Insight
Thomas: Enterprise PLG startups must reach a 50-50 sales-to-self-serve revenue split
“When you're a PLG self-serve business, you at some point need to actually have sales led, especially after you're going after enterprise organizations, be approximately fifty-fifty of your net new revenue that you're generating, and we are far from that ratio,…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Thomas: Async workplace video will match consumer scale within ten years
“We think that over the next decade that Async video will be as big as it is in the consumer landscape at work.”
Insight
Thomas: Early-stage founders must commit to a single product distribution channel
“Now you end up adding on channels over the course of time, but when you are an early stage founder and CEO, you truly only have time for one, right? And there should be one that's as directly aligned with your company as possible, and just go after that one as…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Thomas: Loom raised its Series A with zero revenue despite 80% rejection
“So we went to go raise our Series A as a B to B SaaS company, and it's not like we were below the revenue standards that you typically hit. We had no revenue at that point. And the Series A fundraise actually took a long time. It took about four months, five m…”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Joe Thomas: Required Meetings Correlate With Project Delays on Upwork
“They also said that any companies that provided a required meeting as part of their process actually significantly correlated to delays and slower project finish times, and so they even built a synchronous video conferencing product into their offering, and 57…”
Insight
Thomas: Startups only need one yes while corporate ideas require consensus
“Why startups win is that corporations end up saying no a lot to really good ideas. You actually have to probably get yeses all the way up the chain, whereas startups only need one yes, one percent of the time over the course of a year in order to build somethi…”
Disclosure
Thomas: Pre-seed investors pressured Loom to verticalize for a Salesforce acquisition
“From our pre-seed investors, they wanted us to verticalize specifically with the sales persona, because they're like, you need to build this set of features, and then you do it over the course of the next couple of years, you get to this ARR, and you get acqui…”
What-if
Thomas: Loom probably should have verticalized its product in year five
“I think that we could have started going vertical sooner. I think we probably could have started doing that at year five or six versus year seven”
Disclosure
Thomas: Loom eliminated seat pricing negotiations with fixed rate cards in 2022
“So the big change that we made starting in October of last year is that we reset to high velocity sales model, which is like standardized price card. Like this number of seats gets you this price per seat. It like removes the negotiation part.”
Insight
Thomas: Video is highly efficient for encoding knowledge but inefficient for decoding
“Video is very efficient from an encoding perspective, but inefficient from a decoding perspective for the person receiving”
Disclosure
Thomas: Loom avoided building a dedicated video inbox for five years
“For us, for the first five years, one of our, like, core product principles is nobody wants another inbox to check. Like you already have Slack, you have iMessages, you have email, like, when does Loom reach a threshold of being another inbox, and even if we c…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Thomas: Consumer asynchronous video apps failed due to decoding inefficiency
“There's been plenty of consumer products out there over the course of time that allow for async video conversations. It's like, you record, then somebody records next, and the next person records, and None of those have reached mass adoption, and I think it's …”
Insight
Joe Thomas: Synchronous Communication Is Best for Rapid Idea Exchange
“Studies show that it's best utilized for bursty communication. If you can imagine having a ball in your hands, and when you're in a meeting, you want to pass that ball to as many different people as frequently as you can, because that means you're exchanging i…”
Insight
Joe Thomas: Asynchronous Communication Is Best for Deep Work
“And what it's best used for is for deep work, and it's also best used for information dissemination. How do I get an idea from one person to another?”
Assertion Supported
Joe Thomas: GitLab Handbook Provides Copy-Paste Templates to Decline Meetings
“They actually go as far as to provide copy and paste text in their handbook to turn down meetings, saying that this just isn't useful for us to do synchronous, we should do asynchronous.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Joe Thomas: Async Video Submissions Boosted Loom's Interview Pass Rate 50%
“And what this leads to is a 50% higher pass-through rate versus when we've done live take-home presentations during our super day process, and the reason being is that we take some of the interview process and we make it async, is that we review that take-home…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Joe Thomas: Loom Attains a 72% Job Offer Acceptance Rate
“So our acceptance rate is 72%, which is 11% above industry standard in a really tough market.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Thomas: Loom survived on $25,000 and mere weeks of remaining runway
“We were truly a few weeks away, not just in terms of the 25,000 dollars that we had raised in angel money, but all of our personal savings as well.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Thomas: Product-led virality remains the core growth engine for Loom
“This is still the core growth engine of Loom today, which is that people record videos, they send them to others, and they get so much value out of it that they talk to one another about how they end up using Loom, and that's the core engine of Loom's growth t…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Thomas: The average Loom video recording lasts two to three minutes
“Looms tend to be about two to three minutes in length on average, so it's a long form message, it's not A five-second message that you're sending to others”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Thomas: Loom faced a 98% investor rejection rate across 100 pitches
“We had done about a hundred investor pitches, and again, only had gotten 25 K from two people, so that's a two percent hit rate. 98% were just straight-up no's, including from friends and family”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Thomas: Re-recording single-sentence mistakes is Loom's top user complaint
“We're working on cam and voice avatars that you'll be able to edit via the transcript, so if you want to delete a sentence and retype it, You don't have to re-record, which is the number one pain point that we hear from users, is that, damn, I nailed that five…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Thomas: Loom links expand into inline playable videos across 2,000 platforms
“When you paste a Loom link, there's 2000 platforms in the world that expanded into Loom video in line, because we replicated the YouTube model, where it's like, you don't always want to click a YouTube link to go to YouTube to watch it, you just want to watch …”
Assertion Partly supported
Joe Thomas: 85% of Workers Report Higher Stress Due to Message Overload
“That 85% say that their work stress is greater today than it was five years ago because you have message overload.”
