How Claap Hit $60K Revenue and 20 Paying Customers After a Product Hunt Launch (Interview with CEO Pierre Touzeau)

Introduction and Guest Background

Nathan Latka

00:00Hey, 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?

Pierre Touzeau

00:18>> Yes. Perfect. Hi, Nathan.

What Is Claap

Nathan Latka

00:19Alright. So how would you describe claap? What's the tool do?

Pierre Touzeau

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.

Nathan Latka

01:12Well, 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.

Comparison to Loom and Zoom

Pierre Touzeau

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.

Nathan Latka

01:41There's project manage some light project management tools built on top of the video, so you can get stuff done.

Pierre Touzeau

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.

Nathan Latka

01:55Yep. I don't want to bury the lead here. You just recently launched on Product Hunt. How many upvotes did you get?

Product Hunt Launch and Upvotes

Pierre Touzeau

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.

Nathan Latka

02:26And 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?

Pierre Touzeau

02:33>> So on that day, I would say like during the week, it was around 1,000 sign ups, but like

Nathan Latka

02:401,000 what? 1,000

Sign-Ups and Activation Rate

Pierre Touzeau

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.

Nathan Latka

02:59Interesting. And how many of those sign ups convert? I mean, there a paid option? How many converted to paid?

Pierre Touzeau

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.

Nathan Latka

03:35So 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.

Pierre Touzeau

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.

Nathan Latka

04:04Oh, 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

04:27your 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

04:52a 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

05:14built 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

05:39out 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

06:01you 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

06:27interview. 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.

Activation and Retention Metrics

Pierre Touzeau

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.

Nathan Latka

07:24And to Pierre, how many people are active today? They've created at least two videos.

Pierre Touzeau

07:29>> So we have around 1,400 active users on the platform.

Nathan Latka

07:36Okay. 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?

Pierre Touzeau

07:46>> Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

07:48So 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

07:57show the paywall to?

Monetization Strategy and Paywall Approach

Pierre Touzeau

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.

Nathan Latka

08:57Well, how many people what was the limit? Who who saw the banner?

Pierre Touzeau

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

Nathan Latka

09:09more than with more than five zero videos created claps created?

Pierre Touzeau

09:13>> Exactly. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

09:14Okay. 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.

Pierre Touzeau

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.

Nathan Latka

09:40So, Pierre, how many people saw that banner that said you reached your limit?

Pierre Touzeau

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.

Nathan Latka

09:59Okay. So just to be clear, you

Pierre Touzeau

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.

Nathan Latka

10:11So 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

Pierre Touzeau

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.

Nathan Latka

10:44I'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?

Pierre Touzeau

10:59>> I think it's 50. Yeah. In between 50 to to 60 accounts.

Nathan Latka

11:06K. 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?

Pierre Touzeau

11:22>> Yes. But but in the account, you can have a lot of different users if you see what I mean.

Nathan Latka

11:27Of course. But I but I didn't ask you how many.

Pierre Touzeau

11:31>> I So you have

Nathan Latka

11:32you have accounts, you have workstations, and you have claps created.

Pierre Touzeau

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.

Nathan Latka

11:48Okay. So what's the difference between what's the difference what's the difference between an account and a workspace?

Pierre Touzeau

11:55>> It's the same. Like, sign up. Like, we we have user and we have workspaces.

Nathan Latka

12:00Okay. 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?

Pierre Touzeau

12:06>> Yes. When I speak about account, I speak about workspaces.

Nathan Latka

12:10Okay. 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?

Pierre Touzeau

12:30>> Total workspace, it must be around 2,000, but actually, like, a lot of them are not activated.

Nathan Latka

12:36Okay. 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.

Pierre Touzeau

12:55>> Exactly. We just decided to trigger this for, like, those companies. Yeah. Exactly.

Nathan Latka

13:00That makes sense. Okay. So of those 60 accounts or workplaces that saw the paywall, 20 of them have converted to paid?

Pierre Touzeau

13:08>> Exactly.

Nathan Latka

13:09Now we're on the same page. Okay. So today, have 20 paying customers.

Pierre Touzeau

13:12>> Exactly.

Nathan Latka

13:13Amazing. Okay. So now that we understand the funnel, tell me about the price. How do you decide what to charge?

Pricing Model

Pierre Touzeau

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.

Nathan Latka

14:10What 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?

Pierre Touzeau

14:19>> On average, they pay $10, 10 euros per month per user.

