Claap Revenue, Valuation & Funding (2024)

[00:00] Hey, folks. My guest today is Pierre Touzeau. He co founded claap, that's c l a a p, alongside his partners, Robin and Tom, to create a new decision making system for the distributed era. Before claap, Pierre was VP of marketing at 360Learning, a SoftBank backed company famous for its async and distributed culture. Alright, Pierre, are ready to take us to the top? [00:18] >> Yes. Perfect. Hi, Nathan. [00:19] Alright. So how would you describe claap? What's the tool do? [00:23] >> Yes. So claap, it's an async video collaboration platform. So basically, the key is to say that you have this big shift to a distributed world. One big problem that we have is that back to back meeting that become the norm, but we like the core of the problem is that anytime today we want to align and make decisions. Basically, we are stuck between two options. We have option one, async written communication like Slack, Notion, and so [00:47] >> on. It's flexible. But at some point, we like context, we like interactivity. So anytime we're stuck, we need to revert back to meetings. We're like, okay, let's talk about it, let's align, and we end up in a Zoom call. And the idea behind what you call async with the collaboration is we need to create this new way to align and make decisions that combines both the flexibility of async communication with the context and interactivity of a [01:08] >> meeting. And basically, the way it works is like, let's say I'm a product manager or business guy. [01:12] Well, Pierre, hold real quick. So just to just to pause for a second. So it's effectively like Loom in the sense that it's asynchronous, but Zoom, z o o m, and the fact that you can still do live meetings. [01:23] >> Exactly. To to sum up, it's Zoom, but for feedback and decision making. Because we add, like, on top of Loom, a layer of, like, collaboration together to annotate the video, to make decisions, and so on. But it's also a way to centralize all the videos you have, like, in the in your company in just one place. [01:41] There's project manage some light project management tools built on top of the video, so you can get stuff done. [01:46] >> Exactly. Exactly. Like, the the the way the workspace is built is really inspired by collaboration tool like ClickUp, Notion, Asana, and so on. [01:55] Yep. I don't want to bury the lead here. You just recently launched on Product Hunt. How many upvotes did you get? [02:00] >> So I think we got 1,400. Actually, it's a funny story because at first we got one one thousand eight hundred, but we had 400 votes deleted the week after. So I think it's one of the learnings I can share. If you ask too many people that don't have any account on the product and to vote, you might get some votes deleted. But right now, think it's 1,400 votes. [02:26] And when you launched on Product Hunt, you obviously, that's enough upvotes to hit the number one spot. How many sign ups did you get of claap that day? [02:33] >> So on that day, I would say like during the week, it was around 1,000 sign ups, but like [02:40] 1,000 what? 1,000 [02:43] >> sign ups, but then in total with the launch, I would say like like the effect of the launch, it lasts around like six weeks. And in six weeks, we got around 3,000 new sign ups, thanks to the thanks to the launch. [02:59] Interesting. And how many of those sign ups convert? I mean, there a paid option? How many converted to paid? [03:04] >> So I would say the paid option, it's something we launched recently, but we don't have a paywall yet in the product. We just monetize the existing account that we have. But basically, for the new signup, the metric that you track is really activation rate. The way we define activation rate is number of people that record two claps, and basically, today it's between 15 to 20% of people that really became activated user on the platform. [03:35] So what does that Activation rate just activation rate is you sign up for claap and you record at least one video or you engage with somebody else's video, but maybe don't sign up for claap yourself. [03:44] >> You record the two videos at least because we consider that the first one is a test. So actually, like, the second one is a proper use case. And then we also realized that the retention rate was actually, like, pretty high, actually, like, once you are, like, activated. So that's really, like, one metric that we optimize for. [04:04] Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this, you love watching these interviews with SaaS founders, but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 interviews I've done manually. Saves you a lot of time. Well, we've done this, we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second. But you log in, you connect [04:27] your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time, you can see what changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're gonna get [04:52] a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation, Private equity firm is different. If you're gonna do a minority sale, that's different. And if you sell the whole business, that's a different valuation. You can see all those when I hover over here. Right? So the teal is what a VC would pay. Yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright. Now what's cool about this is this is not [05:14] built off random data. Again, you guys hear these interviews