Jotform Revenue & Valuation (2024)

hey folks my guest today is steve hart dirty's the vice president of enterprise operations at jotform with responsibilities that include marketing brand and corporate partnerships before job for me as president at heart and associates a marketing consultancy that worked with b2b and bdc sas companies he's got more than 30 years of experience in the space with companies like the walt disney company ministry of transport in australia and blue cross ca all right jotform.com steve your area takes you to the top let's go for it now just if you understand the origin story here you are not an original co-founder right how did you get involved what year um i've been with jotforms since 2000 marches 2016 that's when i started working here they uh i started off as the in the marketing side helping them build up the marketing department as a cmo and then about i guess about four years ago now we decided we wanted to start up a new division for enterprise and uh was kind of asked to head up that part of it and as that grew i kind of had to leave the marketing side of marketing side alone and then kind of move over to help grow this new division and uh so i think if you looked at the head count i want to say i was i'm probably in the first 50 employees that were hired for the company so i've seen us grow from you know from where we were to uh we're closing in on 400 employees now that's incredible i mean and just to put that in revenue terms i mean you joined before before you guys broke 40 million bucks in aor you're over 100 million now today right uh i can't comment on revenue but those are public uh that 100 million number you guys put out a press release i believe uh let me pull up let me pull up the source on that and read it hold on okay let me make sure i'm getting that right uh but point being though you've seen revenue growth and not just head count growth you've also you know watched significant revenue growth as well oh yeah we've so we've we've seen true uh incredible growth across all aspects so let's go let's go and talk about that right so um you're obviously competing in a space there's a lot of venture back companies right in your same space there's some also that are bootstrap very capital efficient what's been you guys go to market how have you grown the user base um you know we're bootstrapped we're we've never taken a dime of any investor money anywhere so all of our you know all of our growth has been purely organic and what you know what we focused on really is is delivering a good solid high quality product right and making the user experience good but our marketing has really been revolving around seo um we have really kind of planted our flag on the seo side and uh and i've used that and leveraged that tremendously across all different types of platforms i mean not only just you know say traditional text types of content but also in video content has been very big for us also what does that mean how do you how do you think about video seo well i mean video you can use the the uh the descriptions inside of things like youtube and other types of channels and then uh the video is what helps draw people in so you can use things like a transcript of what your you know what your video is whether it's a two minute demo video or a four or five minute newsletter video or very much of a long form type of a podcast uh video those kinds of things you could you can include those transcripts in different places and that helps drive the seo trip mm-hmm now i'm on i'm on the youtube page you guys youtube page today it looks like you know you guys postings like 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 how do you guys come up with what things to put in the title obviously there's there's search traffic research going into that well a lot of it is yeah a lot of it's brainstorming internally but we also look at what our what our customers are asking for through our support channel right so if they're asking just to support i want to do this how do i do that and so we'll come back and we'll just start looking at that and go well how can we build some video around that or how can we build some kind of content around that and as a result and it helps drive all the all of our other materials that come with it and the benefit of things like the video is they have very long shelf life i mean those things can last several years as far as an item goes versus something like just say an article that can be posted the shelf life might be just a couple of months and then that gets kind of archived but video lives forever basically oh what's going on there youtube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with sas founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews i've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out i'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your sas company you're going to get a different valuation a vc is going to pay a different valuation private equity firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when i hover over here right so the teal is what a vc would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on youtube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raised they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of sas valuations than what you can get now inside of founderpath and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the youtube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform i hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview that makes sense okay so there's a video playbook here there's an seo playbook here what does your seo team look like today or and is it in-house or outsourced it's all internally so how many folks did you say on that team and what are some of the roles look like well i mean we've got we've got a couple of dozen people that are doing on the seo site but i mean really what it comes down to is they look at they're constantly pouring over those the keywords that people are looking at how they're finding us what types of phrases they're looking for uh you know not only just in a general sense but also based on a region you know regional type of situations so from different geographies that we're looking at people say in the middle east versus the eu versus north america versus asia or the apac region those types of things we kind of build our seo around those types of locations and so we can actually kind of identify little pockets of populations that are looking for specific types of forms and then around that then we can wrap content around that that helps address those seo components yep and when you oh i suppose actually you were right it was back in 2017 when we last spoke so a while ago you told me that customers could get on and on average were paying