Hey Bernardo! Preseed to Seed Deck Evolution for Opentest, then Loom.
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Bernardo. Hey, how you doing? So I got our seed and our pree deck pulled up right now and thought I'd just give you a quick run through of them and you can kind of like pause as I scroll through them and look at how we kind of set them up.
So it started off of like the logo, the tagline. And then we, in the earliest days, just wanted to show that there's users who like truly and deeply love bloom.
Team slide is really important, especially in the pree. A lot of times investors are investing in the individuals like the humans because you don't have anything figured out.
I think that our precede deck will actually kind of convey that to some degree. So it's more on does the investors get enough context and sentiment about how they feel about the team and the founders through the fundraising process to be like, I'm gonna invest in them because they're most likely gonna pivot.
What they're working on right now won't be the like ability to scale. And so don't shy away from really leaning into who you are as individuals.
What motivates you? So like why are you going to crawl through the mud for like five to 10 years in order to make this company successful?
Like, what are your drivers as a human and what is your skill sets that you're bringing to the table? Then you go into the problem statement.
So video is the most efficient way to share knowledge, but video creation and sharing is not designed for business communication.
It's time consuming to record. It lacks enterprise features and it's not collaborative. The solution is that, you know, we start to talk about Async video and how that potentially ladders up to being a video CMS for businesses if you are truly creating net new content through asynchronous video recording and sharing.
So like both internal and external and the market opportunity. I think that this is like just more about how you think about the tam, the total addressable market that you're going after and what segment that you're planning to serve.
And to me, again, this isn't necessarily, a lot of times the most successful companies are category creators. And so maybe the serviceable addressable market is relatively small, but you're gonna create a category and you're gonna grow it and it's like a huge opportunity.
And so competitive landscape, you know, creates some sort of matrix and then place who you potentially put within your category is really helpful framing for investors and be like, How should I think about open tests?
And then you start to get into your traction. How many folks are using it? What are the types of organizations that are using it?
So starting to get into the numbers, how we think about our ability to monetize over the course of time. And then how we think about product roadmap.
How Are we gonna continue to evolve on top of what we've already built to date and then short term milestones that we're laying out for ourselves.
So between when you're raising your precede and when you will raise your next round of funding, how do you think about your ability to ladder up de-risking the business overall?
And what milestones are you setting for yourself? So like we were thinking that we would monetize in November, 2016. That didn't actually happen until late 2018, so we were two years behind.
But that's just because we had enough usage and interest in the platform that that was the most important allocation of our resources.
And so you keep it relatively short. You can see here that is 12 slides. I think that that's what you should target.
You should be able to like record a loom and send it over to investors. And so that way, that is like a really efficient way to be like, is there investors who are interested not just in what problem and solution space that we're working within, but who's the human?
Who's Bernardo on the other side, and what is he like? So then how did that evolve into our seed rounds?
Is that, you know, we had rebranded from Open Test to Loom because the products and the pivot that we had made, we felt like it was a much bigger opportunity than what open test the name conveyed.
So we rebranded to Loom and cloud-based video collaboration platform for the workplace. We also upleveled who we felt like our indirect competitors were because we wanted to show a bigger addressable market.
So digital communication continues to evolve Slack, zoom Gmail, but distributed teams have product productivity killing pain points is that, you know, Slack notifications and slack anxiety.
Now there's an actual term for this, which is zoom fatigue. It's not just schedule conflicts, it's actually just like people want less meetings.
And then low morale is that tech space communication for distributed teams is does not build the human connection side. So our solution is effective.
It is easier to create clarity with video versus text based messages. It's efficient because teams from a globally distributed perspective, it's asynchronous communication.
And then video is also more expressive. So nothing beats seeing a person's face or hearing their voice. We then linked to a video in our deck.
And this just does a product demo walkthrough. And then compared to like Pree versus seed, you should actually have charts at this point.
Like you should show how you're progressing in terms of usage on the overall platform. What are the metrics? It's basically communicating to investors which ones are important to you and which ones you pay attention to.
So for Loom, it was weekly active users in the platform and it was also the number of minutes recorded per month.
And then we also wanted to convey that a big question that we would get from pree and seed investors was, Well, is the market Ready for this?
It seems like a relatively obvious solution, but why doesn't this exist? And so we thought it was important to convey how we were making progress on that.
Individuals who were signing up for Loom were going through our activation metrics. So basically one who shared a video and that it would get a view on that video.
So we were able to improve that like double that from 5% to, you know, 11.5% over the course of six months because we really decided to focus on it as a collective team.
And then from there it's doing a more, again, charts oriented view on the video, but looking at slices, so conveying to these investors, where do we think our opportunity is?
And so you can see that we picked some larger enterprise esque logos because we felt like that's where Loom and asynchronous video could be adopted and make significant revenue off of.
And so we chose HubSpot, Nielsen, Google, and Uber. And again, it's kind of like number of new users. So how many have signed up and then the number of videos that have been recorded.
Then you get into more of like the qualitative individual power users. So you can see that Jeff had recorded sorry, risk, Risk Lies had recorded almost a thousand videos, 45 active members.
