Surviving Near-Death Experiences and Going Public in London: Michael Hughes, co-CEO of LoopUp (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Explain the business model a bit. Secondly, describe the competitive landscape. Who or what are you competing against and how?

Michael Hughes: We built up all these systems because we didn’t have any money and it was all we could do. The business model that we followed is very much the same business model that is followed by most of our competitors. In the collaboration space, you’ve all kinds of competitors – Microsoft, Cisco, and now Amazon.

Still the big players are the historical PTT’s. There are several large independent, more audio-oriented players such as Premier Global. The guys that we compete against, day to day, are really the latter groups. The basic model is you sign up. If I invite you to a conference call, the organizer pays per minute for everybody who is in that call.

Sramana Mitra: Why would I use LoopUp versus any other conference calling system?

Michael Hughes: The way that we sell is we go into a customer and we talk to them about their daily experiences of conference calls. Very quickly, they will come to describe problems they have with how they generate invites, problems they have with getting people on the call, problems they have with knowing what’s happening on the call.

We then show them our product which guides you through, step by step, every piece of the way. When it’s time to join your call, you can just click a link to have the system call you or you can dial-in in the traditional way. As soon as the first person joins your call, you are alerted on your mobile device or on your laptop so you can see who that person is. When you jump in, it’s not, “Who’s on the call?” We sell around the proposition that we will offer a premium experience in a part of the market where everyone else is treating it like a commodity.

We sell very much against a market which is in the world of dial-in numbers and emailing out the slides. That is the bit of the market that we go after. By going after that bit of the market, we’ve discovered that you can then move up the value chain and take over some of the activities of a traditional WebEx. You can do this by just a little bit of screen sharing or some other value-added activity that your call-based everyday users might normally be a little bit uncomfortable in using.

If we go into a company that has a thousand users within the organization, they probably have a mishmash of services with that organization. They may have AT&T for their dial-in conferencing. They might have a bunch of WebEx licenses knocking around. They may have Skype for business. When we go into that, we typically find that out of that thousand people, you’re probably looking at around 950 of them using the AT&T dial-in product. Maybe some subset of that, the 50 that are left over, use WebEx in a vigorous way. They need to use WebEx because maybe they’re doing training or desktop support.

What we do is we say, “We’re not the guys that can help you with what you’re using WebEx for. Don’t worry about that. We’ll go after the 950.” We drive adoption in that business. We find that with the cohort that joined in 2016, for example, 75% of our leaders use our technology to join calls. They actually are adopting the technology that they’re too scared to use with other providers. Because they’re doing that, it makes it easy to do a little bit of screen sharing and before you know it, that 950 is now more like 980.

You’re left with this residual group who need to use WebEx. We don’t sell on features. We don’t sell on price. We sell on a premium experience that will make your day less miserable. That’s what we’re all about.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Surviving Near-Death Experiences and Going Public in London: Michael Hughes, co-CEO of LoopUp
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