Jotform Revenue (2024)

[00:00] Hey folks, my guest today is Steve Hartert. He's the vice president of enterprise operations at Jotform with responsibilities that include marketing, brand and corporate partnerships. Before Jotforming as president at Hartert and Associates, a marketing consultancy that work with B2B and B2C SaaS companies, he's got more than thirty years of experience in the space with companies like the Walt Disney Company, Ministry of Transport in Australia, and Blue Cross CA. Alright. Jotform.com. Steve, you're ready to take us [00:23] to the top. [00:24] >> Let's go for it. [00:26] Now just so you understand the origin story here, you were not an original cofounder. Right? How did you get involved? What year? [00:32] >> I've been with Jotform since March 2016, that's when I started working here. I started off 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 was kind of asked to head up that part of it. And as that grew, I kind of had to leave the marketing marketing side side of [01:00] >> alone, and then kind of move over to help grow this new division. And so I think if you looked at the headcount, I'm going 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, [01:13] >> from where we were to we're closing in on 400 employees now. [01:19] That's incredible. I mean, and just to put that in revenue terms, mean, you joined before you guys broke $40,000,000 in ARR. You're over 100,000,000 now today, right? [01:29] >> I can't comment on revenue. [01:31] Oh, those are public. That 100,000,000 number you guys put out in a press release, I believe. 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. But point being though, you've seen revenue growth and not just headcount growth, you've also, you know, watched significant revenue growth as well. [01:47] >> Oh, yeah. We've we've seen incredible revenue growth across all aspects. [01:53] So let's go and talk about that, right? So you're obviously competing in a space. There's a lot of venture backed companies, right, in your same space. There's some also that are bootstrapped, very capital efficient. What's been your guys'go to market? How have you grown the user base? [02:06] >> We're bootstrapped. We've never taken a dime of any investor money anywhere. So all our growth has been purely organic. And what we focused on really is delivering a good, solid, high quality product, right? And making the user experience good. But our marketing has really been revolving around SEO. We have really kind of planted our flag on the SEO side. And I've used that and leveraged that tremendously across all different types of platforms. I mean, not only [02:37] >> just in, you know, like say traditional text types of content, but also video content has been very big for us also. [02:44] What does that mean? How you think about video SEO? [02:47] >> Well, I mean, video, you can use the descriptions inside of things like YouTube and other types of channels. And then the video is what helps draw people in. So you can use things like a transcript of what your video is, whether it's a two minute demo video or a four or five minute newsletter video, or a very much of a long form type of a podcast video, those kinds of things. You can include those transcripts in [03:11] >> different places and that helps drive the SEO trip. [03:14] Now I'm on the YouTube page, your guys'YouTube page today. It looks like you guys post things 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 search traffic research going into that. [03:32] >> Well, a lot of it is, yeah, a lot of it's brainstorming internally, but we also look at 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? [03:50] >> And as a result, and it helps drive all of our other materials that come with it. And 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. [04:13] Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this, you love watching these interviews with SaaS founders. But imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 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 [04:36] connect your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time. You can see what it changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founder Path dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, [05:01] you're gonna get a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation, Private equity firm is different. If you're gonna 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 [05:22] 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 1,200,000 seed round 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you only wanna see companies that have sold the whole business. Well, here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple. [05:48] Maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round. We'll 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 dataset of SaaS valuations than what you can get now inside of Founder Path. And we're thrilled to bring it to you. All right, we're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in [06:10] a second, but if you wanna check this tool out, if you wanna jump in and sign up, you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link, this link, founderpath.com/products/valuations. Or if you go to founderpath.com and hoveroverproducts, 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. Alright. Let's jump back [06:36] 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? And is it in house or outsourced? [06:45] >> It's all internally. [06:47] So how many folks