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
@_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.
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 😉
@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!
@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.
@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
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.
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.
If you are this far down on this comment thread you might be interested in what @_shahedk wrote about for the Loom + Gmail integration on our blog:
https://blog.useloom.com/loom-fo...
Loom takes onboarding to the next level. My only issue is that I can't figure out how to record a video without also sharing my screen. Is that possible or am I missing something?
@josephputnam hey Joe, you are able to do three different types of recordings:
1. Desktop (your entire screen or specific application windows on your screen)
2. Tab (just the current tab you're on with no URL bar or anything else)
3. Cam-Only (just your front-facing camera)
These options can be found in that "Capture Settings" bubble all the way to the left in the box that shows up when you click our extension. If this is still confusing for you or you meant something else completely, let me know or email me directly: vinay@useloom.com
Sorry about this long letter comment... just love your tool...
======
Awesome product, using since openvid, referred several users, loved the referral gamification you've made!
I'm CEO of LinkBiz, a PPC agency and SALES+CRM Consulting company (Pipedrive and Freshdesk reseller). So... We are doing lots of tutorial videos.
# Feature REQUEST:
(...after typing the whole list below It feels like paid version is just around the corner 😏)
- MP3 only (sometimes just a 45 sec audio is enough)
- FOLDERS: organize videos in folders (say 101, 201, etc) + Share entire folder + Drag'n Drop Order videos inside folder
- "List" View (Name, Date, Description, Lenght, Short Url)
- Backup: admin option to download all videos (zip file)
- Select specific folders and give my customer access to a logged area (email + password)
- Much bigger FULL screen Button OR even double tap OR Vimeo-Like Auto-Open in full screen for Mobile (our customers often see video on mobile and sometimes its hard for then to find the "button".... I know... Hard to believe 😒)
- Freshdesk/Zendesk Integration
- Zapier Integration
- Embed Video Code
- Tags
- Short Sharing Url
- Writing tools - Text, Arrow, Square, Circle, etc
- Basic "Post-recording" edition (Camtasia-like Zoom Screen area, Cut, Blur)
- Insert Watermark Logo
- Change while recording to full screen video and back to screenshare + video bubble
- Wistia-like lead collect (after 30 sec video you have to insert e-mail to kee p watching)
- Basic Analytics (View count, Droped view time, etc)
- HD recording (720p)
- Facebook Thumbnail (if you paste the link in facebook writing box, it shows video thumbnail in timeline)
- Comment / liking video with social login
- COLLECTIONS: if the viewer have an account at loom, click "add to my collection" so video is always available inside loom account
- "Public" sharing - if selected, it will appear in public video section at loom website (where you guys could start kind of a "Top 10 videos of the week" section) or at least group by Tag Cloud (say clicking tag "SEO" or "CRM" lists all public videos marked with those tags).
- Whitelabel area (change loom logo and url to my company logo and subdomain)
- When you launch paid plans, launch also Affiliate Area (try LeadDyno http://bit.ly/leaddynofree )
That's all for now. You have proved to ship features fast. I think 2 weeks to deliver all features above its totally doable 😏😏😏
@rbrandao Thanks for all the feedback here. This is very valuable. As a token of appreciation, I've gone ahead and credited your account, you now have unlimited recording time, video access, etc :)
Feel free to email me if you have anymore feedback for Loom!
Love it. Video and screen share is hard because your in email...would love to see circle with video and share browser to show product at the same time.
@dmerms depends on your use case. We make it very easy to share videos with others. Your video is instantly ready to share after you finish recording and has its own URL. :-)
@larrykokoszka@useloom does it not remember your choices from the last recording? It should remember those settings. If not, please feel free to email me and I'll help you debug.
In theory, having this built-in video capture capability would be great. The team's right: it is easier, more productive, more efficient to use audio/video to get your point across than to type stuff out. But the Chrome extension doesn't perform well with my older, lesser equipped workstations/laptops. So, I'm back to Camtasia for now.
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