What We’ve Learned — Quality Over Quantity

At Zoom, we are always striving to provide the best customer experience we can. Doing so means that we always strive for quality, and the Zoom App Marketplace is no different. As we continue to build our marketplace, we are continually learning the importance of providing a smaller subset of apps with higher quality than letting any app onto our marketplace.

We continually hear from our customers how they like that our marketplace doesn’t have a bunch of filler apps that they have to sort through to get to the ones that add value. We have learned that having standards, being picky, and not caving to outside pressures is the best way to provide a rock-solid and consistent experience for our customers. Let’s talk about that in more detail now.

Have Standards

As you grow a marketplace, you must decide early on the standards to which you will hold the apps in your marketplace. This has to be done early, and the standards must be clear. This is the bedrock for how your marketplace will function and how your approval process will go. We have found that having high standards and choosing quality over quantity leads to a marketplace that has meaningful solutions that add real value to our customers. Having clear standards allows you to do the following:

1. Deliver a consistent customer experience.
2. Provide a transparent and efficient approval process for developers.
3. Gives the team managing your marketplace autonomy and allows them to be confident in their decisions.

Be Picky

It’s okay to be picky. Being picky about the apps that make it into your marketplace is the essential way to make sure that your marketplace adds value. Having 5,000 apps might look good, but if only 10 of them provide real value, your customers will notice. We have learned that the last thing a customer wants is a dirty and cluttered marketplace. A cluttered marketplace causes confusion and leads to your customers, ultimately being frustrated with the extensibility of your platform.

Don’t Cave

Being picky and having standards means you are going to have to say no… a lot. This can be hard. It is especially hard in today’s fast-moving world where you may be getting priorities from external and internal sources. As you grow your marketplace, remember that you have already decided on the type of marketplace you want to have and have (hopefully) already defined the standards you wish the apps in your marketplace to adhere to. Regardless of the source of a priority, if it compromises the integrity of the standards you defined, stand your ground.

Time and time again, I see marketplaces fail because of this. They define their standards, but partnership agreements, internal priorities, and laziness compromise the ruleset and the entire marketplace suffers because of it. Those marketplaces that don’t cave into these pressures are the ones that see the most success, and we can say it is working for us, and our customers love our marketplace because it provides a great experience every time.

All in all, we have seen that with our marketplace adhering to our standards and choosing quality over quantity leads to the Zoom App Marketplace as a place where our customers can find apps that add value to their workflows. We are excited to share our journey with you as we grow and learn. Look out for our next article in the series next week!