Use Case Podcast – Storytelling about Livestorm with Gilles Bertaux

Announcer: 00:02 Welcome to RecruitingDaily’s Use Case Podcast, a show dedicated to the storytelling that happens or should happen when practitioners purchase technology. Each episode is designed to inspire new ways and ideas to make your business better as we speak with the brightest minds in recruitment and HR tech. That’s what we do. Here’s your host, William Tincup.

William Tincup: 00:25 Ladies and gentlemen, you are listening to the Use Case Podcast. Today, we have Gilles from Livestorm and we’ll be learning about the business case, the use case for wise customers, prospects, et cetera, purchase Livestorm. So let’s just jump right into it. Gill, would you do us a favor and introduce both yourself and Livestorm?

Gilles Bertaux: 00:46 Yeah, absolutely. So thank you for having me, first of all. And my name is Gill. I know that’s a hard one to pronounce, so just call me Paul. That’s my second name, we can do. And I’m the CEO and cofounder of Livestorm. And basically, what we do is we are what we call ourselves a video engagement platform.

Gilles Bertaux: 01:06 So what is that? And well, think of it as a workspace for your team to actually organize, plan, distribute and host any sort of group meeting presentation webinar. So everything that stands between a simple call and a virtual event that is very complex is what we do. So typically, we’ll have marketer for co-marketing webinars. We’re going to have sales for sales product demos, or we’re going to have internal use cases for HR, for internal training and onboarding and that sort of thing.

Gilles Bertaux: 01:40 So this is what we do today. And we have over 5,000 customers across the globe.

William Tincup: 01:46 And starting the firm, tell us a little bit about the kind of the origin story.

Gilles Bertaux: 01:51 So actually, it all started back in 2015 and well, that’s going to make me look much older. So in 2015, it was a final exam project from school, essentially. So basically, I was like interning in the startup back in Paris and I was running a bunch of webinars for them and it was a pure marketing use case. And essentially, I was like really running into this issue of half forcing people to dum-dum something on the computer just to attend something they were merely interested in.

Gilles Bertaux: 02:29 That’s the first issue. Second thing is I was spending a huge amount of time like coding, landing pages, plugging, whatever marketing tool for the emails. And so basically, 80% of my time was not hosting the thing, but actually, just basically doing the support functions around it. And the last bit was the old data that I was producing for this event was actually very valuable.

Gilles Bertaux: 02:54 I didn’t get anything. I was like, “Okay, so I have this email, that’s fine.” And that’s pretty much. And I know well that person came to the webinar and that was it. And I didn’t have much more engagement data around it, which was actually a very good indicator for qualification and that sort of thing.

Gilles Bertaux: 03:10 So given all that, we had to build this product as a final exam. So, we had to get some users, have a business plan and it was supposed to be as if we were going to launch the whole thing. And so we build this thing in a browser that doesn’t care so much about the video but cares about all the layers around it to help the host and with the really cool connectors and some analytics, like very basic. That was the very proof of concept.

Gilles Bertaux: 03:37 We built that in a couple months. We presented that to the jury and that’s where the kind of the thing happened. We had hundreds of people connecting, all mentors or teammates from school, professors and all those guys actually connecting. And the other teams, they wanted also stream their own presentation using our tool.

Gilles Bertaux: 04:03 And so we actually spent eight hours straight with this thing that was actually built with sticks and stones. And we were like, “Shit, we built something people like. Okay, so maybe there is something to do about it.” And that was the tipping point. Just moving away from being a student to an employee was not so much of a lifestyle change. So we just went with it.

William Tincup: 04:27 I love that. I mean, first of all, that’s a great story of both education and real world coming together. They gave you a project, the project turned out to be a really, really cool project and you couldn’t get any more high praise than your peers in a competition saying, “Can we use your technology to present our technology?” That’s just fantastic.

William Tincup: 04:52 So let’s talk a little bit about HR and recruiting and the things that you’ve seen, the events that you’ve seen your customers use Livestorm for.

Gilles Bertaux: 05:08 For recruiting?

William Tincup: 05:10 For recruiting or HR. You mentioned onboarding and training.

Gilles Bertaux: 05:13 Yeah. I mean, there are two sides of that answer. First of all, there is our usage of Livestorm as the main primary users of the platform and how do we recruit using it and how are customers are using it.

