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🎯 How Loom created a corporate social network
The employee-led flywheel
Read time: 2 minutes 47 seconds
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3 quick callouts on today’s edition:
Atlassian recently acquired Loom. This breakdown was drafted before the acquisition. Timing is a funny thing.
I’m actually an Atlassian employee. These are my own views, not my employer’s.
I had no idea the acquisition was coming. These things are normally kept pretty quiet internally.
With that out of the way - let’s get into it!
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How Loom created a corporate social network
Chess Move
The what: A TLDR explanation of the strategy
The most common use cases for screen recording software in 2016:
Recording yourself gaming to create YouTube montages
Demoing a feature of your SaaS tool for your update blog
Creating a tutorial on ‘How to get Adobe Photoshop for free’
…
Recording yourself explaining an idea/question/update to send to a colleague so you can both avoid a meeting.
An irrelevant use case, or an overlooked b2b SaaS opportunity?
💡 | Strategy Playbook: Give businesses a tool that is highly shareable, and tangibly saves employees time |
Breakdown
The how: The strategic playbook boiled down to 3x key takeaways
1. Build something everyone needs
There aren’t many software categories that 100% of employees in an organisation need a paid license for:
Word processing, task management, instant messaging, and a couple of others.
Historically, screen recording SaaS tools were pitched to specific personas like marketers and designers for publishing demos.
A 1,000 employee company might buy 5 licenses.
Loom promised businesses a new way for all employees to communicate, and save time by doing so.
“Video messaging” saves everyone a meeting, can be watched at 2x speed, and lets recipients jump around to focus on relevant topics.
The same 1,000 employee company can’t wait to buy 1,000 licenses.
2. Make it remarkably frictionless
Imagine you’re an employee wanting to share a screen recording to a colleague.
The old way:
Download a screen recorder
Install the screen recorder locally
Guess the correct video dimensions
Accidentally record without any audio
Wait 10 minutes for the mp4 file to render
Figure out how to add webcam and voiceover
Write an email to explain the recording’s context
Attach the file (before realising it’s too large for email)
Colleague downloads the file, watches on VLC, and emails a reply
The new way:
Loom extension
One-click to record
Video renders instantly
One-click copy a share link
Colleague replies within Loom
Loom took every single step in the workflow and made it frictionless.
They made sending screen recordings to a colleague so easy, the videos became communication tools themselves.
3. Leverage local network effects
When users send a Loom to those not signed up yet, the receiver can still view the Loom and send a reply.
In other words, even non-users experience fast time-to-value.
The modal at the end of a Loom (a) reinforces the value by referencing the time saved, and (b) prompts the receiver to sign up.
Because Looms are inherently shareable within an organisation, employees become net promoters of the tool just by using it.
Similar to the “invite a friend” mechanic that built many of today’s tech giants, employees without a license end up signing up for one organically.
Even with only a handful of initial signups, over time, companies end up becoming a company that uses Loom.
Rabbit Hole
The where: 3x high-signal resources to learn more
[50 minute watch]
Hidden gem: a masterclass on product-led-growth, run by Founder / CEO Joe Thomas.
He breaks down each iteration of the flywheel Loom built to grow to 10 million users without paid marketing.
[14 minute read]
When Loom first launched, it was called “OpenTest” - originally pitched at the ‘usability testing’ use case.
An interesting comment thread: someone asks “What do you think will draw people to Opentest over others in the space?”
Co-founder Joe Thomas elaborates on their strategy at the time: build a ‘two-sided marketplace’ for developers and product experts.
Turns out, they ended up pivoting away from this idea to create Loom, the communication tool, that we know today.
[1 minute read]
Every SaaS company is thinking about AI right now, but many features lack differentiated value.
Loom’s approach: Stay true to their core thesis, and do anything possible to make ‘video messaging’ between colleagues easier.
E.g. AI-powered summaries, action items, timestamps, automatic video titles.
That’s all for today’s issue, folks!
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