← The SaaS Podcast - AI, Growth & Product-Market Fit for SaaS Founders
The SaaS Podcast - AI, Growth & Product-Market Fit for SaaS Founders
SaaS Product-Market Fit Lost at $9M ARR Then Rebuilt
01:02:20
Gilles Bertaux (Livestorm) on losing SaaS product-market fit by becoming a smaller Zoom and rebuilding by narrowing to enterprise webinars
Loading summary
Transcript90 lines
- [00:00]
A
Foreign.
- [00:10]
B
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS podcast. I'm your host Omar Khan and this is a show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business. In this episode I talked to Gilles Bertot, the co founder and CEO of Livestorm and a webinar platform for enterprise marketers. In 2016, Gilles and his three co founders built Livestorm as a university project. They had two months to build a product, get some users and present it to a panel. So they built a browser based webinar tool. On presentation day, they live streamed for all the other student presentations too. Hundreds of people watched remotely and they loved it. Even former bosses from internships told them to skip the job hunt and pursue this idea full time. They were young with no real responsibilities, so they went for it. They spent weeks collecting leads and hosted a launch webinar to showcase the product and it was a disaster. Gilles tried to bring a marketing exec from a big e commerce company on screen. Instead, his CTO popped up and said, I think there's a bug. Live in front of everyone. Growth came slowly through SEO, Quora and partnering with bigger companies to get in front of their audiences and no outbound, no sales team. Gilles wrote three to four articles a day and answered questions on Quora that nobody else was touching. Then Covid hit. In one year, LifeStorm grew from 2 million to 9 million in ARR, but it was chaos. Support tickets jumped from 200 to 20,000amonth. Service crashed for an entire day. They had to throw money at AWS just to keep things running and their margins got crushed. After Covid, things got even messier. They tried building a meeting product, then a sales demo product. Suddenly livestorm looked like a smaller version of Zoom and customers had no compelling reason to pick them. In 2022, they tried to raise a Series C and investors said no. So Gilles had to flip the company to profitability. And that meant going after bigger customers who would pay more and stick around longer. But his sales team only knew how to handle inbound leads and he had to replace almost the entire team. There were moments where he wondered if the product could really make the leap, and part of him questioned whether livestorm's best days were already behind them. Today, livestorm generates nearly 20 million in ARR with 3 1/2 thousand customers and has raised 35 million dollars. In this episode, you'll learn why Gilles believes a product launch is a timeline, not a single day, and how their Buggy first webinar still converted a five year customer. Al Quora drove 10 to 15% of organic traffic for years by answering questions nobody else was answering. What happened when Covid demand exploded and their infrastructure couldn't handle the load? We talk about why expanding into meetings and sales demos meant customers had no compelling reason to pick them over Zoom and how they overcame that. And how Gilles rebuilt a sales team from scratch to shift from self serve to enterprise despite admitting that he's a terrible salesperson. So I hope you enjoy it. If you're building or investing in a SaaS company, you already know security isn't optional. One breach and everything you've built can be at risk. That's where ThreatLocker comes in. Imagine having the power to decide exactly what's allowed to run in your environment and blocking everything else by default. No guessing, no. Hoping your existing solutions catch it real, enforceable or control. Threatlocker is a zero trust platform that locks down your environment without disrupting operations, gives you total visibility, and stops unauthorized applications before they become a problem. If you want stronger security and tighter control, visit threatlocker.com that's threatlocker.com I talked to a lot of founders stuck in the same spot. They've got a clear vision. They just need the right team to build or scale it. That's where Gearhart comes in. They're an AI powered product development studio that handles the entire technical side of building your B2B SaaS platform or AI agent. Built by serial entrepreneurs, they understand the unique challenges of startups and can plug into your team to accelerate growth. They've built over 70 successful products, including SmartSuite, which raised $38 million and is used by companies like Capital One. Right now, they're offering our listeners the first 20 hours of development for free. Just book a call@Gearhart IO. That's Gearhart IO. Right now, there's a number hiding in your SaaS metrics. The exact point where your growth will stall. You can change it, but first you have to see it. It's simple math. When your churn catches up to your new revenue, you stop growing. You're running just to stand still. I've built a free calculator that shows you exactly where your ceiling is and the fastest way to break through it. Find your ceiling at SasClub IO Calculator. That's SasClub IO Calculator. Gilles, welcome to the show.
- [05:12]
A
Hi. Thank you for having me.
- [05:14]
B
It's my pleasure. Do you have a favorite quote? Something that inspires or motivates you?
- [05:18]
A
Yeah, actually my FOMO mentor told me something once. Stuck with me. It's basically, I think the equivalent in English is when there is a doubt, there is no doubt. And the context was we were trying to hire someone and we were debating about the profile and we came up with that and it really stuck with me. And now for any decision, it's kind of a prudent quote, but essentially it defaults you to certitudes, which I think is a good thing on some level.
- [05:49]
B
Yeah.
- [05:50]
A
Cool.
- [05:51]
B
So tell us about livestorm. What does the product do, who's it for and what's the main problem you're hoping to solve?