William Tincup: 05:31 Let’s unpack both of those. That’s good.

Gilles Bertaux: 05:34 Yeah. And actually the good thing about Livestorm, it’s actually quite flexible. You can use it for tiny one-on-one kind of meeting, but also for more let’s say group meeting, as I said, and so on and so forth. So basically, you can actually have something that goes at every step of the funnel.

Gilles Bertaux: 05:49 So let’s say we’re going to go from sourcing a candidate up until onboarding that person once they’re hired. So first of all, we just got a screening, what we call a screening call. So we’re just going to source the person. We’re going to have the call, and going to just hop on a call essentially, and just talk like 30 minutes about whatever they want to do, the position, some of that stuff and then move forward into the process.

Gilles Bertaux: 06:20 And then each of time, we’re going to basically create an event, create a session using a product, a one-on-one for, or maybe one of few if there is a couple of the people that want to attend the interview and we’re going to move forwards like this. So those, mostly on the meeting use case.

Gilles Bertaux: 06:35 And we have actually a lot of customers that use it this way on a kind of meeting formal presentation. And the reason why they use Livestorm versus something else is because of the content they can actually show. They can show PDF if they want to present some stuff of the benefits, for example, or that sort of thing. They can also customize a little bit, actually very much the room for the call and the meeting.

Gilles Bertaux: 07:02 So it feels like they’re brand and they have the background of the room. They have the logos, they have the colors. Everything feels like the candidate is actually at the company HQ, in a way. So this is the big chunk of one-on-ones until the person is actually hired.

Gilles Bertaux: 07:22 And then after that, there is like onboarding sessions. So then you have a couple way you want to do it. You have either live or a-sync and one-on-one and group meetings. So essentially, the way it goes is for the first two weeks, people will meet as a group, as a batch. We try to group people together. Let’s say, it’s usually 5, maximum of 10 people. 10 is actually very [inaudible 00:07:48]. So five to six people together, such a small group of onboardees. And we try to put them into a meeting with the main stakeholders for the couple first two weeks.

Gilles Bertaux: 07:57 So first with me, and then we hop on the session we actually present. Everybody can speak, so they can interrupt me and they can raise their hand. They can just talk. So we use just the Livestorm for that. And they do the same thing with my co-founder, the CPO, CTO and so on and so forth.

Gilles Bertaux: 08:13 And so that’s for the main two weeks. And then after that, obviously in the meantime, the media manager move into more operational stuff, and that’s more one-on-one thing. And then there is like this evergreen training that happens. So how to use the travel budget, how to use that specific set of tools, et cetera, et cetera. And that happens as what we called a tune in and learn session. It happens every two weeks. It is actually mandatory training for everyone that is evergreen.

Gilles Bertaux: 08:43 And each of the time, it’s on a different topic. And it is more of a webinar format. Everybody can join, they can react. We’re going to present a PDF, a video, or whatever content is relevant, Figma or MURAL board, whatever is relevant. And then, we are going to do …

Gilles Bertaux: 08:59 So the tool is actually at the center. It has to be flexible and not just Livestorm, whatever they want to use. It has to be flexible to adapt to every single use case you’re going to have around the journey of someone that you hire. And that’s actually the key thing. The tool should adapt the journey and not the other way around, which is actually very important.

Gilles Bertaux: 09:22 And then we have also some async and on-demand content that is evergreen that can consult on the side. It’s usually like 15 minutes on-demand webinars or prerecorded videos on a very specific topic like, I don’t know, how to use our one-on-one software latest or that sort of thing. It’s very, very specific.

William Tincup: 09:43 So first of all, I love that, especially in the recruiting process. And I would assume that you can record things or not record things if you need to so that you can collaborate and share them with the team. If someone wanted to join that particular session, but couldn’t, they could go back and watch and interact with it.

William Tincup: 10:06 One of the things that while you were a student and you built this, you wanted to get down into the analytics and metrics of an engagement, I believe is what you called it. What are you learning there as it relates to some of the things that you’re doing in recruiting, as it relates to get candidate engagement?

