$2M to $9M ARR in one year. Then it nearly fell apart. Gilles Bertaux expanded Livestorm into meetings and sales demos after COVID, turning it into a smaller Zoom with no clear differentiator. In this episode, founders will learn how he rebuilt product-market fit by narrowing to a niche most would run from.

Gilles shares why 85% of customers on monthly plans was a ticking time bomb, how a failed Series C forced the right strategic shift, and why targeting marketers instead of IT buyers let Livestorm avoid competing with Zoom on budget.

Livestorm generates nearly $20 million in ARR with 3,500 customers and has raised $35 million. Gilles co-founded the company in 2016 as a university project and has led it through explosive COVID growth, a near-collapse in positioning, and a rebuild to product-market fit with enterprise buyers.

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🔑 Key Lessons

• 🎯 Product-market fit can be lost by expanding too broadly: Livestorm added meetings and sales demos after COVID, turning into a smaller Zoom with no clear differentiator. The longer the sales conversation, the lower the conversion rate.
• 📉 Explosive growth can mask a fragile customer base: Going from $2M to $9M ARR in one year felt like traction, but 85% of customers were on monthly self-serve plans. One button click and that revenue disappears overnight.
• 🏢 Narrow positioning wins against giants: Livestorm stopped competing feature-for-feature with Zoom and differentiated on three dimensions - European company for security-conscious buyers, marketers only to avoid IT budgets, and specific industries like banking and pharma.
• 🔄 Selling to enterprise requires rebuilding the sales team, not retraining it: Reps who closed inbound leads from a CRM could not cold-call 10,000-person companies. Gilles had to replace almost the entire original sales team with people experienced in enterprise outbound.
• 💰 A failed fundraise can force the right strategic shift: When Series C investors said no in 2022, Livestorm had to become profitable. That constraint pushed them toward enterprise customers on annual contracts who pay more and stick longer.
• 🛠️ Target the buyer with a separate budget: By positioning Livestorm as a marketing tool instead of an IT tool, Gilles avoided budget wars with Zoom and Teams. Marketers control their own spend and do not need IT approval to buy.

Chapters

• Introduction
• What Livestorm does and who it serves
• Revenue, customers, and funding
• Building Livestorm as a university project
• The disastrous first webinar launch
• Why a product launch is a timeline, not a day
• Finding the first 10 customers through inbound
• SEO, Quora, and co-marketing as early growth engines
• Competing with GoToWebinar and Zoom
• How product-market fit shifted after COVID
• Going from $2M to $9M ARR in one year
• Support tickets from 200 to 20,000 and servers crashing
• Post-COVID churn and the virtual event collapse
• Why webinars survived but virtual events died
• Losing product-market fit by becoming a smaller Zoom
• Rebuilding positioning around Europe, marketers, and industries
• Why video is a commodity and experience is the differentiator
• How Livestorm processes 4,000+ feedback items per quarter
• The painful shift from PLG to enterprise sales
• Rebuilding the sales team for outbound
• From tech nerd to startup CEO
• Lightning round

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Resources

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