How Array Reached $600K ARR and 80 Customers with a Team of 10 (Interview with CEO Matthew Doyle)

Introduction and Company Overview

Nathan Latka

00:00Guys, buildarray.com. Think of it like an enterprise version of Typeform. They've got their biggest customer paying almost a $250,000 per year. They're doing 50 k a month right now in revenue, up from 20 k a year going up from 10 k a month back in 2020 when they raised a 1,300,000 seed round with a 7,000,000 cap. They're building efficiently here. 80 customers paying call between 500 and $1,000 a month on average. Team of six, they outsource some of their

00:20engineering 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 Array to the platform it is today. His hands on visionary leadership drives the team forward to overcome obstacle by following the guiding

00:44principles. Listen hard, change fast, think big, start small. Matt, you ready to take us to the top?

Matthew Doyle

00:50>> Yeah. Sounds great. Good introduction. Thanks very much.

What Array Does: Enterprise Forms and Automation

Nathan Latka

00:52I appreciate that. Okay, so enterprise forms and automation. I mean, I think forms and I think like SurveyMonkey type form, you're like an enterprise version of those guys?

Matthew Doyle

01:00>> Yeah, that on steroids. So we tend to sort of like work with big enterprises like Walmart, things like that, people who need to sort of take those types of paperwork up to next level. So operations type paperwork, we tend to sort of displace legacy systems in organizations.

Nathan Latka

01:16I mean, 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 needs that only you can deliver?

How Array Differs from Typeform

Matthew Doyle

01:26>> Not all forms are created equal. Like some forms are used for surveys. Typeform is a fantastic tool for surveys, question by question. That's not what we try and be. That's what we are. We're operational paperwork, where things where Excel is used for data collection, fillable PDFs, paper and pen clipboards. So our applications work offline, you can do things like signatures, repeatable fields, conditional logic, mathematical equations, we're used for doing food safety checks, audits compliance. So that's

01:53>> the type of stuff we're doing. It's just not where sort of Typeform would want to operate in. So that's the kind areas we're working.

Nathan Latka

01:59This is super interesting. I mean, just looking at how you decide on your website, think it's cool. Turn paperwork into a mobile app. Right? So let's let's dive more into the story here, right? So I wanna get more of your background before we do that, Obviously, Walmart is a big enterprise customer, but what does the average customer pay you per month or per year to use the technology?

Pricing and Average Customer Spend

Matthew Doyle

02:17>> We have that saying, 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 can sign up for free account 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

02:39>> some kind of field based work, it's gonna be fantastic for that it's free. But then we have like, the top pack is like $40 per user per month. But we range with people who have just one or two users, up to the bigger people with thousands of users.

Nathan Latka

02:54So don't name the don't name the logo obviously, but your biggest customer is paying what per year or or range?

Biggest Customer and Enterprise Billing Model

Matthew Doyle

03:00>> The biggest is 20,000 plus a month.

Nathan Latka

03:04So what would they be getting? I mean, how many seats are they paying for? For if I'm paying you a $250,000 a year?

Matthew Doyle

03:09>> Yeah, when it goes up to that area, like sometimes these industries, it doesn't as per seat licensing doesn't always make sense. And that's the thing for any any founder is probably gonna 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 1000s of users, but like they only fill in something

03:30>> 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

03:52>> 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 degree. So we never want to set pricing that they're trying to gain the amount of users they have. So we'll start to get people up to a certain amount of users for a price. So knowing that they're going to fluctuate up and down a bit. But so we

04:12>> know where we are as a company in MRR and ARR. And they know that we know that they're using the product properly, because, you know, I'm a product founder really and I wanna make sure people are actually like getting the most value from the product and they're using it correctly. And so sometimes a typical per seat license at that higher volume doesn't make a ton of sense to say.

Nathan Latka

04:29Fair, fair, fair. I'm gonna push you to an average here just because so wide. I it it 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 a 100 seats?

Matthew Doyle

04:41>> A thousand bucks a month.

Nathan Latka

04:43Okay. Which is what? About fifteen, twenty seats?

Matthew Doyle

04:46>> Yeah. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

04:47Okay. Fair enough. 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 Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second, but you log

05:12in, you 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 Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS

05:36company, 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

05:58is 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 founder 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

06:23multiple. 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 Founderpath. And we're thrilled to bring it to you. All right, we're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in

06:46a 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 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. Alright. Let's

Company Timeline and the LaunchCloud Pivot

Nathan Latka

07:12jump back into the interview. Put this on a on a timeline for me here. When did launch the business? What year?

Matthew Doyle

07:18>> So we we launched quite a while ago as an MVP. I'm a I'm a product founder. So it's quite a few years back, we launched a little product that was called Launch Cloud.