did you say are on that team and what are sort of the roles look like? [06:51] >> Well, mean, we've a couple of dozen people that are doing on the SEO side, but I mean, really what it comes down to is they look at, they're constantly pouring over those are the keywords that people are looking at, how they're finding us, what types of phrases they're looking for, not only just in a general sense, but also based on a regional type of situations are from different geographies that we're looking at people say in The [07:12] >> 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. [07:33] Yep. And when you and I spoke actually, you were right. Because it was back in 2017 when we last spoke. So a while ago, you had told me that customers could get on an average of paying about $300 a month for JotForm. Has that stayed pretty consistent? Is the ARPU still about $300 a year? [07:48] >> Again, I'm not gonna comment specific dollars on revenue, but I mean, our our revenue base has continued to grow as we've added [07:55] Sorry. Sorry. [07:56] >> Added on top of this. [07:57] I'm not asking about revenue. I'm talking about if someone listening right now, I'm trying to help them market here. Someone listening right now wants to use JotForm, what are they gonna probably pay on average per month? [08:05] >> Well, I mean, again, they can use our single plans or what we call our bronze silver gold plans, are our single user plans. And those are listed on the website, they go anywhere high as $99 a month, $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 to about $7,200 a year for that without having compliance and [08:28] >> things like that. It depends on what your needs are as of as part is what somebody's actually gonna be investing in the product. [08:35] Okay. But the cheapest price, but I just heard you mention, was $39 a month. So that's the starting point. [08:40] >> Correct. Yeah. We also we're a freemium model. So we also have a free model or a free product that people can actually use. And like anything else, it's limited to a certain number of forms and submissions you get every month, but allows people to test it out, basically dip their toe in the water and see if the product works for them. And we find that people generally look at that. And then once they get that test, [08:59] >> 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 pricing tier somebody would have to move. But we found that people are very agreeable to that because allows them to actually find a pricing point that fits their needs. [09:19] Mailchimp 2,000 free emails, product led 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 the process you use to make sure what you give away in the free tool is just enough, but not too much. [09:35] >> Yeah, mean, we also look at usage. We look at how people are using the product, how people are consuming it across all different platforms for us, right? It's domestically or in The US or it's somebody say in Canada, Italy, France, Australia, wherever, we look at how they're using it. So we've been able to identify kind of where this division is between what we would consider, say, kind of as a light user, that's a casual user, maybe [10:00] >> it's somebody that's a very small business or they just have very light needs to where somebody is actually using it to drive their business, whether it's 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 [10:20] >> that. So for example, our free plan, you're allowed up to five forms and you get 100 submissions a month per form. If somebody is, again, that's a fairly light kind of a user that doesn't have a lot of, maybe it's a small school, maybe it's a small nonprofit, something like that. 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 [10:42] >> can just move up the plan ladder if that's what you need to do. [10:46] And how many submissions performed you allow on the free plan? [10:50] >> You get a 100 per [10:51] A 100 per So if you have five forms, a 100 submission sheets, it's 500 submissions basically is the max. [10:56] >> Well, yeah, in total. But I mean, get a 100 performs. If that form hits its 100, then it's basically that form kind of caps out for that much for you. [11:03] 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 that a 100 mark and then they convert no touch? [11:11] >> Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Because once they hit that, 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 submissions for the month. To continue, you need to upgrade to our, that 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, [11:33] >> 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 the path for them to upgrade, they look at it and think this is a key [11:50] >> component so they don't have a problem with wanting to do an upgrade at that point. [11:53] And Steve, how do you look at this data coming in every month, every year, every week, you know, and basically go, okay, is a 100 the right number or should it be a thousand or should it be 10? Like, do reverse engineer and say, we want 5% of freezers to convert and then you just toggle by based off that? How do do that? [12:08] >> We really just only what we do is we look at where that number is. We look at our numbers on a daily basis, sometimes several times a day, but we look at them on a daily basis and then we aggregate them across different geographies versus the timeframe. So we might look at 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 [12:28] >> it's fairly consistent for us. Sometimes