- [05:57]
A
Yes. So livestorm is a webinar platform. We work with marketers mostly in Europe, enterprise focused. Our favorite industries that we work with is typically banking, financial institutions, life science in general, so pharmaceutical, healthcare and whatnot, and professional services. So the main thing we're trying to solve for them is they don't want to spend as much for, you know, in person events and they want to have something that it can engage a lot more at scale than just having one on one, you know, remote meetings. So basically we bring the engagement and the authenticity of in person events with something that is actually remote, low cost and, you know, anyone. And also the product is we, we don't focus so much on the video, we focus on the experience around it. And we want to make it so easy that anyone, it doesn't matter how tech savvy you are, you can actually host, just like any professional streamer, a webinar with thousands of people and we give you all the tools you need so you don't have to ask for help. That's pretty much a promise.
- [07:03]
B
Awesome. And give us a sense of the size of the business, where are you in terms of revenue, customers, size of.
- [07:08]
A
Team, closing in on the 20 million essentially revenue wise, about like 3,500 customers, whatnot. Something in that ballpark. And As I said, 80% in Europe. This is mostly in our DNA. It's also obviously a positioning strategy for us and we can talk about that later.
- [07:26]
B
Cool. And I think you've raised 35 million to date.
- [07:29]
A
Yeah, last round was series b back in 2020.
- [07:32]
B
Awesome. So you're doing eight figures in ARR. You're closing in on 20 million in ARR. And the business was founded in 2016 as a school project. Let's, let's start there.
- [07:46]
A
Yeah, exactly. For all my enterprise customers out there, you're basically using your final exam project from school. I met my three calf holders in University and we were doing a bunch of internships and essentially the final exam at that school was a build a product, have a business plan, gets a few users, as if you were going to launch the whole thing. And I was interning in this company and I was hosting webinar for them and I was using like, you know, the webex of this world and all those platforms back in the days, they were like mostly heavy it, having to download first type of platform. Right. And, and the truth is we are not video engineers. We are like interfaces, web design type of engineers. So the goal was to say, you know what, what we do best is actually build experiences around stuff. So we're going to leverage new technology that was getting popular back then, which is the default today. It's called WebRTC inner browser technology. And we're going to build an entire journey for the marketers out there around it. We built like a very simple version of it in like two months. And the fun fact is we presented that to, well, to the jury for the final exam and we ended up actually streaming for an entire day for all the different teams presenting that day. And we had hundreds of people connecting. And at one point we were like, whoa, we built something. People like, what are we going to do with it? And we didn't have any kids or mortgages or whatnot. So we said, you know what, the risk is so minimal. Let's just roll with it and see what happens.
- [09:30]
B
Just from that moment, you guys decided that there's a potential business opportunity here. Let's try to run with this. I thought there was this interesting story about the kind of the big. The launch of livestorm and some of that sounded like that was a turning point where you guys were like, we need to take this more seriously and treat this like a business.
- [09:58]
A
Exactly. I think that's exactly the day we presented it, right? When we had hundreds of people connecting, enjoying the experience so much and actually proactively saying that on chat and telling us that as well. And even like my old bosses from internships and wherever we're working, connecting and say, hey, I don't think you should stay on. I think you should, I mean, stay on as on the job. I think you should try this and you know, all the feedback together, you know, it just a hunch. Right. You know, you have to try it. Worst case scenario, it doesn't work. You can just go back to your life and do something else. And turns out we wasn't that wrong. So it's good.
- [10:40]
B
Yeah. So tell me about that Launch where you invited your CTO to join.
- [10:49]
A
It's a proof, actually that you can actually do a very bad first impression and still make it in this world. So essentially we are hosting our very first webinar, right? We had. We spent weeks and weeks collecting emails and leads and whatnot. And we have finally this very first strong version of the product and we want to highlight it, we want to showcase it to other people. And we have our first lead slash customer, kind of big shot. Right. Head of marketing and a very big E commerce company in Paris. And I want to invite him on stage so he can talk about livestorm. And when I invite him on stage, essentially, I don't know, for some reason there's a bug and it's my CTO that goes on stage and he's like, you know, surprised. So he's basically looking at the camera and then looking at his. Right where my other co founder is. It's like, I think there is a bug. I'm like, no. So anyway, it was fun, you know, looking back, it was fun at the moment, we were like so immersed. But, you know, I think it didn't matter so much.
- [11:59]
B
Yeah. What would you say to founders who, who, who might be listening to this and are maybe in that mode right now, which is they are so worried that if they don't get the product launch right, they'd never get a second shot.
- [12:17]
A
I don't think that's true, to be honest. There are certain things in the company life that, yeah, of course, you will probably have one shot at doing one thing and if you get it, you get it. If you don't get it, well, you might not have any other shot. But I don't think it's true for product launch because the truth is, I don't think the market expects you like the messiah. They're not expecting you to be just to raise up from whatever darkness and of a sudden on that specific day and then buy you out that's you're not Apple. It doesn't work that way. So essentially, I think launches is more of a timeline than a specific day. So for us, the product launch, to be very honest, it was pretty much six months or at least a year. Just building up the engine, building up, you know, whatever sales or PLG motion you're building and getting those first 10, 15 customers that are actually going to trigger the. This word of mouth that's going to be compounding over time. And that's the product launch. I don't think it's one specific day.
- [13:25]
B
So this, this person, this marketing exec that you were trying to impress on the launch when your CTO turned up and said there's a bug, did they eventually become a customer?
- [13:39]
A
Yes, they became customers. They stayed on at least four or five years, I think, and then the company got acquired and then obviously basically life moves on. Right? But I think for a very broad first impression, an LTV of like four to five years, it's decent.
- [13:57]
B
Yeah, yeah, it's pretty good. So tell me about those initial customers. Like where, where did you find them? How did you sell the product?
