The Start:

Shahed Khan, before founding Loom, had a diverse background in the tech and startup ecosystem. Originally from Bangladesh, Shahed moved to the United States to pursue higher education and entrepreneurial opportunities.

He attended the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he studied computer science. Post-graduation, Shahed worked in various roles, gaining experience in product development, marketing, and customer success at companies like Google and Meta (formerly Facebook).

His varied experiences across different facets of tech companies gave him a unique perspective on product development and user engagement, ultimately inspiring him to embark on his entrepreneurial journey.

The Problem:

Shahed Khan and his co-founders, Joe Thomas and Vinay Hiremath, identified a significant communication gap in the workplace, especially with the rise of remote work and distributed teams.

They noticed that traditional methods of communication, like emails and text-based messaging, often led to misunderstandings and inefficiencies.

These tools lacked the personal touch and clarity of face-to-face interactions. To address this, they envisioned a platform that could combine the convenience of asynchronous communication with the effectiveness of visual and verbal interaction.

This led to the creation of Loom, a tool designed to simplify and enhance workplace communication through easily shareable video messages, making interactions more personal and effective.

Getting their first customers:

Loom first launched in 2016 on Product Hunt as OpenTest — a tool to help teams collect video-recorded user feedback directly on their website. Users could request feedback across their onboarding, site nav & other parts of the product experience directly from experts.

The launch was successful & they got 424 upvotes & gained 3000 users from this.

However, just 100 days & 12,800+ users later, the founders, Joe & Vinay & Shahed pivoted Loom as the co-founders worked to build their user base and find product-market fit.

They launched again on Product Hunt this time as Openvid which afterwards became Loom. They got 1652 upvotes, got the Product of the Day badge & was the 3rd most popular product of the week.

That day, Loom saw more signups than it ever had in the past 6 months. Over the next week, Loom had thousands more signups.

Thanks to a strong PLG lever, Loom’s growth loops compounded really fast. Whenever someone received a loom, they were incentivized to record their own loom & share it with more people. The more people knew about Loom, the faster the product grew.

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