it is when you think when you approach influencer marketing, it’s you’re more buying the audience. But the audience resonates with that person. Right? So it doesn’t feel natural. If you just try to interject something like you need that creator to be incorporating it in their activities. So one video that did like really well is there was this woman who makes videos, a lot of her video contents about her and her boyfriend. One of her videos that did really well was they did like a date night live in Canada. They went out to like a lake and had a little fireside thing, you know, built a little bonfire.
Well, she like replicated that video by doing this virtual date in Kumospace. That did extremely well because it resignated with her audience, if I showed up and said like, hey, why don’t you tell people how they can use this for their virtual corporate happy-hour? Like her audience wouldn’t resonate with that. So you want to always think you want to give a lot of creative freedom, whereas you may not do that and other kinds of ad or awareness tactics.
Matthew Todd
I see. So very much steered by the Creator that you’re working with letting them do something that their audience is used to, and they know is going to come across well.
Drew Moffitt
Yeah, you, you want to have a brief that obviously says, like mentioned your brand, highlight the product, use the product, but at the same time, you also want to, you want to give them a high degree of creative freedom. You really, there needs to be a high degree of authenticity coming from that content. Otherwise, you know, their audience will just be like, this doesn’t feel right to them. Like, this is clearly like an ad like, I’m not interested, I want to go back to watching their, like, normal, funny content or whatever they create.
Matthew Todd
As you started as then, you know, grow that, that customer base, then,you know, what are some of the things that that early audience was telling you about the product direction, you know, how are they helping you influence the, you know, both the features in the product, but also the, the kind of the positioning of the product as well.
Drew Moffitt
Since the CEO is a technical person, he really, you know, the the company is very much operated as there’s a product side of the house and this kind of like business side of the house, okay. And the nice thing about Kumospace, we’re a very flat organization.
So we tend to be quite autonomous, but you need to communicate, like, what people are engaging with the product, right, what customer success, you know, is seeing the questions and feedback. So we just built a lot of really good feedback from that side, right? People were saying, hey, we want recording function, we want more robust chat, or we want this broadcast feature. We expanded the product from as I said, initially, it was just like to have 10 people in a room with spatial audio walk around, and like pour a virtual drink.
I think even the virtual drink was something that had been suggested by a customer who had been doing a lot of virtual events and he was like, in a physical world, when you want to exit a conversation be like, Oh, I’m gonna go to the bar and get another drink. They can replicate that for me virtually and we’re like, oh, this is kind of a cute little widget. Now it’s, you know, millions and millions 10s of millions of virtual drinks have been consumed inside of Como spaces.
Matthew Todd
Interesting. And in terms of engagement with chemo space, then how, you know, it sounds like a very, very different model, you know, compared to the normal way people engage, as you mentioned before, you know, either a synchronous chat or on Zoom and the the issues you mentioned around zoom fatigue as well. So, when people are using Kumospace, how, how much time are they spending on platform?
Drew Moffitt
Yeah, so it’s kind of two ways the product gets used in a lot of 2021, when the world was locked down, it was typically larger formal events, all hands, all the way up to like large conferences, things of that nature. team building activities, the users who are primarily remote teams that are using Kumospace as an always on virtual office, their daily active usage is very much akin to slack. Right?
It’s always on it’s kind of in the background, that doesn’t mean that you’re sitting there with your camera always on, right, there’s statuses, there’s just your your, your little avatar in a space. That gives you context, and visibility to what your team is working on what you as a team member are working on, it allows, you know, both parties, both the employee and the employer want greater visibility. It’s why people like the physical office, it’s not about so much like are my people working? It’s as a manager, it’s like, how can I be helpful to my people, and as a person who is working remotely?
A lot of the indicate a lot of studies show that most remote workers are actually working harder and working more. But they’re like, am I actually getting equity? Am I Am I actually getting? Like, is that being perceived by management? Do I have the opportunity for kind of career development?
So that’s really the value that a lot of people get is just that visibility to collaborate quickly and kind of have contextual understanding to like, what’s going on right now. Like, is this person able to quickly talk to a problem with me? Oh, no, they’re in another meeting. Great. I’ll look for them later.
Matthew Todd
In terms of that kind of use case, then do you see Kuhmo space evolving to a point where, those existing collaboration tools are going to be displaced.