And here's the use case. Here's the use case from Nielsen is that it's a senior data scientist and that they had recorded 720 videos and then a HubSpot was at 230 and that they were using it for marketing product tutorials.
This product roadmap is a little bit clearer than the tech based product roadmap that you saw over here. So you know, just trying to bring a little bit more visual and ease of digestion here.
And, and this basically is conveying to investors, how do you think about evolving the platform over the course of time?
What's most important? And so we really thought hard about, you know, what are the categories of like, we're focused on distribution, so where is the Loom software?
What what platforms are we hosting it on? Collaboration, How do we make it more valuable for teams and organizations? And then there's also kind of the video infrastructure side that's unbelievably important, especially when you think about Zoom and how they were able to really take an existing market by storm.
And it's because they had really great video technology. And so we felt like that was important enough to break out as its own separate row.
We also, while we hadn't started monetizing yet during, before we raised the seed rounds, we wanted to show that it was there was a lot of people that the usage wasn't just there, but people were willing to pay for it.
And this is how we thought about monetizing the user base. And then the potential deals. And these have actually come to fruition, which is incredibly exciting to say.
Like, we were able to sell these size contracts to these logos. And then you get into, again, Tam I think is really important in terms of what is the size of the market that you're going after.
And for us it's like, it's obvious consumer behavior leads, enterprise behavior and video and consumer, even back in 20 17, 20 16 was absolutely huge.
And so we were basically translating this existing behavior to the workplace. We also was conveying that massive opportunity for asynchronous video in the workplace.
There's white papers out there for us that we were able to like drag and drop here because it really conveyed why, what would encourage employees to use video.
It's easy to use tools and that's one of the things that Loom was known for is how dead simple it was to use.
And so, you know, simple publishing of videos, culture that fosters videos, centralized video management, all of these things were like, we're working on all of this, but the most important thing is like, and easy to use platform.
And that's what Loom had in spades. And then I, I, like I had mentioned in precede really investing in the team by the time that the seed rolls around.
I think that that's when you put the team slide a little bit further back because it's more about the opportunity and you should have more crisp clarity on it.
And then we decided to lean into how much were we actually planning to raise and what is the most important goal?
Like what is the commander's intent of the company between when we raise the seed and when we wanna raise our series A.
And we wanted to monetize a thousand plus teams and progress towards enterprise teams so that way we could basically be like, we're generating significant revenue by the time we're raising our series A.
So I hope this, this is helpful Bernardo letting know if you have any questions and good luck on your journey.
Transcript
Show Transcript
Bernardo. Hey, how you doing? So I got our seed and our pree deck pulled up right now and thought I'd just give you a quick run through of them and you can kind of like pause as I scroll through them and look at how we kind of set them up.
So it started off of like the logo, the tagline. And then we, in the earliest days, just wanted to show that there's users who like truly and deeply love bloom.
Team slide is really important, especially in the pree. A lot of times investors are investing in the individuals like the humans because you don't have anything figured out.
I think that our precede deck will actually kind of convey that to some degree. So it's more on does the investors get enough context and sentiment about how they feel about the team and the founders through the fundraising process to be like, I'm gonna invest in them because they're most likely gonna pivot.
What they're working on right now won't be the like ability to scale. And so don't shy away from really leaning into who you are as individuals.
What motivates you? So like why are you going to crawl through the mud for like five to 10 years in order to make this company successful?
Like, what are your drivers as a human and what is your skill sets that you're bringing to the table? Then you go into the problem statement.
So video is the most efficient way to share knowledge, but video creation and sharing is not designed for business communication.
It's time consuming to record. It lacks enterprise features and it's not collaborative. The solution is that, you know, we start to talk about Async video and how that potentially ladders up to being a video CMS for businesses if you are truly creating net new content through asynchronous video recording and sharing.
So like both internal and external and the market opportunity. I think that this is like just more about how you think about the tam, the total addressable market that you're going after and what segment that you're planning to serve.
And to me, again, this isn't necessarily, a lot of times the most successful companies are category creators. And so maybe the serviceable addressable market is relatively small, but you're gonna create a category and you're gonna grow it and it's like a huge opportunity.
And so competitive landscape, you know, creates some sort of matrix and then place who you potentially put within your category is really helpful framing for investors and be like, How should I think about open tests?
And then you start to get into your traction. How many folks are using it? What are the types of organizations that are using it?
So starting to get into the numbers, how we think about our ability to monetize over the course of time. And then how we think about product roadmap.
How Are we gonna continue to evolve on top of what we've already built to date and then short term milestones that we're laying out for ourselves.
So between when you're raising your precede and when you will raise your next round of funding, how do you think about your ability to ladder up de-risking the business overall?
And what milestones are you setting for yourself? So like we were thinking that we would monetize in November, 2016. That didn't actually happen until late 2018, so we were two years behind.
But that's just because we had enough usage and interest in the platform that that was the most important allocation of our resources.
And so you keep it relatively short. You can see here that is 12 slides. I think that that's what you should target.
