How Claap CEO Pierre Touzeau grew Claap to $164.7K revenue and 20 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is pierre tuzzo he co-founded clap that's c-l-a-a-p alongside his partner robin and tom to create a new decision-making system for the distributed era before clap pierre was vp of marketing at 360 learning a soft bank backed company famous for its async and distributed culture all right p are you ready to get to the top yes perfect all right so what how would you describe clap what's the tool do yeah so clap it's an async video collaboration platform um so basically like the kid is to say that you have like this big shift uh to a discriminated world uh one big plan that we have is that back-to-back meeting they become the norm but we like the core of the premise at any time today we want to align and make decisions basically kind of stuck between two options we have option one async written communication like slack notion and so on it's flexible but at some point we like context feel 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 the zone call and idbn what you call async the collaboration is really to create this new way to align and make decisions that combines both the flexibility of async communication with the context and interactivity of limiting and basically the way it works like let's say i'm a product manager from business guys 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 exactly it's uh to sum up it's loom but for feedback and decision making because we add like on top of loom a layer of like collaboration together to annotate the video uh to make decisions and so on but it's also a way to centralize all the videos you have like in your company in just one place there's project manage some light project management tools built on top of the video so you can get stuff exactly exactly like the the the way the workspace is built is really inspired by collaboration to like click up notion asana and so on yep i don't want to bury the lead here you just recently launched on product on how many uploads did you get so i think we got 1400 i i feel like it's funny story because at first we got 100 1800 but we had 400 votes deleted the week after so i think it's one of the learning i can share if you ask too many people that don't have any account on a product and to vote you might get somebody deleted but uh right now i think it's 1400 watts and when you launched on product hunt you obviously that's enough upvotes to hit the number one spot how many signups did you get of clap that day uh so on that day i would say like during the week it was around one thousand the sign up uh but like one thousand what seven hundred uh one thousand sign up uh 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 three thousand new sign up uh thanks to the thanks to the launch interesting and how many of those sign ups can work i mean is there a paid option how many converted to paid so i would select the paid option it's something we launched recently but we don't have a payroll yet in the product we just monetize the existing account that we have but basically like for the new sign up um the metric that you track is really activation rate uh the way we make we define activation rate is number of people that record two claps and basically today it's between like 15 to 20 percent of people that really became activated user on the platform sorry what does that mean activation rate just activation rate is you sign up for clap and you record at least one video or you engage with somebody else's video but maybe don't sign up for cloud no you you record the two videos at least because we consider that the first one is the test so actually like the second one is the proper use case and then we also realized that the retention rate was actually like pretty high um actually like once you are like activated so that's really like one metric that we optimize for oh what's going on there youtube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with sas founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 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 founder path check this out i'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your sas company you're going to get a different valuation a vc is going to pay a different valuation private equity firm is different if you're going to 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 built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on youtube all these datas are built from real time valuation data points founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raised they sold 22 to their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to 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 out right now and you're raising your seed round well 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 data set of sas valuations than what you can get now inside of founderpath and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're going to go back to the youtube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations 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 all right let's jump back into the interview so just to be clear when someone signs up for clap you want them to create two claps as fast as possible two videos and then ongoing for retention you want to see them engage with 15 to 20 percent of the total videos that they create to some degree no no no no so to be clear so we have like one step that we measure which is activation rate um the way we define activity user is to clap recorded today the activation rate we have is in between 15 to 20 percent which is really definitely something we need to improve but then the retention rate we have it's around like a 70 to 75 percent after 12 weeks and i think it's also part of reason why we launched on product and that because we knew that the existing users that kept using the platform they were like really engaged with the product so we're actually pretty confident that we have like a product to sell and to have people use it and that we like the moment we decided to launch on product and and to pierre how many people are active today they've created at least two videos so um we have around 1400 activated users on the platform okay and so we understand the product hunt we understand top of funnel we understand conversion into active users 20 or about 1400 today so you almost have five six thousand total sign ups then right so maybe seven thousand yeah yeah so you've got 1400 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 show the paywall to okay so it's it's actually a good question because we we have a we tried to build a plg model and uh 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 payroll 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 like meaning if people are ready to pay for it it means that you have like something that you want to scale so we've done two things for that um the first one that we actually contacted uh the accounts that we knew uh and that were actually like using a clap a lot with basically like more than 20 solid users and so on and the second stuff we did was pure purely like to show a pro pin in the product saying uh you've reached your account limit now it's time to pay redirect to the pricing page and then book a call with me and how many people what was the limit who who saw the banner so the banner we actually like showed the...