Drew Moffitt
I think, you know, that’s a, in a very nice world possibly. Yeah, I think there’s always the innovators dilemma. And if you know if you know the book, it’s a famous business book. But basically what it says is often companies that become large struggle to innovate again, the the most famous case study in there is Kodak.
So Kodak invented the digital camera, I believe in the late 70s was a depot sometime long, long before but the 90s when digital cameras became a thing, but they put it on a shelf, because they had a subscription business in the form of selling you film. So they’re like, we can’t actually put this product in market because we make so much revenue every month by people having to buy another film caster for their physical further for their film camera.
So it’s a similar thing and you see that kind of progression with just a lot of software and tools. So yes, there’s definitely a future where Kumospace could potentially make people replace both Slack and Zoom, I think a lot of companies that use us end up replacing their Zoom, using Kumospace as a replacement for their zoom.
Matthew Todd
I see. And in terms of the size of events and teams, then how, how big do these virtual environments get?
Drew Moffitt
Yes, so you can you build out a virtual floor, you can put like 50 offices in a single floor. So like have 50 team members on a floor, then you can have multiple floors. And just like a physical office, you know, there’s an elevator between the floors. We find that works pretty well, versus just kind of infinitely spreading horizontally. If you think about like, it wouldn’t make sense to have an office that was like a mile, one floor one mile, you know, moving around it.
So the numbers really based on you know, how big is your team, a lot of, and we do every one of our demos. So if you come in and you schedule a demo with Kumospace, you’ll arrive right in our, our Kumospace HQ. So people host all their external meetings with vendors, all of our contractors, etc.
So it depends on the organization. But if it’s a smaller organization, then it’s typically like the CEO, or leadership that is starting to use the product and then the whole team’s their larger organizations, it’s typically individual teams. So like a product team, or a marketing team, or a lot of customer support teams, because it’s helpful to have that collaboration of like, Do you know the answer to this customer’s question? Right? You have that very quick, synchronous communication.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, and I like what you were saying about the demo experience, you know, being a natural extension of the, the product as well. So it’s not that you’re getting on a Zoom call to show them the platform, the demo is in the platform, as wel. It’d interested to hear how effective you’ve found that as a way to acquire new customers and show them the value.
Drew Moffitt
Since Kumospace is a visual product, right and we’re on a podcast right now. Listeners are probably like, oh, what does that look like? It’s like, go to the website kumospace.com. Then you will see a video and right away, it’ll what I’m saying and describing will make like a lot of sense.
So for a sales demo, the best way to show the product is hey, you’re arriving in our virtual HQ and our team is mostly based in North America. So they operate mostly during North American timezone with some team members in Europe. So middle of the day, there’s 25, 30 people in our office, and to arrive there as someone saying, hey, I have a 20, 30 person company. I’d like to see, you know, this is what I’m thinking these are the challenges, these are the pain points I’m looking to solve. It’s like immediately showing it live in work.
Matthew Todd
I think that’s a really powerful environment to bring someone in, right, it’s not like you’re faking it, or showing them a particular view of it, you’re letting them see what you see in a very authentic way.
Drew Moffitt
Yeah, and within a couple of minutes, it’s very clear, like what the product is, whereas often, when you’re on a sales demo, you may have to be like explained and shown through the product, but it’s just kind of like lack of a better expression like describing a physical game. Right? If you’re playing like a card game, versus just playing one hand of it. It’s always so much easier to learn like a new game by just like, hey, let’s just play one round, and we’ll figure it out kind of thing versus like explaining the rules? It’s typically hard for people to like, visualize that.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, exactly. No, I can, I can imagine. You mentioned the, you know, some of the problems people are, are coming with the kind of cool, you know, cause them to book that demo in the first place. But what are the different kind of problem areas that you find the companies are having, nowadays, that, that cause them to seek out something like Kumospace.
Drew Moffitt
Typically, like three kind of buckets. So the first one is, we’re struggling with collaboration and we feel like our team is missing out on its full potential and that it just takes too long to iterate on things. Especially for smaller, early stage companies, that can really just be like a death blow to your business. So that’s a pretty strong pain point.
Another one is this visibility that I was describing before? It’s like, how is the me as a manager running a remote marketing team? How can I be helpful? Right, how and right now, obviously, we’re doing the podcast, but typically in the morning, it’s like, Hey, how’s your morning going? Anything you need for me? How can I be, you know, how can I help you anything that you’re blocked on right now, like, that’s a physical interaction, like expressing your availability, that happens in a physical office.