about 300 bucks a month for jotform has that stayed pretty consistent is the arpu still about 300 bucks a year um again i'm not going to comment specific dollars on revenue but i mean our revenue base has continued to grow as we've added um sorry sorry not i'm talking about someone listening right now i'm trying to help them market here someone listening right now wants to use jotform what are they going to probably pay on average per month well i mean again they can use their single plans or what we call our bronze our bronze silver gold plans which are our single user plans and those are listed on the website they go anywhere high is 99 a month the 39 a month for our bronze plans and if they want to move up to our enterprise plans again there's a minimum of five users on that and that starts uh it's about 70 to seventy two hundred dollars a year for that without compliance and things like that so you know it depends on what your needs are as part of what part as part as what somebody's actually going to be investing in the product okay but the cheapest price but i just heard you mentioned was 39 bucks a month so that's the starting point correct yeah we also you know we're a freemium model so we also have a free model or a free product that people can actually use and you know like anything else it's limited to a certain number of forms and submissions you get every month but it allows people to test it out but you know basically dip their toe in the water and see if that's if the product works for them and we find that people generally look at that and unless they get that test because it's low risk for them they will jump all over it then they want to start moving up through our paid platforms and again it's consumption based so the more you use it the higher up in the pricing tier somebody would have to move but we found that people are very agreeable to that because it it allows them to actually find a pricing point that fits their needs uh mailchimp 2003 emails product live growth is important obviously finding what the metric is and how much you give away free is challenging i imagine obviously you're always testing this but talk to me about how the process you use to make sure what you give away in the free tool is just enough but not too much yeah i mean we also look at usage uh you know we look at how people are using the product how people are you know it's consuming it very very you know across all different platforms for us right whether it's whether it's domestically or in the us or somebody saying canada italy you know france australia wherever we look at how they're using it and we and so we've been able to identify kind of where this division is between what we would consider say you know kind of as a light user that's a casual user maybe it's somebody that's you know a very small business or they just have very light needs to where somebody's actually using it to drive their business whether it's you know e-commerce or they're using it to take orders online or they're using it for taking reservations or something like that and we've been able to identify where that division actually happens and then so from that point we've been able to kind of put in those pricing tiers as a result of that so for example our free plan you're allowed up to five forms and you get 100 subscriptions a month perform so you know somebody's again that's a fairly light kind of a user that doesn't have you know a lot of maybe it's a small school maybe it's a small nonprofit something like that you know you just don't have a lot of demand but it works for you but then again as your business grows or as your organization grows then you can just move up to move up the plan ladder if that's what you need to do and and how many submissions performed you allow on the free plan oh you get 100 100 so if you have five forms a hundred submission sheets it's 500 submissions basically is the max well yeah in total but i mean you get 100 performs if that form hits it's 100 then it's basically that form kind of caps out for that month for you i see i see and is that the most i mean when you look at your no touch sales model is it really that it's people hit 100 mark and then they convert no touch oh yeah absolutely yeah because once they hit that they get you know they'll they'll log in and they'll get just a display pops up if they're logged into our system then they'll get a display that says hey you've reached your maximum number of you know submissions for the month uh to continue you need to upgrade to our what would be our bronze plan and then at that point then if they say yes they can do it otherwise they can say well you know what i'll just go ahead and i'll start deleting out some of those older submissions from earlier in the month or i'll export out a bunch of things or something so it depends on how the user wants to do it but we find that most people once they get to that point they realize this has become a valuable tool for their business and you know the path for them to upgrade they look at it and think this is a key component so they don't have a problem wanting to do an upgrade at that point and steve how do you how do you look at this data coming in every month every year every week you know and basically go okay is 100 the right number or should it be a thousand or should it be 10. like do you reverse engineer and say we want five percent of freezers to convert and then you just you know toggle by based off that or how do you do that uh we really does what we do is we look at where that number is we look at our numbers on a daily basis sometimes you know several times a day but we look at them on a daily basis and we aggregate them across different you know the geographies versus the time frame so we might look at you know again what's up what's going on in australia on a monthly basis versus what's going on in canada on a monthly basis those kinds of things but we find it's fairly it's fairly consistent for us um you know sometimes it depends on whether what the industry is somebody's using so for example during you know the last couple of years with covid uh healthcare use exploded right i mean they they needed it and you know desperately needed it because they suddenly had to go to you know no contact types of environments and things like that but what we did for them is we said okay look if you're a verified healthcare provider whether you're a doctor or a health clinic or a hospital whatever we gave it to you for free we gave you one of our silver plans for free for you know for a year so you could just get in there and do what you had to do um you know to help people so those kinds of things we look at but then we also look at that and go well how are people consuming the product and that's really what it comes back down