Zoom zoom!
06.15.2020 - Today's market sizing exercise
Hello Case Dojo,
… Ok zoomer, you know the drill. Good luck and have fun!
Reminders
Spell out your thinking process, state your assumptions, and evaluate your final answer. There are many valid approaches to each problem.
No calculators are allowed, so make the math easy for yourself.
Try to come to an answer within 3-4 minutes at the longest (here’s a timer).
Today’s Question
How many US Zoom calls are there per week during the COVID-19 outbreak?
Our sample answer
How we broke things down
Let's split this problem into social and business calls. For each, we'll calculate the total number of calls and multiply by the Zoom market share in each segment.
Business calls: Let's calculate the size of the workforce and estimate the percentage that uses Zoom, then figure out how many weekly callers there are based on how many calls per week a person is involved in. We divide the number of total call participants by the average size of a business call to get the actual number of business video calls.
Social calls: We first split the population into age buckets and estimate weekly calls per segment. Then we multiply by the number of people in each segment to get the total number of social call participants and finally we divide by the average size of a social call to get the actual number of social video calls.
At the end, we multiply the number of calls by market share and add to get our total for US zoom calls. This one’s a doozy so pay attention.
Assumptions we made
US population = 320M
Labor force = 1/2 US population
20% of workers use Zoom regularly
Remote workers average of 15 calls per week (3 per workday)
US population can be evenly split in age buckets (0-20), (20-40), (40-60), (60+)
People in the respective age buckets have 8, 4, 1, and 0.25 video calls per week.
On average, business calls are 10 people and social calls are 5 people.
Zoom has 60% market share for business calls and 5% for social calls.
Our evaluation
We arrived at approximately 40M Zoom calls per week. This feels like an underestimate. We probably underestimated the number of workers who use Zoom and the number of Zoom calls per week these workers attend. We also likely underestimated the social use of Zoom and video calling in general.
Other potential approaches we like
Estimate by the number of people directly instead of splitting into business and social.
Segment businesses by size or function to estimate calls per week.
Actual answer
No idea. Maybe one day Eric Yuan will read this post and let us know how close we got.
Extras
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🤠 Fun Fact
Zoom CEO Eric Yuan makes less than one business trip per year — he prefers video conferences.
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