Meet Claap, a French startup that has been engaged on a strategy to collaborate extra effectively as a distributed staff. Claap is formally launching its product as we speak.
As a substitute of relying solely on a mixture of written memos and Zoom calls, Claap allows you to share and obtain fast movies with different teammates so that everybody can perceive extra shortly what you’re speaking about and supply suggestions.
“Six years in the past, I joined 360Learning. Again then, we had a no-meeting coverage. We had been round 20 individuals and I may see what it meant to construct an asynchronous firm tradition — but additionally its limits,” co-founder Pierre Touzeau instructed me.
And he nonetheless believes that async works nicely for some corporations. He named Alan and 360Learning as corporations the place it could actually work as a result of groups are “a bit geeky.”
The idea of async work is written communications. Lots of groups depend on Slack for casual chat, a mixture of Notion and Google Docs for essential memos and emails for companywide bulletins. “However sooner or later, individuals will say ‘let’s discuss it,’” Touzeau mentioned.
Claap customers work together with the product by way of a browser extension. From this extension, you’ll be able to report what’s taking place in your display screen. It’ll additionally report your face in a tiny rounded bubble in a nook. It seems a bit like Loom, one other fast video recording instrument.

Picture Credit: Claap
After that, individuals will obtain your video and open it in a browser window. From there, recipients can annotate the video. At any cut-off date, you’ll be able to pause the video, draw a sq. on part of the display screen and add a remark.
This web page turns into a dialog. You possibly can reply to a remark, @-mention different individuals and shortly soar by way of all highlights. Even months later, somebody can nonetheless open a Claap web page and see how individuals determined to go in a single route as a substitute of one other.
Lastly, Claap content material will be added to your information base and change into a part of your ongoing documentation. As an example, some groups use it with Jira, Trello or Confluence.
Claap will be notably helpful for cross-team alignment. When you’ve been by way of a scaling part at a startup, it may be arduous to maintain up with what different groups have been as much as. These fast interactions might help varied groups keep related.
Product, design and advertising groups have a tendency to start out working with Claap first. In the very best case situation, corporations then begin utilizing it extra broadly after some time.
The startup first began onboarding new purchasers in July 2021. General, 2,500 to three,000 individuals have interacted with the product thus far. Some purchasers embody Qonto, Kavak, Revolut, Libeo and OpenClassrooms.
When it began, the corporate raised $3 million in pre-seed from Headline, LocalGlobe and a number of other enterprise angels, similar to Mathilde Collin, Tony Jamous, Roxanne Varza, Matt Robinson and Chris Herd.
Identical to Slack, the corporate depends on a freemium mannequin. You can begin utilizing the product totally free, however it’s important to pay a subscription if you wish to search in your Claap archive and discover outdated movies.
I requested Pierre Touzeau whether or not Claap had a no-meeting coverage. “I modified my thoughts a bit on no-meeting insurance policies,” he instructed me. “There are some issues that work nicely with conferences, similar to human interactions and the flexibility to consider an answer collectively, two or three individuals at a time. We’re largely async first, however we nonetheless maintain dwell conferences as a result of now we have a full distant staff.”
“When you don’t try this if you’re working remotely, you change into a bit loopy,” he added. In fact, Claap additionally depends closely on Claap to work on Claap.
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