on YouTube. All these datas are built from real time valuation data points founder share with us on the show. So traction 1,200,000 seed round 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you only wanna see companies that have sold the whole business. Well, here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple. Maybe you're going [05:39] out right now and you're raising your seed round. We'll go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down, what they raised, what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold. There's never been a larger dataset of SaaS valuations than what you can get now inside of Founderpath. And we're thrilled to bring it to you. All right. We're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second. But if [06:01] you wanna check this tool out, if you wanna jump in and sign up, you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link, this link, founderpath.com/products/valuations. Or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products, click on get your valuation here, and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl. Again, all that valuation data live right inside the platform. I hope to see you there. Alright. Let's jump back into the [06:27] interview. So just to be clear, when someone signs up for claap, you want them to create two claps as fast as possible, two videos. And then ongoing for retention, you wanna see them engage with 15 to 20% of the total videos that they create to some degree. [06:42] >> No. No. No. No. So to be clear, so we have, like, one step that we measure, which is activation rate. The way we define activated user is two claps recorded. Today the activation rate we have is in between 15 to 20%, which is really definitely something we need to improve. But then the retention rate we have, it's around 70 to 75% after twelve weeks. And I think it's also part of the reason why we launched on [07:07] >> Product Hunt, is that because we knew that the existing users had kept using the platform, they were really engaged with the product, So we're actually pretty confident that we have a product to sell and to have people use it. And that's the moment we decided to launch on Product Hunt. [07:24] And to Pierre, how many people are active today? They've created at least two videos. [07:29] >> So we have around 1,400 active users on the platform. [07:36] Okay. And so we understand the product hunt. We understand top of funnel. We understand conversion into active users, 20% or about 1,400 today. So you almost have five, six thousand total sign ups then. Right? So maybe 7,000? [07:46] >> Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. [07:48] So you've got 1,400 active. You guys then start going, you know what? We need to make money from this. We can build a real business. So how did you think about what to charge and who to [07:57] show the paywall to? [07:59] >> Okay. So it's it's it's actually a good question because we we have we try to build a PLG model, and and when you build PLG, you always you always have a debate about what is the right moment to launch monetization, and we actually decided to launch it pretty early, not to have a paywall, but at least to monetize the existing user, because for us it's really a way to assess if you have product market fit, because, [08:24] >> like, meaning if people are ready to pay for it, it means that you have something that you want to scale. So we've done two things for that. The first one is that we actually contacted the accounts that we knew, and that we're actually using claap a lot with basically more than twenty thirty users and so on. And the second step we did was pure purely, like, to show a pop in in the product saying, you've reached [08:50] >> your account limit. Now it's time to pay. Redirect to the pricing page, and then book a call with me. [08:57] Well, how many people what was the limit? Who who saw the banner? [09:00] >> So the banner, we actually, like, showed the banner for the workspaces with more than 50 claps recorded. And the limit Who would [09:09] more than with more than five zero videos created claps created? [09:13] >> Exactly. Yeah. [09:14] Okay. But it doesn't matter how many team members are on it. It could be one user with 50 claps. They would still see the banner. [09:20] >> Exactly. And I think it's it was more of a way to create a compelling event and to kind of force a discussion because the moment we launched that, realized that actually, like, many people, they contacted us to initiate the discussion because they were afraid to lose our videos, and that was really a good trigger to actually, like, engage conversation and monetization and so on. [09:40] So, Pierre, how many people saw that banner that said you reached your limit? [09:45] >> It's a good question. I I think I don't know exactly this number because it's more in term of, like, accounts, but I would say it would be around maybe fifty, sixty accounts. [09:59] Okay. So just to be clear, you [10:01] >> have like 200 people and so on, and then we manage to monetize around like maybe 15 to 20 accounts out of, like, those fifty fifty accounts. [10:11] So just to build a full funnel, you've got 7,000 sign ups, 1,400 are active. They've created at least two claps. Sixty, six zero, of the 1,400 are power users. At least 50 claps created. They saw the paywall. And of those fifty, twenty [10:26] >> No. It's it's small because the 60, it's a workspaces. So for example, in some workspaces, we have, like, maybe 200 users. So but basically, in term of monetization, the number is that we roughly manage to convert like 50% of activated users. [10:44] I'm trying to stay away from percentages because people listening don't know your what the base is. So I'm trying to use the real number. So you have 1,400 active accounts, and then you're giving me a 60 work workspaces that saw the paid banner. How many accounts saw the paid banner? [10:59] >> I think it's 50. Yeah. In between 50 to to 60 accounts. [11:06] K. So I guess I'm not clear. What I was just saying was accurate. I think there was 1,400 total sign ups. Right. Sorry. 