Funnel teardown: Loom (Screen recording for marketing video)
Founder(s): Joe Thomas, Shahed Khan, Vinay Hiremath (acquired by Atlassian in 2023)

Loom's funnel runs on async-team-communication positioning. The product is the message — record once, share a link, save a meeting.

TL;DR: Loom's funnel works because the product itself IS the marketing. Every Loom recording shared inside a team or with a customer demonstrates the value proposition — 'record once instead of writing a 500-word email.' The free tier seeds the visible-output flywheel; team subscriptions monetize the workflow. The lesson for indie founders: when your product replaces an obviously-painful alternative (long emails, status meetings), the demonstration IS the conversion mechanism.

What they sell: An async video communication platform for teams — screen recording with webcam overlay, instant shareable links, viewer analytics.
Who it's for: Distributed teams, customer success operators, sales teams, engineering teams — anyone whose communication includes async video updates or screen explanations.
Pricing: Free tier (25 videos/person, 5-min limit); Business ~$15/user/mo; Enterprise custom (verified 2026-05-17).

Hook pattern: Replace-the-meeting positioning
The hero leads with the meeting-replacement promise. This works because distributed teams (especially post-2020) feel the meeting tax directly — every meeting that could have been an async video is a recognizable opportunity cost. The hook taps shared pain that the buyer already articulates internally.

Story pattern: Product-is-the-marketing flywheel
Story is told through every Loom recording shared internally or externally. The recipient experiences the value proposition (this video saved a 30-minute meeting) without needing to read marketing copy. The free-tier branding ensures the recipient knows it is Loom; the experience does the conversion work.

Offer pattern: Free-with-branding plus team-subscription upsell
Free tier captures individual users and seeds the visible-output flywheel — every shared Loom link exposes a new recipient to the product. Business tier removes branding and adds team features (workspace, advanced sharing controls, viewer analytics). The conversion happens at team-adoption moments rather than at individual feature gates.

What's working:
Replace-the-meeting positioning taps the shared meeting tax that distributed teams already feel.|Product-is-the-marketing flywheel — every shared recording demonstrates the value to a new recipient without marketing copy.|Free tier with branding seeds the visible-output presence across every shared video link.|Speed-of-recording-to-share matters operationally — Loom's near-instant share link is the structural differentiator against polished alternatives (Screen Studio, Tella).|Team workspace features at Business tier capture the team-adoption upgrade moment.|Acquired by Atlassian in 2023 — keeps the platform funded and operationally stable while preserving the indie-friendly brand on the marketing surface.

What to adapt:
If your product replaces an obviously-painful alternative, position against the alternative directly (meetings, long emails, manual updates) rather than describing your features.|Free-tier visible-output flywheel works when your product creates artifacts that recipients encounter outside the buyer's organization.|Speed-of-action matters as a structural differentiator when competitors optimize for polish — sometimes the right move is to do less, faster.

What to avoid:
Do not adopt replace-the-meeting positioning if your product does not actually replace meetings reliably. Tools that promise meeting replacement and fail to deliver create more meetings (to discuss the broken async workflow).|Do not assume the free-tier flywheel works for non-shareable categories. Internal tools, dashboards, and admin panels do not seed visible output to recipients.

Brunson lens:
Hook: Common Enemy positioning (Brunson Expert Secrets) — meetings as the enemy, async video as the replacement.
Story: Product-is-the-marketing — the demonstration IS the conversion mechanism, no separate marketing copy needed.
Offer: Free-with-branding flywheel plus team-subscription upsell — Brunson structural-trigger pattern aligned with team-adoption moments.
Value ladder tier: Front-end lead funnel (free with branding) plus per-user team subscription core plus enterprise back-end.