it depends on what the industry is somebody's using. So for example, during the last couple of years with COVID, healthcare use exploded, right? I mean, they needed it and desperately needed it because they suddenly had to go to 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 [12:57] >> or a hospital, whatever, we gave it to you for free. We gave you one of our sober plans for free for, you know, for a year. So you could just get in there and do what you had to do, 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 [13:15] >> so we always look at it, but we found that those are, the thresholds where people need to move us have remained consistent because we find that those seem to be pretty good barometers of how we want to move things along. [13:27] Well, what is that barometer? Maybe this isn't specific to JotForm specifically, but when you look at like TiteForm others in the space and other 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 paid conversion rate? Is it 1%, 5%, 10%? [13:43] >> Well, I think everybody wants to get it higher than they can. I mean, a good 5% is about the industry average. [13:49] Seems like [13:50] >> for a free and I'm talking about all SaaS products, not just in the form world. But a 5% conversion rate seems to be pretty solid for people and it varies. Some people can be even smaller because they can be down to one quarter, but they're, you know, they're, what they're trying to do is get as many people out of the pipe. So they're doing it on a volume basis, but about a 5% conversion rate is about, [14:10] >> 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 are better than others and some months, but everybody seems to kind of bubble along that certain 5% threshold. [14:24] But true or false, if you had six months go by where you were at 4%, 4%, 4%, 4%, would you change something about the freemium paywall to try and get back up above five? [14:34] >> No, not necessarily. I mean, we would look at it 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 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. And [14:53] >> now you've got people all over the place on different kinds of tiers and that just leads to a lot confusion for people. [14:59] Yep. Now, believe you guys did celebrate publicly on your blog. Guys Well, first off, when you joined, how many total users? Because you just celebrated a 10,000,000 milestone, right? So do remember what the growth is? [15:09] >> As far as what do you mean growth When you joined in '26 [15:12] yeah. When you no. No. With just users. What you guys already published. Right? So when you joined in 2016, what was the total number of users? [15:18] >> We were probably around I wanna say we're probably I think we had just done about 3,000,000 users. [15:24] Okay. Wow. And then you guys celebrated 9,000,000, I believe, in 2020, and you announced 10,000,000 here this year. [15:30] Is that correct? [15:31] >> Correct. [15:32] That's great. And so is that sort of the goal for this year, just keep adding a million new users per year? [15:38] >> Actually, we're growing faster than that. Mean, numbers continue to climb. Mean, and again, the COVID world has really kind of turned the entire business industry on upside down. 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 olden days were. So what they [16:05] >> ended up doing was they just kind of went into almost like 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 users and then eventually into paid users. [16:25] And Steve, terms of price point of your cheapest plan today, 39 a month, was it always $39 or did you test $5 a month early on or $20 a month? What does that look like? [16:35] >> We started it off at around, I think it was $19 a month at one point. I mean, have sales during the course of the year too. We'll have like a big end of year sale where we discount it. We also have a discount for nonprofits and education users, those types of things. But it's really come down to, as we look at what the competition's doing, we look at what our costs are, Because I mean, obviously you [16:57] >> 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 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 [17:16] >> we think is fair. And we have not had really complaints from customers if a price goes up, because what we do also is when people are on a previous plan, they grandfather in at that plant. So, or a pre grandfather in at that price. So they don't, they're not, our existing customer base does not really get impacted by price increases. [17:35] Only gonna [17:36] >> be new incoming types of customers. [17:38] Yeah. And who would you, and you know, obviously, you don't wanna say market your competitors on the show, but just for my audience to understand the world you're playing in, I mean, who do you consider sort of in your same space? [17:47] >> Well, I mean, some of the ones that we always run into, you got your form stacks and your type forms. Those are kind of the ones we always run into. I mean, there's Cognito forms and there's Wufoo come in the mix every so often, but we also run-in people that use Google forms and Microsoft forms, even though those two free products, what we have found people look at those and they, particularly Google Forms and Microsoft Forms, [18:10] >> they say they're fairly limited in what they can do and they need something more sophisticated. And so they turn to us looking for assistance. [18:18] Which of these two things, you've been at the company now for, well, approaching eight