Gilles Bertaux: 10:28 That’s a good one. Well, my take is that engagement is, funny enough, the notion of engagement is pretty much the same. It’s really agnostic and consistent across different use cases that are actually very different from HR. We see the same pattern on marketing, on sales. When you ask people usually how they will evaluate engagement of either a prospect or a customer or a candidate, it’s actually pretty much the same parameters they’ve gone.

Gilles Bertaux: 10:57 Obviously, some people will put more emphasis on attendance. Some will bring more emphasis on the number of chat and questions and that sort of thing. But at the end of the day, it’s pretty much the same parameters that go into consideration. And as a result, one of the thing we’re thinking about, and this is something we announced, I think, it was last week or a couple weeks ago. We want to build just this scoring system, essentially what we call the VES.

Gilles Bertaux: 11:24 The VES is the video engagement score. And if you guys know NPS, so an NPS is a net promoter score is a scoring that exists. It’s mostly to score the product, any given product, and you’d give a score from 0 to 10 essentially. This is how it works. It’s been there for ages now in the software industry. And we want to basically replicate the same thing for video conferencing because the thing we realize is people use the same parameters, but never the same rules on how to apply it.

Gilles Bertaux: 11:56 So what we try to do is put a framework around it, build this VES. It’s a score from 0 to 100. It’s for now really applicable to event and session. So mostly for group meetings and webinars, and now we are working on a contact-based VES, specifically for that specific use case of candidate or virtual selling, one-on-one and that sort of thing.

Gilles Bertaux: 12:18 And once we have that, it will be actually much easier to, I would say, filter and sort the engagement per lead per candidate to whatever. And it will be a much more consistent indicator for any given talent acquisition manager or sales or whatever the use case. So this is how I’m thinking about it.

Gilles Bertaux: 12:39 But if I had to set some really ground rules on the stuff that are very important, I mean, not just from an indicator point of view, but as a remote hire manager, I will say is, first of all, being there on time. It’s a dumb thing, but you know, being able to be there on time, make sure we are actually able to cover everything during the time lapse that you have given. And also the way that people bounce back on whatever you’re saying and the questions and the followups, that’s actually very important.

Gilles Bertaux: 13:17 I think it demonstrated curiosity in a way. And also one pitfall usually people tend to fall into is you’re remote, you’re hiring remote, or you’re entering remote. And you feel that is actually a bit different and people tend to be a bit more laid back, which is fine. But sometimes you see that it goes a bit too much and it’s not so bad. It’s just as an indicator of seniority or not.

Gilles Bertaux: 13:45 And it depends on the job, but sometimes you want to have someone that is actually very rigorous and a bit senior, and those other sort of thing that actually matter.

William Tincup: 13:55 So folks listening will obviously be asking the question of the difference between let’s say Zoom and Livestorm. I’m sure you’ve answered this a zillion different ways and I get gassed probably daily. So why don’t we just dig into it? What are some of the … I mean, I think you’ve already illustrated a couple differences, but why don’t you tell us the difference between Livestorm and-

Gilles Bertaux: 14:21 It is a good question. It is a good question and it’s not just Zoom. If you look at Team and Webex and all those guys, well, I think the first thing to take into account is, those are IT products. It’s IT. It’s handled by IT. It is same thing as an email like Gmail or whatever you guys are using in your company. It is handled by IT. It is not a very specialized product. It is not an opinionated product or just specific use case, which means that at the end of the day, those platforms what people call the UCaaS, unified communications as a service, they do everything in a very generalistic way.

Gilles Bertaux: 15:00 And as a result, you end up with you adapting to the tool, and not the tool adapting to your use case, which at the end of the day, it’s basically you unconsciously saying, “I’m not going to do this type of content because the tool does not enable me to do it.” And that’s a shame.

Gilles Bertaux: 15:19 And if you hop on any single sales call, you’re going to basically end up with the same pattern of Zoom calls, Teams and whatnot, and using the same content and that sort of thing. So basically it unifies everything. Well, that’s more of a kind of philosophical and market approach sort of thing.

Gilles Bertaux: 15:38 But what we do differently to answer really clear your question is we provide a very customizable environment in terms of video conferencing. So that’s the reason A why people choose us, because we’re extremely modular and customizable. So you can have custom templates, custom cadences for your email reminders. You can have custom design for the room for the learning pages.