From an employee’s perspective, they’re like, Well, I want that access, I want that visibility, there’s so much metadata that you see in a physical office, and that you can see in Kuhmo space, for example, like, we can see, you can see our co founders talking about something like that, you know, that’s happening. And those type of understanding, makes you feel less isolated, and like less, you know, lacking on like, what is actually happening in the company. So that’s a visibility component.
Then the third one is more of this culture component, right? Like, our team is really productive. But our team doesn’t feel like they have any sense of bonding with one another. Especially like for 100%, remote company that maybe doesn’t engage in like a remote first, first, like organization or policy, where they like frequently, maybe every quarter bring people physically together. There’s just like, that lack of understanding, like my colleagues personality, because this environment is fully editable and it looks like a, you know, an actual office, you can decorate your office that like matches your personality, and you start getting to build those, there’s, there’s bonds that are less like tangible that just organically happen in a physical space.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, I can certainly see that across all those points. There’s, yeah, definitely some real pains that any kind of remote or hybrid company will be experiencing. Yeah, from from what you’ve described. Yeah, I want to give it a go myself and see it in action. But from what you’ve described, I can see how it’s a very, very different and what sounds like very engaging, and something that’s a lot closer to that real world environment. But then you get the advantage of allowing people to work remotely from wherever they are, as well. But with a product that is so very different to what is out there at the moment. How do you go about finding those customers and with those pain points? How much education are you having to do about the possibilities that people may not be aware of?
Drew Moffitt
Yeah, so I was describing a lot of our early on marketing efforts of just kind of getting the word out there, there was an alternative to Zoom. Now that we’ve, you know, we have that tactic as a use to acquire users. A lot of the focus has been more recently been around organic search. We are coming category creating right now, right, you could think about Slack, for example, back in 2013. There’s a memo that the CEO wrote, and there’s a line in there he goes, noone is searching for group productivity chat. That sort of the same thing right now, virtual office software is a search topic. But it’s more about putting yourself in the shoes of that manager that like culture, HR person, that employee who feels isolated, like what are the things that they’re going to Google and Bing and searching for, and putting out content in that regard?
Matthew Todd
Yeah, absolutely. I like what you were saying about category creation, something I’m a very big proponent of, as well, I think there’s always the dilemma that many people have when they attempted or we are innovating, we are differentiating, but you’ve got to have kind of one foot on that side of things. But you’ve also got to be willing to meet people where they are in order to move them towards where you want to be.
Drew Moffitt
So that’s the you’re very right about like the education component. So we do very well in branded search. We do very well in the virtual office related virtual workspace related keyword search, but it’s also about like, how to run an effective meeting. How to do team building activities how to run a virtual, like happy hour, how to effectively manage a remote team, how to, you know, do all these things that I’ve described? Then that starts really opening up your total search TAM? Yeah, and that’s, we’re always learning from our customers, we’re always trying to speak to our customers. You know, one of the things that we definitely pride ourselves is trying to give really good customer support. That we view as a knowledge building activity.
So when we were building out a lot, we were discovering that a lot of users were starting to use this as this always on Virtual Office product in early 2022, and if 2021, as the world came back more towards normal, we were like, let’s just start really, let’s find a pool of users who want to get maybe a more buggy version of Kumospace, and like, let’s let them just data access to all the stuff that we’re building. Based on feedback we’d already gotten, and just really iterating on that.
So you just need to really listen to the customer, especially at the price point that the Kumospace is at its, you know, free for, you know, very small teams. And then it’s, you know, five to $8.05 to $10, depending on kind of how you’re buying the product for medium sized teams, and then there’s obvious enterprise solutions with like, single sign on. But that’s really a you need to build a product lead growth kind of people are going to use this product. It’s not an enterprise sales cycle type product.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, I can see, it’s definitely something that lends itself to that product lead approach, because as you say, right from the beginning of that sales process, you’re engaging them with the product, letting them experience the products, and then we’re those kind of small team offerings that are able to, you know, see how it works, and then then scale up as they as they start to see benefit.