years, I think. Which of these two things do you think is more likely to happen first? The company bootstraps its way and breaks $150,000,000 of ARR, or the company bootstraps grows and decides, you know what, there's a big opportunity here, let's go public, raise money, maybe buy up competitors, grow faster. Which one do think is more likely? [18:39] >> Probably the first one. [18:40] I think the Okay, first so you [18:41] guys love the bootstrapping. [18:43] >> Yeah, I mean, that's really kind of been our mantra since day one. That's our CEO's whole methodology to it. And it's worked great for us. I mean, some companies that doesn't work for them, but for us, it has been absolutely perfect. And there's definitely benefits to not having investor money on the side, because you just don't have a lot of competing interests from a board of directors perspective. We can look at things and we can talk [19:06] >> as a group, 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 a board of directors or something like that. We can do what we need to do and get it done. [19:18] Any product coming down the pipeline? If you guys have 10,000,000 users and you converted 5%, now this is probably high, but let's say you have 500,000 paid customers. If you sell them a $20 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 down the pipeline? [19:34] >> We're also looking at adding new features, 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 different types of backend feature adjustments for people like how to pull your data out, how to analyze your data better in the backend types of systems. So it's one thing to get all [19:55] >> your data, but we want to have better tools in place to help people kind of analyze the data. So we've 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, whatever types of parameters they want to work with, and then also push that data into other types of products, whether it's a CRM or something else that people want to [20:19] >> work with. But it's making very easy to use dashboards, making it very, very user friendly, those types of things. So we're kind of taking the no code environment to heart on this and making it really, really simple for people to kind of customize their experience, 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. [20:41] Steve, last question here before we wrap up with a famous five, fill in the blank here. Sometime in the past six months, you tested x channel with $10,000 of spend and the results surprised you. What's x? [20:53] >> Billboards. [20:54] Billboards. How do you even track a billboard conversion? [20:59] >> Oh, you can do it. Just gotta be really gotta be good at it. I mean, because you can put them in certain regions and you don't just blast like you're in San Francisco where we're located, hit the entire Bay Area. You might just focus on a real specific neighborhood, down 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. [21:22] >> 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 us. So there's potential in here. [21:36] What does a monthly cost to get a big billboard in like San Mateo? I just have no idea. It's like $5 a month or are they really expensive? [21:42] >> You know, it's all over the place. It's they're I can't give you a definitive price because it it varies on traffic size of billboard for how long you're gonna be there. So there's a whole lot [21:51] of How do you even get that data? Do you do you work with a broker? Is there a website people go to? Like, you know, billboardpricing.com or? [21:57] >> Oh, you go to the billboard company, usually it's like Clear Channel. The biggest beast on the block when it comes to billboards, but you can go to Clear Channel for example, and say, Hey, we're looking at this billboard on the street. Can you give us information on it? And again, it depends on the size of the board and whether which direction it's facing, those kinds of things, because it all comes down to eyeballs. And so you [22:21] >> want to maximize your eyeballs that you're going to get on that thing. And so they can look at it and they know that how much traffic goes by at a given point during the day, how many times you're, if it's one of these electronic billboards where it's going to be revolving with other ads, you're going get these many types of placements of the day and things like that. So again, the price varies depending on really the [22:42] >> specific geography where that billboard's going to be located up. [22:46] Now I'm clicking through all the pictures of your billboards and Google image results. 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. [23:02] >> My favorite book, I've read so many lately, but I think probably one of my favorite books is the Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs bio. [23:11] >> Lot of really good business tips are in that book. [23:13] Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? [23:17] >> I still look to follow Tim Cook. The guy's got an incredible mind for business, and he's doing quite well there. [23:24] Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building JotForm besides your own? [23:30] >> For building JotForm? [23:32] Like a business tool. [23:34] >> Sheets. [23:35] >> Yeah, okay. [23:36] Number four, how many hours of sleep do get every night? [23:39] >> About five. [23:40] Okay, and Steve, what's your situation? Married, single, kiddos? [23:43] >> I am married and we have a combined family. There's five total children in the family. [23:48] Oh, wow. Okay, and how