7,000 total sign ups, 1,400 active, more than two claps. Of the 1,400 active, there are 60 accounts or workspaces with at least five zero claps. Correct? [11:22] >> Yes. But but in the account, you can have a lot of different users if you see what I mean. [11:27] Of course. But I but I didn't ask you how many. [11:31] >> I So you have [11:32] you have accounts, you have workstations, and you have claps created. [11:35] >> Right? So an account is like one user, one employee at a company. Right? [11:39] >> No. No. No. Okay. One account can be for example, in some accounts like Quanta or Revolut, we can have like 200 at Quanta, for example, we have 200 users. [11:48] Okay. So what's the difference between what's the difference what's the difference between an account and a workspace? [11:55] >> It's the same. Like, sign up. Like, we we have user and we have workspaces. [12:00] Okay. But when you use the word account in this interview, when you use the word account in workspace, you're talking about the same thing? [12:06] >> Yes. When I speak about account, I speak about workspaces. [12:10] Okay. So just to be clear, you have accounts in workspaces, and then inside of accounts in workspaces, you have people. You have some accounts and workspaces with 200 people under them. How many when you say 7,000 sign ups, are those people Users. Or work It's people. Places. Okay. So 7,000 sign ups across how many how many total workspaces today? [12:30] >> Total workspace, it must be around 2,000, but actually, like, a lot of them are not activated. [12:36] Okay. So there's 2,000 companies on your platform with 7,000 employees, right, or users. Is that the right way to think about it? Okay. And then how how many how many of okay. So of those 2,000 companies, 60 of them are power companies. They have at least 50 videos created. [12:55] >> Exactly. We just decided to trigger this for, like, those companies. Yeah. Exactly. [13:00] That makes sense. Okay. So of those 60 accounts or workplaces that saw the paywall, 20 of them have converted to paid? [13:08] >> Exactly. [13:09] Now we're on the same page. Okay. So today, have 20 paying customers. [13:12] >> Exactly. [13:13] Amazing. Okay. So now that we understand the funnel, tell me about the price. How do you decide what to charge? [13:19] >> I think the the the price was there are like two stuff, it's the first one is like a market benchmark, and you compare to existing solutions, etc, so we decided to go with like $10 per month per user. And the second stuff is also based on the I would say, the willingness to pay and how indispensable your tool is. And for example, in some teams like product, design and so on, we know that they have like [13:49] >> essential workflows built with claap, and we can really monetize this easily. So we have like one entry point, which is like the one team plan, which is like $10 per month per user, but then we can also upsell to like $20, $30 per month per user by adding like other features such as like meeting recording and and so on. [14:10] What is so you have 20 paying customers or workplaces today. Right? 20 companies paying for your tool. What does a company today pay on average per month? [14:19] >> On average, they pay $10, 10 euros per month per user. [14:24] Well, I know. I don't know how many users. That's why I'm asking. As a company, what does the company pay on average per month? [14:29] >> Per month, would say they pay in average between, like, 200 to 300 monthly recurring revenue. [14:36] Okay. So they're signing up for 25 paid accounts on average right right away. [14:40] >> Exactly. And I think it's a good validation because something that we really wanted to validate is that we are not purely a user tool, and I think it's also ends the confusion on this, but we are really a team tool, a team platform, and once people pay for it, they don't pay just for one or two users, but they really build for one entire team, or maybe two teams on claap. And it's also mostly, I would [15:05] >> say, hyper growth tech startup. So actually, the number of users per workspace can actually become quite big on accounts of companies. [15:16] Understood. So you have 20 customers today paying $250 per month. So you're doing about $5,000 a month today in revenue. Right? [15:22] >> Exactly. Yeah. [15:23] And where were you exactly a year ago? [15:26] >> Zero. [15:26] Right? [15:27] >> Yeah. A year ago, we actually launched the product a year ago. [15:31] Okay. So no no revenue. Okay. Got it. So you when did you start coding? You started coding, I think, back in 2020. Right? [15:37] >> No. We actually, like, started coding end of twenty twenty, beginning of twenty twenty one. For six months, we really