- [14:09]
A
So we had like three main strategies. So first, the one thing I want to say is I probably like one of the worst salesperson that you can find. It's probably not something I should say as a founder, but the truth is I'm willing to spend 45 minutes or up to one hour with someone that's going to pay like 30, 40, 50 bucks per month on a self service basis on a monthly plan. So I realized very quickly that I was not the sales type. And my knowledge, I come from marketing and growth, so my knowledge was on building PLG motions and that sort of thing and automating stuff. So the first three momentums that we found was the best. I mean back in the days for livestorm, the first one was SEO. Obviously we know this was like a midterm type of long term bet. So I would go to keyword planner, Google Ads, find the most best intentional keywords versus you know, complexity or that, how you call it competition. And I would just like write articles like at least three, four a day and you know, get the SEO up. Like this second one was going to Quora, Quora.com, big topic on video conferencing, webinars left empty, no responses and a lot of people asking questions. So I would like just batch, right? A lot of qu, a lot of answers, like very thoroughly, you're making sure that people get the most value. And for the five years of the company, Quora stayed up to like 10 to 15% of the total traffic we were getting organically on the website. So that was pretty good. And the last one was basically piggy banking on audiences. We shared Persona with a lot of other companies that were actually much bigger than us. So the goal was to say we're going to create content or doing content or do something with those people and trying to be exposed through them to their same audiences. And it's just like basic co marketing strategy essentially. And those were how we get the first 100 customers where did the first 10 come from?
- [16:22]
B
Was it through SEO or Quora or did you do some outbound as well?
- [16:27]
A
Honestly I think they were all organic, all inbound. The very first customers I remember still today it was like, I don't know, it was a Monday at 2pm whatever and this guy actually found us on, on a very obscure Facebook group with like 50, 100 people, I don't know about tech in France or whatever. And all of a sudden you get that struck notification and you're like oh wow, someone paid for it. And you know that was there was it. And I think the first 10 was basic word of mouth inbound through different things we posted online and that was it. Also we are very lucky to have a product that can expose itself. So essentially whoever is hosting webinars is hosting with participants. So there are basically soft demoing the product. So that's also a specificity about livestorm.
- [17:19]
B
So I just want to understand this.
- [17:20]
A
So.
- [17:23]
B
The first 10 customers were inbound, you did PLG from the start and they would just sign up and it was just a self serve thing. Or were you reaching out to do demos and manually onboard them? How did that work?
- [17:38]
A
We did some early demos and early reaching out but those were not to get people to pay. It was to actually get some emails for the launch day for the famous buggy webinar that we hosted. So essentially I would reach out on Twitter to people that were looking at like that would look like us. I would reach out say hey, we have this prototype of a new webinar software. I don't want you to buy it. I just want you to, you know, tell me what you think and I will just demo the prototype and 100% of cases they were like hey, this is interesting actually can I just get your email? And then you know, we'll just inform you when this thing gets, you know, when we launch it. And those were like the few hundreds first lead that we got. But when it comes to paying actually was all. I didn't, I never did any outbound for the first at least, yeah, five to six years of the, of the company. So mostly inbound. Cool.
- [18:33]
B
So back I'm trying to think like back in 20, 2016, 2017, the, the dominant players in the webinar space were probably like, I don't know, like Citrix or Gotowebinar or those types of products.
- [18:52]
A
Yes, go to webinar still today. Right. It's still like very much, very much there. Probably less than before, but yeah. So GoToWebinar on 24 mostly in the US, not so much in Europe back then. And Zoom obviously. And honestly that was it. There was like some smaller players that disappeared, but those were the main ones. And after 2021, 2022 is teams appeared and so that brought up another giant in the ecosystem.
- [19:23]
B
And so what was your main differentiator at the time against those products? Was it basically like we're browser based and you don't have to go and install all this stuff?
- [19:30]
A
Exactly. For the first few years the rationale was hey, you need something browser based because it increases the attendance rate. That was true for a while because nobody had this browser based situation here. Second one was hey, we don't just do just video, we have like, you know, landing page builder, emails, integration. Because that was actually something that was quite new back then. And the third one was just a firm positioning on marketing, lead generation, that sort of thing where Zoom was still perceived as something more like video conferencing, like meeting and that sort of thing. Like webinar was a small portion of the product and not very much dedicated to it, so it was lacking feature and so on. So those were the three parameters for until all series A. And I think after this crazy Covid growth and the attention that we got, positioning got more diluted and and ironically we came back to something even more narrow today which is webinar, marketing, enterprise, Europe and very specific industries. So actually ironically, our positioning today is actually more niche than the one that we had at the very beginning.
- [20:52]
B
That's interesting. Yeah. Because there's always this reluctance. Right. Any founder going in to go niched seems like such a counterintuitive idea. I'm going to my TAM gets smaller, my, you know, my opportunities. But actually you stand out more. Right. Because you're solving a hyper specific problem.
- [21:10]
A
Yeah, I can tell you that for us, I mean we went on both ends of the spectrum. At one point we we had a meeting product inside livestorm to do like you know, sales demos and one on ones and that sort of thing. And we realized that conversation was actually quite difficult because you had to explain. Even when I was talking to investor or customer, I had to really explain what was different and say hey, no, but this is also doing meeting but also, you know, we're just for sales, not so much for internal communication. So you know, it was getting more complex and more comple. And the longer the conversations, the lower the conversion rate at the end of the day. And that's something that we realized now that the positioning is so narrow is you don't have to demonstrate all of that. The. The front window is so clear that basically you go straight to demoing the product or, you know, demoing what? Whatever value that you bring to the table. You don't have to demonstrate how you're different. And that's so much time one at the end of the day.