Nathan Latka

07:27How many was that though?

Matthew Doyle

07:29>> It's about seven years.

Nathan Latka

07:32Seven years. Okay, had MVP. 24

Matthew Doyle

07:35>> Yeah, thanks for doing the math on me for me on that one. And we were working with field marketing companies, we worked with brands directly. So we worked with people at Nintendo, Bosch, Coca Cola. And we found the problem with that market is it's very kind of fickle, know, they've got a campaign going on, you're the biggest thing, but then the campaign comes to an end. So

07:52>> then three and a half years ago, I moved to America, we had this base product with a little bit of revenue, we rebranded and became Array, buildarray.com and focus more on operation and risk. So we started working on new functionality within 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

08:16>> that was for some marketing agencies. And that's where the big pivot happened to us.

Nathan Latka

08:20And how much did you raise in 2020?

Why Array Raised External Funding

Matthew Doyle

08:22>> 1,300,000.

Nathan Latka

08:24And why did you need that money? Mean, obviously, bootstrapping is a beautiful thing. You have 100% control, no board, it's great. Why give up that freedom?

Matthew Doyle

08:32>> Well, it's a blessing and a curse. Like, know, you're able to make a lot of mistakes behind, you know, without too many people seeing when you're bootstrapping. But it's just, you know, with software 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 you're someone like Typeform, you might be able to, although they didn't raise

Team Size and Engineering Setup

Matthew Doyle

08:51>> a ton of money, there's lots of viral ways that you could be you know, acquire customers. 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. So we wanted to and also we want to pay our staff better. We wanted to retain people. We want to hire people. Many folks are

Nathan Latka

09:11full time today?

Matthew Doyle

09:13>> So back when we raised the capitals, only like two of us working on it. And now there's about 10.

Nathan Latka

09:17Okay. And how many of the 10 are engineers?

Matthew Doyle

09:20>> Three.

Nathan Latka

09:21Three. Okay. Very cool. And then I guess fast forward. Right? So your first your first customers came from probably what LaunchCloud users migrating into the buildarray product. How many customers are you serving now today?

Customer Count and Land-and-Expand Strategy

Matthew Doyle

09:33>> Oh, 70 to 80.

Nathan Latka

09:36Okay. 80. Got it. Got it. So you you can afford to put like a big setup fee, a lot of touch on these things. Right?

Matthew Doyle

09:42>> 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 $1,000 mark within about twelve months, they'll be up above.

Nathan Latka

10:00Now, Matt, if I'm doing my math, right, 80 customers paying an average of $1,000 a month means you're flirting with that beautiful million dollar a year run rate, you're doing about $80,000 bucks a month right now in revenue. Is that about right?

Matthew Doyle

10:10>> Not quite, because there's a lot there's a lot of those legacy customers that used to pay the $15 a month fee. But I'd say second quarter of next year is the plan to be where you're

Revenue and Growth Rate

Nathan Latka

10:21Fair. Okay. So you're more like 40, $50,000 a month right now?

Matthew Doyle

10:24>> Yes. We're we're like some of the upgrades that are coming as I said about landing, expanding, January and q one is is where all these big upgrades clunk into place. And so, yeah, that will be will be up there.

Nathan Latka

10:36That's awesome. So so if you're at $50,000 a month today, where were you exactly a year ago so we can calculate growth?

Matthew Doyle

10:44>> We we've probably grown about a 130%. So

Nathan Latka

10:49Okay. So you and a 20, 20 thousand dollars a month about a year ago.

Matthew Doyle

10:51>> Yeah. So when we raised that, like, VC money about a year and a half ago, we're making about 10 k a month, and now about 50 k a month.

Nathan Latka

10:58Well, you closed that 1.3 pre seed in 2020. Right?

Matthew Doyle

11:01>> Yeah.

Nathan Latka

11:03Yes. That would've been, like, over twenty months ago. Right? Almost two years ago?

Matthew Doyle

11:06>> Yeah.

Nathan Latka

11:07So you're doing 10 k a month then? I see. Okay. And then if you double that to 20 k a month last year and then you a 130% grow on top of 20 k puts you at 50 k a month today. This is great. I mean, healthy revenue per employ I mean, look. Ten ten employees, right, at $600,000 ARR is not terrible of revenue per employee for for, you know, you guys are early stage, right, you're hiring ahead of growth

11:27a little bit here. So what are the other explain me what the other seven people on the team do three engineers, and then what?

Matthew Doyle

11:34>> So we got three full time engineers, there's myself, we have a marketing guy, we have customer support people, 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.

Nathan Latka

11:48How many are full time out 10?

Matthew Doyle

11:51>> I'd say six, five or six.

Nathan Latka

11:53Okay, interesting. Very cool. And then how do you decide what to hire in house for versus what you put on contractors?

