This year’s Black Friday might not be a shopping bonanza. The problem? Too many early deals, according to Adobe Analytics.

With Amazon offering a second major Prime Day event this month — along with big sales from Walmart, Target, and other retailers — consumers just aren’t excited about standing in line overnight for post-Thanksgiving doorbusters. Adobe expects Black Friday revenue to increase only 1% from 2021, and PricewaterhouseCoopers cautions that 16% fewer consumers have Black Friday shopping plans this year than in 2020.

It also speaks to how thin family budgets are stretched now. Consumers will grab discounts in front of them immediately — and businesses still banking on delayed gratification might discover coal in their stockings.

Today’s Edition...

2022 Business.com Essentials: Read the picks.

Infographic: Customer service by the numbers.

Bonobos: Co-founder’s memoir of a startup and mental health challenges.

Announcing the 2022 Business.com Essentials

If you had to pick just three indispensable products or services that you would use to run your business during the zombie apocalypse, what would you choose?

Okay, maybe that question is a bit far-fetched. But seriously: What are the most important tech-enabled services for businesses?

To answer that question, business.com surveyed over 600 business owners and leaders across a variety of industries. The results were surprisingly broad, with nearly 350 different products and services represented. Here's a look at some of the most interesting trends that we uncovered during our analysis.

Big Tech Still Leads

Of the more than 1,800 responses we received, Microsoft’s suite of products (Excel, Word, Outlook, PowerPoint and so on) was the clear leader, with nearly a 20% share of the services named most essential. Google and its popular (and free) lineup received the second-largest number of responses, with 10% of the total. Intuit, the company behind the popular accounting software QuickBooks and other finance products, came in a close third.

A Highly Fragmented Market

Our analysis shows that companies have diverse needs, as evidenced by the “long tail” of smaller business technology products and services that dominated the results. Of the close to 350 individual companies and products named as essential by our respondents, fewer than 60 appeared more than three times. Over half of the survey's responses went to companies that, individually, accounted for 3% or less of the total.

Indispensable Categories

We found that a few areas emerged as particularly indispensable for businesses:

Financial management software, where QuickBooks was the overall top choice, received a large number of responses.
Payment technology also proved essential, with Square (56%) and PayPal (24%) commanding a leading share in the space.
In our brave new remote world, Zoom (40%) and Slack (23%) led the communications category, while Canva (44%) and Adobe Photoshop (35%) showed strength in design software.

An increasingly complex world requires a varied set of tools to meet the needs of individual companies. It seems clear from our data that the future of business productivity lies in a more specialized set of tools.

Customer Support by the Numbers

"Courteous treatment will make a customer a walking advertisement,” said James Cash Penney (y’know, J.C. Penney?). In the age of social media and inexpensive chatbots, that’s perhaps truer than ever. Here’s why your business can’t afford to treat customer support as an afterthought …

Burn Rate: Bonobos Co-Founder’s Memoir of a Startup and Mental Health Challenges

(Source: Pepsi)

Many CEO autobiographies are ghostwritten, sanitized, cookie-cutter collections of humblebrags disguised as advice. However, Bonobos co-founder and former CEO Andy Dunn’s Burn Rate: Launching a Startup and Losing My Mind often feels more like Kerouac or Kesey. Yes, it’s the story of an entrepreneur, but it’s also about one who is revealing his bipolar disorder.

“What my friends couldn’t be expected to notice about me, a 20-year-old kid in a state of psychedelic rapture, mesmerized by mountains and falling in love with a woman, doing mushrooms, laughing, drinking beer and smoking pot, and talking fast and thinking fast, was that I was beginning to climb a volcano,” Dunn writes. “This is how a manic episode starts.”

The book is an unvarnished (and sometimes jarring) personal discussion of mental health — and a necessary one. A 2021 study found that half of entrepreneurs “reported a personal mental health history” and a quarter more had family histories of such conditions.

Dunn’s book speaks to the relationship between creativity and disorder, as well as the importance of speaking about it. “Let’s, for everyone’s sake, stop pretending that it’s not here,” Dunn writes. “That we’re not here.”

Burn Rate is available now.