You should be able to like record a loom and send it over to investors. And so that way, that is like a really efficient way to be like, is there investors who are interested not just in what problem and solution space that we're working within, but who's the human?
Who's Bernardo on the other side, and what is he like? So then how did that evolve into our seed rounds?
Is that, you know, we had rebranded from Open Test to Loom because the products and the pivot that we had made, we felt like it was a much bigger opportunity than what open test the name conveyed.
So we rebranded to Loom and cloud-based video collaboration platform for the workplace. We also upleveled who we felt like our indirect competitors were because we wanted to show a bigger addressable market.
So digital communication continues to evolve Slack, zoom Gmail, but distributed teams have product productivity killing pain points is that, you know, Slack notifications and slack anxiety.
Now there's an actual term for this, which is zoom fatigue. It's not just schedule conflicts, it's actually just like people want less meetings.
And then low morale is that tech space communication for distributed teams is does not build the human connection side. So our solution is effective.
It is easier to create clarity with video versus text based messages. It's efficient because teams from a globally distributed perspective, it's asynchronous communication.
And then video is also more expressive. So nothing beats seeing a person's face or hearing their voice. We then linked to a video in our deck.
And this just does a product demo walkthrough. And then compared to like Pree versus seed, you should actually have charts at this point.
Like you should show how you're progressing in terms of usage on the overall platform. What are the metrics? It's basically communicating to investors which ones are important to you and which ones you pay attention to.
So for Loom, it was weekly active users in the platform and it was also the number of minutes recorded per month.
And then we also wanted to convey that a big question that we would get from pree and seed investors was, Well, is the market Ready for this?
It seems like a relatively obvious solution, but why doesn't this exist? And so we thought it was important to convey how we were making progress on that.
Individuals who were signing up for Loom were going through our activation metrics. So basically one who shared a video and that it would get a view on that video.
So we were able to improve that like double that from 5% to, you know, 11.5% over the course of six months because we really decided to focus on it as a collective team.
And then from there it's doing a more, again, charts oriented view on the video, but looking at slices, so conveying to these investors, where do we think our opportunity is?
And so you can see that we picked some larger enterprise esque logos because we felt like that's where Loom and asynchronous video could be adopted and make significant revenue off of.
And so we chose HubSpot, Nielsen, Google, and Uber. And again, it's kind of like number of new users. So how many have signed up and then the number of videos that have been recorded.
Then you get into more of like the qualitative individual power users. So you can see that Jeff had recorded sorry, risk, Risk Lies had recorded almost a thousand videos, 45 active members.
And here's the use case. Here's the use case from Nielsen is that it's a senior data scientist and that they had recorded 720 videos and then a HubSpot was at 230 and that they were using it for marketing product tutorials.
This product roadmap is a little bit clearer than the tech based product roadmap that you saw over here. So you know, just trying to bring a little bit more visual and ease of digestion here.
And, and this basically is conveying to investors, how do you think about evolving the platform over the course of time?
What's most important? And so we really thought hard about, you know, what are the categories of like, we're focused on distribution, so where is the Loom software?
What what platforms are we hosting it on? Collaboration, How do we make it more valuable for teams and organizations? And then there's also kind of the video infrastructure side that's unbelievably important, especially when you think about Zoom and how they were able to really take an existing market by storm.
And it's because they had really great video technology. And so we felt like that was important enough to break out as its own separate row.
We also, while we hadn't started monetizing yet during, before we raised the seed rounds, we wanted to show that it was there was a lot of people that the usage wasn't just there, but people were willing to pay for it.
And this is how we thought about monetizing the user base. And then the potential deals. And these have actually come to fruition, which is incredibly exciting to say.
Like, we were able to sell these size contracts to these logos. And then you get into, again, Tam I think is really important in terms of what is the size of the market that you're going after.
And for us it's like, it's obvious consumer behavior leads, enterprise behavior and video and consumer, even back in 20 17, 20 16 was absolutely huge.
And so we were basically translating this existing behavior to the workplace. We also was conveying that massive opportunity for asynchronous video in the workplace.
There's white papers out there for us that we were able to like drag and drop here because it really conveyed why, what would encourage employees to use video.
It's easy to use tools and that's one of the things that Loom was known for is how dead simple it was to use.
And so, you know, simple publishing of videos, culture that fosters videos, centralized video management, all of these things were like, we're working on all of this, but the most important thing is like, and easy to use platform.
And that's what Loom had in spades. And then I, I, like I had mentioned in precede really investing in the team by the time that the seed rolls around.
I think that that's when you put the team slide a little bit further back because it's more about the opportunity and you should have more crisp clarity on it.
And then we decided to lean into how much were we actually planning to raise and what is the most important goal?
Like what is the commander's intent of the company between when we raise the seed and when we wanna raise our series A.
And we wanted to monetize a thousand plus teams and progress towards enterprise teams so that way we could basically be like, we're generating significant revenue by the time we're raising our series A.
So I hope this, this is helpful Bernardo letting know if you have any questions and good luck on your journey.