Drew Moffitt
Yeah, it’s really cool the things that people tell us. For example, a recent feedback call with our CEO, that he shared a lot of feedback, one of the coolest things that this person had said is they run a customer service business. So focus is on providing customer service on behalf of other companies. This historically is like a super high churn business. And historically, is also a non less physical business, right? Typically, the company that’s providing this service is not in the same geography as the company that’s purchasing the service.
So it’s a high turnover employee business and what he was saying, as the CEO was saying to our CEO, is that his retention of employees has gone drastically up since they’ve adopted Kumospace. That just speaks so well, to these like three kinds of pain points, I was saying around like, the management can have visibility and can help employees learn and do a better job of supporting the clients customers and they’re also like building bonds with one another. So you feel like as an employee, you have a relation or better relationship with your colleagues and you have the equity of like being able to advance or like get better at your skills?
Matthew Todd
Yeah, I think that’s really interesting to add to the conversation on the future of work, at the moment, I know, of quite a few high profile business owners that are basically mandating a certain amount of in office time for all of their employees. On the basis of maintaining company culture, I think they are scared of remote environments where people may view their work, either purely in terms of the set of skills that they’ve got, so their work then becomes reduced to a set of tasks that they can do, whether that’s marketing, web development, design, whatever it may be and I think some of them are concerned that well, if that was just that all they’re doing is a list of tasks.
They could do that list of tasks for me, or they could do it for someone else. It is just about where they can get the bestsalary in that case, right if company culture is removed from it, but it sounds like with what you’re talking about, you’re able to bring that back to the world of remote working.
Drew Moffitt
Yes, you get those benefits of a physical office. I think organizations need to pick an organizational strategy right now there’s arguably about six, I think it’s going to get compressed. So you’ve got four versions of hybrid, you’ve got office first, hybrid, you’ve got fixed schedule hybrid, you’ve got flexible hybrid, and you’ve got remote first hybrid, often is referred to as remote first.
Then the other two is like 100%, in office 100%, remote, I think increasingly, the hybrid is going to kind of one of those definitions of hybrid is going to win out. I think for certain organizations, there is like, people, certain people really love in person work like, so those companies are going to attract that type of person, that who want to do in person, there’s also a lot of companies who want to have a more remote first or fully remote kind of workforce.
So, you know, we’re not saying that our product is going to be for everyone. But I definitely think there’s a big bucket of the category that is going to focus on this remote. But that doesn’t mean that your company culture or visibility, or kind of understanding and making people be better at their jobs should be thrown out the door. Like there’s great degrees of freedom that remote work brings about, but it doesn’t, it shouldn’t come at some some high level sacrifice.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, absolutely. I think it definitely shouldn’t be and I think you’re right, it’s not for every type of company, it’s not for everyone, but I think so many businesses can get value out of hybrid or, or fully remote environments, you know, the issues around geography and access to the right kind of talent, you know, can go away. If you then are able to remove a lot of those negatives that can happen with such a distributed workforce through, you know, new platform and software, like who most folks I think that’s only got to be a positive, you know, value adding thing for many types of companies.
Drew Moffitt
Yeah, I think, increasingly, a lot of organizations are going to go more of that remote route, I think there’s a lot of just forced factors that are even just external to business, if you look at the investments that a lot of countries are making, there’s organizations that are called like destination marketing organizations, which if you are ever turn on the TV, and it’s like, hey, come to Spain and come to or come to Greece, right? That’s a destination marketing company, its economic development activity done by those countries.
But there are a lot of countries that are heavy tourist destinations. I know, Portugal, for example, in the European Union, they are, and in Central and South America a lot in the United States are giving out these digital nomad visas, you basically can’t come here in perpetuity to our country, and work as a remote worker for a an external company. So as that freedom kind of continues to be more popular from a visa perspective, I just think there’s going to be so much more draw towards people wanting to work in that way.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s going to be a real enabler for for this type of working becoming a lot more accessible, more popular. And,you know, I hear about many companies, you know, started to consider or revise elements of their employment contracts as well, to actually, you know, state that you can work from any country or if there are restrictions needed because of timezone things and commitments to you know, client calls, all those kinds of things.
But companies are starting to think about this now and bake in a degree of flexibility around rules and constraints that they got into their contracts as well. So I think it’s going to be really interesting to see how things like that develop.
