Loom PLG Strategy - Things To Learn From a $1.5 Billion-valued Company

It's great to see many companies switching to remote and hybrid work models in recent years, but these setups usually come with challenges. 

One big challenge is communication.

For example, emails, Slack messages, or comments in Google Docs can be easily misunderstood. 

You might lose connection during a meeting or miss meetings due to different time zones. Watching the replay can be tedious. 

These problems can be very frustrating and waste a lot of time. 

In a work world full of notifications and meetings, Loom brings quickness and clarity to every interaction.

If you’re a SaaS founder or marketer trying to get your first users or attract more users, you'll enjoy today's case. 

We’ll cover:

• How Loom began using PLG strategy to land its growth
• What can you learn from their success and implement in your project

The rise of product-led growth trend

Product-led growth (PLG) is a strategy for growing a business in which the product plays a crucial role in acquiring, retaining, and expanding customers.

Traditionally, companies such as Microsoft or IBM heavily relied on sales teams to drive sales through direct interactions and complex pricing structures. 

Additionally, many customers had negative experiences with the traditional sales process for business software. 

This dissatisfaction opened the door for companies like Slack, Notion, Zoom, Loom, etc., to prioritize product quality and community engagement over traditional sales efforts.

These companies prioritized user experience and self-service features, distinguishing themselves from the traditional sales-driven approach.

Differences between traditional SaaS and product-led growth

Traditional SaaS companies usually invest a lot in sales and marketing teams to attract customers through outbound prospecting, demos, and negotiation.

They follow lengthy sales processes to generate demand and acquire new customers. 

On the other hand, PLG SaaS companies prioritize user experience by providing free trials or freemium models. 

They focus on making their products easy to use and learn through in-app experiences.

About Loom

Loom, Inc. is a tech company offering video communication software for work. 

Their tools include screen and camera recording, video editing, transcription, and sharing video links.

Forbes reported its value at $1.5 billion in 2022, with $200 million secured from investors like Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, ICONIQ, Coatue, and Kleiner Perkins. 

Although remote, its main office is in San Francisco, California, with a branch in New York.

On November 30, 2023, Atlassian finalized its acquisition of Loom, Inc.

What can You Learn from Loom’s Product-led growth?

1. Listen closely to your users and make changes accordingly

The most effective product teams swiftly adjust their product based on the customers’ feedback.

Loom underwent four significant changes before arriving at its current version. 

The founding team experimented with different ideas before choosing one to focus on. 

Their initial idea was OpenTest.

Initially, Loom aimed to connect product experts with companies seeking feedback through a two-sided marketplace. 

However, they discovered that customers were more interested in the video tool the team had created to collect feedback from their own users.

In June 2016, they repurposed OpenTest's video feature into a free Chrome extension that enabled users to record and share videos using a link. 

They launched this video recorder as an experiment on Product Hunt:

Results:

• 1st Product of the Day
• 2nd Product of the Week
• 4th Product of the Month 

The product gained significant traction, getting thousands of signups in less than two weeks after its launch. 

To help you launch your tool to Product Hunt, get our Free Product Launch Guide.

Users experienced immediate benefits within the first few minutes of using Loom.

Loom achieved the essential principle for a successful product-led growth strategy: delivering fast and instant value. 

What’s more interesting is that the founders recorded personalized response videos to each comment within this launch, which skyrocketed this campaign toward viral success. 

“The three co-founders, Vinay, Shahed, and myself, were all product-oriented people by trade. I was a product manager. Shahed was a designer, and Vinay was an engineer. None of us had worked on the go‑to‑market side in roles like sales, success, or marketing, so our original approach to building a company was to build the product first.” said Joe Thomas, co-founder and CEO of Loom.

What can you learn based on Loom experience?

Your potential customers should be able to try out your product without any obligations, like entering credit card information, beforehand.

Those initial moments of interaction with your solution are crucial in creating their thoughts about your solution. 

You should use this time to establish trust and deliver immediate value. 