Matthew Doyle

11:59>> Yeah, we have some external developers who I didn't mention in that three, which do look after our iOS and Android app. So 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. 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

12:20>> the 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.

Nathan Latka

12:31How did you find those outsource developers? Did you work with a firm? And if so, what was the URL?

Matthew Doyle

12:35>> I've worked for a lot of I've worked with a lot of external developers with mixed success at the time. Often, like external people, they kind of go through seasons, like they'd be amazing. And if something happens in their life or whatever, things go not so good. But this company, I'm happy to recommend them. I'm on their website as a testimony. So they're called simform, nothing to do with forms, not sure why they have that name, but

12:56>> it's Simform. 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 some React native development as well.

Nathan Latka

13:09Yeah. They charge about $35 per month sorry, per hour for a senior front end React engineer. My friends over at Yak do some form on the side.

Matthew Doyle

13:17>> It was Justin who recommended them to me, actually.

Nathan Latka

13:20Yeah. Just Justin's great. 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 Simform. Alright. Very cool. And then what you know, I I think a lot of founders, when they work with outsourced dev firm, they just they expected that firm is just gonna do everything for them. You have to really give a strong spec to get success with

13:43an outsourced firm. Like, do you make sure and you set Simform out up for success?

Matthew Doyle

13:49>> We luckily got a great CTO, Michael Hudson, who's based in The UK. I'm a designer, so I give them all the designs, they have the full designs they have there. And so normally, like I said, the apps may be maintained at this point. So we were moving from one company to another. So they were taking over. That's a good amount of Simform. Most agencies don't really want to take on someone else's code. And I understand why

SAFE Round Details and Valuation Cap

Matthew Doyle

14:11>> that makes a lot of sense. But they were good. And 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're just enhancing them or improving them. So the scopes don't have to be super complex. But you're right, good designs, well thought through designs, and good scope of like each project and breaking those down

14:34>> into small sprints if you're building from scratch. And again, our CTO, you know, is 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 could maybe coach them a little bit has been helpful too.

Nathan Latka

14:50Now you mentioned your pre seed round, you raised 1,300,000, most folks are selling about 20% of the company and pre seed rounds, were you in that same sort of range?

Plans for a Seed Equity Round

Matthew Doyle

14:57>> We had a convertible note. So we had a safe sorry, a safe note. And so

Nathan Latka

15:02Same thing. You have a cap. Right? So 5,000,000 cap?

Matthew Doyle

15:04>> There's 7,000,000 cap.

Nathan Latka

15:057,000,000 cap. Looking back now, is that the right number?

Matthew Doyle

15:09>> Yeah, I think so. I think so.

Nathan Latka

15:12Any plans to convert them? Any any plans for an equity round?

Matthew Doyle

15:15>> We started a little bit this year, and it was just a bit frothy. So we decided to cut costs, cut some expenses that were around the business and get these like larger enterprise clients that were starting to upgrade, just get them in the door, get them to where we knew they were gonna go. And we're gonna be doing a seed round in new year.

Nathan Latka

15:33That's awesome. Alright, very good. Let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, favorite book?

Famous Five: Books, Tools, and Habits

Matthew Doyle

15:39>> Make, I'd say probably Crossing the Chasm.

Nathan Latka

15:42Yep.

15:43Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Matthew Doyle

15:47>> 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.

Nathan Latka

15:52Fair enough.

15:53Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building array?

Matthew Doyle

15:58>> I love Figma.

Nathan Latka

16:00Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night?

Matthew Doyle

16:04>> Six.

Nathan Latka

16:05Okay. And what's your situation? Married, single, kids?

Matthew Doyle

16:08>> Married, two kids, a four year old and a six year old, a dog and a cat.

Nathan Latka

16:14Busy guy. How old are you?

Matthew Doyle

16:16>> I'm just 37, October 12.

Nathan Latka

16:18Last happy late birthday. What is something you wish you knew when you were 20?

Matthew Doyle

16:26>> It's a big question, think actually. I think always, you know, to always keep 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 always try and keep that innocence and excitement about things.

Nathan Latka

16:45Guys, buildarray.com, think of like an enterprise version of Typeform. They've got their biggest customer paying almost a $250,000 per year. They're doing 50 k a month right now in revenue, up from 20 k a year going up from 10 k a month back in 2020 when they raised a 1,300,000 seed round with a 7,000,000 cap. They're building efficiently here. 80 customers paying call it between 500 and $1,000 a month on average. Team of six, they outsource some of their

17:05engineering to simform.com as he looks Matt looks to scale efficiently. Matt, thanks for taking us to top.

Matthew Doyle

17:12>> Thank you very much.

Nathan Latka

17:14One 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 one

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