About Livestorm
Livestorm is an end-to-end video engagement platform that enables you to connect, engage, and capture actionable insights in one place.
Livestorm enables powerful, yet pain-free video engagements at scale. Our end-to-end video engagement platform requires no downloads, facilitates easy collaboration while capturing actionable insights — all in one place.
Livestorm’s mission
Livestorm’s mission is to enable organizations of any size to connect and engage with their audience.
Livestorm is a video engagement platform that enables people to manage their professional video events such as meetings, webinars, and other online events, end-to-end, in one place.
Livestorm is suited to events that take place frequently like team or board meetings, webinars, sales demos, and employee or customer training.
Tell Us About Yourself?
What is your background? What made you get into this line of work?
Gilles Bertaux is CEO and co-founder of Livestorm, where he shapes the future of end-to-end video engagement.
Livestorm was founded in 2016 as a final-year school project by Gilles Bertaux and 3 other co-founders: Robin Lambert, Tom Forlini, and Vincent Garreau. After doing several internships in tech companies, Gilles was looking for software that could not only stream live video but also manage the painful tasks around it. Like many other professionals, he was looking for an end-to-end management platform where he could organize, host, and analyze his online events in one place.
Recognizing that there was a gap in the market, his co-founders and he built a proof of concept in three months. The product was very well received by their peers and they decided to continue the adventure further.
In 2019, they raised a $5.1M Series A funding round to strengthen Livestorm’s presence in the US and introduce new video use cases.
As you all know, 2020 was a very special year and companies needed a video communication platform more than ever. In a few months, Livestorm grew exponentially – our revenue increased by x8 – but even after the first few months of Covid-19, our momentum was staying strong. In November 2020 we raised $30M in Series B to accelerate Livestorm’s presence in Europe and the US, as well as to scale our go-to-market strategies towards mid-market and Enterprise.
Gilles is an active member of the tech scene and a frequent speaker on startups, growth, and remote company culture.
Prior to Livestorm, Gilles worked as a Product Designer at Totems (an Instagram Engagement platform acquired by Stripe in 2014) and as a Growth Hacker at Mention.
What Is the Inspiration Behind Your Business?
What inspired your business? What problem are you trying to solve and for whom?
Please see the answer above for the first part of the question.
Our customers are feeling the pain of organizing recurrent and complex online events to either collaborate with or engage their audience.
Livestorm serves marketing, sales, customer success, or HR teams, and enables them to create online events for their audiences.
Many of our customers come from the technology, healthcare and government sectors but we serve various industries.
We serve companies of all sizes, from startups to Fortune 500s. Brands like Shopify, Honda, Spendesk, Front, Wish and Revolut trust Livestorm for premium video engagement during meetings, webinars, or online events.
Our customers are looking for an easy way to streamline the organization of their online events. They use Livestorm in many different use cases: for their online meetings, webinars, conferences, online training courses, podcast interviews or product demos. Livestorm is available in 24 languages and our customers come mainly from Europe and North America.
But in the end, our customers choose and love Livestorm for its collaboration capabilities and ease of use.
What Is Your Magic Sauce?
An outline of your magic sauce. How do you differ from the competition?
Many of our competitors focus on video. Livestorm focuses on the packaging of the video: we offer an end-to-end video engagement platform that requires no downloads and facilitates easy engagement while capturing actionable insights.
We are not a video provider and never will be: we believe that video has now become a commodity and the best video technology will be open source.
Instead, we focus on providing all the tools to create live events ready out-of-the-box. Livestorm provides all the tools to:
- Create custom landing pages
- Send promotional emails and reminders
- Host engaging online events with integrated chat, polls, and Q&A functionalities
- Analyze event performance through an advanced analytics dashboard
Livestorm differentiates itself as well by its ease-of-use: we are a browser-based solution and the first platform that makes it possible to host any live event directly from your mobile or tablet without having to download any app. We are also therefore secured by design, subject to the security of internet browsers.
How Has the Pandemic Impacted Your Company?
An outline of the way the world is changing and how you fit into it. (optional)
Covid-19 has created a sharp shift towards digitalization and the need for video communication. Because of Covid-19, people need a way to connect with others, work remotely, and collaborate even if they can’t physically be in the same place.
At the beginning of the crisis, Livestorm’s technology was allowing companies to continue their operations remotely despite the difficulties posed by Covid-19. Overnight, the usage of Livestorm was multiplied by 30 and the business was booming. To be honest, we did not expect such an exponential growth. We had to quickly re-organized the priorities of our teams to maintain our high-level of customer service. We had to hire fast and accelerate the development of some priorities from our product timeline.
Within a few months, we multiplied our revenue by 8X. I’m happy to say that our momentum is still going.
Where Do You See Your Company Going in 5 Years?
What is the vision?
In a few years, we’re aiming to become the leading all-in-one platform that enables teams to create a complete video engagement strategy in one place, to handle everything from A to Z, and to allow people to customize videos with other tools used by the company.
We believe that video communication will have an impact on the way we work and live, whether that means working from home, telemedicine, education in virtual classrooms, or any other online event. There are no limits to the usage of video and we believe that it will strongly influence our day-to-day lives.
From a product perspective, we want to double down on integrations and up-market features to extend our reach to Enterprise customers. Over the next year, we also want to build a Slack-like marketplace of integrations for our platform, an ecosystem where developers will be able to easily build on top of Livestorm.
What Has Been Your Biggest Setback So Far?
Being too prudent. We/I have been very prudent until the Series B when we could have accelerated sooner, be more aggressive on sales, and burn more. We took too long to tackle some topics and I am sure we could have doubled our growth.
What Has Been Your Biggest Win So Far?
Being able to create a large remote organization fast with strong foundations without compromising on culture. It’s still all very new and we have a lot to learn still but I feel our managers and People did a great a job when hiring.
What Is the Next Big Challenge for Your Business?
We continue to consolidate our market position as a global company and keep expanding in dynamic markets with a focus on the United States. To do so, we’re investing massively in our brand awareness and sales development.
At Livestorm, we’re always looking to serve the needs of our customers. That’s why we’re constantly working on new features and improvements. We’re currently integrated with over 20 apps such as Pipedrive, HubSpot, and Intercom, with plans to roll out 100+ additional integrations this year.
We recently launched our public API which provides Livestorm customers and integration partners with a new way to access their data, automate processes, and connect Livestorm with any other leading marketing or sales applications with just a few lines of code.
How Do People Get Involved/Buy Into Your Vision?
I’m part of every hiring process still to make sure I can communicate the important things about what we are building. From a customer standpoint, I am still very active on the marketing side to leverage my voice in PR or content in general.
At Livestorm, we believe that the video conferencing market is finally evolving after 20 years of being stagnant, and it is segmenting around new use cases. We are not just building a software that falls into an existing category, what we sell is a new product category.
We want to leave a footprint on this market and lead the new wave of video products. We call this new category Video Engagement Platform, a collaborative, end-to-end, video platform for all types of company events from sales to HR.
