The Exchanges

Q Okay, and so here's what I'm gonna ask you, right? Um, people listening are gonna go, well, how did he have the luxury of not having to worry about, you know, revenue and a pricing page until now, right? 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 an EIR.

A Uh, yes. So I would say we started off the company, my two co-founders and I, uh, we, I mean, obviously very humble beginnings. We lived in a 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, um, Loom used to be Called open test, which was a completely different idea that we spent three months building, couldn't find product market fit, pivoted into a different idea. Uh, same scenario, built a product, didn't find product market fit. And then at the very end, as we were running out of cash, uh, 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, um, that was mainly targeted towards user testing. Um, 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 in about 21, on about 21,000 companies around the world.

AI assessment note: “it was basically us just bootstrapping... as we were running out of cash”

Q Okay, that's pretty good on a 1.2 registered. I mean, it's almost, you know, pushing 20%. Yeah, no, that's not bad at all. Um, interesting. Why is now the right moment to put up a paywall?

A Uh, so initially when kind of going back to your initial question around like, how did we finance this and like, how did we put off, um, you know, putting up a paywall for about two and a half years, we did, you know, raise some venture financing. Um, we raised just under fourteen million dollars in total. Uh, it was a pre-seed, a seed, and then our series A was most recently led by Kleiner Perkins, uh, partner Ilya Fushman, who comes from a background, um, at, from Dropbox. And we announced that on February But initially, you know, as we started to see the momentum growing early on, we realized that this was the new Behavior. So we, our initial goal was to get as much action and become ubiquitous, um, as a product within a lot of these organizations. So one company, we went from 20 employees when we're raising our seed round to today, about a year and a half later, we're at just over a thousand employees from that company had naturally adopted Loom because the product is inherently viral. And there are some product triggers that led people to also signing up.

AI assessment note: “going back to your initial question around like, how did we finance this”