old are you? [23:50] >> I'm 62 years old now. [23:52] 62 years young. Last question, something you wish you knew when you were 20. [23:58] >> Just be better at financing from the business side of things is 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. [24:11] Mike Guys, there we have it. Steve joined Jotform back in the early days, 2016, when they were called around 3,000,000 users. Now today, over 10,000,000 users. He's trying to figure out, okay, let's make sure we get around a 5% conversion free to pay. That's what he calls industry average. But he's leading the marketing team there today as he continued to scale up into hundreds of thousands of customers, all bootstrapped, which we love. Steve, thanks for taking [24:31] us to the top. [24:32] >> My pleasure. Thanks for having me on. [24:36] One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. 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 1PM [25:01] Central. Additionally, remember these recorded founder interviews go live. We release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM 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 SaaS world, whether it's an acquisition, a big [25:23] fundraise, a big sale, a big profitability statement or something else. I don't want you to miss it. Additionally, if you wanna take this conversation deeper and further, we have by far the largest private Slack community for B2B SaaS founders. You wanna get in there. We've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing. You can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying. Sign up for [25:45] that at nathanlatka.com/slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty minutes. Feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode. And if you enjoyed it, click the thumbs up. We get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows, I do it so that we can all learn. We have to counter those people. We got to [26:05] push them away. Click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys'support. Alright, I'll be in the comments. See you. [26:12] >> Hey.

hello Rowan my guest today is Steve Hart hurt he is the CMO chief marketing officer at job form comm with responsibility for marketing programs brand management and corporate partnerships prior to joining job for me as president of heart hurt and associates a marketing consultancy that worked with b2b and b2c companies Steve is more than 25 years of marketing management experience Steve are you ready to take us to the top yes I am let's go all right so job forum gave you a big juicy chunk of equity to convince you to leave your own company and join them right tell us tell us what job forum does and what's the revenue model how do you make money sure I mean what we are is were online forum builder you know previous to our system if you wanted to build a build forums you had to be a program we had to be a coder and forums can be quite complicated well what we developed was the very first drag-and-drop interface as a SAS product where somebody could just literally say I want these fields I want first name last name on one address I want I want to get a payment or whatever other fields they want and they can create online forms it's very simple very very easy to do and what's the business model is it a SAS play yes we're very much a SAS play what we have is we have a free product so people can test-drive it as long as they want but as they you know as their needs grow and they need more forums or they need more features we have tiered paid products that appeal to various levels of companies that's great and give us a sense I don't go down every single co-worker's I'm sure you have many what's the average customer paying you per month would you say the average customer in our product line starts at $19 a month or our bronze plan and they go all the way up to $99 for our gold plan but right now we've got probably our average cost or average revenue per user is probably somewhere in the mid 20s since we've got a pretty good mix of people okay that's fair enough that's good understand and then help us understand how you got involved with the company was joking when we started but the company was launched in what year and when did you join in why sure the company was launched in 2006 and I think what's unique about jawed forum is we've been a bootstrap company since day one we've never taken one dyno today still today still today we've never taken one dime of any investor money it has been company has grown organically and that's just how we're going to continue to work it we have no plans to take any kind of money from any investors at this point where I came into the picture was about two years ago Ida can tank our CEO approached me and kind of laid out the job forum story told me where the company had been where he would like to take the company and basically made such a compelling story to me and you know told me such a where they wanted to you know really the future where they wanted to go it was very difficult to say no and I thought I talked it over with my family and we said you know it's one of these opportunities that come along probably once in a lifetime and if you're going to jump and grab that ring now's the time to do it and and here we are now you joined you know eight or not almost nine years after launch were you still able to I mean did he incentivize you do you have at least some equity in the company you have some of the upside or no yes yes he did give me some equity was very generous on the