How Loom Grew to 25M Users Without Traditional Marketing: Product-Led Growth Marketing

Howdy marketer,

Here's something many SaaS companies get wrong about growth: they think they need to buy it. 

More ads, more sales teams, more aggressive outreach. 

But Loom proved you don't need any of that when your product does the marketing for you.

The company went from zero to 25 million users without spending much on traditional marketing at all. 

Loom is a masterclass in how to make your product inherently shareable.

This is why Atlassian acquired them in 2023 for $975 million!

Today's Treasure Trove

• What Loom Actually Does

• Who Uses Loom and Why It Works

• Loom’s Marketing Strategies

• Timing and Market Position

• Wrap Up

What Loom Actually Does

Some Stats:

• LinkedIn: 95K followers

• Twitter/X: 44K followers

• Instagram: 10.5K followers

• YouTube: 7.8K subscribers

Loom makes recording and sharing video messages ridiculously easy. That's it. 

You hit record, it captures your screen and your face, and boom, you've got a shareable link. 

It started as a Chrome extension and grew into a full platform for asynchronous video communication.

The company launched in 2016 with a simple premise: sometimes typing out an email or message takes way longer than just showing someone what you mean. 

Support teams use it to explain solutions. 

Designers use it to walk through feedback. 

Sales teams use it for personalized outreach. 

Remote teams use it to stay connected without endless meetings.

What's interesting here is that Loom's social following isn't massive compared to their user base. 

They had 25 million users at acquisition but their combined social reach is under 200K. 

They didn't need influencer marketing or viral social campaigns. The product itself was the distribution channel.

Who Uses Loom and Why It Works

Loom's target demographic is knowledge workers. That's the catch-all term, but let's get specific. 

We're talking about designers, developers, product managers, customer support teams, marketers, sales reps, and anyone working remotely or in hybrid setups. These are people who live in their browsers, use multiple SaaS tools daily, and communicate constantly with teammates and clients.

The positioning is brilliant because it's not about replacing anything. Loom positioned itself as the thing that makes everything else better. You're not giving up Slack or email or Notion. 

You're adding Loom to make those tools more effective. That "and" positioning is way smarter than "instead of" positioning, especially when you're trying to change behavior.

If you're a remote team struggling with communication, you don't need another project management tool. You need context, nuance. You need to see someone's face when they explain something. Loom fills that gap between written communication (too slow, too ambiguous) and synchronous meetings (too time-consuming, too interruptive).

The demographic skews younger, tech-savvy, and working in companies that already use modern collaboration tools.

Loom’s Marketing Strategies

Loom's growth story is basically a textbook example of product-led growth, but that term gets thrown around so much it's lost meaning. Let's talk about what they actually did.

First, they nailed the freemium model. You could use Loom for free with minimal restrictions, which meant there was basically no barrier to trying it. 

Every video you recorded had Loom branding. Every link you shared was a Loom link. 

And because video recording seems complicated, when people see how polished and easy a Loom looks, they want to know how to do that too. That's viral growth built into the product architecture.

The Chrome extension strategy was key. By living in the browser, Loom reduced friction to basically nothing. You didn't need to download software or switch contexts. It was just there when you needed it. 

Many freemium products either give you too little (forcing upgrades) or too much (no reason to upgrade). 

Loom found the sweet spot. Free users could record unlimited videos but with a time limit per video. 

That's enough to get value, but power users hit the ceiling quickly.

Their growth loop looked like this: someone records a Loom → they share it with 5 people → 2 of those people sign up → they each record Looms → it compounds. 

Timing and Market Position

One thing that doesn't get enough credit in Loom's story is timing. They launched in 2016, right as remote work was starting to pick up but before it was mainstream. 

Then COVID-19 hit in 2020, and suddenly asynchronous communication went from "nice to have" to "mission critical." Loom was perfectly positioned to ride that wave.

What made Loom different was the focus on communication over documentation. 

That focus shaped every product decision, from the interface design to the sharing mechanics to the viewing experience.

Let’s talk branding. Loom feels friendly and approachable. 

The purple color scheme, the simple interface, the conversational tone in their marketing. They avoided corporate jargon and focused on real use cases. 

Wrap Up

When your product is inherently shareable and immediately valuable, you don't need to convince people. You just need to get it in their hands.

But you can't PLG your way out of a mediocre product. 

And they did it without billboards, without Super Bowl ads, without enterprise sales teams grinding through cold outreach.

That's harder than hiring more salespeople. But when you get it right, it's unstoppable.

For those in product marketing, Loom is a reminder to stop asking "How do we market this?" and start asking "How do we build this so it markets itself?"

✌️,

Tom from Marketer Gems