How airSlate Reached $200M Revenue and 1.1 Million Paying Customers (Interview with Vadim Yasinovsky)

Opening: Who airSlate Serves

Vadim Yasinovsky

00:00Our customer, and there are 31,000,000 of them in The US, are SMBs. It's the guy who, you know, who fixes your plumbing, who bakes your bread, who sells you books in a small bookstore. They don't need complicated agreements which are going to withstand scrutiny of multiple courts and multiple states and multiple regulations. And I wanna answer 10 questions and get this shit done.

Nathan Latka

00:22I think people would be shocked if they landed on this page and they knew that this page right here does a $106,000,000 of revenue.

Vadim Yasinovsky

00:29DocHub now is doing $20,000,000 to $22,000,000, something like that. pdfFiller is doing about 106, and signNow is around 35.

Nathan Latka

00:38All these gurus right now saying they figured it out, but I don't know that it's actually figureoutable.

Vadim Yasinovsky

00:43No. No. It's bullshit. I'm sorry. I've tried this stuff.

Guest Introduction and Background

Nathan Latka

00:47Hey, folks. My guest today is Vadim, and at his request, I'm not gonna try and pronounce his last name. But he started his first company in 1982 and after several startups cofounded pdfFiller, which grew into airSlate. He's a longtime software industry veteran and returned to the airSlate CEO role in July 2025, now leading the company's next generation of AI products. Vadim, you're ready to take us to the top?

AI Strategy and Product Philosophy

Vadim Yasinovsky

01:11Yeah. Well, you know, next generation is actually a very good beginning because we've been doing on and off AI for, like, forty years. I'm not exactly new guy around the block. So our approach is AI best when it's invisible. AI best when it's actually produces real value. So we're not putting labels here and there saying AI this and AI that. We're just trying to do best job for our customers.

Acquired Brands and Siloed Structure

Nathan Latka

01:38You've acquired many of my my friends' companies. Right? Chris at DocHub, you guys did that deal. Obviously, you were the first, I think, anchor, but you've let all the brands you acquired still keep their original sort of name and structure. How does that impact your AI strategy going forward?

Vadim Yasinovsky

01:53It's actually really interesting because the products are the different stage of their development and their product life. pdfFiller is primarily prosumer and we're getting a lot of traffic and the conversion is very good. DocHub really needs some work in marketing. And signNow is a brand sort of recognition game. The interesting part is that while they're different, we're using same technology for the customer acquisition. But fundamentally, the idea was that we have small amount of common services

02:26that include marketing, you know, things like DevOps, payments and things like that. But the rest of them are siloed. They have their own GMs, they have their own development team, they have their own roadmaps, and they sort of go in their independent way. And so far, so good. I don't think AI will actually change anything in that sense. We do have something called AI Labs which develops common AI solutions which we shift into the product, but

02:55there's no mandate to adapt to any technology developed in house. signNow, pdfFiller and DocHub are three entirely different products, different tech. There are some common components which they share, but very few. We sort of made it intentional because we honestly believe, especially in our days, tech is not the mover. The brand, you know, it's the top of the funnel. That's the things which differentiate. In reality, we're not going to even try to adapt it to the

03:23same tech because economy of scale doesn't work anymore with AI.

Team Size and Revenue by Product

Nathan Latka

03:27How many people are full time today across the whole company?

Vadim Yasinovsky

03:30There's about six fifty people in the company right now. So products have about 120 per each. The rest of it is G and A, marketing, and common services. DocHub now is doing $20,000,000 to $22,000,000, something like that. pdfFiller is doing about 106, and signNow is around 35.

Nathan Latka

03:50I think people would be shocked if they landed on this page and they knew that this page right here does a $106,000,000 of revenue?

Vadim Yasinovsky

03:57Hey. You know, we have close to 860,000 paying customers. So, yes, right now, it's $100,000,000 product, and we're hoping that it will grow to maybe 200,000,000 within about two to three years.

Nathan Latka

04:12What's the rest of the breakdown? So DocHub is 22,000,000, pdfFiller is $106,000,000, signNow is 35,000,000. What about the other three?

US Legal Forms, bizdraft.com, and the SMB Focus

Vadim Yasinovsky

04:20So AltaFlow is sort of a very sort of... It's an offshoot for us. We've been at that thing for quite a while now. It's not a big product, it's about 5,000,000 revenue, something like that. US Legal is about, I think, 6,000,000 something like that. It contributes a lot of traffic and a lot of value to pdfFiller. And it's actually, there's like about 85,000 forms which are hand built by lawyers, and it's a humongous asset because it

04:49allows us to use this data to build new products. We actually have one more product which we do not have on the list because we haven't really publicly announced it. The URL is bizdraft.com, bizdraft.com. And it's our first AI product. We build it specifically for our users. It creates agreements, legal agreements. The interface is unique because we actually combine editing and AI, and we've seen some really interesting stuff about the traction so far. I'm very pleased.