to and so we always look at it but we found that those that are you know the thresholds where people need to move ours have remained consistent because we find that those seem to be pretty good barometers of how we want to move things along well what is that barometer maybe this isn't specific to tight to to jot form specifically but when you look like type four others in the space and now they're just frankly plg tools that have a big premium plan what do you as a guy that just studies marketing like to see in terms of what you consider a good free to pay conversion rate is it one percent five percent ten percent well i think everybody wants to get it higher than they can i mean a good five per a good five percent is about the industry average it seems okay for free and i'm talking about all sas products not just in the farm world um but a five percent conversion rate seems to be pretty solid for people and it varies some people can be even smaller because you know they could be down to one quarter but they're you know they're what they're trying to do is get as many people under the pipe so they're doing it on a volume basis but about a five percent conversion rate uh you know is about i think it's about the industry average we you know we look at that to see how do we stack up against that industry and again it varies some months they're better than others in some months you know but everybody seems to kind of bubble along at that certain that certain five percent threshold but true or false if you had six months go by where you were at four percent four percent four percent four percent would you change something about the freemium paywall to try and get back up above five no not necessarily i mean we would look at and go is this thing that is it just a certain industry is it some other kind of economic condition is it you know what would be causing that but the point is we don't want to sit there and keep kind of adjusting that that threshold because then it becomes confusing to the to our customers because they'll say wait a second last month it was this this month it's that and now you've got people all over the place on different kinds of tiers and that just leads to a lot of confusion for people yep now i believe you guys did celebrate publicly on your blog you guys well first off when you joined how many total years because you just celebrated a 10 million milestone right do you remember what the growth is as far as what you mean growth when you joined in 26 yeah no no with just users what you guys already published right so when you joined in 2016 what was the total number of users uh we were probably around i want to say we're probably i think we had just done about 3 million users okay wow and then you guys celebrated 9 million i believe in 2020 and you announced 10 million here this year is that correct correct that's great and so is that sort of the goal for this year just keep adding a million new users per year um actually we're growing faster than that i mean our numbers can continue to climb i mean yeah and again the coveted world has has really kind of turned the entire business industry on it's on its you know upside down um a lot of people came to us during the last two years because they just they needed something and they needed a product that could actually help them collect information without having to be face to face with people like you know kind of the old and the olden days were so what they ended up doing was they they just kind of went into almost a panic mode and they said hey i need a free registration form i need a patient intake form things like that and that's where seo came into the mix and then helped drive the traffic to us and then convert those people to uh to users and then eventually into the paid users and steve was your in terms of price point of your cheapest plan today 39 a month was it always 39 or what did you test five dollars a month early on or 20 bucks a month what does that look like uh we started it off at around uh i think it was 19 a month at one point i mean we have sales during the course of the year too we'll have like a big end-of-year sale where we discounted we also have a discount for non-profits and education users those types of things but it's really come down to as we look at what the competition is doing we look at you know what our costs are right because i mean obviously you can't you can't have a price from five years ago and have it be consistent today just because that you know our cost of business goes up as well as everybody else's goes up so but there's a lot of things that we do we don't want to be the cheapest on the block but we also know we don't need to be the most expensive we try to look at what we can offer a fair value to our customers and what we think is fair and we have not had really you know complaints from customers if a price goes up because what we do also is when people are on a previous plan their grandfather rented that plan so our grandfather in at that price so they don't they not our existing customer base does not really get impacted by price increases it's only going to be incoming new incoming types of customers yeah and who would you anyone obviously you know i'm saying market your competitors on the show but just for my audience to understand the world you're playing and i mean who do you consider sort of in your same space well i mean some of the some of the ones that we always run into you get your form stacks and your type forms uh those those are kind of the ones we always run into i mean there's cognito forms and uh there's wufoo to come in the mix every so often but we also run into people that use google forms and microsoft works even though those two are are free products uh what we have found people look at those and they particularly like google forms and microsoft forms they say they're fairly limited in what they can do and they need something more sophisticated and so they turn to us and you know looking for assistance which of these two things you've been at the company now for well you know approaching eight eight years i think which of these two things do you think is more likely to happen first uh the company bootstraps its way and breaks 150 million bucks of arr or the company bootstraps grows and decides you know there's a big opportunity here let's go public raise money maybe buy up competitors grow faster which one do you think is more likely uh probably the first one i think okay so you guys love that scrapping yeah i mean that's really kind of been our mantra since day one that's our ceo's whole you know methodology to it and it's worked great for us i mean some companies it doesn't work for them but for us it has been absolutely perfect and there's definitely benefits to not having investor money uh