Async Brainstorm: Public Looms 🌎🤔💭 (1.5x 😬)

Hey, thanks for checking this out. I thought I'd do a really fast intro just since I'll be sharing this brainstorm pretty broadly.

So my name's Sean, I'm a designer here at loom and I'm partnering with Janie on a project called public looms, and we would love your help brainstorming.

It'll really take between I would say realistically three and five minutes, if you're super excited about public looms, the more the merrier, so spend as much time as, as, as you have, but but really any, anything helps.

So I'm going to provide some really quick context just to, just to help you get started. And let me know if you have any questions and I'll be following up once people have submitted ideas to, to vote on things, et cetera.

So with that said the, the problem and opportunity we're thinking about is this idea that, you know, currently people think of loom as a quick way to communicate with coworkers and clients using video but not as a way to share with a larger public audience.

So what I mean by that is you know, loom is inherently public. Like I think without thinking people are able to distribute looms anywhere they intend to.

But, but the keyword is intent. So I, I do believe looms are distributed publicly or internally in very intentional ways versus broadcasting.

And, and that's really the crux of the opportunity we think we have. So we believe with public looms, we have an opportunity to help people with work-related knowledge spread their ideas further by being the casual way to create and broadcast work-related video for the general public.

So I'm not necessarily targeting you with a loom that is all about some knowledge I have, but I'm spreading this information broadly in places that I believe will attract a resonant audience, if that makes sense.

So that's, that's really the opportunity we're focused on and investigating here. And you know, one question on our mind is what does this unlock?

Like, why would people want to broadcast their looms broadly? And this is still an area we're investigating and we want to do so further with research.

But two scenarios that come to mind are like one, we believe public looms can really help someone improve their personal brand.

So as a designer, like maybe you want to share your portfolio of work in a more impactful way that captures your full self.

So typically when designers have a portfolio, it's, it's a series of static or video based content. And then text-based content that kind of explains who the designer is and what their intentions are, but imagine, you know, the power of loom being used in forums like that, like someone's personal website where you're able to actually hear them and where their reputation is actually improved by, by, by being able to really hear and see their full self.

Another, another key scenario we're thinking about is improving a company's public perception. So maybe you're a developer and your internal demo went really well.

And your manager encourages you to share it on the company blog on LinkedIn, et cetera, to attract. This is something that already happens today, but imagine with the power of loom how demos like this in a public space that kind of graduate from a more internal setting how impactful it could be.

So we, we've also, in addition to thinking about scenarios, we've been looking elsewhere for inspiration. So where is this like private to public connection happening successfully?

So design tools like Figma have both a private workspace focused section for designers, but they also have a community aspect where designers are able to create plugins for other designers to use the creators gain notoriety, they gain reputation.

And the designers who use these plugins have a strong incentives, strong incentive to check out the community because it helps them do their job more effectively.

So we should also think about, you know, a strong incentive structure between a viewer and creator. When thinking about this opportunity Coda is another example Janie shared with me.

So it's, it's a competitor to notion. So it's a very much an internal document framework, but they're, they're becoming more public by having this gallery section where people can actually share knowledge using the document framework.

So using Coda, so people are publishing, you know, tutorials are advice, articles, et cetera, using the tool using Coda. And then as a result, spreading their knowledge, increasing the reputation, et cetera.

Medium is another great example it's been around forever. It's a great example of workplace knowledge being shared publicly. Imagine medium combined with the power of loom.

Imagine if looms were optimized for platforms like medium, what would that look like? This is another example. It's a, it's a developer blog.

She's talking about something she built but she's also sharing it as a loom. This is something we want to encourage more as part of this project.

And as you can see, she got a lot of views. And a lot of folks may have resonated much more with her loom than the, you know, the long article.

This is a tweet where someone's talking about like, Hey, does anyone want to see, you know, a loom walkthrough of me doing customer research?

He got a lot of engagement. A lot of people were like, yes, please. Much easier to understand like where he's coming from and how he works versus trying to read like a Twitter thread.

And then this is someone just talking about the, the idea I talked about previously, where maybe as a designer or as a hiring manager, actually, you're able to look at a lot of designer portfolios that are actually looms.

Like imagine, imagine how much easier it would be to get a sense of what a designer is like, how they approach work, et cetera, if what they share is higher and fidelity.

So I realized this looms going a little long, so I'm going to speed it up. So that was the context to get into the brainstorm piece.

I have four prompts, feel free to add as many ideas you have related to each prompt, just grabbing by grabbing one of these post-its and duplicating them and writing your ideas.

So the, the first prompt is how might we improve the discoverability of public looms on other platforms and on loom.com.

So what is going to, if people start creating these public looms, how do we just make them easier to find?

And an example that I wrote is just like maybe potentially including hashtags within embedded looms, more prominently that would potentially improve discoverability, but really looking for a range of ideas here.

The second prompt is how might we make it obvious and safe to share from a workplace to a more public audience?

So, as you can imagine, a lot of people probably feel some anxiety when it comes to graduating content from a work setting to a more publicly broadcasted setting.

So how do we kind of help someone feel comfortable, help someone feel in control when they're doing so? I have an example where maybe they have a one-click way to share a loom to an existing, to existing public platforms like LinkedIn, et cetera.

And it just feels like it's a separate type of functionality that you can't accidentally press. The third prompt is how might we incentivize creators of blooms to share their content more publicly.

This is super important. Like the Figma example, there's a strong incentive between creators of plugins and designers using them. And the ant the idea I had is I'm not sure this is a really hard one for me, so I would love a lot of ideas here.

And then finally, the, the fourth prompt is this one's, this one's going to be the hardest, I think. So how might we evolve looms to better support the use case of broadcasting to large public audiences?

So if people start using looms to compliment their tweets, add to LinkedIn, add to medium et cetera, like how does loom have to change?

How does the format have to change? One idea I had is like, what if we had more powerful CTS? So what if CTA is helped to drive purchases, downloads, et cetera, that would certainly be a way to evolve the loom medium in a way that supports this idea of publicly broadcasting.

So thanks for watching. If you have any questions, please reach out, submit as as many ideas as you can. And I'll talk soon.

Thank you.