Drew Moffitt
I tend to be a quite impatient person, but I think like human nature, especially in the the internet connectivity and world of social media, like we instantly want to declare a winner. Right? And then it’s like a Twitter debate, because when there hasn’t yet been declared. The reality is that there’s a lot of inertia against having an instant winner declared in the in the space like you were mentioning contracts, right? The employment con contracts are gonna take a while to evolve in either way, like we’re a hybrid organization, this is what our hybrid employment contracts work or looks like. We’re in in portion, this is what it looks like what most probably today look like and we’re more remote first or 100% remote, that is going to look different.
So you need to kind of develop that you also have a lot of larger companies, they just are hot committed to physical office because or at least using it in a hybrid setting, because they are not signing like one year leases, like we do in residential like to rent your house or your apartment or house. They’re signing 5, 10, 15 year leases. So these were signed before kind of the pandemic and those larger organizations, the combination of you know, legal compliance and real estate really make it that migration shift a lot harder. I think the CEO of Airbnb put it really well, when he announced remote first, he was like, several decades earlier, Silicon Valley cut down all the cubicle walls, cut down the office of private offices, and went open concept. And there was just a lot of like, wow, that’s, that’s a bad idea, or Oh, my God, I love this on both sides of that coin. It wasn’t a decision, the the outcome of that ended up being more of the open concept. But it wasn’t decided immediately, it took over a decade to really start seeing that fundamental shift, make its way through most of the corporate like business world.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, I remember a lot of conversations about that, and have indeed been in sight of some organizations that were definitely on the slower side of those to adapt to people’s expectations around their working environment, as well. So you’re right, especially for those, you know, bigger corporations that have been working the way they work for a long time, your changes, slow, but then with, you know, the startup ecosystem, and everything else, as well. And internet connectivity being so good. I think it certainly does accelerate a lot of of times of change these days as well.
Drew Moffitt
Yeah, I think the the original definition of remote work was telecommuting. It bubbled up in the I think the late 80s, early 90s, when you started having fax machines, and the very nascent early versions of the internet with electronic communication, that was more real time.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, absolutely. I think I even quite recently came across someone that actually listed their fax number, I’ve got no idea whether anyone’s tried using that for quite a few years. But you know, I was half tempted to give it a go just to see what happens.
Drew Moffitt
See what it returned, maybe it’s a joke. Maybe it like sends you back a funny meme?
Matthew Todd
Yeah, so on the subject or kind of an evolving technology, then obviously, you’ve got other companies as well, like, you know, was Facebook now meta, you know, pushing their vision and category design for the metaverse and what they want that to look like and I know there’s certainly I’ve been seeing a lot more ads recently around kind of the VR type work environments as as well that they seem to be kind of teasing more than actually, you know, putting into practice. But I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on what what they’re trying to look at as well.
Drew Moffitt
Yeah, so you know, some customers refer to us as like the cheap man’s metaverse. That really is a pretty accurate description, right? You just like we’re doing this, this recording right now, using a web browser to actually run through Kumospace, we have a desktop app, really near term or launching mobile apps, but you can just access it with any web browser.
So you don’t need a $1,500 Oculus Pro headset. You don’t have that like visual draining nature. I think there is a future where this type of things that meta the meta is building or trying to build will ultimately be some version of the future.
The question for me is like when is that and it feels like it’s it’s a really cool product to use for say playing like a video game. But for work applications, it just feels way too and like heavy. Like the physical hardware is heavy on you. The the use of the product can be physically draining on you, you need something that’s very light. And it doesn’t impede productivity at the cost of better collaboration or better communication. I was describing the innovators dilemma earlier and I think if you look at a future where there’s a world where a Slack and Zooms maybe gets usurped by product, like a virtual office software product, which ultimately gets usurped by something that is a true, very lightweight, easy, it’s, you know, no, no draining this to it, AR or VR type product, but I think there’s probably a middle ground and I think that middle ground is going to be virtual office software.
Matthew Todd
That makes a lot of sense. It’s like, 3d TVs, right. But a whole 10 times worse, almost. Oh, it’s a cool idea. Oh, that looks nice. You know, I’ll stick the goggles on track for five minutes. Oh, wow. That’s really cool. And then no one ever went back to it because of those problems that you you mentioned. Right? You You got to physically do that is it’s heavy, it’s gonna be uncomfortable after a while.