on the side because you just don't have a lot of competing interests uh from a board of directors perspective we can look at things and we can talk as a group you know determine what we want to do and we can just focus on it so if we need to turn on a dime we don't need to justify it to a to a board of directors or something like that we can just we can do what we need to do and get it done uh any product coming down the pipeline you know if you guys have 10 million users and you converted five percent now this is probably high but let's say you have 500 000 paid customers if you sell them a 20 you know a month new product that goes nicely with their forms that's a lot of revenue expansion do you have a second or third product coming on the pipeline um we're also looking at adding new features um but as far as new products go i can't comment on what we've got in the pipeline but we definitely always got new features coming up so we're looking at different types of payment integrations we're looking at making you know different types of uh back-end back-end feature adjustments for people like how to pull your data out how to analyze your data better in the back end types of systems so it's one thing to get all your data we want to have better tools in place to help people kind of you know analyze the data so we we've built our rebuilt our interfaces so it looks almost like a spreadsheet type of model so people can actually look at things easier they can sort it out they can you know whatever types of parameters they want to work with and then also push that data into other types of products you know whether it's a crm or or something else that people want to work with um but it you know making very easy to use dashboards make things very very user friendly those types of things so it's you know we're kind of taking the no code um environment to heart on this and making it really really simple for people to kind of customize their experience you know not only in the front end where they're building forms but also on the back end when they're trying to interpret all that data steve last question here before we wrap up with a famous five fill in the blank here uh sometime in the past six months uh you tested x channel with ten thousand dollars of spend and the results surprised you what's x um billboards billboards really how do you even track a billboard conversion oh you can do it you just gotta be really you got you got to be good at it i mean because you can put them in certain regions and um you know you don't just blast like the like here in san francisco where we're looking you know hit the entire barrier you might just focus on a real specific neighborhood say down you know further south down towards silicon valley or a very specific neighborhood here in san francisco itself and you see what kind of response you get out of that and so you can if you want to look at an individual billboard unless you've got one no but if you can look at other billboards you can look at a group of billboards and you can say hey look this generated x amount of business for so there's potential in here what is a monthly cost to get a big billboard in like san mateo i just have no idea it's like five grand a month or are they really expensive you know it's all over the place okay it's there i can't give you definitive price because it varies on traffic size of billboard for how long you're gonna be there so there's a whole lot of how do you even get that data do you work with a broker is there a website people go to like you know billboardpricing.com when you go to the billboard company usually it's like clear channel is like almost the big it's like the biggest beast on the block when it comes to billboards but you can go to you can go to clear channel for example and say hey we want to we're looking at this billboard on the street can you give us information on it and well you know again it depends on the size of the board and whether which direction it's facing those kinds of things um because it you know it all comes down to eyeballs and so you want to maximize your eyeballs since you're going to get on that thing and so they can look at it they know that how much traffic goes by at a given point during the day how many times your you know if it's one of these you know electronic billboards where it's going to be revolving with other ads you're going to get these many types of you know placements of the day and things like that so again the price varies depending on really the jack the specific geography where that billboard's going to be located now i'm clicking through all the pictures of your billboards and google image results so jot form powerful forms purple background white text rock and roll so very simple branding that's nice okay let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite book um [Music] my favorite book i've read so many lately but i think probably one of my favorite books is the walter isaacs and steve jobs bio a lot of really good business tips are in that book number two is there a ceo you're following or studying i still look to follow tim cook the guys got an incredible mind for business and he's doing quite well there number three what's your favorite online tool for building jot form besides your own if you're building chat form uh like a business tool uh google sheets yeah okay number four how many hours of sleep to get every night about five okay and steve what's your situation married single kiddos i am married and uh we have a combined family there's five total children in the family oh wow okay and how old are you i'm 62 years old now 62 years young last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. um just be better at financing uh friend the business side of things is i wish i had paid more attention in my uh finance classes because money is what makes the world go around and as a marketer the more you understand how money works the better a marketer you really are guys there you have it steve joined jotform back in the early days 2016 when they were called around 3 million users now today over 10 million users he's trying to figure out okay let's make sure we get around a five percent conversion free to pay that's what he calls industry average but he's leading the marketing team there today as it continues to scale up into hundreds of thousands of customers all bootstrapped which we love steve thanks for taking us to the top oh my pleasure thanks for having me on one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1 p.m central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the sas world whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else i don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack community for b2b sas 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