Gilles Bertaux: 16:02 Analytics is actually very deep. So you can customize the workflows. You want to go after that. And we integrate with those tool that you use. So it can really be plugged very deeply into who you are as an organization. So that’s the first one.

Gilles Bertaux: 16:15 Second piece is UX. So we want to have a product that is actually so easy to use that it looks like a B2C product. It is actually in a browser. So you don’t have to download anything on both end of the spectrum as an attendee or as a host. So that’s the first thing. And the second piece is you should be able to produce any sort of event, whether it’s a one-on-one or a one-to-3,000 people in less than 10 minutes. You should be able to produce that with all the email cadences set up with the landing pages, with the integration, everything in less than 10 minutes. And that’s the promise of having a really smooth UX.

Gilles Bertaux: 16:54 And I guess the last piece is mostly, it’s a big bucket of data. And all the thing we can produce to actually give you array on whatever you did, either as a one-on-one or as a webinar. And it means having analytics. It means having an API and sort of integrations with many different tools so you can leverage that data.

Gilles Bertaux: 17:17 So, those are the three main things that make us different from Zoom. And we don’t necessarily compete head to head actually, and that’s the most interesting thing now. We have clients that use Zoom for their calls, and then they use Livestorm for presentations, either sales or HR or marketing, and then they’re going to use maybe something else for big virtual event with hundreds of thousands of people, and that’s a different game.

Gilles Bertaux: 17:43 So we are this formal layer that goes above Zoom, essentially, if I had to really summarize it.

William Tincup: 17:50 I love that. I love that. And I’m so glad that you explained that as well. So we’ve talked a little bit about the recruiting usage that you’ve seen, that y’all use as well for yourself. What are some of the HR use cases that you’ve seen? I know you mentioned training. What are some of the other use cases that you’ve seen there that your customers have used Livestorm for?

Gilles Bertaux: 18:15 So any indication industry, we see a lot of, it’s in the HR extended. So in the university, for example, we have a lot of them and they do like actually recruiting fairs and either recruiting fairs for the companies that are partnered with their university or their recruiting fair for their own universities. So it’s kind of a webinar presentation of what is they’re all about and the profiles of their students and whatnot. So that’s the first use case.

Gilles Bertaux: 18:45 Second use case that we see a lot in the others is internal training/onboarding. So essentially, it’s either for the first three months, people that just are walking through the door and you want to train them at scale on the given topics that are actually very important. So you take batches of newcomers and you put them in a virtual room, and you just present whatever you have to present. So that’s a very common one.

Gilles Bertaux: 19:13 This third one is evergreen training, and this is typically what we do what we call the tune in and learn. And that happens whatever cadence that you set and you can talk it for 30, an hour, about something that either … It’s a most of a kind of learning and give back, so marketing worked on something cool. They want to share, or maybe the growth team and a sales team have managed to work something together in terms of process and they want to share that with the rest of the team, that sort of sharing. And we see that a lot.

Gilles Bertaux: 19:49 And those are the main top use case and obviously, there is the one-on-ones and everything that goes into the smaller meetings, when you have to go one-on-one for management purposes of hiring. And those are actually also very recurring. But I wouldn’t say that’s the vast majority. I think the first ones are the vast majority of what we do.

William Tincup: 20:13 I love it. I love it. So obviously, the pandemic forced us all to think differently about work. How have you seen your business, especially with remote employees? How have you seen Livestorm help companies build culture, build teamwork, camaraderie, et cetera?

Gilles Bertaux: 20:40 We’ve seen, what actually is more interesting is … What we did not anticipate is we’ve seen banks and very large enterprise that not that tech-savvy getting very diversified in their usage. They were actually using yours historically for mostly, I’d say marketing kind of use case. And all of a sudden, they needed this way of maintaining culture and maintaining internal communication with the team.

Gilles Bertaux: 21:12 And they really diversify the use case and they expanded their usage of the platform. So that was actually very interesting to see that there was that specific segment of people that did that first, if not the usual suspects, the tech savvies, scale-ups and startups. So that’s very interesting.

Gilles Bertaux: 21:28 And so what we’ve seen is a lot of different things. So the first one was obviously, we’ve seen gaming sessions and this is actually something that we do as well. So being able to set an event somewhere at some point in the calendar, and you can invite people that want to join to have a, how do you call it, a role playing game. I was actually looking for the word. So role playing game where you … No, an escape game. Sorry, I was looking for the word in English.

