I want to be clear about something before I get into this: Loom is a genuinely good product, and I have nothing against the people who built it. I've been using it for a long time, and truth be told, it has its strengths. The problem is that the thing it solved was not actually the thing I needed solving, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure that out.
Here is what was actually happening. I would record a Loom of my product, paste the link into a cold message or a reply to someone interested, and feel like I had done something useful. The video existed. I had sent it. I had shown the product. Whatever happened next was on them. Except nothing kept happening, and I kept telling myself that the problem was my targeting or my messaging or some other variable that I could optimize my way out of if I just iterated enough.
It was not my targeting. It was not my messaging. It was that a Loom video, for all its convenience, was solving the wrong problem entirely.
What I Thought Loom Was Doing
My mental model when I was using Loom heavily was that the video was a substitute for a live demo call. Someone could not get on a call, or I did not want to wait for a call to be scheduled, so I would send a video that showed the same things I would have shown on a call. Same content, asynchronous delivery, lower friction. That seemed like a reasonable trade.
The thing I was not accounting for is that a live demo call and a recorded video are not the same experience for the person watching, and the difference matters more than I initially understood. On a live call, the prospect is an active participant. They can ask me to go back, they can tell me to skip ahead, they can ask what happens if they click the other button, and they can interrupt me when they see something relevant to a problem they have been trying to solve. The conversation moves in response to them, which means by the end of it they have seen the parts that matter to their specific situation.
A Loom video shows them the parts that matter to me. I decide what to record, in what order, at what pace, with what emphasis. The viewer is a passive audience for a presentation I scripted in advance, and unless I happen to show the exact thing they care about in the exact moment they are paying attention, the video fails to create the connection I needed it to create.
The Number That Made Me Stop
I had access to Loom's view analytics, which tells you how far through a video each viewer got before they stopped watching. I started looking at this data seriously after a few months and the picture it painted was uncomfortable.
The average viewer of my product demo videos was dropping off somewhere around the forty percent mark. This means the majority of people who clicked my Loom link never saw the part of the product that I actually wanted them to see, because I had structured the video the way most people structure demos: context first, then the impressive part. By the time I got to the impressive part, most viewers were already gone.
I tried cutting the videos shorter. I tried leading with the most interesting part immediately. I tried adding captions and cleaner editing. The completion numbers moved slightly but never enough to feel like I had actually fixed anything. The fundamental problem was not the length or the structure; it was that asking someone to watch a video requires them to give you their continuous, undivided attention for however long the video runs, and most people in my target audience simply do not have that kind of attention to spare for something they are not yet sure they care about.
What Changed When I Switched
When I started sharing interactive demos instead of Loom videos, the first thing I noticed was not a conversion metric. It was something qualitative in how people responded when they did reply. The replies were more specific. Instead of "looks interesting, I might sign up at some point," I was getting things like "the step where you showed X was exactly the problem I have been dealing with" or "I clicked through it and had a question about Y." These are the responses of someone who engaged with the product, not someone who watched a video about it.
The difference is that an interactive demo puts the prospect in control of the experience in a way that a video never can. They decide when to advance to the next step. They can spend thirty seconds on a step that is relevant to them and skip past one that is not. They can go back and look at something again without scrubbing through a timeline. The experience is shaped by their curiosity rather than by my editorial decisions about what to show first.
This matters because the people I am trying to reach are founders and builders who are used to evaluating tools by using them. They do not consume software the way they consume content. Giving them something they can click through rather than something they have to watch meets them where they actually are.
The Specific Difference in How I Send Demos Now
The practical change in my workflow is smaller than you might expect. I still record myself going through a specific flow in my product; that part is the same. The difference is what comes out of that recording.
With Loom, I end up with a video file that I can share as a link. The person on the other end gets a player with a timeline, a play button, and my face in the corner if I chose to turn on the camera. With an interactive demo, I end up with a shareable link that opens to an experience where each screen I visited during the recording becomes a step the viewer can click through themselves.
The recording itself takes the same amount of time. Setting up the annotations, which are short labels I add to each step to guide attention, takes maybe three additional minutes. I write something like "click here to add your first integration" or "results appear here in real time" rather than narrating those same things out loud in a video. The resulting link goes into my outreach message in exactly the same place the Loom link used to go.
