Clap

Pierre Tuzovic spent years as VP of Marketing at 360 Learning, where he helped grow the company from 25 to over 200 people and $30 million in ARR. But working at that scale in a fully remote world exposed a critical problem: those quick five-minute office conversations about a prototype or spreadsheet had ballooned to 30-minute calendar blocks. The core issue wasn't remote work itself—it was that teams had no efficient tool to share feedback asynchronously while maintaining context and making actual decisions.

Starting in October 2023, Pierre and his co-founder Robin (best friends for 14 years) began building. Rather than jumping straight to code, they spent months researching the landscape. They tested 15-20 existing products like Loom and frame.io to understand what drove adoption, engagement, and virality. This deep research led to a precise prototype by January 2024. When they finally wrote the first line of code around October-November, they focused on the hardest problem first: the video recording system and managing its costs. Development accelerated dramatically in January.

The MVP cost roughly $150,000-$200,000 to build. Pierre, leveraging his marketing background from his previous role, handled much of the website design himself using Figma, Photoshop, and Webflow—work that looked polished enough to seem agency-built.

Clap's breakthrough came through a carefully orchestrated LinkedIn strategy. Pierre spent months iterating on positioning and narrative before making a public announcement, focusing on creating a new category rather than just another product. When they announced Clap in January 2024, the post generated 45,000 views and hundreds of beta signups. But the real traction driver came in April 2024 when they launched a meeting calculator—a free tool that connected to users' Google Calendars and showed them stats on their meeting load. This small product launch became a major lead generation engine and helped build their 3,000-person waitlist.

The meeting calculator proved brilliant because it let users experience the problem Clap solved before they even tried the product. By April 2024, Clap had only about 100 monthly active users and 30-40 daily active users in closed private beta—small numbers, but enough to validate product-market fit signals.

The fundraising announcement in June 2024 was equally calculated. Pierre wanted to raise $500,000initially, but the combination of strong narrative, proven concept, and public momentum created a bidding war. Within three weeks, they had 15 term sheets. The competition drove their raise from $500K to $3 million at a $17.5M post-money valuation—all before launching publicly or generating revenue. By September 2024, the team had grown to nine people with five engineers.

Clap remains in private beta with plans to accelerate onboarding in September and open public beta by year-end 2024 or early 2025. Pricing will be usage-based, likely $10-$20 per month per video creator with variable features and future additions like polls, video feedback, and voice feedback. The product addresses a universal pain point—back-to-back meetings—but initial go-to-market targets product teams, who have the most visual, context-heavy collaboration needs. Pierre believes the long-term vision is democratizing asynchronous decision-making across entire companies, not just one function.