built the product. We launched in private beta in July 2021. Far, actually, for ten months, we remain in private beta. We had actually a huge wait list of users, so we had a lot of people to onboard. But I think the goal was really to understand, like, the use cases where we have, like, a quick activation and [16:07] >> viralities. Also validate that the retention is good. And once we had, like, a good user retention, that's the moment we decided to open the product. He built, like, the website, the branding, the content, and so on, refined onboarding. We said, okay. Now we are going to test to open the product on the on the product end. [16:27] Understood. And you raised a 3,000,000 seed in 2021. Right? [16:32] >> Exactly. In 2021. Yeah. [16:35] Most companies are selling, you know, 20% of their business in their seed. Did you did you sell about 15 to 20%? [16:41] >> No. It was less, actually. [16:42] Oh, it's less less than 10%? [16:45] >> No. It was less than 20%. [16:47] Oh, less than 20. Okay. Got it. So between 1020%, though. [16:50] >> Exactly. [16:51] Yeah. I see. Okay. So that I mean, that's like a what is that? It's like a $20,000,000 valuation, something like that, pre money? [16:58] >> Pre money, it was a bit less. It was Okay. Yeah. In dollar, I think it was around [17:05] >> 17 in in dollars, it was around 17. [17:10] Have you been able to use that 3,000,000 to get to you are today, or did you have to go raise more capital? [17:14] >> No. We still have a lot of, like, we have, like, two or three years of runway left. I think we have we like, the type of product we build is not, like, super cash intensive because we are, like, still pretty small. We are just 14 in the in the company. We are also, like, in the total. [17:28] How many engineers? [17:29] >> Eight engineers. [17:32] Okay. Any salespeople yet or no? [17:34] >> Just one sales, but actually, like, left, and I think it was maybe a bit too soon to do it. Right now it's more me doing sales and we have one head of customer success, actually like the former head of customer success from Typeform. And I think this is something you should prioritize when you do like a PLG. But sales, I feel like it's something that the founder must do at the beginning, especially like when you test [18:01] >> like use cases, pricing and all this kind of stuff, because it's a lot of product marketing work that you need to do. [18:08] Now, when you talk about, you know, obviously, runway, you gotta talk about what is your, you know, burn per month. So you have 14 people. Your revenue is still growing. I mean, are you burning what? $100 k a month? 150,000 a month? [18:19] >> Yeah. 100. [18:20] 100. Net burn? [18:22] >> Net burn. [18:23] Yeah. And you're comfortable with that? That doesn't keep you up at night? [18:26] >> No. I think we are comfortable because like two things. We have like two years of runway left by adding actually, like, one software engineer. So that's we are comfortable with that. And also, stuff, I think we have a a pretty good signals on our side of of [18:44] >> PMF and and and so we are like yeah. We are pretty confident on this. [18:49] Pierre, how do you have three years of runway if you're burning a $100 k a month? [18:52] That's 1.2 a year times three is [18:54] >> Two years of runway. No. And and I think, like, something I forgot to mention that so we are based in France. And in France, you raise the, like, 3,000,000, you can add on top of that some debt. And actually, like, we add 1,500,000 of debt. Thanks to, like, a BPI, which is, the public investment bank. Such, like, in total, we got, like, 4,500,000. [19:19] I see. I see. I see. Do you have to pay that debt back, or is it basically free money from the government? [19:27] >> It's basically you need to pay back if you succeed. [19:31] >> And for any fundraising, you can actually, like, get more debt. But if you fail, you don't need to pay back. [19:36] >> Yep. Yep. Makes sense. [19:37] Very cool. Well, listen, this is a this is a ton of fun. You know, it's interesting for me to compare your story with Looms. I had them on right before they were launching their Paywall, but they had I mean, they had 1,200,000, right, active users. And so you're choosing to launch Paywall way before they did in terms of your just pure usage numbers. I'm I'm sure you are aware of that comp, and [19:56] I was an I I am 'm imagining that that was an intentional decision you made. Why? [20:01] >> I think it's because the play we have is a bit different. And I think like the also the angle we approach like, I think claap is really a collaboration platform. Loom was more of a pure PLG product, basically enabling individual users to share quick videos in Slack, email, so on. But in the end, what we realized is that claap, we have platform that teams used. We wanted to validate that teams are willing to pay for that. [20:33] >> And in the end, I feel like the type of play that we have will be maybe a bit more sales driven compared to the the approach Loom had at the beginning. [20:44] Mhmm. Mhmm. Yeah. [20:45] Makes sense. [20:46] >> And and we also see, I think, that Loom is trying to move upmarket. I think one way they build the product being super just user centric has some limitation in actually becoming a platform for the entire organization. That's really the we build the product completely differently in terms of workspace. That's a key strength, but