What changes is what happens after they click it.
Why This Works Better for Cold Outreach Specifically
Cold outreach has a specific dynamic that makes video demos particularly ill-suited to it and interactive demos particularly well-suited. When someone receives a cold message from a person they have never heard of, their default level of trust and attention is low. They are willing to give you thirty seconds to make your point, maybe a minute if the first sentence was compelling. They are not willing to sit through a four-minute video from a stranger.
An interactive demo works in that attention window in a way a video does not, because the viewer can get a meaningful sense of the product in thirty seconds of clicking rather than needing to watch four minutes to see the whole arc of the demo. If they are interested, they keep going. If they are not, they stop. The experience is self-pacing in a way that matches how people actually evaluate things when their attention is limited and their trust is not yet established.
There is also something about interactivity that signals confidence in the product. Sending a video implies that I want to control what the prospect sees and in what order. Sending an interactive link implies that I am comfortable letting them explore because the product can speak for itself. That second impression is a meaningfully better one to make.
The One Thing Loom Still Does Better
I want to be honest about where Loom still has the edge, because I think intellectual honesty matters more than a clean narrative.
For explaining complex workflows where the sequence and timing genuinely matter, a narrated video with a human voice is still more effective. If your product requires understanding a multi-step process where step five only makes sense in the context of steps two through four, and the timing between those steps is part of what makes it work, a video where you can narrate in real time while the viewer watches is hard to beat.
There are also situations where the personal element of seeing someone's face and hearing their voice builds trust in a way that interactivity cannot replicate. If the relationship is warm already and you want to send something that feels personal and considered, a Loom with your camera on has a warmth that an interactive link does not quite match.
But for cold outreach to people who do not know me yet, and for sharing a product with a broad audience through a public link, the interactive approach wins on almost every dimension I care about.
What My Current Process Actually Looks Like
When I want to share Escourtly with someone now, here is exactly what I do. I open the page in my product that I want to start the demo from, install the Chrome extension, and click record. I click through three to five screens: the starting point, the key action, and the result of that action. I stop recording, add a short annotation to each step in the editor, write a one-sentence headline, and publish. The whole thing takes under ten minutes the first time and about five minutes once I have done it a few times.
The link I get goes into whatever message I am sending. I do not add much explanation in the message itself, because the demo is the explanation. I usually write one sentence about what the link shows and leave it at that. "Here is a short walkthrough of how the recording works" is enough context. The demo fills in everything else.
After someone clicks through it, I can see in my analytics which steps they reached and whether they clicked the CTA at the end. This tells me something useful about their level of interest without requiring them to tell me anything explicitly. If they got through all five steps and clicked the CTA, they are interested and I follow up with a specific question about what they saw. If they dropped off at step two, I might follow up with something that addresses what step two shows, because that is where they stopped engaging.
That feedback loop, where I know what they actually experienced rather than just whether they opened my message, is something Loom never gave me at the step level. It is the part of the switch that I find most useful in practice, and it is something I did not anticipate when I first made the change.
The Broader Point
The reason I am writing this is not to convince anyone to delete their Loom account. The reason is that I spent a long time optimizing around a tool when I should have been questioning whether the tool was right for the job. Screen recording is a solution to a specific problem: how do I show someone something that is happening on my screen. It is not necessarily a solution to the different problem I actually had, which was: how do I give someone a genuine sense of what my product is and does without requiring them to commit thirty uninterrupted minutes to finding out.
Those are different problems, and recognizing the difference saved me a lot of time that I was spending on outreach that was technically correct but practically ineffective. The switch I made was small in terms of effort and large in terms of results, and that combination is worth writing about honestly even if it means admitting that I was using the wrong approach for longer than I should have been.
That is the same principle that led me to build Escourtly in the first place, and if you want the longer story of learning it the hard way, it is in Relaunching Escourtly. The pattern kept repeating across every channel I tried: the moment I stopped describing the product and started letting people touch it, the conversations got easier. Cold email is just the channel where that difference is most dramatic, because the reader's skepticism starts highest there.
You can build a demo worth putting in your next cold email in a few minutes at escourtly.com. Record your product, get the link, and send an email that shows instead of tells. If the demo breaks or a step feels off, tell me directly; I read every message and I am still sharpening this.