- [22:17]
B
So I'm just trying to understand before, just before COVID roughly, do you remember where your revenue was and had you guys raised any money up until that point?
- [22:28]
A
Yeah, so we had a cram that was back in 2017, 500k something. So very small compared to the benchmarks today. Then a Series A, that was in June 2019, so that was like a close to 5 million round something. And so actually we entered Covid, we were doing like 1.52 million euros something of AR, but we had like, the bank was pretty filled with cash, so we were in a really good position to absorb whatever was coming to us. We didn't know, obviously, but, you know, we were in that position, so that was actually a good timing. And we started the year around two, ended up 2020, around close to nine.
- [23:12]
B
Nine million?
- [23:13]
A
Yes.
- [23:14]
B
In one year.
- [23:15]
A
Yes. That was dimensional.
- [23:18]
B
Yeah. But it wasn't that straightforward. Right. Because you had been building this business for three, four years, got to seven figures in ARR, raised seed round, Series A things look good. You feel like you're kind of on top of the product. And then Covid hits and usage spiked. What, like 30x?
- [23:40]
A
Oh, yeah, close. Even more than that. Actually. There are different ways of looking at it. I know that, for example, if you look from the conversation prism of conversation of meaning, like tickets, for example, or chat conversations that you have with customers. I had like three people or two people taking care of that on a daily basis. And they were used to have like, I don't know, like 200 tickets or 200 conversations on intercom with. And all of a sudden they have like 20,000, you know, per month. So that was just, you know, obviously at that point, you know, you don't. You cannot hire because it's Covid, Everyone is actually, you know, on lockdown and it's more difficult, so you don't have no choice. It's basically everyone who was doing like, at least, at least two to three hours of ticketing, it was so intense. But I think, honestly, looking back, it was probably the time where I never felt so connected to the team on some level. I was like, weary when you act as one. So that was very interesting as well. Product usage in terms of infrastructure was mental, actually. We went from having like a 85, 90% gross margin infrastructure with very nicely, steadily 10%. And all of a sudden your infrastructure starts burning because obviously you cannot scale to 100x overnight. So everything starts to crash. And we had one full day where we couldn't actually get the servers up from so much load that we had. So we had this cash in bank. So we just paid aws, we just threw money at the problem. So it's always funny when I go to investors and they look at the gross margin graph over time for many years now and they look at early 2020 and like, why does this go from 90 to 20%? Yeah, well, we just like threw money at AWS because Covid and then obviously we hired people and we optimized the infrastructure and whatnot. And today actually on any given year, we actually have close to 2x the volume that we were getting during COVID phase, which is interesting.
- [26:00]
B
Building a SaaS company from the ground up is tough. Protecting your data and securing your environment shouldn't be. With Threat Locker you can deploy application control in days to weeks, not months to years, and enable your IT team to decide exactly what's allowed to run and deny everything else by default. Lock down your environment without disrupting operations and operate with confidence. No guesswork, no reactive solutions, just true proactive control. ThreatLocker is a zero trust platform that mitigates the risk of downtime reputational damage and cyber attacks, including ransomware and zero day exploits. If you want stronger security and tighter control, visit threatlocker.com that's threatlocker.com so that was, you know, obviously that was a pivotal moment for you. What happened with a lot of startups, and especially if they were sort of event based, was after Covid people started going back to in person events and things like that. So you saw this huge spike in usage and growth in revenue. What happened after that? Did you continue to see growth or it kind of plateaued or.
- [27:13]
A
Yeah, so actually we were one of the few lucky ones and for many different reasons. So the first thing for context is at that time nobody was equipped with video conferencing in general, webinar meeting, whatever. So people started like, you know, benchmarking tools and trying to find something that was feeding their usage. And I think in that mayhem there was a kind of a semantic dilution of what's video conferencing and what's webinar. And people were treating one on one bidding as a webinar. They were actually telling people this is a Webinar? No, it's not a webinar or this is a virtual event. And basically they had like many different names for many different use cases and nobody was understanding anything. So after let's say 2021, people started realizing and understanding what, what their need was. And then this is where the churn happens. Plus also when you start having people, you know, going back to kind of in person type of events. So there is this one category of products, virtual event, that was basically a compensation for not being able to go in person. That specific vertical got hurt very, very bad. And the virtual event definition was we want to have once a year, twice a year, I don't know, a big event with exhibitions with ticketing system, just like you would do actually during an in person event. Right. And that category actually almost disappeared, you know, the hopping, if you don't know. If you recall the company called Hopin, it was valued like 4 billion. It got like sold 15 million two years later to Ringcentral because the business was dead essentially. So a lot of this product in the virtual event category, they actually tried to find a new segment, either webinars, meetings or maybe actually assume the in person vertical. And the webinar was interesting because webinars is not a real in person event. It's something with a much smaller audience, it's much cheaper. It's something that you do on a recurring basis, maybe on a weekly basis even. And you intentionally do webinars because you don't want to spend as much as you would do in an end person event and you don't want to have something as technical, but still you want to do it repeatedly because you have a full strategy of doing that every week for a reason. So for us, the use case was so specific that actually stuck. Obviously we got some churn from that semantic dilution of people that wanted to do something else that wasn't webinars and then realized that in 2021, and then you just moved away with something else. But for the ones that were actually willing to keep doing webinar, we got very few churn. So to give you an idea, I think the worst month that we had in terms of churn was in July 2021, if I recall correctly. Or was it in 2020? I don't, I don't remember. But it was one of the two. And the revenue dropped by 11% on that month. And that was the worst month that we had otherwise. We had. And that actually was just for one month. But looking at the full year, we actually had Some growth. So all in all, we were like, very lucky.
