Fourth video call of the day, Thursday, and I caught myself watching my own face in the corner of the grid instead of listening. Eleven people on the call. Two of them talked. The rest of us arranged our expressions into something that resembled attention and waited for the hour to expire so we could go do the work the call was about.
Somebody said let's take it offline. Nobody took it offline.
I closed the laptop feeling like I had been through something, which is strange, because I had been sitting down the entire time.
Every widely shared, rarely discussed pain point is a positioning opportunity sitting in plain sight, and video call exhaustion is one of the largest available right now.
Here is the part that gets lost. Brands keep hunting for unmet needs in categories, in features, in demographic slices. Meanwhile there is a shared daily misery that almost every knowledge worker in America is experiencing and almost nobody is naming out loud, because complaining about meetings feels unserious. Unserious is exactly where the good positioning lives.
Consider what is now available to any brand that is not Zoom. You can position as the thing that does not require a camera. Basecamp built an entire identity on writing things down instead of gathering people in a room, and the identity is doing more commercial work than the feature set is. You can position as the thing that gives time back rather than filling it. You can position as audio only, which is half of why podcasts feel restful: nobody can see you, so nobody is performing.
The mechanics are simple enough. Find the exhaustion, name it plainly, and then be the relief. Not the solution, the relief. Those register differently.
What is striking is how few brands will do it, because naming a customer's exhaustion requires admitting the category caused it. Marketing has an allergy to that admission. Easier to sell better meetings than to sell fewer of them, even though fewer is what everybody wants.
Find the exhaustion, name it plainly, and then be the relief.
I would push this further. The next few years of workplace tools will be won by whoever is comfortable saying the quiet thing: most of this could have been a document. Whoever says it first owns it, and whoever says it second sounds derivative.
So go find the thing your customers apologize for being tired of. It is usually adjacent to what you sell. It is usually something your internal team complains about too.
Friday I went to karaoke instead of anything productive, sticky floor, host calling everybody baby, and sang two songs badly with total commitment. Forty people in a room, all of them looking at each other. No grid, no lag, nobody watching their own face. I slept great.