but it means that the approach is a bit more like sales driven sales driven in the end. [21:15] Yep. Well, we'll see what happens. It'll be fun to watch you guys both over the next couple of years. In the meantime, let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, favorite book? [21:22] >> I think it's Play Bigger. I'm a magazine guy. [21:25] Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? [21:29] >> I really love David Cancel from Drift. [21:32] Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building the business besides your own? [21:38] >> Notion. You can do, like, so many stuff on Notion. [21:40] Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night? [21:43] >> Sorry? [21:44] Sleep. How much do you sleep each night? [21:47] >> I think seven seven hours. [21:50] Okay. And what's your situation? Married, single, kids? [21:54] >> Not single. Not married, but not single. [21:56] Not married. No kids in our what are you 33? I'm Years old? [22:01] >> I'm 33. Yeah. [22:02] Alright. Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20. [22:10] >> It's a good question. [22:13] >> I think last time I didn't know. [22:19] >> Like, my big wish would be, like, to speak maybe five different languages with no accents, especially There [22:26] you have it. Claap.io launched on Product Hunt, got 6,000 sign ups, converted that into $60,000 a year in new revenue. Really incredible funnel as they look to scale and build maybe an enterprise version of, call it, Loom plus collaboration tools built on top of that. We'll see what happens. Pierre, thanks for taking us to the top. [22:41] >> Thanks, Nathan. [22:44] One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM Central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. We call it deal or bust. One founder comes on, three hungry buyers, they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards, their expenses, their revenue, ARPU, CAC, LTV, you name it, they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live. It is fun to watch every Thursday one [23:08] p. M. Central. Additionally, remember these recorded Founder interviews go live. We release them here on YouTube every day at two p. M. Central. To make sure you don't miss any of that, make sure you click the subscribe button below here on YouTube, the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live. I wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the SaaS world, whether it's [23:30] an acquisition, a big fundraise, a big sale, a big profitability statement or something else. I don't want you to miss it. Additionally, if you wanna take this conversation deeper and further, we have by far the largest private Slack community for B2B SaaS founders. You want to get in there. We've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing. You can go in there and quickly search and see what people [23:52] are saying. Sign up for that at nathanlatka.com/slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty minutes. Feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it, click the thumbs up. We get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows, but I do it so that we can all learn. We have to [24:11] counter those people. We got to push them away. Click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys'support. Alright, I'll be in the comments. See you.

hey folks my guest today is pierre tozo he's the co-founder of clap he's currently building the future of asynchronous communication in a work from anywhere world he started his career at l'oreal where he learned how the best brands become and remain world-renowned leaders before clapp he was vp of marketing at 360 learning an organization famous for its meeting limitation policies where he helped the company grow from 25 to over 200 people and more than 30 million dollars in ar pierre are you ready to take us to the top yeah all right did you get any equity at 360 learning as vp of marketing or no yes i i got some and it's funny because right now i have the opportunity to invest like small tickets in small startup and it's like a it's a it's good to be on the other side of like the like founder like from founder and employee to like first time like investor as well so you're doing some angel investing then huh yeah yeah a lot of a lot of station f stuff i hear something special is happening there yes the chef actually like we we know quite well because roxanne was actually like invested in club and we are like very friendly with them very cool tell us what club does yeah so basically like the idea of crap it's an asynchronous meeting platform and the basic idea is to say that we are living maybe the larger shift in our work in the last industrial version which is working from anywhere it's going to define route for the upcoming 24 years but we have you know like this one big issue which is like back to back meetings have become the norm uh and basically like what we've noticed that when are in the same office and let's say i want to align with you on a product prototype a spreadsheet like a deck etc it's just going to take me like five minutes i'm going to see you with my desktop maybe like show my screen ask a few questions i'm going to get like some precise feedback and then i can move on but the problem is like those five minutes i will like turn into search me and zoom call by default when we all switch to like full remote and the idb and what