How Loomly CEO Thibaud Clement grew Loomly to $18.1M revenue and 7K customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is tebow clementi's a self-taught programmer and began building software to make naomi's job easier in 2015. back then the pair was managing a marketing agency and developed an in-house solution to streamline the process of creating and sharing editorial calendars with their clients encouraged by early feedback and peers about the prototype they launched and made it available to other marketing teams this company today is called loomly all right tebow you already take the top yes sir now who who is naomi is this your partner yes this is my spoos i and my and the co-founder of lumley that's so sweet so you put yourself you built your spouse software and now you guys are co-founders yeah i guess we can uh we can feel you know that lumley is kind of the most romantic gesture i've ever done here's the real question who has more equity up well we are exactly on par wow 50 50. so what if you disagree on something how do you break the decision to tie we have a board well usually we agree but we have a board in case you know something happens so you know like any kind of startup uh that is ventured back how did you build the board uh well you know it's it's people who have been following us and helping us since the beginning so it made sense to uh you know have them join the ball how many people are on the board four four pa well that's like rule number one of boards is never have an even number well it's not because there are there's an even number that of people that we have an even number of voices yeah or votes so but usually you people do three five seven because the whole purpose of a board is to split a tie but if then the board could tie two two then what would he do well like i said we don't have the same number of boats uh i have oh i see i see i see i understand okay very cool let's let's talk about the product so so what does the company do uh you know we are what we call a brand success platform and so what we do is that we help marketing teams uh streamline collaboration uh you know along the entire content publishing cycle so we help them manage their assets come up with ideas for content actually produce the content um with some editing tools and then we generate mock-ups for them so that they can share the content with their team make sure that everyone is on board everyone sees you know what what the posts are going to look like they can approve and then you can publish and you can respond to comments and you can of course measure your success and then you start all over again i mean so is this like a more sophisticated version of like hootsuite yeah in a way uh you know you can think of it as like hootsuite meeting github in the sense that you know you can upstage your content you can review and improve it and then you distribute it i see interesting okay and and give me a general sense of what customers pay per month to use the technology uh 50 bucks on our brand one five or five zero five zero five zero interesting and when did you land your first paying customer what year april 2016. and was that the first year you guys had the business yes it was two months after launching wow okay so how'd you get your first customer two months after launch uh well it's you know we kind of opened up the platform in public beta and uh there are people who started you know signing up and from day one we had a paywall it was 12 bucks per month because we wanted to uh make sure that people were interested in using and paying for the product and at that time uh the free trial that we you know that we had was two months now it's 15 days but at that time it was two months so we launched in february two months later we had the first paying customer okay but where did you get that customer from that doesn't just magically happen you have to make it happen well you know noemi and i we used to have an advertising agency so we were in all those you know social media marketing and digital marketing groups online and so once you know we built the product because we built it for ourselves in the first place we we started to share it in those groups and we said hey uh we built this tool for us are you interested in giving it a try then you know people started signing up and then they started saying yes i've been looking for that for 10 years or i've been trying 10 different products and none of them is doing what you do so that's how it started how much revenue does the agency do in 2015 well that's usually something we don't we don't share because it's kind of not relevant to me what actually it actually is right so so when you look at the success of a lot of the largest sas founders hootsuite included they usually start as an agency and then there's a very tricky moment for the founders where you have to figure out do we stop the agency and go all in on the sas do we do both or do we kill the assassins doing the agency so by asking how much revenue you did it helps me understand what you guys gave up to go all in on the sas yeah we were you know we had an agency in france we had an agency here in the us uh it was you know it was it was enough to kind of sustain everyone we were growing nicely but you know it was very clear once we started having feedback on the product that the product would be just you know uh had just more potential because it was basically allowing us to do what we were doing for a couple of clients but at scale and today we kind of serve 7 000 clients you know around the world so you know that's you know it kind of proved to be true so this wasn't a situation where the agency was doing 10 million a year in revenue you shut it down on loom it was like a smaller than what like a million bucks a year or less yes i see i see okay that makes more sense so so let me know second question is did you use agency cash flow to invest in the software at the beginning or how did you fund the mvp yeah uh that's exactly what we did so i wrote the first line of code in august 2015 and you know we only incorporated what is now lonely in uh july 2016. so during that entire time we were kind of working by day on the agency and then you know with whatever money we were making we were kind of you know financing uh you know like the hiring of our first engineer and some some marketing and all the expenses that come with building software so it was just youtube it was just you two at the agency then yeah oh wow okay i mean indeed i mean in the u.s but uh yeah well how many total people were full-time at the agency uh depending on you know it's like agencies they always kind of go up and down but it was like you know anywhere between four and six i see i see so did you move most of them over now they're still with you on the sas product uh no because it's different skill sets you know so only you know i mean i moved from the agency to i see okay and so flush out the team today how many total people on the team uh we're seven seven uh you know there are i kind of oversee the product and there are three engineers with me and then noemi kind of oversees everything on the marketing side and there are two customer success managers with her and we are kind of uh we're currently opening four positions so growing pretty fast now okay so the first customers came from your agency customers it sounds like you just up sold them from agency to sas is that accurate um i wouldn't say so like we we did try the product with the with our agency clients to get some feedback so they did try it first but i wouldn't say they were the first paying customers the first paying customers were people that we didn't even know uh from those uh you know social media marketing groups that started using the products for the trial and you said it was interesting enough to pay for it can you name one or two of those groups we're talking like social media examiner facebook group or amy porterfield's group or like the laura roder crew like yeah it's just kind of saying uh no emmy would know that better than i do because she was the one managing that and she's the one who is involved in all those groups but it's it's you know that's the idea on facebook and on linkedin and even sometimes on reddit yep okay very cool now uh you've built this business up those were the first hundred customers how many are you serving today uh over seven thousand actually going uh to eight thousand okay guys so seven thousand paid do you have a free plan nope okay we have a 15-day free trial and everyone i see i see icic do you require a credit card at the start of the free trial nope tell me why you want to keep using the product walk me through that decision everyone does this differently yeah uh well you know we think that uh what is important is that we make the free trial as seamless as possible so that you know if you hear the value proposition in one way or another you come to the website you find it's interesting you sign up for your free trial you don't need to put in a credit card with a company that you don't know yet um you can try the...