As a Co-founder and the CEO of Loom, I often get asked how we leverage video messaging as a tool on our own teams. As we’ve grown to 100 teammates and counting, video messages improve our workplace communication and performance across the company.
Ultimately, asynchronous communication has enabled our teammates — all over the world — to stay connected and to scale faster than we would have been able to without it.
I’d like to share some of these use cases, in the hopes that what I’ve learned along the way will help other business leaders and founders grow their businesses, build their teams, and increase their teams' effectiveness –– all while creating a more human way of working together.
Leverage video messaging to grow your business
Make introductions
Whenever I introduce two people, I love to pull up their LinkedIn profiles or other digital representations and do a brief intro of the two via Loom. It’s always well received, and it gives me a chance to add a little more personality and to provide more valuable context to the connection than the generic email intro.
Support Customer Success
The ability to help customers with video messages –– say, when introducing a new feature or sharing the benefit of using Loom for a specific use case –– without the need to ask for time on their calendar has been one of my favorite aspects of the asynchronous communication benefits Loom offers.
I find it annoying when I want to move a conversation forward with a third-party vendor and they require a synchronous meeting. Information and decision velocity go way down. Loom helps move the process ahead without sacrificing the relationship building.
Expand your team
Use video for recruitment outreach
I love using Loom for recruitment outreach. Incorporating video communication into the process yields a high positive response rate and gives the candidate a potent look into the culture of our company. Some responses we have received:
“Hey Zack! Great timing, I hate Amazon.” — Cameron, Amazon
“The video you recorded was the only reason I replied.” — Trevor, Apple
“It seems like your team is fun and I like the Loom website a lot.” — Lu, TikTok
We've scaled this out to everyone who has a hand in recruiting. While it’s more time-intensive than scraping info and emails and blasting them out, it has a higher rate of success.
Introduce and onboard new employees
Adding video to your new hire introduction and onboarding process has distinct benefits.
For one, this approach is more efficient because writing up onboarding materials can take a long time and only larger organizations can afford this. However, without detailed and thorough onboarding materials, you risk building inadequate relationships with new employees up front. So, most companies fall back on meetings to onboard and introduce candidates, which isn't very scalable and is highly variable from employee to employee. This is where Loom shines. Keeping onboarding videos in your team library ensures asynchronous access for new employees to view when they join.
To introduce new employees to the company, I record a quick welcome in the form of a video message, which makes this information more readily available to everyone across the company. Employees have reported "feeling like I know the person a bit better" after watching these introductions via Loom.
Give feedback
Pointing out an area for improvement can be incredibly uncomfortable. I don’t recommend for everyone to use Loom in these situations. However, we've set up a culture of API (assume positive intent), and we treat feedback as a gift.
Among those with whom I've built up enough trust, I feel comfortable and have delivered feedback to them via Loom to great effect. This also gives them a chance to digest it and respond on their own time.
Increase your team's effectiveness
Project updates
Being able to record a loom of a product spec, design update, build update, recruitment kickoff, or research finding has saved the Loom team countless meetings. It also is so much faster than typing up paragraphs with screenshots.
Analytics reviews
At my previous company, I used to spend entire evenings trying to explain the nuanced connections in data across various charts and dashboards — which would end up requiring a meeting anyway.
A quick loom showing how you change variables and the specific data points to look at has truly been a game changer for me.
Internal process overviews
Communication channels, operational experiments, project and product management alterations — at a startup, processes are constantly changing.
I think of our company as a product in and of itself. Loom has helped me distribute ideas quickly and get buy-in from key stakeholders much faster, as long as I make them more fun than a memo. 📝
Internal bug reports
There is nothing more precise than a loom to report a bug: no back-and-forth, no writing up the steps.
Record a quick loom to demonstrate an issue you found in the code review, send the link, and you’re done.
Have fun (imagine that) 😀
Speaking of fun, one of our core values is to embrace the weird, which translates into our mission to bring unique perspectives to the table — a growing use case for me. When you have a team spread around the globe, it's important to inject humor for humor’s sake into the mix when you can.
The Loom team is generally great at this, but a loom itself is an incredible way to be more expressive and to build a human connection with each other.
Now you know how I use Loom — how do you use it?
I hope this post was informative and actionable and that it gives you an understanding of how an executive and Co-founder at Loom uses quick videos day-to-day. I'd also love to hear from you: How do you use Loom? Which of these use cases are most useful to you?
See what video messaging plan is right for you and your team.