How Loom Got Its First Customers

Loom got its first users by shipping a feature and discarding the product around it. Joe Thomas, Shahed Khan, and Vinay Hiremath had spent roughly a year on Opentest, a user-testing service that was not working; the one part users engaged with was the recorder that captured a tester's screen. They stripped it out, rebuilt it as a free Chrome extension called Openvid, and launched it on Product Hunt in June 2016, where around three thousand people signed up in a day — more than the previous product had accumulated in six months.

The wedge was a substitution, not a new capability. Screen recording already existed; what did not exist was recording something and having a shareable link ready the moment you stopped, with no file, no upload, and no editor in between. The product traded a paragraph of written explanation for ninety seconds of talking, and aimed that trade at a moment that occurs many times a day inside any company.

Founded in San Francisco by Joe Thomas, Shahed Khan, and Vinay Hiremath, initially as a user-testing product called Opentest (2015).

The first channel was a launch moment chosen when the company had almost nothing left to spend. Product Hunt's audience in 2016 was disproportionately made of the exact people who would use a screen recorder for work — founders, designers, engineers, product managers — so the placement was a match rather than merely exposure, which is the difference between a launch that converts and a launch that trends.

The channel that made it durable was the artifact itself. Every Loom recording is sent as a link to someone who is usually not a Loom user, and that recipient watches it on a Loom page with an obvious way to make their own. The product's core action was also its distribution: the company never had to buy an introduction to the second user, because the first user made it for them, repeatedly, as a byproduct of doing their job.

There were two turns, and only the second was a choice rather than a rescue. The first was survival: abandoning Opentest for the recorder inside it, which is how the company found a product at all. The second was converting a beloved free tool into a paid one — building team and enterprise tiers on top of a base that had adopted Loom precisely because it cost nothing, which is the harder of the two and the one most free-first products never complete. That transition is what made the company acquirable; Atlassian bought Loom in 2023 to fold asynchronous video into its own work-management suite.