How Jotform CEO Aytekin Tank grew Jotform to $144.9M revenue and 500K customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is steve hart dirty's the vice president of enterprise operations at jotform with responsibilities that include marketing brand and corporate partnerships before job for me as president at heart and associates a marketing consultancy that worked with b2b and bdc sas companies he's got more than 30 years of experience in the space with companies like the walt disney company ministry of transport in australia and blue cross ca all right jotform.com steve your area takes you to the top let's go for it now just if you understand the origin story here you are not an original co-founder right how did you get involved what year um i've been with jotforms since 2000 marches 2016 that's when i started working here they uh i started off as the 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 uh was kind of asked to head up that part of it and as that grew i kind of had to leave the marketing side of marketing side alone and then kind of move over to help grow this new division and uh so i think if you looked at the head count i want 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 you know from where we were to uh we're closing in on 400 employees now that's incredible i mean and just to put that in revenue terms i mean you joined before before you guys broke 40 million bucks in aor you're over 100 million now today right uh i can't comment on revenue but those are public uh that 100 million number you guys put out a press release i believe uh 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 uh but point being though you've seen revenue growth and not just head count growth you've also you know watched significant revenue growth as well oh yeah we've so we've we've seen true uh incredible growth across all aspects so let's go let's go and talk about that right so um you're obviously competing in a space there's a lot of venture back companies right in your same space there's some also that are bootstrap very capital efficient what's been you guys go to market how have you grown the user base um you know we're bootstrapped we're we've never taken a dime of any investor money anywhere so all of our you know all of our growth has been purely organic and what you know what we focused on really is is delivering a good solid high quality product right and making the user experience good but our marketing has really been revolving around seo um we have really kind of planted our flag on the seo side and uh and i've used that and leveraged that tremendously across all different types of platforms i mean not only just you know say traditional text types of content but also in video content has been very big for us also what does that mean how do you how do you think about video seo well i mean video you can use the the uh the descriptions inside of things like youtube and other types of channels and then uh the video is what helps draw people in so you can use things like a transcript of what your you know what your video is whether it's a two minute demo video or a four or five minute newsletter video or very much of a long form type of a podcast uh video those kinds of things you could you can include those transcripts in different places and that helps drive the seo trip mm-hmm now i'm on i'm on the youtube page you guys youtube page today it looks like you know you guys postings 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 there's search traffic research going into that well a lot of it is yeah a lot of it's brainstorming internally but we also look at what our 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 and as a result and it helps drive all the all of our other materials that come with it and the benefit of things like the video is they have very long shelf life i mean those things can last several years as far as an item goes versus something like just say an article that can be posted the shelf life might be just a couple of months and then that gets kind of archived but video lives forever basically 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 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 connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your sas company you're going to get a different valuation a vc is going to pay a different valuation private equity firm is different if you're going to 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 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 raised 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 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 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 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 or and is it in-house or outsourced it's all internally so how many folks did you say on that team and what are some of the roles look like well i mean we've got we've got a couple of dozen people that are doing on the seo site but i mean really what it comes down to is they look at they're constantly pouring over those the keywords that people are looking at how they're finding us what types of phrases they're looking for uh you know not only just in a general sense but also based on a region you know regional type of situations so from different geographies that we're looking at people say in the 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 yep and when you oh i suppose actually you were right it was back in 2017 when we last spoke so a while ago you told me that customers could get on and on average were paying about 300 bucks a month for jotform has that stayed pretty consistent is the arpu still about 300 bucks a year um again i'm not going to comment specific dollars on revenue but i mean our revenue base has continued to grow as we've added um sorry sorry not i'm talking about someone listening right now i'm trying to help them market here someone listening right now wants to use jotform what are they going to probably pay on average per month well i mean again they can use their single plans or what we call our bronze our bronze silver gold plans which are our single user plans and those are listed on the website they go anywhere high is 99 a month the 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...