How Array CEO Matthew Doyle grew to $2.5M revenue and 80 customers in 2024.

guys buildarray.com think of like an Enterprise version of type form they've got their biggest customer paying almost a quarter million bucks per year they're doing 50 Grand a month right now in Revenue up from 20 grand a year going up from 10 grand a month back in 2020 when they raised a 1.3 million seed around with a 7 million cap they're building efficiently here 80 customers paying call between 500 and a thousand bucks a month on average team of six they Outsource some of their engineering to simform.com as he looks Matt looks to scale hey folks my guest today is Matt Doyle he's building Enterprise forms and automation at buildarray.com he's got a fascinating entrepreneurial career that includes opening the markets at the NASDAQ lunch with Richard Branson a failed professional snowboarding career and he spent the last three years building reign of the platform it is today his Hands-On Visionary leadership drives the team forward to overcome obstacle by following the guiding principles listen hard change fast think big start small Matt you ready to take us to the top yeah sounds great good introduction thanks very much I appreciate that okay so Enterprise forms and automation I mean I think forms and I think like Survey Monkey type form you're like an Enterprise version of those guys yeah that on steroids so we tend to sort of like uh work with big Enterprises like Walmart things like that people who need to sort of take those types of paperwork up to the next level so operations type paperwork we tend to sort of displace Legacy systems um in organizations well I mean what I mean my audience when they think about like type form and they think about like what what Walmart might need on top of their type form give me an example what is something Walmart need that only you can deliver no forms are created equal like some forms are used for surveys title is a fantastic tool for surveys question by question that's not what we try and be but that's what we are we're operational paperwork where things where Excel is used for data collection fittable PDFs paper and Pen clipboards so our applications work offline you can do things like signatures repeatable Fields conditional logic mathematical equations we use for doing food safety checks audits compliance so that's the type of stuff we're doing it's just not where sort of typeform would want to operate in so yeah it's working this is super interesting um I mean just looking at how you discover on your website I think it's called Turn paperwork into a mobile app right um so let's let's dive more to the story here right so um I want to get more of your background before we do that though obviously Walmart is a big Enterprise customer but what is the average customer pay you per month or per year to use the technology and when we we have that saying you know you know think big but start small because we want you know people as they're approaching new technology they want to be able to try out they want to do a free version so in Array you can go there today you just setting up a free account it has like a limitation on submissions it's designed for trying to start doing offline data collection so we have mobile applications for IOS and Android so if you're doing something in a field based work it's gonna be fantastic for that it's free uh but then we have like the top pack is like 40 per user per month uh but we we range for people who have just one or two users uh up to the bigger people who have thousands of users so don't name them don't name the logo obviously but your biggest customer is paying what per year or or a range um the biggest is 20 000 plus a month so what what would they be getting I mean how many seats are they paying for for if I'm paying you a quarter million bucks a year yeah when it goes up to that area like sometimes these industries it doesn't all it's the first seat licensing doesn't always make sense and that's the thing for any any founder is probably going to find is software as a service makes sense to a point but then as soon as you get up to the higher volumes it doesn't make sense for different reasons so it could be that they have thousands of users but like they only fill in something once or twice a week right and can you really warrant spending that kind of can you warrant charging them that amount of money or maybe the value proposition is in a different place so we work with insurance companies and insurance adjusters so like they might have sporadic people that come in and do the work but every time they do do the work it's worth quite a lot because it's per claim so we tend to sort of work on billing in a different way one thing we always try and do about pricing is remove complexities that we never stop them using the product to its full to create so we never want to set pricing that they're trying to gain the amount of users they have so we'll start to give people up to a certain amount of users for a price so knowing that they're going to fluctuate up and down a bit uh but so we know where we are as a company in mrr and ARR and they know that and we know that they're using the product properly because you know I'm a product founder really and I want to make sure people are actually like getting the most value from the product and they're using it correctly and so sometimes it's typical per seat license at that higher volume doesn't make a ton of sense I'm going to push into average here just because it's so wide it's hard for me to focus my questions when it's so wide would you say sort of the average team signing up for you is paying for like 10 seats or 100 seats a thousand bucks a month okay which is what about to 15 20 seats yeah yeah