How Formstack CEO Chris Byers grew Formstack to $35.6M revenue and 25K customers in 2023.

hello everyone my guest today is chris byers he's the ceo of a company called formstack a versatile online form solution that streamlines processes for capturing and managing information his mission is to empower business professionals through simple and elegant tools that remove complexity from everyday business processes formsteck is committed to pursuing that via sustainable growth he works with a leadership team to advance the community's initiatives including its culture code and vision which focus on relationships results and the community chris are you ready to take us to the top absolutely so i've always wanted a tool like you right when google releases google forms tools like you still grow and people still use them and people still you know don't churn and expansion revenues there how have you kick us off and kind of tell us what you do and then tell us specifically how you've competed with kind of the google forms threat yeah so i think the uh you know if you go back to the early days uh back in 2006 it was you uh excuse me needed a developer to build a web form and get it on your website and so if you weren't a developer and you wanted to collect a lead we kind of made it easy to get that done roll forward a few years that's kind of baked into every software that you've got crm email etc and so it kind of transitioned to collect data and then get it into what is now one of 50 kind of native integrations because really you want to get it into those back-end systems that are really important to you to send an email or start your you know kind of relationship with customer process payment something like that and as we've kind of gone forward we've really started to think about and built out this kind of collaborative moment around data collection so we're all living in these much more collaborative environments and so you can imagine a time where you need multiple people to kind of input along a form kind of to get the right data and so imagine something as simple as a reimbursement form you go travel somewhere you need to fill that out your manager needs to actually see that data via they get in an email or something pull up the form they see what you filled out and then they say oh yeah i need to add to that i need to code it to this project and then it passes on to the ap department who says okay i paid this paid it on this date it notifies you realistically that's just one big form but you need to kind of assign parts to different people and so if you think about what google has done they've served the audience really well of just basic data collection get it into a google sheet at the end of the day and they do that cleanly it's easy to use it's free um but it sticks with that use case it's just i need to an an internal use case often where you don't care about brand as much you don't care about styling it as much and so we definitely have i'm sure we lose business to them but we don't hear it much because people are really starting to automate a process when they're thinking about formstack versus just quick data collection quick form collection so in 2006 you said it was your one is that right yep that's right and then and then walk me through i want to hear kind of where your head was at in 2006 but first like when a customer signs up for form stack on average what are they paying per month would you say on average 60 70 80 bucks a month okay and is that per seat or that's kind of the logo the brand is paying 60 70 yeah the brand is paying and often you'll start to add users and so that's what's going to drive your price up you can start as low as 19 bucks a month but you know often people will start with about five users because they want to have multiple people be able to get in and see the data or maybe again use approvals or workflow or something like that got it so three four five users that's where you get your 60 70 80 buck arpu on average okay interesting so take me back to 2006 where was your head at that point did you just you know you know quit your corporate job because you're frustrated back against the wall no money had to make this work what were you thinking yeah so i'm in an interesting scenario where uh an old business partner of mine and i we had a software company uh what is nearly 20 years ago now and he actually started formstack and uh then started a second business in 2009 and i had helped him kind of raise money and was an early product user and so i said hey in 2009 i said i'll come in and run the business for six months and find somebody to run it long term and then i never left so uh you know the in the early days it was all about how do we just empower other people i mean here's the thing you're an entrepreneur you know how to solve most of the problems that you're trying to solve you just don't always have the technical capability to get it done and so where we can give you software to get that done because you don't really need to go pay a custom you know for custom development or something like that where we can kind of give you those assets in your hands all of a sudden you've got a power that you didn't have beforehand and uh you know can kind of get the job done so it from day one was about making people's lives easier in some way i understand the product i want to dive more kind of into the growth and how you've gotten to where you've gotten so just to be clear though in terms of looking at the company if i looked at the cap table would it be very clear you're a co-founder or were you added for like you know one or two percent equity as a ceo in charge at 09. yeah i mean i i've kind of both had been an early investor and then uh kind of have grown equity over time and so okay our founder was uh you know really controlling investor for a long time but from day one he gave me complete autonomy to go build the business that i felt like i needed to build which which was amazing and so um yeah that's kind of roughly how that uh that's great and what do we scale to today in terms of total customers using you so we're about 16 000 customers okay and those aren't like free and paid those are the actual paying customers yep that's exactly right so we get you know probably 4 000 people coming to try the product every month and then you know some few hundred of those sign up but uh yeah i've grown this kind of sixteen thousand and there were about a hundred thousand active users sitting on top of those paid accounts guys so 16 000 logos 100 000 kind of people inside of each of those logos together yep that's right and can i mean can i multiply that times the 70 rpo and you guys are north of a million a month at this point is that accurate yeah that's a good uh good way to think about it okay and i mean what does this kind of space look like in terms of how have you guys guys been growing year over year so if you're out north of a million today 12 months ago were you at 500 where were you yeah i mean we've kind of been in the 30 to 40 growth range probably for the past few years and as you grow you know as you grow business one of the things that gets obviously more challenging is i mean realistically the core in initial market uh forms let's say it's just it's not going to grow to 100 million dollar business sure and so we had to add elements like workflow and beginning to automate process uh so that we can start to think about oh it makes sense for me to add 10 users or a thousand users or 10 000 users because i need them to be a part of this process whereas in the beginning i said oh i like my one marketing person needs to have access to formstack to collect leads and so uh and then we also have done an acquisition we did an acquisition late last year with a product called fast forms where they were really deeply embedded into the salesforce app exchange and we're doing a really amazing job of collecting data in that kind of ecosystem but you start to see where you have to add other elements to the business to kind of keep growth rate uh going yeah no it's a really smart product decision obviously to drive expansion revenue give us a sense of that i mean how it sounds like if your price point starts at 19 bucks and your average is 70. you've done a great job growing seats and adding additional features etc but can you quantify that for us like maybe in terms of you know net revenue retention annually yeah so i mean i guess the best way i'd say it is if you rolled back three four years we were probably three uh you know three percent gross churn on a on a monthly basis but then even that turn was not much better that maybe you're talking logos or revenue uh revenue churn they probably look the same yeah yeah and one of the things as we've really gotten better at going up market and expanding with customers we've driven that kind of we're not at a regular negative kind of churn rate but we are pretty flat and so that means when we do go at least acquire customers and bring them on we're being much more efficient about keeping them around uh long term but yeah that's a hard problem to solve well especially your price point two smbs are notorious for churn but let me just...