equity so that you know obviously that's very helpful when you want to sit there and keep building a company but you know it was also he gave me the challenge he gives me the freedom and he as he does everybody here I think really to kind of just do it the way you think you need to do it you know we're not my no.1 in this company as micromanaged we try to be a very many we are about 75 people in total and and that's you know that's a mix of programmers support people the marketing team obviously and such like that so in San Fran know we've got people actually based all over the world we've got it we've got our headquarters is based here in San Francisco but we also have a programming group that's based out of Ankara Turkey we have support people all over the country there are actually all over the country and all over the world so we can provide 24/7 support to our users just to kind of give you an idea of the size of the company and where our footprints at we have users and about a hundred ninety two different countries around the globe so just about every you know just about every piece of dirt on the planet we've got a role in it somehow we this isn't a couple of I think it was in September maybe it's October early October we crossed the three million user mark for the first time which is phenomenal growth for us and you know I mean we just don't see any end in sight to where this company is headed that's great and what have you grown to now over the two years you've been there what do you guys out now right now in terms of total customers using you guys I mean total customers the growth has been over 50% when I came on board we had just crossed a two million mark so it took us about 10 years they go from 0 to 2 million users and in really the last 18 19 months we've been able to add 50 percent more user base and our you know we're actually in that if you look at our growth it was very slow and steady and for the last you know say 18 months it's climbing big time so the hockey stick is starting to very much happen for us that's great I want to talk more about that but just to be clear all of those 3 million are paying they're all paying customers or there's free users there's a mix of paid in used paid it for I should say paid in creek okay can you give us a general idea of how many folks are actually paying for the platform that one I'm gonna have to kind of hold that card fairly close but it's a it's we're above industry average let's just put it that way okay and you'll have to educate us because I just don't know what I mean is industry average five percent of users 10 percent a twenty percent of users pay so it's about six and a half to seven percent of average and when you have a freemium model like what we have but I say our user base our paid user basis is beyond that okay that's great and we're how do you get that average number what who are you comparing yourselves to they're really worth comparing ourselves to other saps companies when you know we did some research and you look at what other SAS companies are that offer the same kind of freemium model that we do that's really where we fall into place and we know it's great you know we're above where that industry average would be it that's great and see I want to give you credit where credit's do so hopefully doesn't make you nervous but you know at a minimum if you're beating 6% you got three million users you have over 180,000 paying folks right and if they're paying an average of 25 per month you guys are doing well north of 4.5 million bucks a month is that generally fair to say yeah I would say that's pretty good any what to the bubble okay good that's healthy that's good understand now your CMO this is a very it's a it's a very competitive space and by competitive I mean keywords for anything related form are very expensive to buy how are you acquiring customers you've got to get creative I imagine yeah we do I mean we use multiple different channels to get to get our customer base growing I mean what we've found works very well for us again is the key word are CEO works quite well we have a tremendous growth in our organic search and that's really where people find us and we've been very very deliberate in how we structure that so what we found is by addressing specific challenges that companies face and and using that as our foundation on the SEO that's where we're finding the growth is coming from because people have a particular problem that they're trying to solve and they pop it up and we show up as that solution and then they sign up and we're up and running at double how do you discover more terms people are searching for that your product helps them solve we constantly look at I mean there's a lot of different ways we do it one is we talk to our customers all the time so we're constantly serving them to find out what they liked about is how they find us what were they trying to solve or what problem they were trying to solve and then we also just look at general search terms where you will go in there just do search terms on our own to see what pops up so we might do something that's to say I need a contact form or I need an online contact form and we will see what shows up as far as is that one of our competitors is it something completely random that you know no one ever knew about in someone we structure that way you start the picture search to develop and show you where that path is that in which way you need to go with it and if you kind of back into today what you're paying