- [30:45]
B
What was the hardest part of making that shift? Nobody likes to lose customers.
- [30:50]
A
Right.
- [30:51]
B
So what made that hard for you, knowing that you were going to lose some?
- [30:57]
A
We knew that we were going to lose. We knew that we were going to lose some. It was difficult to understand how many back then. But one thing we were certain of, it will be very clear in assume completely the positioning that we had back then. My team was pressuring actually to go on a virtual event type of vertical because this is what the customers needed. I was feeling that this specific vertical was going to get hurt once Covid was over. And I think I was kind of right looking back. So we stuck with webinars and we knew that some people were actually using us and hacking the product for doing something else. We knew it was something around like 15%. Turns out we lost actually almost all of them. So, you know, it was, you know, we were kind of right. But then what. What did you do when you know this? You know, you just. You don't plan for it. So what it means is you have your expenses and you try to plan the business with knowing that actually 15% of your revenue is purely virtual. It does not exist. And I think that was one of the few prudent things we did. And I was like, yeah, around series B or pre series B. And then we raised and. And we were like, much more. We were more comfortable afterwards, obviously.
- [32:24]
B
So you realized this was a declining vertical anyway and at some point you were going to lose these customers because this whole thing was going to go away.
- [32:35]
A
Yeah, absolutely. We knew some use cases were going to disappear, but we also knew that the vast majority of people that were actually doing on a weekly basis something for marketing or for a user that was very much identified as webinar, those guys were going to stick around.
- [32:50]
B
So you see this massive growth during COVID shift to focusing on webinars. But then this company called Zoom also sees huge growth during COVID And then they also have this webinar software. In fact, I've seen people use the conferencing, the meeting software for webinars as well. And so I guess you're in this situation now where Zoom is so well known. How did you, like, deal with objections like, you know, why shouldn't I just use Zoom? I mean, obviously you were doing still PLG at the time, but I'm just wondering how much of an issue was that for you.
- [33:37]
A
It was an issue until, honestly, that's an issue that grew very. That Grew bigger and bigger as when we started diluting the positioning as well. During COVID we had a lot of press, a lot of awareness around the product. So we started onboarding very different people, very different companies for many different use cases. Then we erase the Series B and then we start exploring those new use cases. Maybe there is a meeting product to build, maybe there is a sales demo product to build on top of the webinar one, et cetera, et cetera. And soon enough we start looking very much like Zoom. The product is essentially a smaller version or less developed version of Zoom and browser based, if you will, or that sort of thing. So, yeah, it got very much diluted. And I don't crystal specifically that probably was a bad idea. And that's when we realized that actually we needed to go more focused and say that the positioning and the difference between Zoom was not a. Between us as Zoom was not a feature to feature comparison. It needed to be something much more. Stronger. Much more. Yeah, much stronger. Something more. Much deeper than that. So basically we looked at our best customers and we say, okay, we are a European company and that's something that should. Is even more a French company. And that's something that, you know, actually plays a lot of, has a lot of weight in the sales conversations that we have. So that was item one, Item two was we want to talk back to marketers because if. And I was kind of a something that came up actually a little bit later even. But we want to talk back to marketers because marketers have a separate budget. If you start doing internal communications, then all of a sudden you have a conversation with other people and they're going to challenge you on budgets that are either with Zoom teams, you start making more to it. We want to avoid talking to it because it is very political. But if you start talking to market and say, hey, this is actually marketing and lead generation product, it's a very different conversation in theory. Okay, so that was item two and item three was obviously when I say Europe, it goes with security and so on and so on. And item three was say, hey, we have huge chunk of customers that bring a lot of value. And Those guys are FTEs have more than 1,000 FTEs or 1,000 employees and they have this specific industries very much represented. So we're going to focus on those. So if you attach all of those, all those parameters together, all of a sudden the way you differentiate from Zoom is say we are actually specialists in external communication and marketing for enterprise marketers that work in Europe. And we specialize even more in those specific industries because we have specific features, security, reliability stuff that are very much suited for them. And yeah, and this is how we build up back or positioning and differentiation with them.
- [36:57]
B
I love that's a great breakdown of going through and being a webinar product for anybody and everybody to being hyper specific about the location, the kind of customers you're targeting, the use cases and so on. I read somewhere that you had said that video is a commodity, which I agree with, and that you differentiate. The way you differentiate is more around the workflows and the experience. And you mentioned a little bit about this earlier. Tell me about how that, what that user or customer experience looks like. In terms of.
