The folks at Openvid just rebranded and updated their awesome Chrome extension to work seamlessly within Gmail. Pretty sweet update to an already sweet (and super useful) product. If you haven't started making Quick Videos with Loom yet, make sure you check it out. I use it daily! (And it really is faster than typing =)
Hey, Product Hunt! 😀
Thanks @hnshah for the hunt! Some big updates have rolled out since Openvid 2.0 back in September (comments, analytics, descriptions, password protection, etc etc). The most obvious one being our new name!
Our amazing and selfless power users spent many hours talking to us on how we can improve remote & distributed teams workflows. Many of our users told us their granular discussions with teammates sits in Slack, but a majority of all other communications still happened in their email.
We wanted to enable more efficient and effective communication in a somewhat antiquated experience––so today, we're announcing the launch of Loom's Gmail integration.
You can now create and share Quick Videos directly from your Gmail inbox. It's faster than typing up a response and adds quite a bit of personality.
Let us know what you think and please give us your feedback in the comments below!
Ask us anything! 💬
Shout out to the boys @paulius_dragunas@vhmth@joethomas_x
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@_shahedk@hnshah@paulius_dragunas@vhmth@joethomas_x Awesome rebrand, love the new name and really digging the salmon color! Excited to start seeing videos in my inbox -- thanks for making the video capture experience so effortless and easy to use :)
@mohsin585 Thanks! Appreciate that! With this rebrand we really tried to bring the user experience together to set the base for our product going forward as a communication platform.
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Took another look at loom and uninstalled it for the same reason I did last time: I don't have the time, or the inclination, to access essential features by referral.
I am using screencastify (silly name, excellent service) because they do two things right: charge me a reasonable amount of money for a great service and drop recorded videos directly into my google drive instead of holding them hostage until I spam my friends.
I really like the product, I hate the hoops you're trying to force me to jump through. If you've got something to sell then sell it. Stop playing this idiotic and annoying referral game. /rant
@andreasduess you have touched on the hottest debated topic over here at Loom. And because of the nature of the Product Hunt community I thought I'd explain how we arrived at the current referral system.
~6 months ago after we initially launched Openvid we were a fledgling startup with a itty bit of capital. In an extremely difficult fundraising environment. We had to prove to potential investors we had what our users kept telling us was a useful product in a largely "undefined" space.
Enter the referral system. It has been an extremely effective mechanism to get more immediate returns for our business. It proved it wasn't just early launch hoopla. There was a larger *opportunity* here with more and more people sharing everyday.
Early on we optimized for growth over revenue in order to raise capital.
Every major sprint planning meeting, the topic comes up: Is it time for revenue yet?!
What we discovered after talking to hundreds of people using Loom, our biggest opportunity was to build a team communication platform. With limited resources and building great product for TEAMS, we avoided charging anybody until we knew what features would be most valuable for teams to be provided for free versus paid.
We will have a payment option soon, and it will include the ability to pay for the power features. However, that initial payment experience will be architected around our vision of teams. We try and minimize doing work twice, to the chagrin of ourselves and some of our users.
P.S. Thank you very, very much for the question and support. Check both your accounts 😉
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@joethomas_x Thanks for the explanation Joe. I guess it also depends on your user base.
In a corporate environment, paying for great services is not a problem - if whatever you sell helps us service our clients better then we have no issue paying. Our time has far greater value than the $24 a year that, for example, screencastify charges us.
@andreasduess Absolutely: User base, stage of the company, and mission.
We hope to provide you with a platform to service your clients better in the most efficient and effective manner possible. You guys have been more than patient with us and we are very grateful for that.
Please let me know if there is anyone else on your team that would like the power features. I'd be more than happy to gift them the power features so you guys can crush it with your clients!
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@joethomas_x Thanks Joe, that's super nice of you. We've got a corporate membership with "the other guys" so we're good for now. I much prefer your style of communication and the way you present yourself, so I'll keep both accounts going for now and we'll reevaluate in a year or so.
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@andreasduess@joethomas_x Love this dialog on PH and the open reasoning for the model! This sounds like a direct challenge to give Andreas a reason to reevaluate in a manner of WEEKS next quarter instead of a year ... this a high velocity team, no? ;)
Excellent team with a super easy to use product. Great if you do sales or customer service! Also pretty fun for sending your friends messages. Joe does this to me all the time, never ceases to crack me up.
Keep up the good work guys!
@eytanbuchman thanks Eytan! It's funny because, as a product maker, you're constantly thinking about how to make your onboarding and other user flows better. Good to know that it's still good for some right this second. :-) How do you think we could do better?
@rrhoover being a video recording and sharing company, we learned pretty quickly from our users that video isn't always the most appropriate medium for sharing knowledge. Haha!
Across our most popular use cases, there is a formula that can predict when video will be used:
1) Is it the most efficient way get the knowledge out of my head and into the world? (50%)
2) Is it the most effective way for the receiver of the video to learn that knowledge? (40%)
3) Is a personal touch needed in this situation? (10%)
Customer support (both real time and help center materials), team training, new employee onboarding, etc. fit pretty snuggly within all three variables.
Hey PH peeps! Thought I would provide a breakdown of some of the things we've shipped over the last couple of weeks. Might be useful for you beta users who have been with us to but haven't kept up-to-date on what we've been shipping. :-)
* Gmail link expanding (Loom links expand to thumbnails)
* Gmail inline videos (Loom thumbnails expand to inline videos in email threads so you never have to leave your inbox)
* Camera tab following (your camera bubble follows you tab-to-tab when recording)
* Videos play inline in iMessage
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The original Openvid was already one the fastest and easiest ways to show clients analytics, explain work flows, or even recreate an issue in another platform so you had real time video of bugs for support. The tab switching and Gmail additions now have me wanting to take Loom to the damn high school prom! Awesome work guys!
Do you guys sleep? I mean, honestly. My favourite products are the ones that are super useful and also fun to use. Amazing job, folks! I can't wait to see what you guys have up your sleeves for the next release.
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Used Openvid previously, use loom now. Best way to communicate bugs, answer questions, provide updates.
Plus Joe sent me a book because I'm involved in a running tech startup. I'm a loom fan for life.
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