$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
<ul>
<li>🎯 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.</li>
<li>📉 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.</li>
<li>🏢 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.</li>
<li>🔄 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.</li>
<li>💰 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.</li>
<li>🛠️ 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.</li>
</ul>

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

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