- [37:43]
A
One thing we realized is actually it's funny because a lot of the early investors conversations that we had was, hey, why don't you actually build your own video technology? And our bet was to say we had a lot of providers actually building APIs to build videos. And the consequence of that is soon enough there are going to be a lot of them. It's gonna, the prices will go down. So even though we have a smaller gross margin, it will increase over time. And also it means that we're gonna have more and more competitors. So it means that essentially the balance, the tipping point between choosing one or the other is not going to be on the video anymore because we're all using the same technology. It's going to be on the experience. So experience means how do we give maximum autonomy? Actually this is the first one. There are multiple layers, but the first layer is how is basically autonomy. How do we give maximum autonomy to the people using us? Because the truth is, especially enterprise is people don't have access to other teams, they don't have access to skills, they don't have access to additional budgets, they don't have access to additional teams. This is a belief that we have because we work in startups and basically we all jack all the trades or maybe the guy from marketing is across the table, which is definitely not true when you work like in a 10,000 people pharmaceutical company. So basically the more we provide to the organizer, the happy they are, the happier they get. Because all of a sudden they have an email software, they have an analytics software, they have integrations, obviously videos, they can survey people, they have landing pages and they don't have to have it, don't need to rely on anyone, they can just do that by themselves. And the big plus is everything is there by default, so they don't have to do anything. And so that was the first thing autonomy and making sure that anyone that even someone that works in accounting, it doesn't know anything about the video stream can host in 1000 people event. And we have this very specific metric, they're on a product where actually the time between your first signup and the first event that you publish is around like four minutes. It went down from 10, 15 four years ago to four minutes today. We want to shorten that path as much as possible to make sure that everyone can do it. And the other metric that goes with it is what is the time to first value. So basically first value is your first attendee. And no matter the size of the webinar, no matter the size or the complexity of it, it should happen within two weeks because there is a promotion phase. So we want to make sure that the distribution of 90% of the webinar and all the attendees first value happens within two weeks. So those are the two main metric on the product for onboarding. And so yeah, autonomy, making sure that we also provide ROI and value and we show value of what they're going to produce and making sure they have as much as possible without to do anything else. What I mean by that is the webinar will produce a lot of content, but it will produce a lot of data points as well. So we try to ingest as much engagement as possible, like cta, post questions, thumbs up, emoji reactions, whatever it is that will actually create engagement qualification points at the end of the day, because every interaction is a point that goes up in your potential qualification score. So we need to provide as much as possible, provide as much attendee, as many attendees as possible by having really high attendance rate. And I think that's also, and this is probably the next step with AI, is to say that for every video you're going to produce, you're going to have maybe a week or months of content from that single video. So the goal will be always to produce them all with the same effort.
- [42:03]
B
How did you figure out what to build? Because what I love about what you said is everything is about helping the marketer end to end. How they could put a landing page, how they're going to capture registrations, how they can run the experience, the follow up and so on, as opposed to webinar software and meeting software and something else. Right, that's great. But when you're sort of PLG driven, was this based mostly on looking at the usage and customer support kind of requests or were you going out there and talking to these people as well? To figure it out.
- [42:43]
A
I think it's two things. Customer feedback for sure. I can talk about that a bit after. But if we were to build only what customer told us to build, obviously the product will be probably very different. But the second thing is my CPTO has this very great framework which is this kind of flywheel where, you know, the more, the more you put in the flywheel, the more, the faster it spins. And essentially, not to get into much detail, but essentially the goal is to say we, if we decrease the time to produce anything, whether that's the content, the webinar itself, the promotion or whatever it is, if we decrease the input and maximize the output, you basically increase the chances of repeating the same thing over and over and then you increase the results and the flywheel keeps spinning. So it's all the features that we are going to think about should kind of fit into that framework. What are we doing? Are we reducing the input or are we maximizing the output? So that's one way to think about it. And the other way is obviously customer feedback. And then customer feedback is something that is very much industrialized today. So we have about 4,000 to 5,000 customer feedback classified every quarter or every. Yeah, something like that. Something like every quarter. I don't recall correctly, but every single intercom conversation, every single sales conversation, everything that is even like in person conversation, everything is logged and processed. Now automatically used to be manual, but now is automatically through an AI that's going to match or feature database with whatever feedback is being sent. So we extract the semantic and then we match with the feature. If this is a feedback that comes from a CRM or that comes from a customer or a prospect, we are even able to attach the AR potential to that feedback. So it is a entirely automated process today because thanks to AI, but used to be something done by the team.
- [45:00]
B
So you go through this journey of like four or five years, you hit 9 million, you've got this PLG motion, you're getting more and more refined with it. The team understands how to execute on it. It's like this train that's moving in the right direction at the right speed and it's getting better and better. And then you raise your Series B and say we're going to become sales led too and we're going to start selling to enterprises. How did that, what was the biggest challenge for you to get the team kind of thinking the right way? Because it's a very difficult thing to do once you've been in PLG for so many years.
