Vimeo – All-in-one Video Solution, Enterprise Opportunity & Recent IPO Impact – 6 October 2021

Could you describe Vimeo and what it does? I have a feeling a lot of people have consumed videos somewhat connected to the company.

How has Vimeo evolved and what are its priorities? It talks about offering a SaaS solution that addresses all of a business’s video needs as you mentioned. What does this consist of and what are its most important aspects?

What are your thoughts on Vimeo’s significant pivot towards selling solutions to enterprises as well as to SMBs over the last couple of years? The company has been around for about 16 years and has transformed its offering over the past three.

How are Vimeo’s solutions differentiated? The company says its software enables users to create, collaborate and communicate with video, eliminating the need to pay for multiple software providers and removing barriers such as time, budget and technical expertise. I think people understand using Vimeo for a variety of video-related needs that used to be fulfilled with various providers and types of software and solutions which have been cobbled together, so the company’s value proposition is that it’s an all-in-one video solution. What about Vimeo’s offering is most important to users? How important is its SaaS platform that can do a variety of things?

What three attributes would you highlight as most critical for Vimeo to differentiate and win in the marketplace? We discussed the brand, the ease of use, and the customer support, A lot of solutions in this category have involved hardware, which can complicate things. You also touched on how people know the platform and may have used it in another context, and the company has pointed to customisability, interoperability and integration, developer-friendliness, and creative inspiration as well.

How known, respected and liked is Vimeo by users and how much can this influence related decisions? Is there a particular product offering or feature that operates as the tip of the spear when the company is seeking to call on and win business with enterprises? You highlighted ease of use, which is key given finding and putting together various solutions and workflows used to be a challenge, as well as interoperability and integration – which could be aligned with ease of use. Would you agree that live streaming has become the offering that has allowed the company to get into enterprises, given coronavirus? How much importance does live streaming hold for Vimeo’s positioning and how could it succeed in the future?

What could Vimeo do after live streaming that enterprises could buy into, be interested in or focused on? Enterprises were worried about how to communicate with employees in ways other than by e-mail, and live streaming is a fairly powerful way to do this. Vimeo has four paid plans – Plus, Pro, Premium and Enterprise. Premium and Enterprise both offer live streaming, but Enterprise has security controls and dedicated support, which I assume means a person or team works with you. A lot of people were using Zoom for a variety of things in unanticipated ways or with more volume than they would have expected at the beginning of the pandemic, and then Zoombombing led to security becoming a huge focus for a lot of enterprises. How important is dedicated support and security to companies after they sign on because of live streaming?

What else does Vimeo offer that differentiates it in the marketplace or functions as its next feature or functionality that enterprises are interested in or focused on?

Why has Vimeo recognised and focused on the enterprise opportunity? Did it notice the opportunity and shift its business model accordingly or did it offer these products and shift the model and it’s now noticing the opportunity? Vimeo has estimated, based on its internal data, that its TAM is around USD 40bn as of 2021, and it’s growing to around USD 70bn in 2024, which equates to a CAGR of around 20%. It’s interesting that the company predicts a USD 20bn market for SMBs growing to USD 25bn and a USD 20bn market for enterprises growing to USD 45bn, so the disparity is such that it predicts the market for SMBs to grow at 25% over the indicated period and 125% for enterprises.

Is this TAM disparity largely due to enterprises not focusing on this very much and to using different, more consumer-oriented solutions that don’t meet their needs? Is due to coronavirus? It’s a fairly dramatic disparity, and it’s noteworthy because it’s roughly the same size of the perceived opportunity between SMBs and enterprise and then so much more growth from enterprise. How does a company’s TAM go from USD 20bn to USD 45bn in three years?

Are Facebook and YouTube Vimeo’s primary competitors? Just because Vimeo is indicating the TAM over three years is going to easily more than double, it doesn’t mean that it will capture a significant percentage of that TAM. Vimeo talks about social media, which is based more on communication and distribution, and video solutions, which is video creation and editing. Another way to consider this is in four dimensions given the client types across SMBs and enterprises. Social media help produce and distribute content without question and they have massive brands and audiences. Vimeo indicates it has native distribution from Vimeo to Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter and Pinterest, and people understand coopetition. How is the company positioned within social media and the competitive set?

Do you think enterprise customers are more interested in Vimeo’s value proposition of distributing instantaneously to every platform simultaneously and it being agnostic to which one is prioritised? Or are they more interested in the appeal of simply making use of their existing presence on Facebook or YouTube? You touched on habits and old habits, and I wonder if trying to convince enterprises to use them instead of directly using Facebook and YouTube is too steep a mountain for Vimeo to climb and prioritising video services is perhaps the path of least resistance from a sales perspective.

How would you characterise the competitive landscape? Who does Vimeo come up against when SMBs and enterprises are considering a video solution to help with creation and editing? I’m aware of Brightcove and Wistia.

Does anyone else come up against Vimeo in the enterprise segment? You seem to think Brightcove and Wistia are the best competitors, and you would characterise them as enterprise and more SMB-focused respectively.

Do you think Vimeo’s various attributes are important when competing with Brightcove or an incumbent in the enterprise segment? Could pricing be a competitive advantage that Vimeo uses to win business as it moves upstream, given you touched on this? How much does that resonate? These enterprises can pay a lot of money, but a lot of it depends on how much activity Vimeo is engaged with and the volumes it’s producing.

Do enterprises use solutions alongside Vimeo – such as Zoom, Microsoft Stream, Loom or Hopin – if they standardise on it to create and edit videos and to live stream? You highlighted that you didn’t spend a lot of time working with or thinking about enterprises, but that is a major part of what the company is doing. We’ve learned over the last year or two that there are a whole host of different solutions that people and companies use for video. Video has a number of different shapes and sizes, such as live streaming from your company off- site and internal communications with a recorded video. Zoom, Microsoft, Google and many others do this in addition to Vimeo.

Do you know whether enterprises might specifically seek to align Vimeo with Zoom or a different solution more than another? Vimeo’s solution is largely one-to-many or couple-to-many, whereas some of these other solutions are much more of a one-to-one or back-and-forth-type offering.

What are Vimeo’s most significant risks? Is it increasing competition from Zoom, Microsoft, Google and Slack – which is now owned by Salesforce? Is it the ability to move upstream and hire, train and execute with a whole host of enterprise salespeople? We discussed that a couple of years ago, Vimeo might have thought that it was the only live-streaming player that has the scale and branding, but that’s no longer the case and there’s a fair amount of live streaming taking place. This definition is shifting as people use these platforms and they evolve their features and functionality.

Vimeo’s self-service sales model might not work as successfully when selling to enterprises. How much of a risk is that when reorienting a company to enterprises which historically hasn’t sold all that much to those types of customers?

What impact could Vimeo’s May 2021 IPO have on its opportunities? It spun off from IAC and has its own status as a publicly traded company, has the currency to do M&A or compensate employees and is more independent as a business.

What areas and types of companies and technologies would make sense for Vimeo to pursue? I think the company’s M&A thus far has been perceived as fairly successful for the company.