okay fair enough 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 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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 raise 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 valuation 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 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 put this on a timeline for me here when did you launch the business what year so we launched quite a while ago as an MVP I'm Alexa I'm a product founder so it's quite a few years back we launched a little product that was called launch cloud and when was that though it's about seven years seven years MVP yeah uh thanks for doing the math on me on that one and um we were working with field marketing companies we worked with Brands directly so we worked with people at Nintendo uh Bosch Coca-Cola and we found the problem with that market is it's very kind of fickle you know you know they've got a campaign going on you're the biggest thing but then the campaign comes to an end so then three and a half years ago um I moved to America uh we had this base product with a little bit of Revenue we rebranded and became array Builder ray.com and focus more on operation and risk so we've started working on new functionality with the product that lended itself to that industry and that was the first time we raised money so about two years ago we raised our first pre-seed round before that it was bootstrapped just this little app that was for some marketing agencies and that's where the big pivot happened and how much did you raise in 2020 1.3 million and why did you need that money man obviously bootstrapping is a beautiful thing you have 100 control no board it's great why give up that freedom well it's a blessing and a curse like you know you're able to make a lot of mistakes behind you know without too many people seeing when you're bootstrapping um but it's just you know with suffer as a service you know if you can't kind of figure out how to get lots of customers really quick and that can be hard for B2B companies like us right if it's someone like type form you might be able to remember they didn't raise a ton of money um there's lots of viral ways that you could be you know acquire customers um but we weren't able to do stuff like that so we needed to raise capital and go after some of these more Enterprise level customers um so we wanted to and also we want to pay our staff better we wanted to retain people we wanted how many people say full-time today so back when we raised the capitals only like two of us working on it and now there's about 10. okay and how many of the 10 are engineers three three okay very cool and then I guess fast forward right so your first your first uh customers came from at probably what launch cloud my users migrating into the build array product how many customers are you serving now today about 70 to 80. okay 80. got it um got it so you you can afford to put like a big setup fee a lot of touch on these things right we can but we try and let them like you know start small and expand so typically a customer will start around the 300 mark and then scale up so the Enterprise Market that we've been focusing on now they scale over and above that thousand dollar Mark uh within about 12 months they'll be no matter if I'm doing my math right 80 customers paying an average of a thousand bucks a month means you're flirting with that beautiful million dollar a year run rate you're doing about 80 80 000 bucks a month right now in revenue is that about right not quite because there's a lot uh there's a lot of those Legacy customers that used to pay the 15 a month fee but I'd say um second quarter of next year is the plan to be waiting okay so you're more like 40 50 000 a month right now yes but we're like um some of the upgrades that are coming as I said about Landing expanding uh January and q1 is is where all these big upgrades clunk into place and so yeah we'll be we'll be awesome so so if you're at fifty thousand dollars a month today where were you exactly a year ago so we can calculate growth um we we've probably grown about 130 so you would have 20 000 20 000 a month about a year ago yeah so when we raise that like VC money about a year and a half ago we're making about 10K a month and now about 50k now well you close that 1.3 precede in 2020 right yeah yeah so that would have been like over 20 months ago right almost two years ago yeah so you're doing 10 grand a month then I see okay and then if you double that to 20 grand a month last year and then you 130 grow on top of 20 grand puts you at 50 Grand a month today this is great I mean healthy Revenue I mean look 10 10 employees right at 600 000 bucks ARR it is not terrible a revenue per employee for for you know you guys at an early stage right you're hiring ahead of growth a little bit here so um what are the other explaining what the other uh seven people on the team do three engineers and then what so we got three full-time Engineers this myself uh we have a marketing guy uh we have customer support people and it's and there's some people who I don't know if you asked this like full-time employees or part-time I might have misunderstood but some of those people are part-time as well how many are full-time out of the ten I'd say six five or six okay interesting very cool and then how do you decide what to hire in-house for versus what you put on contractors yeah we have some external developers who uh I didn't mention in that three which do look after our IOS and Android app so um because we don't need a ton of work on our apps they're pretty good it's only when things come up or features that's one that we do like that uh and then we have some part-time support agent a support agent