How tl’dv drives expansion revenue and offloads maintenance with Paragon

About TL;DV

tl;dv was founded in 2020 out of deep conviction in the future of asynchronous work. In just two short years, the company has amassed over half a million users, with customers from big names such as Cloudflare, Hello Fresh and Zalando.

So what do they do, and why have they grown so quickly?

At their core, tl;dv is tackling the problem of information silos that arise from meetings. 

Meetings can often be expensive and inefficient, and now that the majority of meetings are held remotely, even finding time that works for everybody's time zone has become difficult. Thankfully, calls are now almost always held on Zoom or Google Meets, so tl;dv is making it possible for users to seamlessly record, index, transcribe, and share key moments from video calls. This enables colleagues to catch up on the key topics covered in meetings asynchronously in a matter of minutes, making it easier than ever to keep everyone on the same page in a fraction of the time. 

“We believe that the future of work is not only remote, but first and foremost async-first. And we are excited to fuel that movement.” - Raphael Allstadt, CEO

How does it work? Users can timestamp key moments from meetings and create clips within the app, making it easy to share the most important insights with clients, investors and other key stakeholders. These timestamps are searchable, so that any action points don’t get forgotten. 

As co-founder & CEO Raphael Allstadt puts it, “We believe that the future of work is not only remote, but first and foremost async-first, and we are excited to fuel that movement.” 

The opportunity

They realized that within their large user base of over half a million users, there were many different teams using their product for distinct use cases. For example:

• Sales teams were using it for documenting notes on demo calls

• Product teams were using it to grab insights on feature requests

• Recruitment teams were using it to share notes from interview calls

Raphael and the team realized the only way to provide each of those user segments a superior product experience is to deliver the insights from these meetings into the platforms where they needed it – such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms for sales teams and Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS).

“We´re making live meeting insights asynchronously accessible, and it´s very important for us to deliver the insights to where people already collaborate.” - Raphael

This would also pave a straightforward path for them to upsell their free users through the additional product value that would be created, by making integrations a paid feature on their plans.

The problem

The business value for building out all of these integrations was clear, but there was a consistent problem.

tl;dv initially attempted to build a Slack integration in-house, but lacked the engineering resources to justify dedicating significant efforts on integrations without slowing down development of their core product offering.

“We initially attempted to build integrations in-house and started with Slack. But since integrations are not our core product offering, we felt it was a huge undertaking.” - Raphael

Prior to becoming aware of Paragon, tl;dv had built Zoom and Google Meet integrations in-house, as these integrations were essentially the backbone of their product, and they needed to understand their APIs inside and out.

However, while integrations with platforms like Slack, Salesforce or Hubspot are still extremely important product features for them to build, they knew it wouldn’t make sense to have their developers spend weeks learning each platform’s API documentation.

“Integrations into Slack, Salesforce, Hubspot etc. are rather straightforward compared to our Zoom and Google Meets integrations, yet cumbersome to build 1:1 due to the customization between each platform.” - Raphael

On top of that, Raphael recognized that it would cost them approximately a week per year to maintain each of the integrations, which would quickly add up as they scale to dozens, if not hundreds of integrations in the future.

As a result, tl;dv knew that the logical decision was to buy, not build.

The search for a solution

“We prioritized finding a provider that can help us scale integrations well," says Raphael.

tl;dv began their search for the right solution as many founders do: by using Google and speaking to their investors. They became aware of Paragon after a friend (also a founder) tipped them off over dinner one evening.

As they started to look into Paragon more closely, Raphael and his team were impressed by how developer-orientated Paragon’s solution is compared to competing products, which were often internal automation platforms like Tray and Workato who have built workaround products to try and serve the embedded use case.

“The documentation was so straightforward, it was clear that you´re building the product with our needs in mind and could deliver the experience. Rather B2C pivoting into B2B, you were developer and B2B centric from day 1”. - Raphael

Beyond the product itself, the customer success and support that Raphael and his team experienced gave them even more confidence in partnering with Paragon.

The outcome

Raphael anticipated that if they were to build in-house, it would take a minimum of 4 weeks to build a single integration.

Luckily, In a matter of a few days, the tl;dv team was able to create the Slack integration they needed using Paragon, followed immediately by Salesforce and HubSpot.

“Our engineering team was very excited about the documentation and the speed to get it live. We shipped Slack, Salesforce, and HubSpot to production in under 3 weeks.”

This translates not only into a 75% reduction in engineering resources required to build an integration, but they were also able to get the integrations into their customers’ hands 4x faster.

The result?

“They love it. These integrations were some of our most requested features. And these integrations are paid features and therefore drive MRR growth for us”

An update

Launching Salesforce, HubSpot, and Slack 3 integrations was just the beginning - after we originally interviewed Raphael, , tl;dv has since shipped significantly more integrations on their platform, including collaboration, project management, and even HRIS platforms.

Now that their team is equipped with Paragon, building the integrations has become the easy part.

Instead, their focus is on understanding the demand for the additional integrations, and making sure they do proper discovery with their customers to determine how to design the best integration experiences for each of their segments.

In summary, the amount of additional product value that tl;dv has been able to drive with integrations has been instrumental in driving their growth, especially in terms of converting free users to paying customers. And, thanks to Paragon, they will be able to consistently build on top of this integration-driven growth lever significantly faster.

If you’re looking to scale your integration roadmap faster while saving over 75% of the engineering resources required, you’re in the right place? Book a demo with us today, and we’ll walk you through building your integration use cases on Paragon.