- [45:52]
A
It's so difficult. It's. I was not expecting to be so long and so difficult because it is a huge change of culture as well. So it didn't happen overnight, right? It was not like I didn't wake up one Monday and say hey guys, let's go sales. We realized after 2020 that actually a very vast portion of the customer were actually on the monthly plan, on the self service, right? So it was like something like 85% of them. So essentially they could actually go on the dashboard tomorrow, everyone and hit a button. They will churn and bye bye, that's it. So there was like this huge thing hanging around above our heads and we wanted to get rid of it. So also we had a little bit of inbound from enterprise. So you know, we thought, hey, this is actually a good time to start investing in proper sales. And at least the first challenge will be to reach out to those people and convert them to a yearly plan and try to see if we can actually secure a bit of that revenue. So that was the very first mission of the sales team back then. It was a small team. I had my head of sales, a few people and we started doing that. It was actually quite easy because the ACV of those people were actually very low. Right. So it was not like proper outbound, traditional sales, enterprise whatnot. So we secured about 70 to 75% in 2022. 75% of the customers were on a one year plus type of plan. We had our first enterprises, first mid market, et cetera. So things were kicking off on the sales side and then 2022 happens and well, this whole crisis with Russia and Ukraine and it was obviously a really good timing as per usual because we were trying to raise our series C and then it was like no, sorry, we don't have any more money because we cannot actually get financials to invest in our funds or whatever. So here we have two choices. Either we try harder or we say hey you know what, let's just maybe flip the company and try to make it as, as durable and sustainable as possible to avoid that sort of crisis. Because we never know. And we have a product, I think with my coffee we have this really prudent nighter. So we went with the option B and it was like a two way street. We wanted to go A profitable as fast as possible and B we wanted to make sure that the customer base is so, is very strong, reliable and sustainable. We want customers that will not go out of business in the next 24 months. So obviously that led us to targeting enterprise. And that was very hard because all of a sudden we need to do outbound. We didn't know how to do outbound. We still don't know how to do outbound. No, I'm kidding. We know how to do outbound. It's just, it takes a lot of time. Like 90% of what we do is still like inbound. But you know that 10% is a huge victory in itself. Obviously it's a change of mindset. I had cells that were used to basically sit down, they will open CRM, they had leads, they would just like sign quotes, get the quota and that's it. You know, it was like so easy for them and all of a sudden we just ask them to pick up the phone, call this, you know, person in a 10,000 people company and find the right guy and trying to sell them a product they have never heard of. So difficult. And we went through so much phases of figure figuring this out. We had like we had to reset the entire, almost entire sales team at some point trying to have people that were actually more traditional in the way of doing sales outbound that had more experience as well. So it was a big struggle to be very fair. But I think we're there. Yeah, we're there now.
- [50:10]
B
So was this like up until that point did you have a sales team at all? Because there wasn't much selling to do when it's all inbound and self serve and so on or was there?
- [50:24]
A
It was a small team definitely like I would say like four, five people, ish something. And then we started investing in sdr. So we had two types of sales. We have SDR in what we call mdr. MDR was basically market development representative. They were just taking care of the inbound. SDR was doing the outbound. We have AES for SMB as for enterprise. So we really over complexified stuff at some point point and when we refocused the entire go to market on solely enterprise, solely marketers, we merge everything together. We also, when a company went profitable we wanted also to have a more efficient team, a more efficient way of doing sales. So basically we hired account executives that were able to actually create their own pipeline because this is how they used to work. So they were doing the outbound, closing the outbound and then they will actually pass the customer then to the account managers and big transition there being, you know, trying to find out. And I think the sales team that we have Today, it's like 18 people including account managers, all enterprise, all educated of, you know, doing Outbound or talking to enterprise, negotiating stuff that actually very highly complex deals with it involved and everything else. Big change of culture, definitely.
- [51:43]
B
I'm curious, when you were going back to 2016, what was your career plan at the time? Was it to be a startup CEO?
- [51:53]
A
No, not at all. Actually. I didn't even come to the private sector. I come from a family that were actually public servants. I was teachers actually. And they still don't understand what I'm doing, to be honest. They don't have a clue of how it works. So it's funny conversations always. No, I was enjoying very much tech ecosystem. I knew I wanted to work there. It was like very. I still think it is very interesting on so many levels. I had this very nerdy thing inside of me. I wanted to build stuff. That's all I knew. I wanted to build stuff, whether that's a workflow, automation, code, whatever it is, I just wanted to build stuff. But I didn't. I don't think I became an entrepreneur because I wanted to build a company. I just wanted to build a product. I think that's and same for my co founders. I fail. Which I think ironically is perhaps a little bit different today because I think being an entrepreneur in a tech ecosystem, back in, in 2015, 2016, we didn't have all that publicity about all those highly successful entrepreneurs, highly successful startups and the mediums that go with it. I think it was the thing that motivated everyone was something like the love for the craft, love for the product, I think. And I don't know if that's still the thing today, I hope it is. But yeah, I think that was it.
- [53:33]
B
Yeah, I've seen that a lot with. I think the people who seem to do the best are not the ones who set out to become entrepreneurs. They were either frustrated by a problem and couldn't see anybody else fixing it, so they said, I'm going to go and fix it. Or they just like you just had the bug to build stuff and just.
- [53:57]
A
It's crazy because the school that we were in, I don't know if that exists in the us It's a university that was actually dedicated to the web in general. So basically we're going to learn to code and do some design and marketing everything on the web. And 80% of what we learned in those four years, three years, I don't recall. 80% of how we learned was actually by doing, you know, just by doing projects. And we had. And before we actually launched Livestorm, back in the days we knew each other for three years and we had, like, so many projects together and. Yeah, so I guess, like, we were like, you know, I remember actually spending nights, like, redesigning websites that I loved just because, you know, that was fun for some reason. So anyway, that was. I think it was a very candid but also very cool mindset, I feel.
- [55:01]
B
That's awesome. All right, on that note, let's. Let's wrap up and get onto the lightning round, and I've got seven quick fire questions for you. What's one of the best pieces of business advice you've received?
- [55:15]
A
Honestly? The quote about the doubt is something that I always default to. Honestly, when there is. Don't. The ecosystem will tell you to rush it for sure, because this is. It fills. Everything goes very fast and the ecosystem will tell you to rush it. But honestly, take your time and if there is a doubt, there is no doubt. You know, just do what's certain of it. It doesn't mean that you don't have to risk it. Don't take any risk, actually. But when it comes to hiring, for example, when it comes to investors or when it comes to those things, it is difficult. Choices and doubt should not probably be something to minimize.