we call asynchronous meeting is to make it like super easy to share like video updates of your screen then to collect like precise feedback what we call incontext feedback tied to a specific minute but also like zone of your screen and then to turn this back into like next steps and decisions but without the need to be in the same room at the same time we like the idea behind this is to yeah create a new format for like quick alignment and decision making where we were kind of stuck between like two options you know like asynchronous written communication which is like flexible but limited like that like context and interactivity so when we're stuck we always revert to me things and the idea of clap is to create this a new format that combines the flexibility of asynchronous communication with like the contextualization and interactivity of a meeting got it yeah this makes perfect sense you know i found myself using loom a ton to do this sort of thing right so how do you beat companies like loom and i imagine zoom will also get into this at some point yes so so i think like the main difference with like loom loom it's more like for video sharing like if you want to share like an update it's like perfect but it's not like build to basically like collect feedback and make decisions it's not also it's not a system of record and we like the idea of clap is to really like build this kind of asynchronous like decision making workflow which is like you share an update then you get feedback then you turn feedback into next steps and at scale you basically like you also become a system of recall in the company so you create transparency and scale and and what's the revenue model how do you make money so it's a premium model so like the the idea is to have like a free plan uh which is like basically like people starting to like but recall the claps and then like inviting people to comments and clubs et cetera and then at scale if you have like a revenue model based on like a video creator how do you turn that how do you turn that on yet or you still pre-revenue so we are still pre of new we launched the private data actually like um around like one month ago and right now it's really close private beta and we have like around maybe uh i would say like monthly active user around like 100 months active user around like 30 to 30 like daily active user and we have like around three thousand people in the waitlist a bit more and it is really to iterate first on like you know like understand what drives like adoption activation and also like virality and and that's we like the goal of like this super like close private data when did you guys write the first line of code for cloud uh it's actually it was like around october november um the first pass we wanted to know as we liked the like the video recording system you know like managing like all the kind of costs related to that but we really accelerated on the development in january okay and how much have you spent on the mvp so far but what do you mean by that how much money have you spent building the mvp so far not a lot to be honest i think maybe uh 150 uh 200 okay and and so what is your goal when you guys want to launch pricing um it's it's a good question i think we want to have like a pricing model really defined when we open the public uh we we open the product to public beta because like you know like the i think like at first we are like a bit naive we wanted to launch like the pricing model in like one year or two years but we realized that if you launch a product that is like free from the beginning and then you launch the pay plan maybe one year after you it's going to be like super hard to do it so what we want to do is we need to have like the pricing plan uh ready when we open the beta so what do you think the pricing plan will be yeah and when do you think you'll open it how much time i think we'll open it like so basically we are going to do it in two steps so we are going to accelerate onboarding in september uh because we have like some good feedback on the product usage and we have like a better understanding of like the the go-to-market that works uh so we plan to keep like the private product private the accelerate on boardings and then the public beta i think it will be probably by end of the year or early next year and what will that price point be do you think the starting price point if it's a good question to be honest i'm not ready to answer i think it's do you think it'll be like a consumer five dollar a month thing or like an enterprise 500 a month minimum no i think it will be like somewhere between like 10 to 20 dollars a month per video creator and what utility-based upsell like will you build is it like would a per seat model work or a number of recorded videos per month work or like what's the usage metric yeah so basically i think like the it will be like based on like the video recorded but then the question is also in terms of like features limitation the idea of clap is really to build like a new decision making system and we are going to launch a lot of like features linked to that you know like for example one of the primitive features of clip is what we call in-context feedback so it's really like feedback type with specific like minute but also like zone of your like video and right now it's more like text plus like emoji feedback but tomorrow we have like for example system of