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Zoom’s early growth was fuelled by seamless video meetings, but staying relevant required a bigger shift. By expanding beyond scheduled meetings into chat, phone, and whiteboarding, and by relentlessly removing friction from user workflows, Zoom embedded itself into daily collaboration routines. Through habit loops, emotional investment, and cross-surface engagement, Zoom transformed from a meeting tool into a living workplace environment sustaining over 450 million Monthly Active Users globally by 2025.
When Zoom launched in 2013, it didn’t promise innovation through flashy features or radical reinvention, its pitch was simple: video calls that actually worked.
In a world where WebEx dropped connections, Skype froze mid-sentence, and Hangouts tangled users in account permissions, Zoom’s promise of seamless, reliable meetings felt revolutionary. It wasn’t marketing magic. It was product execution.
By prioritising join speed, video quality, and minimal friction, Zoom captured millions of users who simply wanted a call without technical headaches. Early growth exploded, fuelled almost entirely by delighted users inviting others to meetings.
However, solving for video reliability was only the first act. As the market matured, new competitors entered the ring. Microsoft Teams bundled video into Office 365 accounts. Google Meet made joining calls one click from Gmail. The race for technical parity was on, and reliability alone was no longer a durable moat and with that Zoom risked becoming an app you opened once or twice a week, only for scheduled meetings. It risked fading into the background of daily work.
If Zoom remained just “where you go when a calendar invite demands it,” competitors offering bundled, daily-use platforms would erode user loyalty over time.
To grow Monthly Active Users sustainably, Zoom had to embed itself everywhere work happened. This meant being used not just during formal meetings, but in quick questions, spontaneous brainstorms, product updates, client calls, team huddles, and creative planning sessions.
Learn more about what defines a Monthly Active User
Zoom’s early success came from delivering an experience that was simply better: faster joins, clearer video, fewer headaches. But to sustain long-term growth and expand Monthly Active Users, Zoom needed to move beyond winning individual meetings.
Through understanding that meetings weren’t isolated events, but part of a much larger workflow of messaging, calling, brainstorming, and decision-making, Zoom outlined a strategy of needing to own the entire arc of workplace communication. By threading itself through all those moments, it could shift from being an occasional tool to a daily environment.
To accomplish this, Zoom built its strategy around three core pillars:
Zoom realised that most workplace communication doesn’t happen on a schedule, or in formal meetings. It happens organically: team members shoot a quick question, want to brainstorm solutions quickly, or make a fast decision.
In tackling this genuine user paintpoint, Zoom launched:
In doing this, Zoom created new daily reasons to open the app beyond calendar invites. In turn this had a direct Impact on Monthly Active Users:
Each of these micro-moments counted as a platform interaction which collectively multiplied monthly active touchpoints. Ultimately this led to Zoom expanding from a "once-a-day" app to a "dozens-of-times-a-day" hub, significantly increasing Monthly Active User counts through higher user frequency.
Understand how session frequency impacts Monthly Active Users
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Beyond launching three additional features, Zoom made launching any communication frictionless. A perfect showcase of the fewer the steps, the higher the usage.
Zoom made it easy to join links from calendar invites with just one-click, to join from a browser without needing to download or update an app. Zoom even made it a single click to schedule a meeting from within Google Calendar, Outlook, and even CRM platforms. For Product Managers, this is a prime example of the Fogg Behaviour Model, “The easier the action is, the more often it happens.”
Zoom realised early-on that friction points (downloads, long setup times, permissions) are silent killers of repeat behaviour. Through the ruthless elimination of friction Zoom achieved:
By lowering the threshold for action, Zoom increased session counts per user, thereby raising both DAU/MAU ratios and overall Monthly Active User retention.
The lesson is simple. When a product becomes the easiest way to do something users already need (communicate fast), they default to it.
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Expanding communication channels and removing friction brought users into Zoom more often. However, keeping them there required a deeper layer: investment.
Zoom designed its platform so that users were building something inside Zoom, and with every asset created, they were binding themselves closer to the product:
This wasn't accidental. It was a deliberate application of the Hook Model in product design. The more users built inside Zoom, the higher the emotional and practical switching cost became.
Critically for Monthly Active Users, it meant users weren’t tied to Zoom only by scheduled meetings anymore. They wanted to open Zoom because their work, their history, and their team’s momentum were anchored inside it.
By extending its reach beyond scheduled meetings, eliminating every ounce of friction, and turning daily interactions into invested behaviours, Zoom transformed itself from a tool people used because they had to into a platform people stayed inside because they wanted to.
Zoom’s strategic evolution wasn't about adding more features, but rather reshaping user behaviour by embedding Zoom deeper into daily routines, increasing frequency of use, and raising the stakes for switching away.
Zoom’s strategic shift from “scheduled meeting tool” to “daily collaboration hub” wasn’t just a defensive move. It unlocked massive, measurable growth in Monthly Active Users which helped Zoom sustain that growth even as the pandemic-driven surges stabilised.
The results tell a clear story of behaviour-driven expansion
Explore the full framework behind Monthly Active User growth strategies.
In its first five years, Zoom’s laser focus on seamless video meetings fuelled steady organic growth and by 2018, it had surpassed 700,000 business customers. Most of these users were acquired through product-led virality, not heavy marketing spend. However, usage was still tied primarily to formal meetings meaning Zoom was growing fast, but remained vulnerable to episodic engagement patterns.
The COVID-19 pandemic triggered an unprecedented shift toward remote work, and Zoom became a household name overnight. Meeting participants skyrocketed from 10 million in December 2019 to over 300 million by April 2020.