to acquire a customer or maybe not what you're actually paying but a different question is what are you willing to pay to acquire a customer currently I mean really what we're willing to pay is you know I think we would go as high as maybe 20 to 30 dollars per acquisition per a paid customer but we're not paying anything near that to be honest with you because again because the way our the model works for us when they come in and they will then they will generally come in as a free user to start with we do get a certain percentage that come paid right off the gate but we get a certain percentage that will come in as a free user and then when they said they will stick around as a free user probably for say six to eight weeks maybe nine maybe not 90 days and then they start to see the value and their needs grow and then at that point it's like well I need them I need to purchase the product cuz I need additional forms or I need more form submissions or I need additional features maybe they want to take more online pay something along those lines and then from that point then they come on and then the long term the long term of a customer for us as and we measure that in years how many years do you soon they stick with you usually I recorded our measurements we have an average of right around three years that's what a paid customer so you can see if we're looking to go in as high as twenty dollars an acquisition cost or maybe in 30 dollars an acquisition cost and we're multiplying sayed even if they came in at the low rate at $19 a month times thirty six months that's pretty good yeah I mean you're let's just use the twenty five dollar number since that's your average that's $900 in lifetime value across three years right yeah that's interesting and so just to confirm it's fair to say you're spending significantly less than 20 bucks to acquire a new customer exactly okay and your pedigree is obviously healthy in this kind of space I've heard sometimes churn is difficult right high volume low ARPU um what is your guys annual turn right now and what are you doing to drive that down yeah the I mean we've been studying our churn for the lat really since I came on board and what I'm looking at on the churn our churn rates are probably their average their average for our space we want them to go lower educator to see what is that yeah I think this in the space itself it's around 5% is probably your typical I actually five to seven percent I would say probably your typical turn and that's local churn monthly that's that's actually that's that's the monthly churn but on logo or revenue on that's just that's users the revenue the revenue churn is is almost insignificant to be honest with you cuz it's all the same price point you have a lot of expansion ARPU right exactly so we're looking at I mean when we're looking at what the causes of our churn art is we've been able to identify some very specific causes of what's what's driving our churn rate and we're actually gonna be developed we've got a plan in place that we're gonna start putting out in the next really next probably two months that we think is really gonna significantly drive that down come on Steve you're teasing me what's the plan the plan really is to is where is the head off the problems before they pop up we have found what's really probably the biggest driver for us is when people have their their credit cards expire right when people just forget to do payment and we've identified that wait a second these people are just forgetting to update their payment and so that's causing them to fall out and by identifying that group earlier on we're able to sit there we did a test on that and we found yes when we alert them and say did you know your payment's going to expire now we're finding that those people go oh I wasn't aware of that and then they go ahead and then they update their payments and they stay on as a paying customer so that that churn element does not happen I can't say that this has been done or that I've done it or anyone I know has done it cuz I have no idea if it's legal or not but in their general idea of breaking rules I mean many people the most successful churn reduction they've had in this kind of at this kind of price point when they realized the expiration date was the biggest issue which 60 70 % of turns sometimes is just actually guessing right the new updated year of the expiration has significantly driven that down now you can do that in a variety of different kind of ways in terms of doing it the right way the wrong way but it makes complete sense why that's what you're focused on right right as we identified as probably our biggest piece of churn yeah and by looking at that going well we know cuz if somebody signs up we understand what their payment process is because we when they sign up but we get their expiration dates on their credit cards and so what we've done is we just flagged it to say okay now starting at you know somebody's going to expire say January 1 2018 we're recording this here on December 1st we would start sending those people out notices now to say you need to update your payment yep and guys you just heard kind of the recording date and remember I do so many these interviews if you want to not have to wait you're probably hearing this in March if you want to not have to wait so long can go to get Latka calm where I publish them instantly so just just to call out there to check that out now Steve the the last question I have for you before we wrap up with the