in the UK so he doesn't need to be full-time he just needs to cover the that that time zone so there's that and then we have people just doing bookkeeping here and there or accountancy and stuff like that so things that are just Services though how did you find those outsourced developers did you work with a firm and if so what was the URL I've worked for a lot of I've worked with a lot of external developers we've mixed success over time and often like external people they kind of go through Seasons like they'll be amazing and if something happens in their life or whatever and things go not so good uh but this company I'm happy to recommend them I'm on their website as a testimony and so they're called Sim form nothing to do performs not sure why they have that name but it's Sim form and it was a fellow founder from one of our Venture Capital Partners who recommended we should try them out and we do we use them for QA and we use them for IOS and Android and I've used them some react native development as well yeah they charge about 35 uh per month sorry per hour for a senior front and react engineer uh my friends over at Yak do Sim form on this side it was Justin who recommended them to me actually yeah just Justin's great um I always try and collect the really good outsourced Dev shops that Founders are using because then I can recommend them out so there's another one guys for Sim form all right very cool um and then what you know I think a lot of Founders when they work with outdoor stuff firm they just they expected that for I'm just gonna do everything for them you have to really give a strong spec to get success with an outsourced from like how do you make sure and you set Sim form out up for success well we lucky we got a great CTO Michael Hudson who's based in the UK um but I I'm a designer so I give him all the designs they have the full full designs they have there and so normally like I said the apps are maybe maintained at this point so we were moving from one company to another so they were taking over that's a good thing about SIM for most agencies don't really want to take on someone else's code and I understand why that makes a lot of sense uh but they were good and they they helped us take on that Legacy code and helps improve it and squash any bugs that we had but nowadays they're kind of working on things that kind of already exist and they just enhancing them or improving them so the Scopes don't have to be super complex but you're right good designs well for through designs and good scope of like each project and breaking those down into small Sprints if you're building from scratch and you're gonna have CTO you know it's very senior so he's there to help their team because they have project managers they do have senior people but sometimes you've got people who just need a bit more hand-holding and having a CTO that understands who can maybe coach them a little bit helpful too now you mentioned your preceded around you raised 1.3 million most folks are selling about 20 of the company in pre-seed rounds where you're in that same sort of range we had a convertible note so we had to say sorry a safe note and so same thing you have a cap right so 5 million cap 37 million cap seven million cap looking back now is that the right number yeah I think so I think so uh any plans to convert them any any plans for an equity round um we started a little bit this year and it was just a bit frothy so we uh we decided to cut costs cut some cuts and uh expenses that were around the business and get these like larger Enterprise clients that was starting to upgrade just get them in the door get them to where we knew they were going to go and we're gonna be doing a seed round in the new year that's awesome all right very good let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite book um make uh I'd say probably uh crossing the castle number two is there a CEO you're following or studying I mean we're all following Elon Musk these days aren't we but I've always been a big fan of him before it was cool fair enough number three what's your favorite online tool for building array um I love figma number four how many hours of sleep to eat every night uh six okay and what's your situation married single kids married two kids a four-year-old and a six-year-old um a dog and a cat busy guy how old are you I'm just dead 37 October 12th last quite happy late birthday what is something you wish you knew when you were 20. um it's a big question I think actually I think um always you know to always all hold of your kind of Innocence about things and excitement about things because startups is very kinetic and very physical and it can take it out of you and so uh always try and keep that innocence and excitement about things guys buildarray.com think about an Enterprise version of type form they've got their biggest customer paying almost a quarter million bucks per year they're doing 50 Grand a month right now in Revenue up from 20 grand a year ago and up from 10 grand a month back in 2020 when they raised the 1.3 million seed round with a 7 million cap they're building efficiently here 80 customers paying car between 500 and a thousand bucks a month on average team of six they Outsource some of their engineering to simform.com as he looks Matt looks to scale efficiently Matt thanks for taking us to the top thank you very much one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1pm 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 our poo 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 2PM Central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the Subscribe button below here on YouTube their big red button and then click the little bell 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