Gilles Bertaux: 22:03 So escape game, and you have teams and you have what we call breakout rooms. So you have different teams of four and five people, and you have five teams of five. And each of them have their room inside the room. So the breakout rooms are basically sub rooms of a live room and they all do the challenge. And at the end of the day, the one that was the fastest basically wins the game or the contest or whatever.

Gilles Bertaux: 22:27 So that was something that we did, something that we’ve seen as well. So it’s very interesting. Also something that I think we are the only one who did that but I wouldn’t be so sure, is have what we call lounges. We have this feature in Livestorm, it’s called instant meeting room. It’s basically a link, just like a Google Meet link. Basically it’s a link. It’s has always the same nomenclature.

Gilles Bertaux: 22:53 So for example, the coffee room is always /coffeeroom and it’s there. And you can join at any time and people can join and you can just hang out. And you don’t have to start. You don’t have to end. It has no start and end. Actually, it’s just like evergreen, as it says. And what we did is we plug or live chat on top.

Gilles Bertaux: 23:13 So the Slack that we use internally, and every time someone would join that you will prompt a notification for everyone and say, “Oh, Frank just joined the instant meeting room through the coffee room. If you want to jump in, just click on this link,” that’s it. And kind of true cuff, it created this habit which was very interesting.

Gilles Bertaux: 23:35 Another thing that we’ve seen about culture is the usage of all hands. The usage of company town halls is something that we’ve seen expanding a lot. The need for the remotes has accelerated the need for alignment between teams and across the company. So the town hall use case is something that really, really grew internally on every customers. So that was also very interesting to see. So yeah, those are mostly the ones.

William Tincup: 24:04 Very nice. So a couple questions on the company side, and one is success stories. And what I like to ask about this question or this particular question is the ways that people are using Livestorm in a way that basically for HR and recruiting in particular that you didn’t envision, or maybe you didn’t think that those would be a usage and you’re just really … No brand names by the way. We’re not looking for company names or anything like that. But it’s more the usage of the product in a way that you’re like, “Oh, that’s cool.”

Gilles Bertaux: 24:45 Yeah. We’ve seen, obviously in 2020 when COVID hit, we didn’t have that many use case. We were mostly targeted towards marketing team and sales teams. And when the COVID emerged, the whole thing, the whole need for internal communication, people got equipped with lifestyle for internal purposes. And that’s something that was actually very cool in itself to have that emerge so fast.

Gilles Bertaux: 25:15 Something that we’ve seen a lot also is tech companies having a semi-internal/external, where they actually have a community-driven approach of growth. So you’ve seen those small software, actually not just building marketing but having a strong community of users and early users and trying to engage them this way. And some of the users will end up actually working at their company or they will end up being a client, but it was interesting to see the momentum on community-driven growth and the whole engagement and the whole of recurring aspect of it. It was actually very, very interesting.

Gilles Bertaux: 25:58 Second also we saw, the Google yoga sessions and sports session remote, we’ve seen that a lot also emerged. It was not something that lasted, honestly. It’s very much during COVID and people just adapted. And we see that very temporarily but it was very cool to see.

Gilles Bertaux: 26:18 I think the coolest thing that I recall is I think, yes, it was back in 2020 when I think it was during first or second lockdown. I don’t recall. But we’ve seen different hospitals and different, I’ll say, medical institution mostly in the UK but also in France starting coordinating themselves. So they were not even partner. They were not even customers, not even colleagues. It’s just that they wanted to connect to share knowledge and to share perhaps even people because some of them had needs of resources and about whatever the hell was going on.

Gilles Bertaux: 26:58 And it was cool. I mean, it’s not the most uncommon use case. It’s just that it felt cool to see that it is useful, I suppose.

William Tincup: 27:12 I love that. Great, great story. So your favorite part of the demo when you show Livestorm to someone for the first time, what is your particular favorite part to show them?

Gilles Bertaux: 27:28 That’s a good question. I’ve never had that question.

William Tincup: 27:32 It’s like asking you which one’s your favorite child.

Gilles Bertaux: 27:34 Yeah.