famous five usage metrics that you know tie directly to increase lifetime value you want to push forward on the onboarding as much as possible what is the number one thing you know you have to get new users to do in the first seven days to make them significantly more sticky right I think for us it's engagement it's to actually does sign up for the product we want them to actually start using the product more than just I want to create a basic form and so we have found that the more engagement we can get with a user the hey did you know yes most of them will come into want to create a simple contact bar but when we used when we show them how to create say an online payment form or how to create an online survey or how to make an extensive kind of form that uses things like conditional logic when they start to see the sophistication that the product actually has that's when the stickiness factor suddenly comes in the into play and that's when those customers will be much more of a long-term customer than a short-term customer how do you know whether they're to focus your energy on like them just getting the fort like them just logging on then them just getting the first form created then actually launching and embedding their first form them actually getting 20 new opt-ins to the form like how do you know which of these points you should put most your resources - yeah we've our metrics team is incredible and I do fantastic work and we've actually been known what to look at so many of our new users to see what that usage pattern is when they come on board and so we identified if somebody came in and just created a simple form kind of like created and then walked away we found that the engagement fell off immediately but we found that by going in there and continually to educate those users in that first 10 days of them as a new user that basically did you know you could do this did you know you could do that with a job form here's how you do it we found that by showing them a path of how to do it significantly improve the engagement and those customers then create more forms and then we start to become a much bigger piece of their daily workflow as a company makes a lot of sense let's wrap up here in a second Steve with a famous five last question you mentioned about twelve months ago you were at about two million four users you've grown significantly since then up to three is that also translating to revenue in other words are you are you you're not seeing decreased conversion right as you increase volume of new free are you know I've actually seen an increase in conversions which is which is great that's exactly we wanted to see I mean if you look back again over the history of the company the conversion rate stayed at a very specific level but in the last 12 months that conversion level has started to climb and so for us it's a matter we know that the more customers we can get in now we can the percentage that we're going to Rover is growing yep and and just to be clear you said you're beating industry average of 6% I mean we can say between 6 and 15 percent somewhere in there right okay Jeff and if you've grown by 1/3 over the past 12 months I mean if you're at you know above 4.5 million a month today go back 12 months you guys were doing what to 9 something like that yeah a general Rindge healthy growth Steve let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book probably my first famous business or my favorite business book is gonna be the Steve Jobs bio by Walter Isaacson it's good one number two is their CEO you're following or studying right now probably Tim Cook I he's a very fascinating individual and yeah he's a very interesting person to follow number three is there besides your on with your favorite online tool Twitter number for how many hours of sleep are you getting every night about five okay and what's your situation married single you have kiddos Oh girlfriend girlfriend and any kids are now oh yeah my kids are older their and their mid mid to late 20s now if you can play that's great and how many I have two boys two and how old are you Steve 57 years old 57 years young last question take us back 37 years what he was your 20 year old self Neil I wish my 20 year old self knew probably said a better sense of direction and where to go I think if I spent a little bit more time paying attention than my finance classes in college I would have saved myself a whole lot of grief early in my career there you guys have it from Steve he wishes he would have spent more time understanding finances earlier on in his career was doing his own thing and in the jock form crew came along and said Steve you have to join here's a big juicy deal he does back about two years ago now jaw from his growing launched in 2006 they've passed over 3 million free users well over 6 percent of those paying so they've grown over the past 12 months from about 2.9 million bucks a month in revenue generally to over 4.5 million Steve's driving churn down from 5% to monthly logo churn focused on driving that down super healthy economics right now they're spending less than 20 bucks to acquire new customers with a 36 month lifetime value at 25 bucks a month that's 900 bucks an LTV again less than 20 bucks in CAC so healthy their payback period happens in the first month which is great their team of 75 based in San Francisco and the remote offices focus on making online forms significantly easier Steve thank you for taking us to the top oh thanks for thanks for the opportunity