Jotform Has 36 Marketers and 4 Salespeople for 10 Million Users

Nathan Latka spent the first ninety seconds of the July 2022 interview trying to pin a number on Jotform. “You joined before you guys broke $40,000,000 in ARR,” he said. “You’re over 100,000,000 now today, right?”

I can’t comment on revenue.

That was Steve Hartert, vice president of enterprise operations at the form builder, and a man who then spent twenty minutes describing his entire growth machine in working detail while refusing to attach a dollar figure to any part of it. Latka pushed — he said the $100M figure came from a Jotform press release — and Hartert let it sit. GetLatka’s own revenue row for that same week reads $84M, so the number in the headline of this story is the host’s recollection of a press release, not something the company confirmed on tape.

Two dozen people on SEO, four in sales

Hartert joined in March 2016 to build the marketing department, inside the first 50 employees by his own count, and moved across to stand up the enterprise division about four years later. Asked what the go-to-market was, he answered with a balance-sheet fact before he answered with a strategy.

We’re bootstrapped. We’ve never taken a dime of any investor money anywhere. So all our growth has been purely organic.

Organic is meant literally. “Our marketing has really been revolving around SEO,” he said. “We have really kind of planted our flag on the SEO side.” Latka asked whether that work sat in-house or with an agency; the answer was “it’s all internally.” Hartert put the group at “a couple of dozen people” on the SEO side alone.

Hold that against GetLatka’s headcount rows from January 2022, seven months before this tape: 137 engineers, 36 in marketing, four in sales. If roughly two dozen of those 36 marketers are working search, then SEO is not one channel among several at Jotform. It is the sales force.

4people in Jotform sales as of January 2022, against 36 in marketing and 137 in engineering

The support queue is the keyword research

Latka pulled up Jotform’s YouTube channel live on the call and read the titles back: how to create a property listing online, how to start an online clothing business from home, three widgets that will help you increase form completion rate. Where do those come from? Partly internal brainstorming, Hartert said, and partly from reading the support inbox as a demand signal.

The argument for video over written posts was not about reach. It was about amortisation.

The benefit of things like the video is they have very long shelf lives. I mean, those things can last several years as far as an item goes versus something like just say an article that could be posted. The shelf life might be just a couple of months and then that gets kind of archived, but video lives forever basically.

Steve Hartert, VP of enterprise operations, Jotform

The geographic slicing is the part most content teams skip. “We can actually kind of identify little pockets of populations that are looking for specific types of forms,” Hartert said. “And then around that, then we can wrap content around that that helps address those SEO components.” A patient intake form in one market and a registration form in another are the same product and two different search markets.

That machine got its stress test in 2020. Healthcare usage “exploded,” Hartert said, because providers suddenly needed contactless intake; Jotform gave verified doctors, clinics and hospitals a paid plan free for a year. People arrived in what he called panic mode, needing a free registration form or a patient intake form. “That’s where SEO came into the mix and then helped drive the traffic to us and then convert those people to users and then eventually into paid users.”

• March 2016 · about 3 million users Hartert joins as a marketing hire, inside the first 50 employees.
• 2020 · 9 million users The milestone Jotform celebrated publicly, as put to Hartert on the tape and confirmed by him.
• 2022 · 10 million users Announced the year of this interview, and growing by more than a million a year: “actually, we’re growing faster than that.”

Five forms, 100 submissions, then a wall

Search brings people to a free account. The free account is where the pricing decision actually happens, and Hartert described the mechanics without hedging.

1. The cap is set by usage data, not by a target. The team watches where light users — a small school, a small nonprofit — separate from people running a business on the product, and puts the tier boundary at that split.
2. Free gets five forms and 100 submissions per form per month. The ceiling is per form, not per account, so a user with five busy forms hits five separate walls.
3. The wall speaks for itself. A logged-in user who hits the cap gets a display saying “you’ve reached your maximum number of submissions for the month” and an upgrade path to the bronze plan.
4. The alternative is manual work. Delete old submissions, or export them out. Hartert’s read is that by that point the form is load-bearing for the business, so most people upgrade instead.

Asked whether that no-touch path really is the conversion mechanism, he did not qualify it: “Oh yeah, absolutely.” With four salespeople covering ten million users, it would have to be.

