SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Claap Is a More Feature Rich Loom for Product Managers, $3m Raised on $17.5m Post Money Valuation
02 Sep 2021
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
So we are still pre-op new, we launched the private beta actually like around like one month ago and right now it's really like close private beta and we have like around maybe I would say like monthly active user around like 100 monthly active user. You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom.
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Hey folks, my guest today is Pierre Tuzov. He's the co-founder of Clap. He's currently building the future of asynchronous communication and they work from anywhere world. He started his career at L'Oreal where he learned how the best brands become and remain world-renowned leaders.
Before Clap, he was VP of marketing at 360 Learning, an organization famous for its meeting limitation policies, where he helped the company grow from 25 to over 200 people and more than $30 million in ARR. Pierre, are you ready to take us to the top? Yeah. All right. Did you get any equity at 360 learning as VP of marketing or no? Yes, I got some.
It's funny because right now I have the opportunity to invest like small tickets in small startup. And it's like it's it's good to be on the other side of like the like founder, like from founder and employee to like first time like investor as well. So you're doing some angel investing then, huh? Yeah. Yeah. A lot of a lot of station F stuff. I hear something special is happening there.
Yes, the chef. Actually, we know quite well because Roxanne was actually invested in Clap. And we are very friends with them. Very cool. Tell us what Clap does. Yeah, so basically like the idea of CLAP, it's an asynchronous meeting platform. And the basic idea is to say that we are living maybe the largest shift in our work since the last industrial revolution, which is working from anywhere.
It's going to define our work for the upcoming 20, 30 years. But we have, you know, like this one big issue, which is like back-to-back meetings have become the norm. And basically like what we've noticed is that When we're in the same office, and let's say I want to align with you on a product prototype, a spreadsheet, like a deck, etc. It's just going to take me like five minutes.
I'm going to see you with my desktop, maybe like show my screen, ask a few questions. I'm going to get like some precise feedback and then I can move on. But the point is like those five minutes, I will like turn into 30 minutes Zoom call by default when we all switch to like full remote.
And the idea behind what we call asynchronous meeting is to make it super easy to share video updates of your screen, then to collect precise feedback, what we call in-context feedback tied to a specific minute, but also zone of your screen, and then to turn this feedback into next steps and decisions, but without the need to be in the same room at the same time.
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Chapter 2: What is Clap and how does it redefine asynchronous communication?
So it's feedback tied to a specific minute, but also zone of your video. And right now, it's more like text plus emoji feedback. But tomorrow, we'll have, for example, a system of polls, a system of video feedback, or voice feedback, et cetera. And what niche are you building it for though? Right.
So like, if you look at like frame.io for video editing, they do a good job of this, but it's for a very specific niche. Like, are you targeting salespeople or product engineers or something else? Yeah, so like the goal for Clap is really to build a product for like anyone in the company.
It's funny you mentioned like Frame.io because it was like part of like the testing we made to launch like this feature. We use like, we kind of hacked Frame.io to like understand, okay, what drives adoption, what drives engagement on a video. If you want, we like collect feedback. So for us, the goal is to build a product that anyone in the company can use.
But in terms of go-to-market, what we've noticed, the product teams are really like the early adopters because they have super visual use cases. Don't you have to go super deep on that niche? If you try and be everything for everyone in the company, you just get diluted. But if you build specifically for a product manager, you can go really deep and just dominate and charge more.
I don't know, because I think in the end, our end goal and our mission is really to help people work from anywhere. What we've noticed, if you want to work from anywhere and free your calendar from back-to-back meetings, you need to master asynchronous communication. And basically, that is to say the way it's done today, it's mostly limited to asynchronous written communication.
With Flume, you add context, but you don't have the whole decision-making system. And the mission of Clap is to democratize this way of making decisions and aligning internally. So I guess it would change the mission of the company to say this is just for product teams. And the second point is... Can't your mission change over time? I mean, don't all big companies start by dominating one niche?