05:27Most likely we're not going to actually monetize that. It's much easier for us to use this as a traffic generation engine.

Nathan Latka

05:34I want to ask you like a deeper question here, right? So let's just look at US Legal for a second. This site structure is actually very interesting because they have these thousands of templated forms which pull in a lot of traffic. And I'm not even sure that Ahrefs is capturing it all, but I'm leading to a question. My question is this. Harvey and all these legal AI tools, they have to have a large training set to

05:55sort of win. You guys should have won that space because you had a very large training set. Why weren't you guys Harvey?

Vadim Yasinovsky

06:01You have to remember, our customer, and there are 31,000,000 of them in The US, are SMBs. It's the guy who, you know, who fixes your plumbing, who bakes your bread, who sells you books in a small bookstore. And these guys don't need this monstrosity and huge building sets. We have enough information to build a solution which is, I wouldn't say good enough,

06:24I would say great enough for them, them, okay? They don't need complicated agreements which will withstand scrutiny of multiple courts and multiple states and multiple regulations. And I want to answer 10 questions and get this shit done, Okay? And this focus on the customer is extremely important.

Capital Raised and Investor History

Nathan Latka

06:42Remind me, how much capital total have you guys raised today?

Vadim Yasinovsky

06:45I think about 150 if you count, you know, all the loans and stuff like that. But I mean, we got money from GC Capital, Morgan Stanley, G Squared, and some minor

Nathan Latka

06:45UiPath Ventures.

Vadim Yasinovsky

06:45Yeah, UiPath Ventures. Yeah, it was a minor investment.

Valuation and Market Conditions

Nathan Latka

07:03That last price round was June 2022, $51,000,000 to $52,000,000 raised at a $1,250,000,000 valuation. Right?

Vadim Yasinovsky

07:11That's right. That's right. Your numbers are better than mine.

Nathan Latka

07:16I have good memory. But how do you... Are you... I mean, what are you seeing in the market today? Do you think... If someone offered you... I mean, are you in the money today? Do you think you're valued north of 1,300,000,000 today?

Vadim Yasinovsky

07:25No. I don't think so. I mean, let's be honest. Market really went down. You know, I I would place a value of the company right now. I mean, optimistically maybe 800. And you have to understand, it was $100,000,000 revenue when we got the last evaluation. Now it's 200,000,000 revenue. So the reality is very substantial. I think my market is panicking. I think my VC friends really don't understand what's going to happen. I think I have a

07:52very clear vision of where we're going and how it's going to play out. I do not believe for a second that my customers are going to build their own software. That's absolute baloney, And only people who never build products can actually think that that's what's going to happen.

Revenue History: From $18.5M to $200M

Nathan Latka

08:06Can you fill in those gaps really quick? So the metrics I have from direct interviews with you and Borya was 2022, a 100,000,000, and 2026, 200,000,000. But fill in the gap between 2016 and 2022. Like, when did you break 50,000,000?

Vadim Yasinovsky

08:202015, I would say. We got the money from GC. That was the first investment of capital. We bought signNow. We rebuilt signNow, and we got to about 50,000,000.

Nathan Latka

08:31Did you break 10,000,000 before the money from GC in 2015?

Vadim Yasinovsky

08:35Oh, yes, absolutely. We raised money when we were close to 18,500,000. That's the point.

Nathan Latka

08:42So so you hit 18,000,000 of revenue in what, 2014?

Vadim Yasinovsky

08:46Yes. Something like that. Maybe 2013.

Nathan Latka

08:50And when you bought signNow, that basically doubled the business? Were they doing about the same revenue?

Vadim Yasinovsky

08:54No. It didn't double the business. Far from it. We bought it, it was doing about $3,000,000 a year. Now it's about 35, so it didn't really I mean, we had to rebuild the entire product, and we had to, you know, weaponize the marketing stuff, so it took a while. No, pdfFiller continued to doing great, and that's where we got most of money. I mean, the way company was built, pdfFiller was a cash machine, and we just

09:18paid the cash and invested in other products.

Nathan Latka

09:21When you guys sit down and have a coffee and look back at the golden years, printing money, no board, no VCs, do you ever go, like, what?

Vadim Yasinovsky

09:27God. Please. You make me feel so nostalgic.

Nathan Latka

09:32Would you change anything, though? I mean, teach the founders listening right now. Would you change anything?

Vadim Yasinovsky

09:37Try to get money as late as you possibly can. Cash is the king. Make money. Don't pay yourself a lot of money. Don't spend money. I mean... And from day one, think about exit. That is something which I learned. I don't like to exit, to be honest. It's like a baby, right? I mean, you've raised this thing. You want to become a real company. You want to build real value. You want to build cool products. But

10:05you have to think about it all the time. Guys, if you can avoid it, don't raise money. I know that it's sort of a, you know, a very modern tendency, which is because we need to scale.