5% is a benchmark, not a dial

Latka asked what a good free-to-paid conversion rate looks like. Hartert gave the number as an industry figure rather than a Jotform one, and was careful about it both times: “a good 5% is about the industry average… for a free and I’m talking about all SaaS products, not just in the form world.” Everybody, he said, “seems to kind of bubble along that certain 5% threshold,” and Jotform watches its own number to see how it stacks up against that.

Then came the more interesting question: if you ran 4% for six months straight, would you move the paywall? No.

We don’t want to sit there and keep kind of adjusting that threshold because then it becomes confusing to our customers because they’ll say, wait a second, last month it was this, this month it’s that.

One caution about a number that has travelled since. Later in the call Latka multiplied ten million users by 5% to get 500,000 paid customers, and flagged his own arithmetic in the same breath: “now this is probably high.” GetLatka’s company record for Jotform carries 500,000 customers. Hartert never stated a paid-customer count on this tape, so treat that figure as a host’s hypothetical that hardened into a database field, not as a company disclosure.

From $19 to $39, and nobody on the old price pays more

The published ladder, as Hartert laid it out in July 2022:

• Free — five forms, 100 submissions per form per month.
• Bronze at $39 a month — the cheapest paid plan, and the entry point the wall pushes people toward.
• Silver and gold, up to $99 a month — still single-user plans, still consumption-tiered.
• Enterprise from about $7,200 a year — minimum five users, before compliance add-ons.

The bottom of that ladder started at roughly $19 a month, Hartert said, and moved up as costs did. What kept the increases from stinging is a policy more SaaS pricing teams talk about than practise: existing subscribers are grandfathered at the price they signed at. “Our existing customer base does not really get impacted by price increases,” he said. “Only going to be new incoming types of customers.” The positioning rule underneath it is equally plain: “We don’t want to be the cheapest on the block, but we also know we don’t need to be the most expensive.”

The competitive set he named is a who’s who of the form market — Formstack, Typeform, Cognito Forms, Wufoo — plus the two free giants, Google Forms and Microsoft Forms, which he treats as a feeder rather than a threat: people find them “fairly limited in what they can do and they need something more sophisticated. And so they turn to us looking for assistance.”

The $10,000 test that surprised him

Latka’s standing closing question is which channel a marketer tested recently with $10,000 that surprised them. From the man who planted his flag on SEO, the answer was one word: “billboards.”

Attribution, he argued, is a matter of resolution. Don’t blanket the Bay Area — take a specific neighbourhood in San Francisco, or a stretch down towards Silicon Valley, and read the response. A single board tells you nothing; a group of boards will tell you it “generated X amount of business for us.” Pricing comes from the operator, usually Clear Channel, and moves on traffic volume, board size and facing direction, “because it all comes down to eyeballs.” The creative, which Latka scrolled through in Google image results while they talked, is a purple background and white text.

The bootstrapped question

$150M in ARR, or an IPO?

Latka put the two futures side by side and asked which arrives first.

The annual run rate path he picked has been slow and steady on GetLatka’s numbers. Four dated rows across seven years, the last one an estimate rather than a company statement:

Between the July 2022 tape and the most recent rows on the Jotform profile, headcount went from the 400 Hartert described to 500 by May 2023 and stayed there through October 2024 — a company adding revenue faster than it adds people, which is what a search-and-paywall funnel is supposed to produce.

Hartert was 62 at the time of the recording, five hours of sleep a night, five children, a Walter Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs on the nightstand and Tim Cook as the CEO he studies. Latka’s last question is always what you wish you had known at 20. From a career marketer who had just declined to discuss revenue for twenty straight minutes, the answer landed with some irony.

I wish I had paid more attention in my finance classes because money is what makes the world go round. As a marketer, the more you understand how money works, the better a marketer you really are.

Sources — Steve Hartert on the Latka podcast, recorded 7 July 2022 and published to YouTube on 22 July 2022; GetLatka revenue, headcount and team-composition rows for Jotform, November 2017 through October 2024, with the October 2024 revenue figure flagged in the database as an estimate. Pricing, free-tier limits and user milestones are as stated on the tape in July 2022.