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Logan Vantrease
We want to highlight the indisputable fact that Jeff Bezos has provided everyone with a serious favor. We think of Amazon as a digital one-stop-shop for everything we need, but they’re truly in the business of saving people time. How many hours a week does the average American save by shopping online?
The hours we save thanks to Amazon are ultimately spent on subjects and issues we believe are important. Whether that’s an extra afternoon diving into a challenging subject at work or a free evening to spend time with our children, Amazon has given us an opportunity to open our schedule.
These benefits don’t stop in our own households. They extend outside, as well.
Doctors, surgeons, and cancer researchers need to shop for clothes and groceries, too. Instead of waiting in that 10-person line at the store twice a week, they can spend extra time in the lab.
Farmers who work long hours don’t need to drive 30 minutes to the nearest store when Amazon can bring it to their doorstep. They can spend that time and gas money improving their farm and the health of livestock that ultimately appears on our dinner plates.
Teachers have an extra hour when they come home on Mondays because they don’t need to swing by Office Depot for out-of-pocket school supplies. Now your daughter’s teacher received a better night’s sleep and is less stressed come Tuesday morning when she stands in front of 30 screaming 6-year-olds.
Save an hour a week? Nice. Save an hour every week for a year? Even better. While Amazon didn’t invent time-savings, they have shown us that these compounding effects reach into our lives in unexpected ways. The people we rely on for other necessities also receive extra time to spend doing what they do best. This helps us, our communities, and our economy.
There is no longer a need to visit four different specialty stores if a single trip to Walmart offers everything you desire. Walmart sharpened this time-saving mindset in the 1990s, but Amazon certainly mastered it.
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We believe that every single prosperous modern company is in the same general business as Amazon (and not because they sell absolutely everything). There’s a common thread that links Silicon Valley unicorns and successful IPOs. Yes, they sell a particular product, integration, or software. However, their salespeople are successful because they sell customers on the idea of extra time.
Atlassian’s tagline is “helps teams work smarter and faster, together.” Instead of Amazon’s B2C approach to time-savings, this business model believes that streamlining organizational processes will offer valuable time-savings for businesses. Atlassian’s total revenue last year was $874 million.
If you’re familiar with the story of Ray Kroc, then you know that McDonald’s doesn’t make most of its money selling hamburgers. Instead, the majority of McDonald’s profit is realized through purchasing land and then leasing the property to franchisees. They might sell hamburgers as a means to own real estate, however, the real value of their business does not lie with land or McFlurries.
McDonald’s removes the need to prepare food in your kitchen and the need to do dishes. They save you 30 minutes waiting at your booth for food to be delivered. They offer their customers something invaluable – and that’s time. McDonald’s revolutionized this belief for the restaurant industry, however, this focus has existed within countless industries (and for innumerable eras).
We can look at Slack, Salesforce, DocuSign, Asana, GitHub, Shopify, Zoom, Airtable, Zapier – all of these companies perform different tasks to save your business time. Companies who use this software have a head start. Now, it takes them a single week to complete certain tasks. 5 years ago, those same tasks would’ve required a whole month of work.
Just like the examples listed above, we create solutions to save time – and that time compounds. Our JIRA Integration+ inserts JIRA tickets into a Slack channel of your choice. This reduces context switching, eliminates JIRA emails, and parses notifications so only important updates can distract you from the task at hand.
Let’s use Cloudera as an example. 3,000 of their global employees use our tool. On average, JIRA Integration+ saves most workers 1 to 1.5 hours a week (about 2.5 – 3.7% of their weekly schedule). Look at how these numbers compound.
3,000 employees x 50 weeks x 1 hour/week = 150,000 hours saved each year
At the risk of being reductionist, there are only two ways for a business to make more money.
With time-saving as our focus, our products help to reduce input costs. If the work completed : hours needed ratio rises, your employees are free to produce more work in the same given time period.
At Nextup.ai, we have put in the extra hours to help your team save time – no pun intended.