10:19It's funny, I was teaching this seminar on Software 101, how to build software company, and I asked one question to the audience. I said, What is the essential part of having a company? And you know, people say great business plan, funding, great talent, and they're going on and on and on and on. And this little girl in the front row who must have been 16 said, customer, said finally, somebody figure it out. You know? That's what

10:46it's all about. It's about customer.

Nathan Latka

10:48I think you said 800,000 paying customers today?

Vadim Yasinovsky

10:51No. Actually, altogether, we have about 1,100,000, but pdfFiller has 860,000

Nathan Latka

10:59So 1,100,000 paying customers into 200,000,000

Vadim Yasinovsky

11:03Altogether, all the products.

Nathan Latka

11:04Yep. Into a 200,000,000 a 200,000,000 ARR base means each customer is paying you on average $180 per year. I mean, is the definition of SMB.

Vadim Yasinovsky

11:13Right. Yeah. Exactly.

Organic SEO Machine: 4.8 Billion Keywords

Nathan Latka

11:15So if someone else is running that same playbook, you know, and we dig in... I mean, this is where all your this is where all your top of funnel is coming from. What did you guys do at pdfFiller to build such a massive organic content machine?

Vadim Yasinovsky

11:26We have under management, as far as I remember, 4,800,000,000 keywords. And we had 35,000,000 pages. This stuff has changed significantly, so it worked really well for us for quite a while. But what's happening right now is very different. AI is getting smarter, search engines are getting smarter, our ability to create perception is weakening, let's put it this way. AI requires a very well structured information. We throw a lot of stuff out there and it's not exactly

12:06clean, it's pretty messy. So now we're going into a process of reducing what we had before and making it more productive.

Nathan Latka

12:14When I came up there to Boston, and you, me and Borya, some other folks, you guys got together, we had a brainstorm. I mean, remember one of the topics of conversation was how to think about contextual relevance. So instead of programmatic SEO like this kind of keyword here, it was how to build contextual relevance around keyword clusters. Is that still your thinking? And how are you testing?

Vadim Yasinovsky

12:33Absolutely, yes, yes. You know, we're talking about clusterization. We're talking about semantic core. We're talking about discovering new keywords and so on and so forth. Now, you do have to understand this. You take this huge, you know, 4,800,000,000, very few of them are actually productive. So figuring out which clusters are more productive and trying to cover as much as we possibly can, that's definitely part of the journey. But I got to tell you, Nathan, this

13:00stuff is about to change and it's going to change not overnight, but it's going to change pretty drastically.

Search Influence Dropping from 80% to 30%

Vadim Yasinovsky

13:07Our ability to influence and bring people over is going to be probably significantly diminished. Before I would call it 80%, now it's going to be 30%. And it doesn't matter how many landing pages we have. It's the quality versus quantity now, that's the name of the game. It's real sources like Wikipedia, Reddit, things like that which will make a huge difference. I'm not telling you anything you don't know already. I'm just saying that this massive push

13:37towards enormous amount of keywords, I think, has come to the end or will come to the end within the next, I don't know, nine months to twelve months. This stuff is happening.

ChatGPT SEO Gurus and Adaptability

Nathan Latka

13:48Okay, let's use a real example, okay? Say I am a pool contractor in Austin, Texas, I need, know, I pay pdfFiller because I found a long time ago some template doc about how to get a proposal out quickly to a pool owner in Austin, Texas. Moving forward now, I'm that same... A new contractor, pool contractor in Austin, Texas. And I go to ChatGPT, and I say, free two page template for me to get my first, you

14:13know, proposal out in Austin, Texas. Can you actively influence... Have you found a way to actively influence the results ChatGPT is showing? There's always... All these gurus right now saying they've figured it out, but I don't know that it's actually figureoutable.

Vadim Yasinovsky

14:27No. No. It's bullshit. I'm sorry. I've tried this stuff.

14:32Again, think about it. ChatGPT today has IQ of about 110. Once it has an IQ of 400, whether you and I have 80 or 140, it doesn't make any difference. It's getting much smarter, and it's very unpredictable. So the answer is adaptability. Know, there's no way we're not going to have the same wonderful scheme of SEO experts telling you what to do. Forget it. One of the reasons why we were so successful, know, to be

15:02honest, our competition was not sophisticated. So we used high level math, our bidding on PPC was superior, now everybody has a Claude. We are on an equal basis, so you have to be I think it's gonna be a lot more about the product and about reputation in the future.

Growth Plan: Existing Products, New Products and Going Vertical

Nathan Latka

15:23What is the growth plan moving forward? How do you go from 200,000,000 to 400,000,000 of revenue?

