‘The direct integrations with Teams, Slack and Zoom are critical for bringing calls and meetings to the forefront of the Produce8 experience,’ says Joel Abramson, Produce8 CEO.

Joel Abramson and Produce8’s mission is to solve the productivity problem they see in the channel.

Vancouver, Canada-based Produce8 is a work analytics platform that allows MSPs to visualize calls, calendars and organizational metrics to maximize workday productivity and well-being.

“We’ve generated all of this incredible activity in the MSP space with MSPs doing all this great work for their end market customers,” Produce8 CEO Abramson told CRN. “But we discovered that there has been absolutely no productivity increase for all knowledge workers post 2008. In 2008, productivity peaked and has never again increased, and then at the onset of the pandemic we actually started to get less productive.”

There are about 11 million meetings taking place in America every day and a third of them are unproductive, estimating a $37 billion loss every year to unproductive meetings, according to a 2019 Business Insider article.

Further, 60 percent of an employee’s time is spent on work but not on skilled work. Globally, on an annual basis, the average knowledge worker spends 103 hours in unnecessary meetings, 209 hours on duplicative work and 352 hours talking about work, according to work management platform Asana.

With new features unveiled in April as well as integrations with Microsoft Teams, Slack and Zoom, Produce8 gives MSPs the ability to capture organizational metrics to measure the financial impact of time spent in calls and meetings.

“We are bringing this to MSPs to help them solve their productivity problem,” Abramson said. “And we’re bringing it through MSPs because every MSP on the planet has been asked about employee monitoring tools and productivity and none of them have ever been able to give [customers] a really great solution.”

The product also helps organizations understand what’s happening in their organization to support change initiatives and boost productivity.

“The direct integrations with Teams, Slack and Zoom are critical for bringing calls and meetings to the forefront of the Produce8 experience,” he said. “These major collaboration tool integrations really honors the MSP and allows them to have a business conversation with their execs and with their end customers.”

Produce8 was founded in 2021 and is backed by Top Down Ventures. The company initially raised $2 million from Top Down at the onset and an additional $8 million through various angel investors to build out the product, and their focus is on the channel.

“We’re bring something exciting in front of the customer that says, ‘I’m going to show you something transformative for your business that affects 75 percent of your costs with your labor, and it’s around productivity and meeting waste,” he said. “I’ve given you all these technologies and now I’m going to show you how they’re actually being used.’ We think that’s a really exciting and refreshing conversation for MSPs to have with their customers, as opposed to another fear around selling security or a tool that makes them slightly better but doesn’t really affect the end customer experience that much.

“This is the next horizon of what MSPs are doing for their customers,” he added. “We’ve taken them through the digital transformation, we’ve secured them and now we’re going to tackle the problem as to what actually happens with all this technology that we’ve given our people.”

CRN spoke with Abramson to further discuss MSP challenges, productivity woes and how Produce8 is solving a need in the market.

How do you differentiate yourself in the market?

It’s not monitoring. We built it from the ground up putting privacy controls in the end user’s hands. We wanted to build a product that allowed for people to share the data that they wanted to share and allowed the organizations who are paying for the licenses to aggregate the data in an anonymized fashion to understand what’s going on in the workday. Ultimately, it’s for the people to use this and understand what’s happening with their workday without the fear of Big Brother. The other thing is we’ve really taken this approach that micro changes over time can create big impact. Maybe it’s not about this massive productivity experiment using time blocking to try and get back 10 hours a week, it’s about awareness.

What is the company focused on this year?

This year is really about getting the MSPs to understand the scope of the problem and the costs associated with this lack of productivity. We finally started to monetize a lot of these things, so putting dollars next to app usage. I can look and see, ‘We’ve spent $1,000 or $2,000 of man hours utilizing that tool last week.’ But I can draw the assumption that we actually had created a bunch more productivity because we were using those products. Whereas if I see we spent $25,000 of labor in meetings but $16,000 of that was internal meetings, you start to ask yourself, ‘Do I need to be in this meeting? Am I an active contributor or can I just consume this information after and get that time back?’