Yet internally, Zoom knew this hypergrowth wasn't guaranteed to last. To transform temporary users into long-term active users, it accelerated its multi-surface strategy launching Zoom Chat, expanding Zoom Phone adoption, and investing heavily in Zoom Whiteboard and app integrations.
Rather than treating the pandemic as a one-time boost, Zoom treated it as an opportunity to anchor users into daily workflows.
As offices reopened and hybrid work became the norm, Zoom’s usage naturally dipped from its 2020 peak, but it didn’t crash. Instead, the investments into everyday workflows paid off with Zoom reporting over 497,000 business customers with more than 10 employees by late 2021.
Zoom’s behaviour shift strategy worked and as of 2025, industry estimates placed Zoom’s core platform at over 450 million Monthly Active Users globally, across meetings, chat, phone, and events combined, maintaining strong growth well after the remote work surge cooled.
Zoom’s transformation wasn’t fuelled by ads, gimmicks, or one-off feature launches.
It was powered by a fundamental rewiring of user behaviour from attending meetings to living and collaborating inside Zoom every day. By embedding itself into every workflow, Zoom stayed essential.
Zoom’s path to sustained Monthly Active User growth wasn’t powered by luck, it was the result of deliberate product decisions designed to reshape user behaviour.
Learn why tracking Monthly Active Users is critical to product strategy.
For Product Managers looking to drive similar growth, Zoom’s journey offers three critical lessons:
Zoom systematically mapped out the moments before, between, and after formal calls, resulting in the launch of products like Zoom Chat, Zoom Phone, and Zoom Whiteboard to meet users there. By addressing spontaneous needs, Zoom multiplied daily touchpoints and deepened its relevance.
✅ Actionable Tip: Audit your user’s full workday and look for opportunities to naturally extend your product into adjacent tasks, reducing the gaps where users might leave your ecosystem for someone else’s.
Zoom understood that motivation is often fragile, and even minor obstacles like a download, a forgotten password, a clunky join process, can derail usage before it starts.
By removing every barrier to communication, Zoom increased spontaneous adoption, accelerated habit formation, and strengthened daily return rates.
✅ Actionable Tip: Treat friction as a silent killer of retention. Prioritise reducing time-to-value at every stage of the user journey, especially around core repeat actions like joining, sharing, or collaborating.
When Zoom expanded into Chat, Phone, and Whiteboard, it wove them tightly into the meeting experience letting users flow naturally from chatting to calling, or from discussing to brainstorming visually, without changing tools. This seamless bridge-building deepened usage without requiring users to rethink their workflows.
✅ Actionable Tip: Design every new feature with embedded discovery in mind. Where can users encounter your expansions without leaving their existing workflow? Features adopted inside natural contexts are far stickier than those introduced separately.
A Monthly Active User is someone who meaningfully engages with your product at least once within a 30-day period. For Zoom, that could mean joining or hosting a meeting, sending a message in Zoom Team Chat, making a Zoom Phone call, collaborating on a Zoom Whiteboard, or participating in a Zoom Webinar or Event.
🔍 Want the full breakdown?
Check out our full Monthly Active Users explainer here
Zoom defines MAUs based on active engagement, not passive access. A user is counted as active if they:
Simply opening the Zoom app without meaningful interaction typically doesn’t qualify.
Zoom’s focus is on capturing intentional collaboration, the real moments where users are communicating, sharing, and building inside the platform.
The biggest challenge was avoiding a return to episodic, scheduled-only usage.
By embedding itself into asynchronous work (chat, whiteboards) and synchronous communication (calls, meetings), Zoom diversified its use cases and maintained habitual engagement even as remote work normalised.
In a crowded market, users rarely tolerate clunky experiences. Zoom’s relentless focus on fast joins, seamless integrations, and low-effort adoption kept switching costs low for users while DAU/MAU ratios remained high, a vital competitive edge as the platform matured.
Zoom expanded into Chat, Phone, and Whiteboard carefully, integrating them naturally into the existing meeting flow. By making new tools discoverable at moments of need, not through disruptive prompts, Zoom kept adoption organic and prevented feature fatigue.
Building lasting user habits isn't easy, but it's possible. See how these leading tech companies designed products that drive daily engagement and Monthly Active User growth.
Duolingo didn’t grow to 113 million Monthly Active Users by adding more content, it grew by building habits. Using gamification like streaks, XP, and leaderboards, Duolingo made learning feel like progress. Structured around the Hooked Model, every lesson reinforced daily engagement, driving growth without relying on paid ads.
Read the full Duolingo case study
Slack’s growth came from product, not marketing. It activated teams, not just individuals, turning signups into viral loops. Unread messages, smart notifications, and deep integrations kept users engaged daily. By structuring itself around team behaviour and real-time collaboration, Slack scaled to over 79 million Monthly Active Users through usage alone.
Read the full Slack case study
Spotify’s growth wasn’t about the biggest music library, it was about personalisation. Features like Discover Weekly and Wrapped built habit loops, delivered variable rewards, and anchored users emotionally. By making every return feel uniquely personal, Spotify scaled from 75 million to 675 million Monthly Active Users through loyalty, not just content.
Read the full Spotify case study
Notion didn’t just build a tool, it built an ecosystem. Templates, creator communities, and user empowerment turned the blank page problem into a compounding growth flywheel. By aligning product and community strategy with behavioural models like Guided Mastery and Social Proof, Notion transformed engagement into lasting Monthly Active User growth.
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