Nathan Latka

14:24Well, 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?

Pierre Touzeau

14:29>> Per month, would say they pay in average between, like, 200 to 300 monthly recurring revenue.

Nathan Latka

14:36Okay. So they're signing up for 25 paid accounts on average right right away.

Pierre Touzeau

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.

Nathan Latka

15:16Understood. So you have 20 customers today paying $250 per month. So you're doing about $5,000 a month today in revenue. Right?

Pierre Touzeau

15:22>> Exactly. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

15:23And where were you exactly a year ago?

Pierre Touzeau

15:26>> Zero.

Nathan Latka

15:26Right?

Pierre Touzeau

15:27>> Yeah. A year ago, we actually launched the product a year ago.

Nathan Latka

15:31Okay. So no no revenue. Okay. Got it. So you when did you start coding? You started coding, I think, back in 2020. Right?

Company Timeline and Private Beta

Pierre Touzeau

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.

Nathan Latka

16:27Understood. And you raised a 3,000,000 seed in 2021. Right?

Pierre Touzeau

16:32>> Exactly. In 2021. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

16:35Most companies are selling, you know, 20% of their business in their seed. Did you did you sell about 15 to 20%?

Pierre Touzeau

16:41>> No. It was less, actually.

Nathan Latka

16:42Oh, it's less less than 10%?

Pierre Touzeau

16:45>> No. It was less than 20%.

Nathan Latka

16:47Oh, less than 20. Okay. Got it. So between 1020%, though.

Pierre Touzeau

16:50>> Exactly.

Nathan Latka

16:51Yeah. 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?

Pierre Touzeau

16:58>> Pre money, it was a bit less. It was Okay. Yeah. In dollar, I think it was around

Fundraising and Runway

Pierre Touzeau

17:05>> 17 in in dollars, it was around 17.

Nathan Latka

17:10Have you been able to use that 3,000,000 to get to you are today, or did you have to go raise more capital?

Team Size and Headcount

Pierre Touzeau

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.

Nathan Latka

17:28How many engineers?

Pierre Touzeau

17:29>> Eight engineers.

Nathan Latka

17:32Okay. Any salespeople yet or no?

Pierre Touzeau

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.

Nathan Latka

18:08Now, 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?

Pierre Touzeau

18:19>> Yeah. 100.

Nathan Latka

18:20100. Net burn?

Pierre Touzeau

18:22>> Net burn.

Nathan Latka

18:23Yeah. And you're comfortable with that? That doesn't keep you up at night?

Burn Rate

Pierre Touzeau

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.

Nathan Latka

18:49Pierre, how do you have three years of runway if you're burning a $100 k a month?

18:52That's 1.2 a year times three is

Pierre Touzeau

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.

Nathan Latka

19:19I see. I see. I see. Do you have to pay that debt back, or is it basically free money from the government?

Pierre Touzeau

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.

Nathan Latka

19:37Very 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

19:56I was an I I am 'm imagining that that was an intentional decision you made. Why?

Claap vs Loom: Strategic Differences

Pierre Touzeau

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.

Nathan Latka

20:44Mhmm. Mhmm. Yeah.

20:45Makes sense.

Pierre Touzeau

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.

Nathan Latka

21:15Yep. 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?

Famous Five Rapid Fire

Pierre Touzeau

21:22>> I think it's Play Bigger. I'm a magazine guy.

Nathan Latka

21:25Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Pierre Touzeau

21:29>> I really love David Cancel from Drift.

Nathan Latka

21:32Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building the business besides your own?

Pierre Touzeau

21:38>> Notion. You can do, like, so many stuff on Notion.

Nathan Latka

21:40Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night?

Pierre Touzeau

21:43>> Sorry?

Nathan Latka

21:44Sleep. How much do you sleep each night?

Pierre Touzeau

21:47>> I think seven seven hours.

Nathan Latka

21:50Okay. And what's your situation? Married, single, kids?

Pierre Touzeau

21:54>> Not single. Not married, but not single.

Nathan Latka

21:56Not married. No kids in our what are you 33? I'm Years old?

Pierre Touzeau

22:01>> I'm 33. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

22:02Alright. Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.

Pierre Touzeau

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

Closing Summary

Nathan Latka

22:26you 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.

Pierre Touzeau

22:41>> Thanks, Nathan.

Nathan Latka

22:44One 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

23:08p. 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

23:30an 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

23:52are 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

24:11counter 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.