SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Throwback: Before Loom Was Worth $1.5b, Founder Describes Paywall Launch
08 Jun 2021
Chapter 1: What consumer behavior trends influence enterprise video communication?
So the one thing that we talk about quite a bit here at Loom and also to our customers is we see that consumer behavior tends to lead the path of enterprise by around two years. So what we saw with Instagram, Snapchat, where people would pull out their phones and it was socially acceptable to record yourself and send a video of yourself speaking to the camera.
and these bite-sized video recordings files. We're starting to see that trend and behavior come into the workplace, and that's why we feel with video and as more companies are becoming remote and distributed, synchronous calls aren't always the best answer.
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Or bootstrap founders like Vivek of QuestionPro. When I started the company, it was not cool to raise. Or Looker CEO Frank Bean before Google acquired his company for $2.6 billion. We want to see a real pervasive data culture, and then the rest flows behind that. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com.
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He's the founder of Loom. He previously worked as an entrepreneur in residence at NFX, a venture capital firm focused on investing in networks and marketplaces. Prior to that, he was an analyst at Los Angeles-based venture capital firm Upfront Ventures. Shahid, you ready to take us to the top?
Yes.
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Chapter 2: How did Loom transition from a user testing tool to a video communication platform?
He's two and a half, three years in. So what's the answer to that? I'm gonna guess here you potentially raised right out of the gate because you were in EIR.
Yes. So I would say we started off the company, my two co-founders and I. Obviously, very humble beginnings. We lived in an apartment in San Mateo. My co-founder, Joe, actually stayed in my room with me. And it was basically us just bootstrapping. In fact, we actually launched... Loom used to be...
called OpenTest, which was a completely different idea that we spent three months building, couldn't find product market fit, pivoted into a different idea, same scenario, built a product, didn't find product market fit. And then at the very end, as we were running out of cash, we had to come up with some Hail Mary.
And that's when we realized that people were actually using the Chrome extension we had built that was mainly targeted towards user testing. People were actually recording these videos and sending updates to their coworkers. with the exact same extension. So we decided to follow that path and then launched the product in June of 2016.
And then in two and a half years, we went from zero to now 1.1 million registered users on about 21,000 companies around the world.
Okay, so 1.2 registered users and sorry, how many companies?
1.1 million registered users and on 21,000 companies around the world.
And so the question I have to follow up with there is that number is great. It's a good bite, but how do you measure who's active or engaged?
So we have video recorders, and then we also have video viewers. So anyone who engages within the video platform, whether they're recording video, commenting on an existing video, reacting to videos with emojis, that's kind of like what we dictate our active users.
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Chapter 3: What growth strategies has Loom implemented to reach nearly a million users?
I would say roughly out the gate. So that's because that's existing users. That's like immediate conversions. And that's more on like, I mean, I'm pulling that number from like a financial model that we put together. So the numbers are a little bit more on the conservative side. But I do think... we, you know, as a company and as, as a community, uh, we, we definitely will do better.
Yep. Yep. No, that's great. And then, um, you mentioned a little bit getting in like the team space. That's then starting to push up to some companies that have raised a crap ton. And you're talking like the Mondays of the world, this kind of space, why kind of get into that?
I mean, is there not an opportunity to just like be the video that like the video thing back and forth and just API or, or add to the app exchanges of these kinds of tools are actually going to go build a team and kind of project management tool.
Yeah, I would say there's a lot of avenues we can go down. The one that's been the most fascinating, I mean, we've gotten a lot of inbound from a lot of, like you said, the Mondays of the world that have reached out to us saying, hey, we want to take Loom and build it inside of our product using your API.
Did they offer to acquire you? What's that? Did Roy offer to acquire you? Did Roy? The founder of Monday.
Oh, no, no, no.
Okay.
Okay.
Um, no, but like, I mean, there's companies similar to Monday that have reached out, um, some who've tried to acquire, you know, for the sole purpose of like, you know, this, uh, like basically what we're doing, um, on the asynchronous video side.
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