These questions start to get put on the table when the data is all visible and there’s a dollar sign next to it. For MSPs, the number one thing we hear is, ‘We’ve got less output and we don’t know why. It’s not that our people are trying less hard or that our technology is eroding, it’s quite the opposite. We’re giving them all these great tools and we know we have the best people invested in our culture, why are we producing less?’ So we’re trying to really showcase that there’s a bunch of waste that gets created with meetings and collaboration and different productivity things that they can start to take action against and help give the time back to the people.

Would you say that’s your partners’ biggest pain point? Losing hours in the day and being less productive?

I think that it is. I think profitability is a big challenge for a lot of MSPs and I think tool overload is a challenge for MSPs. Just not knowing what people are doing to actually solve any of the problems that they’re faced with is a big problem. We’ll help you prove that when you change a PSA, you’re actually spending less time documenting and taking notes and things like that and spending more time solving problems. MSPs have a really tough time explaining the value of the services they provide to their end customers. When the next opportunity comes, we’re not in the greatest position to take advantage of it and continue to provide value even if we know it’s the right thing to do for our end customers. We’ve seen it with security, it’s been really hard for a lot of MSPs to cross the chasm to MSSP because their customer is like, ‘I’ve already given you all this money every month, aren’t you doing that for me already?’ That’s a challenge for them. We’re bring something exciting in front of the customer that says, ‘I’m going to show you something transformative for your business that affects 75 percent of your costs with your labor, and it’s around productivity and meeting waste. I’ve given you all these technologies and now I’m going to show you how they’re actually being used.’ We think that’s a really exciting and refreshing conversations for MSPs to have with their customers, as opposed to another fear around selling security or a tool that makes them slightly better but doesn’t really affect the end customer experience that much.

What is your biggest challenge?

Our biggest challenge is representative of the MSP’s challenge. We’re thinking of products and we’re building for the future of an industry and we’re trying to take them there. There’s a lot of steps in helping each local MSP mature their organization and progress their conversations inside all these SMBs to move along. We saw it with security, it took a long, long time for fixed-fee, standardized stacks to become the norm of the industry.

Productivity is declining and people…are not having good days despite all of the ecosystem of tools that we’ve given them. We think that the change can start tomorrow. Just like MSPs have a long road in educating their end customers, we feel that same challenge. We know this is the next wave of value MSPs are going to provide the end market and we’d love to get there faster.

Talk to me about your go-to-market strategy over the next 12 to 24 months to scale the business.

We’re from MSPs so we want to bring this to market through MSPs. It’s something that we’re super proud of because we know there’s some great innovation that starts in the channel. We see new technologies pop up every day and this is a transformative knowledge worker product that we’re proud to originate in the channel. We’re taking this to MSPs to use for themselves and in June we’re launching a full partner program for MSPs to bring to their customers. From there, we’ll continue to work with MSPs to ensure that this is the right product. We’re showcasing the right data and bringing AI into the platform to bring the coaching element for themselves to optimize their business for their customers and really create impact on that end. That’s a two-year journey. We will eventually bring this up market and create some of those more enterprise-direct relationships, but at this point we want to bring it through MSPs.

What more can you tell me about the upcoming partner program?

It will be a full partner enablement program complete with understanding how to bring this to end customers. It will have playbooks and impact plans where you can commit to the work that the partner needs to have done as well as the work the MSP will do to ensure that we’re actually seeing the results that we expect. This is a key part of any change initiative. It’s getting the product rolled out successfully but more so the underlying materials that make it successful. We’re excited to wrap our arms around MSPs and say, ‘This is how you’re going to make your customer successful with this product, this is how you’re going to impact 75 percent of your OpEx budget that goes to labor. This is how you’re going to ensure that your customers and employees are having great work days,’ and bring that positivity into their environment.

What message do you have for the MSP community about Produce8 going forward?

The next horizon of the MSP impact will be around productivity. It’s something I want every MSP to start thinking about beyond cybersecurity and managed IT where you can impact your customers. Start with yourselves. Start to understand everything that you’ve asked your MSP to use and do in their workday and think about how you can positively impact your team with some sort of focus and understanding around that. Then think about how we can start to impact the big market opportunity of SMBs and their use of technology.