Third Tap: Loom ‘Video messaging for work’

The past weeks were tough but exciting for me. I quit my job at PwC and accepted an offer from EY. I was dealing with paperwork and negotiations.

This is why it took me so long to write this blog about Loom.

About Loom

Loom is a work communication tool that enables its users to get a message across instantly shareable videos. It was founded in 2016. Their vision is to empower effective communication, wherever work happens. It enables its users to send a video to their colleagues whether for education, meeting, planning or feedback. It helps the employees in many ways;

• It helps them to send their feedback on a document via video. By that way, users can save their time. The below image shows how a video can be recorded. After recording, you can save and send it to your colleague easily.

• You can record an educational video and pass it to the following generations in your company. It will save companies a humongous time. I encounter many times being taught the same topic over and over in my team. I cannot imagine how big the burden is for the instructor and the company.
• It is for sure that the pandemic changed the way we work. We need to manage the housework more often as we stay at home more, and sometimes we work at night. But not everybody has the same routine, in fact everybody has a different one. Loom helps people with different routines to work on the same route. The documents can be improvised collectively at different times. A manager can give feedback on a document at night and an assistant can provide answers to these feedback early in the morning. You do not have to find a time to arrange a meeting,
• It is also used by customer support teams. It helps the support teams to help the clients visually. By watching the solution instead of reading, the clients’ problems are being solved faster. It can be useful for the IT solutions within the company.

Loom has different features for different departments such as marketing, product management, engineering, sales, design and support. These individual tools are designed for these departments only because these are the departments which have interaction the most. Yet the team alignment tool can be used by all the departments.

As a person who started working in a new department during the pandemic, I can imagine where Loom would benefit me and my team if we used it. There were several times that my seniors hesitated to teach me something at work. Instead of spending time teaching me, they did it on their own in order to finish the task earlier. If they had a saved tutorial on Loom, they would not behave in such a way. Instead they would focus on other jobs while I am dealing with the task.

The Business Model

Loom has three different packages:

• Starter: It is free, but very limited. It cannot be used forever but it can be used to understand if your team will align with the loom effectively or not. It lets your 50 employees record 25 videos which are limited to 5 mins.
• Business: Ok, you tried the starter package and you were happy about the result. It makes your employees work more effectively. You switch to the business plan. In this plan, everything is limitless but just for 50 employees. It costs 8 dollars per user per month if you are enrolled annually. It is 10 dollars per user per month if you are enrolled monthly.
• Enterprise: Think about the business package, but make it for limitless users. There is no info about the pricing of this package.

According to Loom’s website; they have huge clients such as Netflix, Lacoste, Hubspot, Juniper networks etc. Yet I believe they should focus on the startups which are suitable for the business package and grow together with them. Because I know that implementing such programmes also creates a burden for well-established mature companies. Yet if they can make successful startups implement loom, they can be with them when they grow up.

The Sector

Loom can be categorized under the video conferencing / video sharing market. The rising globalization of businesses across the globe has led to an increased demand for video conferencing solutions in major companies. Moreover, the coronavirus pandemic has created a major pull towards the video conferencing solutions as the work from home concept has to be adopted at various industry levels.The global Video Conferencing Market in 2019 was approximately USD 4.8 Billion. The market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 11.45% and is anticipated to reach around USD 9.2 Billion by 2026.

I believe that also video streaming market size is important for the future of the Loom, because it basically creates a platform like Youtube but for internal use. The global video streaming market size was valued at USD 50.11 billion in 2020. It is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 21.0% from 2021 to 2028.

The Team

Loom has three co-founders; Joe Thomas CEO, Vinay Hiremath CTO and Shahed K. They all have other startup experiences before. Also they have experienced employees at C-level such as;

• Nicole Obst — Head of Growth. Former head of web growth at Dropbox
• Andy Gale — Head of Operations. Former tech and consumer investor at Citigroup and Taconic Capital
• Joshua Goldenberg — Head of Design. Former Head of Design at Slack and Palantir

The Future

You believe in a startup in its early days and it becomes Google; it is wonderful. But sometimes, you believe in a startup because others believe in it. Besides liking the startup idea, the second option is the case for me.

Sequoia Capital, the VC firm that invested in Youtube, WhatsApp, Instagram, Tumblr before, also invested in Loom. No need to mention that the Sequoia label is one of the best things that can happen to a startup. There is more! Privileged VC firms like Kleiner Perkins, General Catalyst and Slack Fund are also investors of Loom.

As a fun fact, the investors of Loom include Instagram’s co-founders, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. This duo tries to make Loom contagious and user friendly like they did on instagram.

Loom’s journey has been going exciting so far with the momentum gained from lock-downs and home-offices and the knowledge from experienced VC firms and investors. Yet, the growth might slow down with back-to-office scenarios or accelerate even more. The moves of the Loom’s executive team will decide its fate in the future. Sure, we will continue to analyze them.