- [56:03]
B
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
- [56:07]
A
I think not a business book. I think not a business book because you. I mean, the thing that it's a. I don't know if it exists in English, but it's a book that I read when I was. When I was a teenager. It's a. From. It's going to sound very pretentious, but it's a book from Jean Paul Sartre. It's a book from Jean Paul Sartre. It's called Hui Claud. And basically the story is you have all those people and they are locked up together and they have no mirror, they have nothing. They cannot see themselves anywhere. The only thing they can see is actually each other. And those people, they end up defining themselves by the look of other people. And it's a big reflection on how we define ourselves through. Through others and et cetera, and specifically in startups where we tend to benchmark ourselves to metrics, to benchmarks, to other companies, and usually on LinkedIn, where we see everything is super beautiful and rainbows and butterflies and whatnot. Don't trust that. Don't define yourself by the look of other people. Ask yourself what you want to be. You know, you have more liberty and freedom than you think.
- [57:35]
B
Yeah, love that. What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?
- [57:42]
A
Resilience.
- [57:43]
B
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
- [57:46]
A
I'm not going to be super, super original I think notion for sure.
- [57:52]
B
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time?
- [57:56]
A
Honestly, I should not say that because I feel that when you start thinking about other things it's probably like a sign that you should be doing something else. But I started thinking about something recently. I think the whole business planning area is interesting because it's either like highly complex stuff that lands and that pretty much looks like a spreadsheet or whatever. And when I say business planning is like pure business planning with forecasts and stuff, it's usually very, very enterprise, very, very complex as well. Requires a lot of tata and whatever. But I feel there is a room for a small platform self service SMB for the mom and dad type of business where you can actually have a proper business planning. Super simple with some AI forecast in it. Something like, you know, that could help any real life businesses actually do some, some really cool business planning. I don't know, just a hunch, an interesting idea.
- [58:57]
B
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
- [59:01]
A
Actually it's going to sound like super dark, but it's really not. Sorry. I was in a plane crash when I was a kid. Actually I can show you here that my tattoo here is basically the, the location of the crash and. Wow. Yeah, it was. Well it was, it was a small plant, right? There was a small like four or five people and five, four people. And I used to, to live in Western Africa and I was 10 and we were like taking this plane and we lost the wheel at takeoff and the pilot knew it so he ended up actually landing very far away on a landing zone that was actually not a landing zone because obviously if you start landing on asphalt and without the wheel, like without the front wheel, you know, things start burning and you know, obviously you don't want that. So we basically crashed onto the sand like in the dunes actually. And yeah, and then we got rescued by the French army and everything. So it was, it was interesting.
- [60:10]
B
Wow, that's got to be one of the best stories I have heard. And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?
- [60:22]
A
Cinema actually. I know it doesn't sound original but you will be frightened by the number of movies that I watch every year. It's crazy. That's the only thing I do, only thing I read about. One of my biggest dream is actually to attend one of the most prestigious festival like Cannes or anything. Yeah. Well, anyway, that's so cool.
- [60:48]
B
My son is into movies big time as well. And I always make fun of him that he's like the human IMDb, because I can like randomly name some movie and he'll tell me, oh yeah, it was produced by so and so and it was back in this year. And so I'm always like, randomly I just find him and I just throw a movie at him and it's like, ah, I'm just blown away.
- [61:11]
A
That's crazy. I love it. I love it. That's great.
- [61:15]
B
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining me, Gilles. It's been a pleasure. If people want to check out LifeStorm, they can go to Livestorm Co or Livestorm.com as well, right?
- [61:25]
A
Both of them actually. Yeah.
- [61:27]
B
And if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
- [61:30]
A
Well, I guess LinkedIn. Find me on LinkedIn. Reach out to me. Happy to answer.
- [61:35]
B
Awesome.
- [61:35]
A
He was. Thank you so much for having me.
- [61:37]
B
SaaS companies move fast. Most teams are focused on building and optimizing, not thinking about vulnerabilities, ransomware or zero day attacks. But they can strike without warning and put your entire business at risk. With the Threat Locker Zero Trust platform, you can get ahead of these attacks and stop them before they start. Instead of allowing everything and trying to spot the bad, Threat Locker blocks everything unless you approve it, giving your IT team full visibility across your environment. The result is stronger security control and your business keeps moving without interruption. Visit threatlocker.com that's threatlocker.com if you're building an AI agent, a SaaS product, or stuck trying to scale, check out Gearhart. They can act as your fractional CTO and technical team, bringing AI expertise from projects for Meta and Google plus, strong Silicon Valley connections with founders and VCs. And since they're a Ukrainian born company, you get senior engineers with an offshore pricing model with offices in San Francisco and London, and a distributed team of 40 experts. They've helped build over 70 successful products. Right now, they're offering our listeners the first 20 hours of development for free. Just book a call@Gearhart IO. That's Gearheart IO. Right now, there's a number hiding in your SaaS metrics. The exact point where your growth will stall. You can change it, but first you have to see it. It's simple math. When your churn catches up to your new revenue, you stop growing. You're running just to stand still. I've built a free calculator that shows you exactly where your ceiling is and the fastest way to break through it. Find your ceiling at SASClub IO calculator. That's SASClub IO calculator.