like polls a system of like video feedback or voice feedback et cetera and what nation are you building it for though right so like if you look like frame dot io for video editing they do a good job of this but it's for a very specific niche like are you targeting sales people or product engineers or something else yeah so like the goal for clap is really to build a product for like anyone in the company it's funny you mentioned like friend otario because it was like part of like the the testing we made to launch like this feature we use like we kind of act frame dot io to like understand okay what drives adoption what drives engagement on a video if you want we like collect feedback so for us like the goal is to like build a product that anyone in the company can use but it's in terms of like go to market what we've noticed like the product teams are really like the basic like the early adopters because they have like super like you know like visual use cases like they want to don't you have to don't you have to go super deep on that niche like if you try and be everything for everyone in the company you just get deluded but if you build specifically for a product manager you can go really deep and just dominate and charge more i i i don't know because i think in the end like our end goal and our mission is really to you know like help people work from anywhere uh what we've noticed like if you want to work from anywhere and free your calendar from like back to back meetings you need to master like asynchronous communication and basically like that is to say like the way it's done today it's mostly like limited to like a synchronous written communication with flume you add context but you don't have like the world decision making system and we like the ideas to like and the mission of clap is to democratize like this way of like making decisions and like aligning internally so i i guess like it would change like the mission of the company to say this is like just for product teams and the second point is uh can't your mission change over time i mean don't all big companies start by dominating one niche i mean of course everyone has a lot of right and and i think like the second point to answer your question is more like the added value we also have for product teams is you know like one of the big nightmare you have as a product manager it's like crossteam communication like as the company grow it becomes like super hard to like align with like your sales team your customer success team your marketing teams et cetera and you are kind of stuck because you want to align them you want to collect their feedback but at the same time you want to keep like shipping like features like really fast gardens you need to have like a product that speaks to both like product teams but also like sales teams etc in terms of like um usage and complexity yeah here we're running strong time here i'm trying to sneak in a bunch of questions here quickly um you mentioned you raised some capital how much have you raised yeah so we raised three million dollars three million yes two million and how did you obviously you're you're sure pre-product right how did you raise that three million evaluation that wasn't you know super low yeah so actually like what we did um it was like a funny story but we we wanted to raise at first like 500k dollars in january uh and but before that we added like a lot of vcs on linkedin uh for a few months uh and we prepared like a landing page like for a few months like uh some social media posts etc and when we announced like clap on linkedin we had like i think around maybe four forty forty five thousand like views on the post uh hundreds of people like registered for the beta and we had like a lot of requests for like uh vc's uh and i think like ander one was in the end like super competitive we had like one time sheet in a few days and in tweaks we had like 15 term sheets and and that's how we basically went from like 500k to 3 million and what was the valuation on that uh the valuation like free money was around like 14.5 million okay so 17 5 post and who is we who's on the co-founding team you who else yeah me and robin um did you guys just split equity right down the middle yeah yeah really so you're nice you're a nice guy 50 50. yeah you know like we we've known each other for like 14 years uh we are we like best friends and and i think like the and the contribution is really the same yeah what's the team size today how many people yes who are going to be nine in september how many engineers uh five engineers five engineers okay interesting and how much of your own money have you put in the business you had a little exit i guess because you had some equity in your previous company right uh yes but actually like none because like we incorporated the right for the fundraising announcement like uh like when we had like the term sheet we are not incorporated yet oh wow okay got it and what what what got these vcs so excited were they vcs that you guys already had relationships with because they saw what you built previously or how did they find the linkedin post yes i guess it's like it's kind of um like it's what people need right now um and knew like we spend a lot of time really like iterating on like on the positioning on the narrative uh before like making the announcement to make sure like it speaks and it resonates to people uh i think like