Drew Moffitt
It’s it looks very weird when when you don’t have the goggles on, because you’re you’re seeing right and left. So the colors are like there’s basically weird shadows on on everything you’re looking at, in practically to us. That’s a great example.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, it’s technically possible. But just because it’s totally possible doesn’t mean it’s, it’s going to be an improvement on the experience that that people have. And yeah, with Kumospace, like, you know, desktop, other platforms as well, I think it makes a lot of sense that it’s something that integrates with the way that people are using technology, yet it is still portable, in its own right, compared to as you say, you know, having to bolt on a very expensive and very heavy headset is is not going to be accessible. I don’t see that changing anytime soon. I don’t think.
Drew Moffitt
Yeah, I think we’re speaking about the digital nomads and digital nomad visas. For example, in South America, Central America, they tend, you know, there’s tend to be like warmer climates. I can’t imagine trying to sit outside for eight hours with an Oculus headset, just like the sweat stains on your skin from that would be unpleasant.
Matthew Todd
No one’s gonna be posting on Instagram, saying that they’re working on the beach with a headset on for, you know, eight hours a day, are they?
Drew Moffitt
Yeah, they would have some weird Tad’s or something like that. But sitting outside with your laptop is like a very normal activity.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, absolutely. 100% agree. I think it’s definitely gonna be interesting to see how that that whole virtual office space evolves. I’ll certainly be interested to see how Kuhmo space evolves, you know, along that journey, as well. But, you know, for other other founders, other people working in in startups and scales listening in with your experience.
Just before we wrap up, I’d love to hear, you know, any kind of advice that you would you would give them, you know, around some of the areas that we’ve we’ve talked to whether that’s kind of acquiring customers or, or on the category, definition side of things. But yeah, any other advice you want to leave our kind of audience with?
Drew Moffitt
You want to balance what you’re trying to do with where the product is. But you also need to set clear, reachable goals.
Drew Moffitt
Yeah, I think, a parting piece of advice. It’s December, when we’re recording this right now. So you’re ahead planning is top of mind for me, I think you balance and goal settings would be the two things, right? So you want to balance what you’re trying to do with where the product is like what the newer product improvements might be. But you also need to set like clear, reachable goals. Something that often I’ve struggled with, I’ve gotten a lot better with is prioritization. Right?
So it’s like, here’s 100 ways that we could market our product. But let’s prioritize the three that we’re going to run out this quarter and there’s maybe one or two ongoing efforts that you’re engaged in. And here are pretty whether you’re using like an l like level 10 type management practice or like an OKRs type management practice. And just have, here’s the three goals that roll that roll into that and then if you’re the CEO, it’s how do Drew’s three or four or two OKRs roll into the company wide two to four OKRs and just really kind of flushing that out, really helps, especially as the team goes from, you know, five or 10 people to 30, 40 people to really keep that same degree of momentum happening. The balance here is you don’t want to overly plan you want to have gone through this exercise with the understanding that the exercise is not going to be a perfect predictor of the future and perfectly right.
Matthew Todd
Great advice, I thinksomething like that to enable you to have that clarity of focus could help a lot of people, because you’re right, there’s typically 100 different ways that you might think of or see other successfully marketing their products, I think you’ve got to bear in mind what is appropriate for the stage that your startup or business is at. I think, you know, even with that shorter list, you’ve then got to decide on the ones that you want to commit to for a period of time and not lose focus, because there’s likely, you know, multiple subsets of that list that would work if you gave them appropriate focus and just because someone else is making one strategy work doesn’t mean you can’t work make a different strategy work. But if you try and do both, and you’re not going to be fully there with them off very well at all.
Drew Moffitt
Exactly. And that’s tough. The prioritization thing, getting that skill set really refined, takes some time, it just takes doing it a bunch. But then it’s very clear to say like, why I think this is why I’m why this is number one, why that’s number two and why that one is in the we aren’t doing this quarter or this year category.
Matthew Todd
Thank you for sharing that as well as sharing the Kumospace journey and, and thoughts on, you know, bringing that to market and how you’ve approached that as well as sharing the thoughts on the future of work as well. I think many people listening will get a lot out of this conversation and encourage them to, you know, try and apply some of the advice that that we’ve talked to today and also encourage anyone to check out Kumospace as well. Thank you for joining me on this episode of Inside the ScaleUp. Remember for the show notes and in depth resources from today’s guest. You can find these on the website insidethescaleup.com can also leave feedback on today’s episode, as well as suggest guests and companies you’d like to hear from. Thank you for listening.