If they are impressed by your product after their first experience with it, it will be much easier for you to earn their trust. 

However, just gaining their trust initially isn't enough to create excitement. 

You need satisfied users who will become advocates, spreading the word about your product to others. 

To win their loyalty, you must demonstrate how much you value their needs and opinions, just like the co-founders did with creating personalized video responses.

2. Make a seamless onboarding

The initial experience with your product is key to having satisfied users. 

To help your users get instant value, one thing you should focus on is getting them onboard smoothly. 

It leads to:

• Increased User Retention: Smooth onboarding helps users quickly understand and start using your product, making them likely to stick around and use it.
• Enhanced User Satisfaction: A clear and easy onboarding process reduces frustration and increases satisfaction, leading to happier users who have a positive experience from the start.
• Higher Conversion Rates: When users find it easy to get started and see the value of your product early on, they are more likely to convert from free trials or initial use to paying customers.

That’s exactly what Loom did.

They simplified their onboarding process as much as possible to get their users to use the tool almost immediately.

Here’s how to improve your onboarding process and increase your product adoption:

• Make signing up easy by offering options like social login, free Chrome extension, etc.
• Guide users with first-time steps using in-app messages to help them adopt your product piece by piece. 
• Make sure your main features are easy to find as users navigate through your product.

Note: Don’t overcomplicate your onboarding process, as it will confuse your users and drive them away.

If you have more features, make sure to provide them only with the most important ones at first.

Then, as users get connected to the app, you can show them more of it.

How they could expand through product-led content?

Loom is performing great, there’s no doubt about it. 

I especially admire how they craft specialized landing pages for each use case.

And they wouldn’t be able to do that without knowing their audience well.

Seeing that their top performing traffic source is direct traffic, with 82.52% share, according to the similar web, says enough about their brand power.

Having 18.5M monthly visitors is a great amount of traffic, considering that only 7.15% of visitors are gained through organic search.

By analyzing their top-performing pages, we noticed some interesting product-led content pages and blog posts that generate decent traffic and conversions for Loom.

Note: Analyzing such pages and identifying keywords you can use in your case can be helpful to drive new leads and source product users organically.

Just think about how it would be for Loom, besides highlighting the tool's benefits for team alignment, they developed a range of topics for each use case.

According to the Ahrefs keyword research tool, "team alignment" is a low-competitive keyword that generates 1,5k searches per month worldwide.

Loom could invest in content creation centered on this keyword, offering guidance to remote and hybrid teams on improving alignment using Loom.

Discover how we used this approach to create a range of use-case high-intent topics to help our client grow from 0 to 2.73 million organic clicks in 13 months.

Some potential content ideas to cover this cluster might include:

• What is Team Alignment, and What You Need To Know About It?
• Most Common Team Alignment Mistakes To Avoid
• X Ways to Determine How to Maintain Alignment in Your Hybrid Team
• How to Improve Team Alignment and Performance: A Guide for Hybrid Teams
• X Tips to Keep Team Aligned As You Scale

Note how these topics directly address the relevant use case.

Loom could leverage these topics to dominate search engine results pages and meet user needs through organic search. 

By adopting this strategy across various use cases, Loom could create thought leadership, SEO-focused articles, and case studies to establish itself as the go-to resource for all aspects of remote and hybrid work video communication.

The same way as Webflow did.

Did you know that Webflow also uses this SEO approach to generate content that captures demand for its products? 

Its blog contributes to more than 21% of its organic revenue, which is nearly $460K.

Imagine what it could do to Loom’s revenue, but also think about how it can affect yours.

It’s Time To Implement The Same For Yourself

Having an SEO combined with product-led growth can help you grow drastically.

But to leverage these strategies, you will need a fully focused and reliable team that can cover the whole content SEO side.

That’s where Omnius can help.

Combining product-led content with SEO best practices, we can help you drive product growth naturally.

Interested in hearing more?

Schedule a 30 min call and discover how we can help you implement product led content to drive sustainable growth today.