How Typeform CEO David Okuniev grew Typeform to $141.1M revenue and 130K customers in 2024.

quick context this was recorded March 28th and 29th so a couple weeks ago at my live event SAS open.com we had a thousand software CEOs there if you missed it we hope to see at the next one September 5th and 6th in New York City SAS open.com but for now let's jump into the recording that we accelerated growth on that first brick we added another almost 60 million can we aspire to have paybacks within the year 6 8 12 months hey folks if we haven't met yet my name is Nathan ladka I launched and sold my first software company back in 2015 and went on to write a book about it which you guys made a Wall Street Journal bestseller purchasing over 30,000 copies thank you so much for that after the book I launched this show and went went on to create founder path.com I raised a large fund to do non-dilutive deals with B2B software founders so far we've invested in over 400 software Founders totaling $150 million here in 2024 we're doing three to four New Deals per week so if you're looking for Capital and don't want to give up Equity go sign up at founder path.com for free to get your offer all right let's jump into the interview hello everyone uh good afternoon and thank you for being here I'm fortunate in my position I have the opportunity to talk to uh many leaders um other cosos other Founders other departmental leaders and the question that is in everybody's Minds nowadays especially nowadays is how can I help my company grow more efficiently so in the next 20 minutes I wanted to share with you our uh past how we got to where we are um to um let's say there's two chapters to this up to 125 ,000 customers globally and more importantly I also want to talk to you about how we are focusing and and thinking about um growth and efficient growth in this third chapter of the company that started in 2023 and in that sense that is through what we call one funnel I would like to also explain you the five specific steps that we've been taking since 2023 to implement that one funnel hope hopefully with the idea that um after this you will have you will take away some new insights and especially some actionable steps that um might help you also um grow your companies more efficiently in 2024 and Beyond who knows type form okay that's good that's good thank you thank you for being users and customers of type form for those who do not know type form um the company was founded in 2012 with the objective of helping companies ask important questions to their most valued audiences so think of a marketer that wants to know the name the surname the email the contact details of somebody think of the product uh manager that wants to ask important questions about the new feature or the new product that is available but needs to improve these things are done through mainly surveys and quizzes and um um forms uh via text via video via voice that people inet in their web pages in their emails and all of that was there but the thing that set type form apart was excellent responding experience we realized that if the respondent was having a new Fresh and great experience responding those questions our customer would benefit from more information better information higher completion rates and so on it's also a Moment of Truth where that company and each of those respondents get in touch sometimes for the first time so it's a moment where that company can stand out right and can feel different can start connecting via brand Etc the other pillar is our focus on making sure that we give our customer superpowers specifically the first two of these were the engineering and the designer superpower so without any coding or without any design knowledge everybody can easily create amazing online interactions so that's type form and one of the key takeaways here in our growth story is how the product was different was better and the product itself helped grow a lot David our cofounder shared with Nathan Thea podcast some Revenue metrics here are for context but what I want to to talk about is these first two chapters that then will lead into the third chapter the first two chapters is chapter one from inception in 2012 to 2018 in this chapter the company achieved let's say the first level the first step the first brick which is more or less around this 20 million it took 6 years and you can see that at the beginning the slope of the curve is flatter because it is never easy to start a company and to be successful so kudos to all of you who are in these early stages at some point because the product was so good and purely because of the product the growth started accelerating right and you can see that in 200 um 16 17 but eventually in 2018 the growth has slowed down to that 31% so that was the first moment in our time when we thought okay what got us here will not take us there we have to rethink this and that's what we did right so enter chapter 2 because chapter one had been purely product Le growth we thought what are we going to add in this chapter two and what we thought was we have to accelerate with goto market and in the next four years so 2019 to 2022 you can see that we accelerated growth and on that first brick first 20 million we added another three bricks or almost 60 million so let's talk about that a little bit more in detail okay we need to accelerate growth we need a second engine that first plane was a small plane with one engine the product right now this plane becomes bigger it already has 45,000 customers but it needs another engine go to market is the engine what we do is we go and take a look at our customer base we realize one thing every customer creates forms these forms are shared there's 370 submissions on average per month right so 370 people per month per customer are exposed to the product right also customers are happy because the product is a good product product they talk about the product so there's a viral growth there's an organic growth and their realization is customers bring customers so as a company we need one goal right one Northstar total number of customers so that's the one goal that we set ourselves for to let's say starting in 2019 now the goal needs a strategy how are we going to achieve that goal we I said already go to market but what kind of options are there for us so in terms of our strategy there are four different criterias that we used to assess those options the first one if if it can be something simple better than complex back in the day a lot of people talked about growth Loops right so you had to invest in many different areas and one thing one flywheel would Mo move a second flywheel it was too complex for me the second thing is it has to be scalable I mean we already have 45,000 customers we should have we should aspire to something that will bring tens of thousands not hundreds or thousands the third thing for me was we haven't done a lot of goto Market in any sizable way so we have to learn so there needs to be quick feedback loops right so we have to know as soon as possible whether something is working or it's not working and the fourth um criteria there was hopefully it's not only positive Roi but it's fast Roi so can we aspire to have paybacks within the year 68 or maybe 12 months so that's those were the decisions one goal number of customers strategy with clear criterias and then then we found out one tactic the one tactic was paid marketing Google search hats this is mostly what we did and because we focused we became very very good so our teams could learn very fast how to do that how to improve it how to optimize it over time how to do automatic beaing how to and we also because we were focused on that we also created very good Partnerships very good relationships with the partners that helped us achieve those results so in these four years we added these three additional bricks we added 880,000 plus customers and we added more than 300 submissions 300 million submissions but you might have uh recalled previous slide when the last year 22 we only grew 22% and that was below our average so second moment of recognition what got us here will not take us there again we went back to our customers and this is um early 2023 and we say okay we don't have 45,000 now we have 125,000 and taking a look at them we saw that they were very very different right so in company size where they are from how they use the product what for how many how much value they derive from this the average of submissions per customer per month decreased to around 330 but we could see that that average that applies to all customers there were some customers that got 125 or less per month and then within um those all customers we had a Target group that got almost a thousand something in the north of 900 and within that Target group there's other subs segments specifically Meat Market companies that are actually using us for big at a bigger scale they were buying the Enterprise skus and they were getting 15 to 22,000 submissions per month so not all customers are the same some get more value from using type form and we should focus on these customers again we needed to shift from one go all being total number of customers to something else that would support a much more successful strategy what we did was to shift to total number of submissions so now we want to increase and we want to reach 1 billion 2 billion 3 billion submissions as fast and as soon as possible and that allows us to think about those customers that derive the most value in the end the submission is a proxy for Value right because when...