Vadim Yasinovsky

15:27Double back on our existing products. We believe there's a 20% to 30% growth in there. But majority of the plan is probably going to go to new products. And by the way, the example you brought up is really interesting, the guy at the pool. Think about this guy not worrying about how to find document, what to stay with compliance, you know, how to make sure that the pool is going to be clean to the point

15:52of the inspection, permits and things like that. That's a huge area where these poor people spend six to eight hours a week. Instead of getting a couple of slices of pizza and a nice cold beer and watching a football, they're sitting there with their fingers on the keyboard trying to figure out how to fill up the damn document and there's a bureaucrat somewhere who needs to approve it. This is we believe it's a humongous market.

16:18We'll be able to tackle those problems, and we'll be able to provide enough of a value to a lot of people and remain horizontal while verticalizing the product for a lot of vertical sort of sub markets.

Nathan Latka

16:31My argument is you really have to go vertical to keep your net dollar retention high, but you want to stay horizontal.

Vadim Yasinovsky

16:36Now you're talking. So how the hell do you do that? The answer is your product has to morph itself. It has to speak the language of your customer. So if it's a small medical office, you know, it needs to understand this stuff. If it's, I don't know, pool guy, it's a different language. It makes all the difference in the world, and I think that AI actually allows you to morph your software to address a particular user

17:02segment. The great thing is that we don't have to rush. We can wait for the feedback loop to kick in. We are not a startup in that sense. All the startups are going to be starved to death before they actually get the real feedback. There's uncertainty in these times. It's coming big time. Guys, preserve cash. Do yourself a favor. There's nothing else like that in the world.

Acquisition Strategy and M&A Criteria

Nathan Latka

17:25Are there legacy... Like, when you look at what Bending Spoons has done. Right? You guys know a thing or

17:29two about buying companies.

17:30Yes.

Vadim Yasinovsky

17:31Yes. We do.

Nathan Latka

17:32If you were gonna run their playbook and you were thinking about acquisition targets today, who would you think about going and acquiring?

Vadim Yasinovsky

17:37You know, show me success on product market fit and domain expertise, and we can talk.

17:43And

Nathan Latka

17:43Yep.

Vadim Yasinovsky

17:43Yeah, it has to be more than, I don't know, 5,000,000 or even 10,000,000 because it needs to make a significant contribution to the revenue of the company. You know, so 1,000,000 products are not interesting.

Capital Efficiency and Board Management

Nathan Latka

17:55So you said you hate managing like a board. I I think you really like being your own boss, but I mean, you have a real board today. I mean, there's a lot of money in the business. Like, how do you manage that?

Vadim Yasinovsky

18:05Low expectations, under promise, over deliver, consistency. You know, when I took over, which was almost a year now, in the beginning, they were very, very frantic and nervous. And I just made it my business of talking to them all the time and telling them why I'm doing it, what I'm doing it. And, eventually, they start trusting me. And now, you know, they bug me on on the board meetings, and it's like, it's been great.

Nathan Latka

18:30Because even though you have a board, you're still... I would consider you guys very capital efficient. If you're at $200,000,000 of ARR, you've raised under 200,000,000 of equity to date. Right?

Vadim Yasinovsky

18:39Yes. Yes.

Nathan Latka

18:40Very cap... Very capital efficient. There's people listening right now that have, you know, raised $20 for every dollar of ARR. That's not you.

Vadim Yasinovsky

18:46That's not us. And at the end, you have to win big. And remember, VCs are in this game for different reasons, right? They want to win big. They can't afford. I mean, if one company out of five wins big, they're cool. And the rest of them, they don't care about. While I respect my board, I like those guys very much, I do have to understand that their objective and my objective are slightly different, and I have

19:11to adjust for that all the time.

Nathan Latka

19:13On that note, if people wanna follow your story after meeting you here on this interview, where can they find you online?

Vadim Yasinovsky

19:18You can't find me online. I'm not anywhere. I'm I'm building new AI products. So I mean, you can send me an email if you want, vadimatearestlate dot com. Don't check Facebook. I'm sorry. I'm like off the grid.

Nathan Latka

19:32You don't do a lot of interviews. Why'd you agree to do this one?

Vadim Yasinovsky

19:35So I mean, I saw you laugh. I could make you laugh. I think we have same sort of foundation basis. This is not an interview to promote the company or anything else. I mean, we can talk about, you know, we can shoot breeze about whatever the hell you want, doesn't matter. So that's why I'm here. I mean, I don't do interviews. That... You're right. I mean, this is, like, exception. So... And you've done a great job,

19:59man. A lot of respect.

Nathan Latka

20:00Well, I've got a

20:02lot of respect for what you guys have built.

20:03So I appreciate you making time for us. Vadim, thank you for taking us to the top.

Vadim Yasinovsky

20:07Thank you, sir. Really appreciate it.

Nathan Latka

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