William Tincup: 27:34 I get it. I get it. But there is a part. And sometimes it’s a new feature or something like that, but sometimes you just love showing you get to that aha. When they see this, I know they’ll love it.

Gilles Bertaux: 27:47 Yeah, absolutely. Well, it’s a tricky one because there actually two parts where I feel there is something going on, is when you go to the dashboard and you just start filling a couple thing on the settings and all of a sudden it’s there. I think that people usually, they don’t realize that in a couple of clicks, the whole thing is there. The whole logistic is there.

Gilles Bertaux: 28:21 And when you show them that just with those couple of clicks, they have, “Oh, I have the emails.” “Oh, shit, I have a landing page.” “Oh, I have the room with everything ready and I don’t have to do anything?” “And oh, by the way, my CRM is plugged and I don’t have to manage that as well. Wow. That’s pretty cool.” And it’s a simplicity of it when they realize the flow is so simple and takes me literally like even five minutes just to set up something, the demo use case that I’m presenting, that’s something that usually fill pretty cool.

Gilles Bertaux: 28:51 The second piece is when we start [inaudible 00:28:56] rating and showing all the different ways you can interact with someone. Usually, we get a question is, “Oh, do you have a chat or do you have a question or you have a poll?” The usual suspect, they’ll say, “Yeah, I do. But also look, we have this and this and that and this.” And they’re like, “Oh, wow.” So it doesn’t end. And it’s actually pretty cool, and because they don’t realize …

Gilles Bertaux: 29:20 And I think that’s the beauty of design. You see the surface, and you can see, “Oh, okay,” everything is there. And then when you start actually digging, you say, “Oh, there’s more and wait,” and you just keep looking beneath and you see that there is even more and more and more. And that’s the beauty of design when you actually discover the product by using it and by digging into it. Those are my two favorite parts, just like showing the engagement features and everything that is built inside the room and the simplicity of setting up something and right from the browser without having to leave my browser.

William Tincup: 29:58 Love it. What I love about that is when someone says, “Can it do this?” And you’re like, because the product has elasticity to it, especially from a branding perspective. It’s like, “Yeah.” “Can it do this?” “Yeah.”

Gilles Bertaux: 30:09 Yeah. I mean, at the beginning, the worst feeling was to say, “Eh, no, we don’t have that yet because,” blah, blah, blah. And now you’re like, “Yes, we do.” “Oh, yes, we do.” And then yes. And it doesn’t stop. And then you’re like, “Well, I guess, you’re going to become a customer because we have everything.” And it’s pretty neat, and I love it.

William Tincup: 30:35 So buying questions, as people think about this and they’ve listened to the podcast, what are buying questions that they should ask you when you’re in your sales team? What should they be asking you?

Gilles Bertaux: 30:51 They should be asking me as, how can we help them? So that’s something that is actually very important specifically in our industry where actually getting in front of webcam, whatever use case, it’s a bit stressful. So, I think the main question they should ask is how can we help them make their life easier? Not just in organization standpoint, but also for hosting. How are we going to relieve that stress and make sure everything goes smoothly? That’s the main question.

Gilles Bertaux: 31:29 And I think the second one is ask us perhaps … Actually no, not ask us, but perhaps tell us how you work. Tell us how you work, not just from an HR perspective, but how you collaborate with the other teams. Because something that we see a lot specifically in the video conferencing industry is that every single team has a different tool or maybe it has a different way of using it.

Gilles Bertaux: 31:58 And usually when you talk to sales, you talk to marketing, they have two separate way of working. They have two different silos in video conferencing and that’s a shame because those guys, they could actually exchange some stuff. They could actually collaborate on stuff. And actually when you think about it, HR works the same because part of HR is employee branding. And marketing and HR, they shouldn’t have silos. They should work together.

Gilles Bertaux: 32:20 So, I think the question that we want to hear is, how can I work with the other teams? How can me as an HR person, can I work with marketing and organize events with my marketing team using you guys? That’s interesting. Collaboration is at a core of Livestorm.

William Tincup: 32:41 I love that. Well done. And thank you so much for your time. This has been wonderful.

Gilles Bertaux: 32:47 Thank you for having me.

William Tincup: 32:48 Absolutely. And thanks for everyone listening to the Use Case Podcast. Until next time.

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