I mean, of course, everyone has a brand vision. And I think the second point to answer your question is more like the added value we also have for product teams. One of the big nightmares you have as a product manager is cross-team communication. As the company grows, it becomes super hard to align with your sales team, your customer success team, your marketing teams, et cetera.
And you are kind of stuck because you want to align them, you want to collect their feedback, but at the same time, you want to keep shipping features really fast. And you need to have a product that speaks to both product teams, but also sales teams, et cetera, in terms of usage and complexity. Remote teams are all the rage right now.
In fact, many companies want to stay this way, even post-pandemic. And the reasoning's obvious. Hiring talent from anywhere in the world means you can bring on better talent. But the challenges are very real. How do you manage employees in other countries legally and easily? What about international payroll, employee benefits?
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Chapter 3: How does Clap differentiate itself from competitors like Loom?
And in the end, we had a prototype, which was actually quite precise. And we were super, I guess, accurate to explain, OK, this is the reason why, for example, we need to have this in-context feedback feature. This is the reason why we need to basically store recordings this way, et cetera. And I think it was like,
the mix between yeah like the category narrative but also like the product design um we came up with like with the with the prototype yep that makes a lot of sense i'm trying to look back on your linkedin right now to find that initial post but i can't find it uh but that is how you really got term sheets that's how you got everything going so it makes a lot of sense
Okay, guys, so launch is coming. You talked through how you built the beta list, 300 folks. There's 3,000 on the waiting list right now. You're letting them on one by one. Product engineers is the focus. This all makes a lot of sense. Anything I'm missing that you want to chat about for the last minute? No, what kind of question do you have?
I think maybe because you mentioned that you like the website, maybe a few things we did at the beginning, like between the launch. Who did you pay? Who did you pay to do the website? I did it myself. And it looks really good. It looks like an agency did it. It looks really nice. Okay.
No, I think that's a cool stuff because, you know, like before I was like VP of marketing and I had like, you know, like a team of like a lot of people. And in the end, you are like nuts and zone. But I love to build stuff.
and and it's super funny when you go back to be like a founder it's like you need to build stuff on your own uh so you know i did like most of the stuff on like photoshop on figma on webflow etc and you can really like uh yeah it's good to be like an individual contributor sometimes and uh yeah and really enjoy like the
building the website and you like one other thing we did that was super successful because you know one of the key when you want to build like a category is that you need to own the problem like you need to kind of build the cognitive link between like the enemy like the prime in our case like back-to-back meetings and the category so that like people when they think about back-to-back meetings they are going to think about like clap
So one of the things we did, for example, was to launch a meeting calculator. It's on our website as well. And basically, you connect your Google Calendar, and then you are going to see a lot of stats around your number of meetings, the type of meetings you have, et cetera. And we did a small product launch in April. And actually, we got a lot of traction and visibility through this small launch.
And I think this meeting, this meeting calculator app is really smart. This is where you got a lot of new, new signups from. This is how you're building the beta list. Yeah, exactly. I think it's part of this. We like basically like the wait list.
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Chapter 4: What is Clap's revenue model and how does it plan to monetize?
I need to kind of repeat the same narrative about beating the enemy. And that's exactly what we did for a few months. Pierre, it makes a lot of sense. Let's wrap up quickly here with the famous five. Number one, favorite book? I would say Play Bigger. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? Yeah, I love Dave Cancer.
Number two, is there an online tool that you really enjoy or like? I would say clap, but right now I discovered June, but so for analytics, it's really cool. Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night? Sorry? Sleep per night. I would say between seven to eight hours. And situation, married, single kids? Single. Okay. And how old are you? 32. 32. Last question.
Something you wish you knew when you were 20. Tough question. I would say maybe human psychology. Learned psychology? No, human psychology. There you guys have it. Guys, Clap launched a couple of months ago, 3,000 on their wait list, did a $3 million round on a 17.5 post, team of nine right now growing the company. Two co-founders, they were nice. They split it 50-50.
Again, they believe in the future of asynchronous communication using their tool with a lot of utility value. Highlight parts of the video where you're talking about, use it at your system of record. We'll see if they can beat loom and others playing in this space pierre thanks for taking us to the top thanks