what this is like is when you come with like a strong narrative which is not about like creating a new product but like creating a new category uh and then like we also like work with like for a few months before uh just to basically like test the id so basically like what we did we did some consulting missions and the idea was to take maybe like the 15 20 different type products on the market and test them as if it was like our own mvps and we like understand okay what are like the right use cases uh what drives like engagement what drives like variability etc and in the end we had like a prototype which was like i feel like quite precise and we were like super like i guess i create to explain okay this is like the reason why for example we need to have like this in context feedback feature uh this is like the reason why we need to basically like store like recordings like this way et cetera and i think it was like the mix between yeah like the category narrative but also like the product design um we came up with like with the with the prototype yep that makes a lot of sense i'm trying to look back on your linkedin right now to find that initial post but i can't find it uh but that is how you really got term sheets that's how you got everything going so it makes a lot of sense um okay guys so launch is coming um you talked through how you built the beta list 300 folks there's 3 000 on the waiting list right now um you're letting them on one by one product engineers is the focus this all makes a lot of sense anything i'm missing that you want to chat about for last minute um no like what kind of question do you have i i i think maybe like uh because we you you mentioned that you like the the website uh maybe a few things we did um at the beginning like you know like between like the the did you who'd you pay who did you pay to do the website uh i did it myself well it's written it looks really good uh it looks like an agency did it looks really nice okay no i i think that's that's a cool stuff because you know like before i was like vp of marketing and i had like you know like a team of like a lot of people and in the end you are like nuts and then and but i love to build stuff and and it's super funny when you go back to be like a founder it's like you need to build stuff on your own so you know i did like most of the stuff on like photoshop and figma on webflow et cetera and you can read like uh yeah it's it's good to be like an individual contributor sometimes and uh yeah and really enjoy like the building the website and you like one other thing we did that was super successful because you know one of the key when you want to build like a category is that you need to earn the problem like you need to kind of build the cognitive link between like the enemy like the prem in our case like back to back meetings and the category so that like people when they think about back to back meetings they are going to think about like clap so one of the things we did for example was to launch a mid-sim calculator it's on our website as well uh and basically like you connect your google calendar and then you are going to see a lot of like stats around like your number of meetings like the type of meetings you have etc and we did like a small product launch product and launch in april and actually we got a lot of traction and visibility through like this small launch and i think this meeting this meeting calculator app is really smart this is where you got a lot of new signups from this is how you're building the beta list yeah exactly i think it's part of this we like basically like the waitlist we had it like from the initial announcement in january uh with like the meeting calculator uh and also with like the fundraising announcement campaign we did in june and i think like all the time is like you know when you don't have like any product you need to speak about the absence of the product i need to kind of like keep it like the same narrative like about the enemies and that's exactly what we did for for a few months here makes a lot of sense let's wrap up quickly here with the famous five number one favorite book uh i would say play bigger number two is there a ceo you're following are studying uh yeah i love dave cancer number two is there a online tool that you really enjoy or like uh i would say clap but right now i discovered june.so for analytics it's really cool number four how many hours i'll sleep to get every night that's high sleep per night i would say between seven to eight hours and situation married single kids uh single uh okay and how old are you 32 32 last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. tough question i would say maybe um human psychology learned psychology no human psychology ah there you guys have it guys clap launched a couple months ago three thousand on their waitlisted a three million dollar round on a 17.5 post team and nine right now growing the company two co-founders they were nice they split up 50 50 again they believe in the future of asynchronous communication using their tool with a lot of utility value highlight parts of the video where you're talking about use it at your system of record we'll see if they can beat loom and others playing in the space pierre thanks for taking us to the top thanks edwin one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe 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